Real Dictators - Colonel Gaddafi Part 4: The Munich Olympic Massacre

Episode Date: July 6, 2021

In the summer of 1972, at the Munich Olympic Games, a festival of sport becomes a terrifying nightmare. The Libyan leader tightens his grip on power at home, while exporting terror abroad. Tension with America is reaching breaking point. For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

TD Direct Investing offers live support, so whether you're a newbie or a seasoned pro, you can make your investing steps count. And if you're like me and think a TFSA stands for Total Fund Savings Adventure, maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing. In Munich, West Germany, in the summer of 1972, there is a buzz of expectation. The city is preparing to host the Olympic Games. It's a symbolic welcoming of the country back into the international fold. While East Germany languishes in the Soviet bloc, the western part, the Federal Republic, is viewed by many as the very model of a democratic state. The Germans are mindful of their recent past.

The last Olympiad they hosted, 1936, in Berlin, was a virtual commercial for Hitler and the Nazis. These games will be different, friendly, accessible, or so they think. different, friendly, accessible, or so they think. In fact, this festival of sport will soon become a terrifying nightmare. This is part four of the Gaddafi story. And this is Real Dictators. The Games get off to a good start beneath the sweeping glass and modern architecture of the brand new Olympic Park. In the first week of September, eyes turn to the Olympic Stadium itself and the track and field events. So far, the Games truly are living up to their motto the cheerful games.

In the Olympic Village in keeping with this spirit the security has been deliberately low-key. There are no police. Instead, unarmed security guards are posted around the staggered concrete rises of the residential complex. At around 4.40am on September 5th, a small team of Israeli athletes are asleep in their group of five apartments at No. 31 Connolly Strasse.

Outside, a group of eight tracksuited young men approaches. They've jumped over a fence and strolled through the village unchallenged. The guards assumed they were just sneaking back in after a night out. Some passing athletes even gave them a leg up. But these are no sportsmen. In their bags, there are no items of kit, no running spikes. The bags contain Kalashnikov assault rifles, Tokarev pistols and ski masks, because these men are members of Black September, a radical faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The men mount the walkways that slope up towards the Israeli bloc. An Israeli

wrestling coach, Yosef Gutfreund, a 300-pound hulk of man, hears scratching at the lock. Suspicion aroused, he throws his considerable strength against the door. Gutfreund holds back the assailants. At the same time, he raises the alarm. This allows some of his colleagues to escape out of the windows. It's a valiant effort, but Goodpoint is ultimately overcome. A colleague, wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg, is shot through the cheek. The intruders demand access to the Israeli athletes.

With an amazing presence of mind, the injured Weinberg leads them past the quarters of the track athletes to the rooms housing the wrestlers and weightlifters. They might stand a better chance in a hand-to-hand struggle. Gaging the situation, the Israelis make a desperate break for freedom. The wounded Weinberg and a weightlifter, Yosef Romano, grapple with the Palestinians. Both are gunned down. In a sickening coda, a detail learned only later, Romano is then castrated. With the West German authorities now alerted, Black September's commander, Lutif Afif, codename Issa, makes a demand.

Israel is currently holding 236 Palestinian prisoners on terror offences. West Germany too is presently detaining the leaders of the militant Red Army faction. Release them, all of them, by 12 noon, and the hostages will come to no further harm. They toss out the body of Weinberg as a statement of intent. Fail to meet the deadline, Black September warn, and they will execute one hostage every hour. In the Bavarian sunshine, as the world's media wakes up, events appear surreal against the idyllic late summer backdrop. A billion people around

the world have tuned in for the games. Now they're watching something distinctly different to the show they were advertised. The TV coverage is so saturated that it actually helps the gunman. In the apartment, they can observe live television pictures of German police moving into position around them. But the police are soon called off. This situation must be handled with maximum delicacy. This is a human tragedy unfolding in real time. But it's also a political minefield. The West German authorities have spent the last 27 years defanging their security apparatus.

They're acutely mindful of the context. Only six miles from the Olympic village lies the site of the infamous Dachau concentration camp. The Israeli government's representatives are unmoved. They will not negotiate with terrorists. End of story. The West Germans are now the only ones who can make concessions. There are several rounds of frantic talks. Masked individuals come in and out of the apartment balcony.

New deadlines come and go. Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher offers himself in exchange for the hostage athletes. The government offers money. Both are declined. In a bizarre contrast, just 200 yards away, resting athletes sunbathe, play table tennis and jog round the warm-up track. At the stadium, the games continue as if nothing has happened. Only the next day does the International Olympic Committee consent to suspend the games, albeit temporarily. At 6pm, with nothing resolved, the gunmen up their demands.

They want a plane to take them all away. A flight to Cairo. After a 17-hour standoff, darkness falling, the Germans grant them an exit. They bring in two helicopters to evacuate the hostages and their captors. The party is bussed out. The choppers take to the air. At 10.30 pm, the helicopters land at Fürst & Feldbruck NATO base, 15 miles away. Here a passenger plane, a Boeing 727, is waiting.

Ostensibly, this is their flight to Egypt. But in reality, unbeknownst to the gunmen, the plane's crew are disguised federal police. At the same time, the control tower is ringed with snipers. The scene is set for the authorities to spring the hostages from their captor's grasp. At best, the history books will describe what happens next as a botched rescue attempt. To others, it's quite simply an unmitigated disaster. For reasons known only to themselves, the on-board police decide, unilaterally, to abandon their posts. Meanwhile, around the runway, the marksmen, as it will later transpire, are untrained in anti-terrorist tactics. They have just ordinary rifles, no infrared sights, there's no radio communication between them, and there are just five snipers in total.

The negotiators have miscalculated the actual number of hostage-takers. The negotiators have miscalculated the actual number of hostage takers. The Germans are left to finish the job unprepared, outgunned and in the dark. With the plane now empty, the terrorists smell a rat. A gunfight ensues. A grenade is thrown into one helicopter, blowing it up, killing all the Israelis on board, before the Palestinians turn their weapons on the others.

It takes two hours for the guns to fall silent, for the smoke to clear. For a while, the world is presented with the illusion that the operation has been a success. The Palestinians have been killed, the Israeli athletes freed. There are wild celebrations. But the reality is exactly the opposite. All nine hostages, two Palestinians and a policeman, lie dead. The world is stunned. In the aftermath, amid the vilification of Black September,

the identity of their patron becomes apparent. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Black September had trained for their mission in a Libyan desert camp, most likely funded with his money. Gaddafi's response to that was to have the bodies of the five Arab guerrillas killed in the action flown to Tripoli where they were given a martyr's burial. Gaddafi orders that the bodies of the dead terrorists are to be interred with full military honours. In frenzied scenes, the coffins draped in Palestinian flags are borne through the streets of the Libyan capital. The three surviving terrorists are held in police custody in West Germany, but they will

still manage to evade justice. Just seven weeks later, a Lufthansa jet is hijacked en route from Beirut to Frankfurt. The trio of gunmen are released from jail in an exchange. Frankfurt. The trio of gunmen are released from jail in an exchange. There are later suggestions that the hijacking is undertaken in collusion with the West German government, who just want the whole embarrassing episode simply to go away. On the 29th of October, these three men are also whisked to Libya. They're given a hero's welcome and a televised press conference. The Munich gunmen revel in their exploits. We have made our voice heard by the world, they claim. The Israeli

authorities, meanwhile, will launch a covert mission for justice. Over the coming years, Operation Wrath of God will hunt down and kill the perpetrators and associates one by one. There's no evidence, certainly in the record, that Gaddafi was in any way involved with the planning of the attacks inside Germany in Munich in 1972. in 1972. Libya's real connection with that was simply it was the place to which those who were killed, those Palestinians who were killed as part of the operation were sent for burial and were honoured. Libya certainly knew nothing about the planning of the operation. He may well have provided general finance that may have been used in the operation, but he didn't do so knowingly. It was a question of solidarity. And by the way, it was in Gaddafi's nature to want to take credit and to suggest that in some

way he created the climate in which these sorts of things could occur, and therefore he was ultimately responsible. in which these sorts of things could occur, and therefore he was ultimately responsible. Whatever the extent of his real, material connection to Black September, Gaddafi is desperate to take credit for their activities. It's all part of his way of painting himself as the great Arab liberator. In 1973, or so it's said,

Gaddafi even embarks on an extraordinary plot to torpedo the cruise liner QE2 as it heads towards Haifa, Israel, packed with American Jews arriving to celebrate Israel's 25th anniversary. It's claimed that Sadat of Egypt, whose submarines Gaddafi wants to use, is having none of it. This will add to a growing deterioration in relations. Gaddafi will deal with Sadat later.

Whatever credit Gaddafi may have had with Egypt or with the West, he has blown it utterly. But he doesn't care. Defeating the West, defeating Zionists, defeating anyone who opposes him can be done by fair means or foul. Gaddafi's passions become inflamed even further in February 1973. Libyan Airlines Flight LN114, en route from Benghazi to Cairo, strays into Israeli airspace during a sandstorm. Assumed to be a military aircraft, and refusing instructions to land from the intercepting Israeli jets, it's shot down. 100 civilian passengers are killed.

Gaddafi's foreign minister, Salah Busir, perishes among them. perishes among them. Over the coming years, Gaddafi will extend huge generosity to independence movements and terror groups of all persuasions. Anyone who can be construed as anti-Zionist or anti-imperial in any way can rely on Gaddafi's support.

The long list includes the Black Panthers, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the Provisional IRA, ETA, the Red Brigades and Red Army Faction, the Japanese Red Army, and more besides. Some terrorist groups are even given space on Libyan soil to host training camps. This is not diplomacy by conference, not even by gunboat. This is diplomacy by Semtex. It's not only those abroad who are beginning to think Libya has gone too far. At home there is unrest too.

In the summer of 1975 there are rumours of a planned counter coup. And after burning his bridges with the CIA, Gaddafi can't rely on them to watch his back. Gaddafi discovers the plot anyway, and its ringleaders are uncovered. They are Omar Maheshi, Bashir Hawadi, and Awad Hamza, members of Gaddafi's own inner circle. Maheshi flees to Tunisia. August of 1975, you had a revolt within the RCC. In the end, only five of the original 12 members were left standing.

That shook Gaddafi up. Gaddafi's response is swift. He purges the army of 200 officers and arrests anyone who is publicly unhappy about his increasingly autocratic rule. He goes further. On March 2, 1977, in the town of Ceiba, he makes another grand declaration. Cuban leader Fidel Castro is flown in to address the crowd first, effectively as Gaddafi's warm-up act. Taking to the stage after Castro, Gaddafi announces the declaration of the authority of the people. He has dissolved the Libyan state, he says.

Libya is now no longer a conventional national entity. Instead, it is the great socialist people's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. Jamahiriya translates as a state of the masses. This is a rebranding of the most extreme order. The Libyan flag is shorn of all stripes, all adornments. It becomes just a solid green rectangle. There is a weekly magazine to go with the new look, called The Green March. Qaddafi had this idea of what he called a direct democracy

because he believed that a representative democracy was not something that was going to work for the Libyan people. How he viewed the political structure of Libya was actually sort of having what he considered no formal representative bureaucratic apparatuses. So he thought it was a state that didn't operate like any traditional state that the world had known. In his phrasing, he was a brother who was helping to empower his fellow brothers to basically run their own country.

The reality was that Libya was not even a one-party state. It was a one-man or perhaps a one-family state. The word Jamahriya, that's not even an actual word in the Arabic language. It's something that Qaddafi made up. In theory, Libya will now exist in a state of permanent revolution, and there will be no need for that troublesome Revolutionary Command Council anymore. Representative democracy, governance by elected delegates, is a thing of the past. In the new utopia, Libyans will now directly govern themselves by way of a series of local people's congresses.

Of course, they will be subject to a higher, general people's congress, a congress that will have Gaddafi himself at its head. In reality, Gaddafi will rule by decree in his new self-styled role, another piece of radical image overhaul. He is now the so-called brother leader of his fellow Libyans. I think it's quite telling. Around early 1970s, Gaddafi said he was going to drag the Libyan people to paradise in chains. 1977 is when Gaddafi introduces his Jamahariya. Everybody is supposed to come together and debate policy and ideas, and then these ideas and decisions are then fed all the way up to the top, and it's supposed to be implemented but in reality this was a very complex formal structure it was busying itself all the time whilst Gaddafi held a real range of power behind

through various informal structures the revolutionary committees which are basically like a paramilitary parallel security force that are there to impose the revolution, to ensure conformity, uniformity. He basically unleashes these revolutionary committees on the population, and anyone who is not deemed to be sufficiently loyal is then at the mercy of these very sinister groups that were given free reign to do whatever.

Just to put a stamp on proceedings, Gaddafi will also change the calendar. August becomes the month of Nasser. September, the month of Hannibal, the celebrated Carthaginian leader. He changed the Christian calendar to the Islamic calendar. Then at some point in his rule, I think in the 70s, he said that the calendar should be dated, I think, from the death of the prophet rather than the date when Muhammad went from Mecca to Medina. I can't remember the exact details, but it sort of arbitrarily changed the way the dates were done. And again, it was based on a whim and it was keeping everything spinning around constantly in chaos. People didn't know whether they were coming or going.

He believed that everything should belong to the state. Nobody should be allowed to exploit anybody else. You weren't allowed to rent property. You weren't allowed to employ people. Everybody became reliant on the state. So even food, they would create these massive state-run supermarkets where the state was responsible for importing food and selling food. But because they were so corrupt, they were so badly managed, food would never be coming in in the right quantities at the right time. People were going hungry in Libya with all that oil wells. It was a really totally bizarre, chaotic system.

Even this early in Gaddafi's reign, some Muslim scholars are already decrying his elevation and the publication of his sacred green book. These are false idols that contradict the tenets of Islam. In the new people's congresses, absenteeism is up to 90%. That means only 10% of people are actually turning up to do politics. It makes little practical difference when Gaddafi himself is pulling the strings. There are rumours of discontent.

Among some student groups, protests emerge. These largely focus on the introduction of compulsory military service. Gaddafi looks for scapegoats. How about Sadat? He blames Egypt for stoking unrest. He supports assassination plots against ministers in the Cairo government. In July 1977, a four-day border war breaks out between the two countries. Egypt rebuffs the Libyan invasion with a chastening counter-attack and the bombing of Libyan military bases.

For the paranoid Gaddafi, enemies are now seen to be everywhere. There are disappearances, arrests, executions, including the 22 army officers involved in Maheshi's failed coup attempt. In 1984, Maheshi will be handed back to Libya by the Moroccan security services. Gaddafi will have him kicked to death by his bodyguards while he waits in an adjoining room. This period will henceforth be known as the terror, the Green Terror. Gaddafi had basically created what is known as a munkabarat state, which is a state where the security services have penetrated society to the degree that no one can trust anybody. And it sort of creates a very paranoid societal milieu

where neighbors can snitch on other neighbors. Part of how Gaddafi helped enforce this security state was through doing things like public executions and televised show trials. The security services was a vast organ of his regime that was highly, highly skilled, intimidating people, getting people to rat on their neighbors

about, you know, anyone who was doing something that was sort of not entirely patriotic or critical of the regime. The universities come in for special treatment. They are hotbeds not just of radicalism, but of future opposition. These are the minds that must be shaped, tamed. Gaddafi, the self-styled great thinker, the intellectual, will spend a lot of time at Libya's campuses,

dropping in unannounced, giving rambling ad hoc lectures. Juma Bukhleb remembers one such occasion. I remember I saw him once in the university. One day I was in the library studying, doing my work, and he passed by. This is maybe in 1974. That's the first time I came face to face with him. As soon as he got into the library, I took my books and ran away. I left him. I left the library and ran. I don't want to stay. I supported him at the start. When he started his cultural revolution and I saw my friends and my favorite writers and journalists

being taken into prison, this is when I said, no way, no way. I knew that things would change and I don't want to be associated with him or do anything with him. Gaddafi has other ways too to educate, to focus the mind. Yousef Sawani is a student at the University of Benghazi in the mid-1970s. In April 1977, we were at the dormitory and suddenly there were, you know,

students shouting and banging on the doors of every room in the dorms. They were shouting that, get out, go to the square in Benghazi, get out, go to the square in Benghazi. And they made sure that everyone left the dorms and went to that square. We had no idea, I mean, about what was happening. All that we knew at the time was that there were two people arrested for allegedly conspiring with Egyptian intelligence to destabilize Libya and plant bombs in the port in Benghazi city. When we went to the square before a building that I think used to be a church as well,

there was the hanging platform. Horrific scene. So young and well, full of energy and aspiration. We saw just, you know, people hanging from ropes on the high platform. I wish I could have raised this from my own memory, but every time I remember this, I just feel the pain of the atrocities committed.

One of those hanged at the time, I think, was a student, and the other one worked in the board. They were hanged and I think that initiated a wave of physical liquidation of those who were considered against the revolution support or the regime. It was horrific and later on the regime had no shame to even show those hangings during Ramadan on TV. And I think those really are very stark and painful memories that one had to go through when speaking about this period.

And for me, those actions were further attestation that we are really before an authoritarian dictatorship, nothing more or less. The revolution is a moving train, Gaddafi proclaims. Whoever stands in its way will be crushed. In Sun Tzu's famous treatise, The Art of War, the author decrees, to know your enemy, you must become your enemy. Gaddafi seems to be taking this rather literally.

In a way, he has become just a more brutal version of his old bétnoir, King Idris. If he's not lining his own pockets with Libya's oil wealth, a billion dollars a week at its peak, then he's blowing it in huge quantities on terror groups and military hardware. Gaddafi is an arch-anti-American. At the height of the Cold War, Libya finds convenient friends in the leaders of the communist world, Tito of Yugoslavia, Ceaușescu of Romania, and the big one, Brezhnev of the USSR.

Gaddafi, with his weighty pockets, is a very valued customer. He has no problem procuring arms and armaments from the Soviet Union in particular. In one single missive, he dashes off an order for 6,000 tanks, 1,000 warplanes and 200 ships. More equipment than there are troops to man it all. Soon, Libya's military bases are teeming with Soviet advisors and imported Cold War strategists from other communist countries. The military that Gaddafi headed up in 1969 was, at best, rudimentary. But by the end of the 1970s, he has assembled an army, air force and navy sufficient to become an irritant to anyone else in the region,

particularly to any Western or NATO forces that are passing through the Mediterranean. Gaddafi is given some encouragement by events some 3,000 miles away. In 1979, in Iran, another of the old order has been overthrown. The long-serving Shah, widely regarded as a stooge of the West, has been toppled in an Islamic revolution led by the religious figurehead Ayatollah Khomeini. Gaddafi sees in Khomeini a kindred spirit, a fellow leader with scant regard for diplomatic niceties. In a huge escalation the Ayatollah

backs the storming of the US Embassy by student agitators. These frenzied radicals seize 52 diplomats and embassy staff. This marks the beginning of the infamous Iranian hostage crisis, which will last 444 days. Anti-American riots break out across the Islamic world. It's a familiar scene. Mobs in the streets, the stars and stripes on fire. On December 2nd, the US embassyS. Embassy in Tripoli is attacked. 2,000 rioters sack it and burn it down.

Gaddafi alleges that the U.S. Embassy is a secret military base responsible for unleashing poison gas. For America, things go from bad to worse. In April 1980, under President Jimmy Carter, US special forces launch a military rescue mission in Iran, Operation Eagle Claw, to bring the Tehran hostages home. With shades of Munich, it's another calamity. Helicopters get lost in the desert and malfunction.

One collides with an incoming transport plane and explodes, killing five Air Force personnel and three Marines. The mission is aborted. The debacle proves to be the undoing of Carter, who goes on to lose the 1980 presidential election. This president has pursued a somewhat softly, softly approach to foreign relations. He's even attempted to woo Gaddafi back into the international fold. But the American humiliation in Iran emboldens Gaddafi, not just diplomatically, but militarily.

The United States would now appear to be fair game. It's August 1981. A US naval force has been charged with asserting its presence in the region. Their job is to ensure that freedom of navigation rules are observed in the southern Mediterranean. The task force is large. It comprises two enormous carriers, Nimitz and Forrestal, along with their attendant support ships and escorts. They begin conducting exercises in the Gulf of Sidra, sometimes known as the Gulf of Sirte, the huge bay off the central coast of

Libya. The fleet is operating around 70 miles out, technically well within international waters. To Gaddafi, however, the Gulf of Sidra is off-limits. It is his, regardless of what the rules say. Gaddafi has declared the northern extent of the Gulf, in typically understated fashion, the line of death, and woe betide anyone who crosses it. Well, the line of death was a mythical line at the top of the Gulf of Sirte, which, according to the Gaddafi regime, delineated where the territorial waters that they claimed began. So they named it the line of death simply as a way to indicate that if you crossed over this imaginary line, you were going to be in deep trouble with the regime.

They found that actually they were the ones that were in deep trouble because the U.S. ignored the so-called Line of Death and continued to sail in and around the Gulf of Cirque in a provocative manner to some degree. At the time, Libya described the waters as internal waters, arguing that the Gulf was surrounded on three sides by Libyan territory, was located within territorial waters, and as a result, constituted an integral part of Libya. Now, that was not accepted around the world. Gaddafi's claim that this was territorial waters of Libya was widely rejected. To make the point, the United States government in the late 1970s

began to protest Libyan policy by sailing warships in and around the Gulf of Sirte. In 1981, on the morning of August the 19th, a series of routine missile exercises takes place. U.S. jets war game possible encroachment from Libyan aircraft. Two American F-14s are flying an air patrol up above, keeping an eye out for any mischief. There is a sudden crackle of activity on the airwaves. It's from a Hawkeye early warning plane, picketed out ahead.

It alerts the F-14s that two Soviet-made Su-22 fighters have taken off from a Libyan airbase. They're heading towards the carrier fleet, fast. from a Libyan airbase. They're heading towards the carrier fleet. Fast. At 20,000 feet, the F-14s, piloted by Commander Kleanman and Lieutenant Muszynski, maneuver into an intercept position. It's probably just a case of brinkmanship, of Libyan chancers probing the US defenses. But there's barely time to act. It happens within the space of a mere minute. From a distance of just 300 meters, one of the Libyan planes fires an air-to-air missile at the lead F-14. Banking to evade it, Kleinman wheels his bird around. Beneath the scattered clouds he sees that the Libyan jets have now split, turned and

are screeching away. But they could be positioning themselves for a second attack, and there may be others. The order comes through, act in self-defense. Turning to port to align themselves, the experienced US Navy pilots hit the afterburners and give chase. Using the enemy's blind spots, they come up behind them and loose off sidewinder missiles. Both F-14s score direct hits. As the Libyan jets disintegrate, plummeting towards the shimmering sea,

their pilots eject, though one of the chutes doesn't open. The Libyans will mount further mock raids throughout the day, testing the US Navy's reflexes. But they're repelled each time. In the first open battle, the US has won. I mean, if one's going to be honest, the Reagan administration came in in 1981, and one of the things that they were determined to do was show strength in the world. And one of the targets they chose was Libya.

And many people have asked over the years, well, why did they choose Libya? And my answer is because they could. Because Gaddafi was full of bluster and blunder but was not in the end capable of matching the United States' more power ships, airplanes or whatever in any effective way. The Gulf of Sidra incident is only the beginning. In Washington, there is a new administration in town, and it has determined to do all it can to take down the man now dubbed the Mad Dog of the Middle East. In the next episode of Real Dictators, Gaddafi takes his terror onto the streets of London

and Berlin. The Reagan administration in America launches retaliatory airstrikes against him, targeting the dictator and his inner circle. With the stakes higher than ever, the Libyan security state continues to stamp out dissent. Some 6,000 children, some as young as six years old, are bussed to a sports arena. Here, they will bear witness to a gruesome lesson in tyranny. That's next time on Real Dictators. To be continued... Produced by Joel Dudell Editing and music by Oliver Baines and Dory McCauley Sound design, mix and mastering by Tom Pink Editing and additional effects by George Tapp

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