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David Berger’s father was cramped inside an Austrian phone booth when he learned his son was dead.
Berger’s parents were overseas to watch him compete for Israel at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. Originally from Ohio, Berger made the team as a weightlifter. Sharing his Olympic experience with family thrilled Berger until eight Palestinian terrorists took 11 members of the Israeli delegation hostage early on September 5. They killed two Israelis in the Olympic Village and held the remaining nine men, including Berger, as tools for negotiation.
Also Read: Oklahoma City Bombing: Head FBI agent recalls terror attack 30 years laterThe captors demanded the release of 234 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel and two more in Germany. After the talks didn’t result in a resolution, the terrorists demanded an airplane to take them to Cairo. A Boeing 727 awaited them at Fürstenfeldbruck Air Base, but it was a trap.
After they arrived with the remaining hostages on September 6, law enforcement and the terrorists exchanged fire. During the massacre, the terrorists killed their hostages. Berger survived an initial gunshot wound, but he died when a terrorist threw a grenade into his helicopter. The explosion killed Berger, whom his family recalled as a practical joker and a pacifist.
“I remember it as if it was yesterday,” Fred Berger, David’s brother, told the Cleveland Jewish News in August 2022.
What Was Operation Wrath of God?
West German authorities arrested the three surviving militants from the massacre, but they weren’t in custody very long. Officials released them in an exchange for those on board a jet that Palestinian terrorists hijacked on October 29, 1972.
Israel responded in short order to the carnage its representatives endured at the Munich Olympics. Prime Minister Golda Meir authorized the Mossad—Israel’s version of the CIA—to hunt down those responsible for organizing or carrying out the murders.
“From the blood-drenched history of the Jewish nation, we learn that violence which begins with the murder of Jews ends with the spread of violence and danger to all people, in all nations,” Meir said then. “We have no choice but to strike at terrorist organizations wherever we can reach them. That is our obligation to ourselves and to peace.”
The Mossad named the covert operation “Wrath of God.” It targeted an offshoot of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement called Black September, which claimed responsibility for the heinous acts.
In her book about it, professor Aviva Guttmann said the Israelis sought more than just to avenge their countrymen’s deaths. They also aimed to thwart existing plots before terrorists carried them out, as well as stymie future attacks. For any hope of achieving these wide-ranging goals, the Israelis couldn’t go it alone. In fact, they tapped into an intelligence network involving several Western European nations, Guttmann said.
“Israeli agencies had almost no intelligence on Palestinian terrorism in Europe [before the Olympic attack],” Guttmann explained.
After Munich, those countries created a special channel containing intel on Arab terrorism efforts in Europe. They dubbed the channel “Kilowatt.”
Exacting Revenge
The first “Wrath of God” killing that the Mossad carried out occurred on October 16, 1972. The target was Wael Zwaiter, a PLO representative in Rome and one of Arafat’s cousins.
Mahmoud Hamshari followed. Pretending to be an Italian journalist, an Israeli intelligence agent set up a supposed interview with Hamshari in December 1972. Not knowing that the Mossad planted explosives in his phone, Hamshari answered the call and identified himself. Those were his last words before the bomb went off.
Wrath of God operatives detonated a remote-controlled bomb under Hussein Abad al-Chir’s to kill him in Cyprus on January 24, 1973. They shot and killed Basil al-Kubaisi in broad daylight in Paris that April, then within a week, they killed one of Fatah’s top leaders and three other men. In response, Black September murdered a suspected Mossad agent. That man, Vittorio Olivares, didn’t turn out to be a spy.
The killing didn’t stop there.
Then there was the death of Mohamed Boudia on June 28, 1973, in Paris. Mossad killed the terrorist despite Boudia’s best efforts to hide his identity, as Guttmann chronicled in her book. The Algerian, who belonged to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, did not put his car under his real name. Thanks to the Kilowatt intelligence-sharing network, the Mossad confirmed Boudia’s location. Israeli agents killed him with a car bomb.
A Tragic Case of Mistaken Identity
One of Meir’s stated conditions for starting Operation Wrath of God was that any attacks would not harm innocent bystanders. Agents made a tragic error three weeks after taking out Boudia. They mistook a waiter for terrorist Ali Hassan Salameh in Lillehammer, Norway, and killed him.
The incident led to the arrest and conviction of several Mossad agents and prompted Meir to suspend Operation Wrath of God. The program came back briefly in 1979, when the Mossad killed Salameh with a car bomb in Beirut.
It is not known exactly how many people died during Operation Wrath of God or other programs such as Operation Spring of Youth. At least in the Bergers’ case, they didn’t seek revenge after David’s death. In the days immediately after the heaviest loss a parent can bear, they hoped for peace.
“There’s certainly no reprisals because of this incident,” Buddy Rosenthal said on September 7, 1972, per the Cleveland Jewish News. “Because seeing more families going through the same grief is not going to do anyone a bit of good. It’s our family’s hope that through this, the many countries around the world will have enough sense to get together, and we’ll have an end to this fear of hostages, kidnapping, and reprisals.”
