UK -Politics & World Current Affairs

When the Munich Olympic Games started in 1972, hardly any one heard of ‘Black September Organisation’ BSO( Ayloul al-Aswad) the Palestinian terror organisation, apart from a handful of Middle East specialists and intelligence services’ agents following the deadly game of assassinations and counter assassinations between Palestinian guerrilla groups and Israeli intelligence service Mossad. The game, sometimes spectacularly violent, was often more about revenge rather than a pre-emptive step.
The BSO, a splinter from the Palestine Liberation Organisation PLO, was established ‘to avenge the blood of the martyrs of Black September’. The Name given by Palestinians and their Arab nationalist backers to Septembers 1970s ‘ battles of refugee camps’, when the mainly Bedouin Jordanian Army ( formally the Arab Legion of the British Aram), known for their unquestionable loyalty to King Hussein (1935- 1999) attacked Palestine Liberation Organisation PLO fighters who broke an agreement confining their activities to refugee camps (the 1969 Cairo Agreement established a framework of coordination between Palestinian guerrilla groups and governments hosting refugee following violent clashes in Lebanon and Jordan in 1960). Palestinian fighters challenged the late King Hussein’s sovereignty taking-over major cities, setting up checkpoints and collecting taxes from Palestinians who became Jordanian citizens. The Last straw for the Jordanian monarch came when groups belonging to Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine PFLP hijacked four civilian airliners, BOAC, Swissair, TWA and an Israel El-Al then landed them at Dawson airfield near Amman. The airport was totally controlled by Palestinian guerrilla blocking Jordanian security personnel from operating. BSO aim was to ‘ avenge the blood of 20,000 martyrs’, as the organisation literature circulated in refugee camps and university campus in the Arab world in 1970’s claimed (official figures by the Jordanians put the death toll at 1000). BSO, which was later aided by international terrorist groups like the German Bader Meinhoff, and the Japanese Red Army, targeted Arab regimes it accused of backing the Jordanian Army in September 1970.
In November 28, 1971, they assassinated Wasfi al-Tal, who was Jordan’s prime minister during the September refugee camps war, outside Sherton hotel in Cairo, earning the wrath of President Anwar Sadat, who later made peace with Israel, turning his back on Colonel Gamal Abdel Naser’s revolutionary Arab Nationalist agenda.
The chief of operation of Black September was a Mohammed Oudeh, a alestinan born former science teacher ( employed by the Jordanian ministry of education in 1960s), who was known by his nom de guerre Abu Daoud (Abu is father of… and Daoud was his father’s middle name which he gave to his only son). It took him five months to plan the operation using his contacts within Syrian intelligence – who took advantage of diplomatic privileges- as well as the Stasi (former East German ntelligence service) to smuggle equipment, explosives and weapons to Munich, as he later told me (his admission was completed over a number of years in different locations, including Amman, Damascus and Beirut) .
Mr Oudeh spent the evening of September 4, 1972 at a restaurant attached to Munich central railway station complex, briefing 11 of ‘operators’ from his organisation over dinner, and going over the final details with them.
A few hours later, just before dawn, armed members of BSO scaled the wall surrounding the Olympic athletes’ village, while the other three (who were never caught) helped them from outside. They managed to break into Israeli athletes sleeping quarters taking them hostages, and killing two who resisted. The Israelis’ say they were a weightlifter and a wrestling coach, but Mr Oudeh years later said they were ‘armed Israeli secrete agents’.
BSO offered to release the nine Israeli hostages in exchange for 236 Palestinians held in Israeli jails, but Golda Meir ( 1898-1978), Israelis Prime Minister at the time refused to negotiate and for 20 hours a tense standoff ensued while television images of an empty balcony on a grey, modern dormitory where the group and their hostage made their stand-off, were beamed around the world.

Mr Oudeh has been consistent, over half a dozen of personal conversations, in media interviews and in his 1998 book (min al-Qudus Illa Munich ‘From Jerusalem to Munich’, published in English a year later as ‘Memoirs of A Palestinian Terrorist), that in planning Munich operation his instructions were clear ‘ to avoid killing or injuring any one, including Israeli hostages’ whom he wanted to use as a bargaining chip to release Palestinian comrades in Israeli jails. But later he added that he was deliberately prolonging negotiation in order to maximise publicity ‘alerting the world to the Palestinian legitimate grievances’, in his own words.

Having aborted a previously rehearsed plan to storm the compound (Since world TV cameras were transmitting live the image of the outside building, which was also seen by the hostage takers) the West Germans finally agreed to transport both captors and their hostages, in two helicopters, to Furstenfeldbruck the military airfield, where an aircraft was waiting to fly them to Cairo (The Egyptians, infuriated by BSO terror activities had planned to arrest them, according to their official papers released in 2004).
To every one’s surprise, West German security staged a bungled attempt to rescue the Israelis at the airport, resulting in a chaotic gun battle. When the smoke cleared, five Palestinians, a German police officer and all nine hostages bodies were found on the tarmac, and on the plane.
Israeli government statement vowed to hunt down and kill any Palestinian who had survived or who had been involved in planning the operation; special squads were recruited from Mossad for the mission, which went on for years.

Mohammed Daoud Oudeh, was born in Silwan, East Jerusalem, in 1937. Trained as a teacher in Amman, Beirut and Cairo, he taught maths and physics in Westbank secondary schools (Administered by Jordan’s ministry of Education). He later studied law and helped draft PLO charter (constitution) and other legal issues after joining the Palestinian National Council (parliament).
He remained in East Jerusalem until captured by Israel in 1967 Six Day War when he moved to Jordan to join the PLO. He later admitted that he had been in contacts with PLO as a ‘ sleeper’ of the PLO largest Arafat lead subgroup, Fatah, of which he was one of the founders. He claimed to taking part in Al-Karama battle in 1968 when Israeli forces using air cover attacked refugee camps run by the PLO, inside Jordan near the village of al-Karama, which was the first time Palestinian ‘resistance’ fought Israeli army face to face instead of hit and run or bomb planting operations they started in January 1965.
He had major disagreement with Arafat over priorities. While Arafat exploited the contradictions between Arab regimes, Oudeh was more of a revolutionary puritan who saw regimes not aiding the Palestinians, or making bilateral peace deals with Israel, as ‘ enemies who should be fought before fighting Israel.’
He went underground moving into Lebanon via Syria after 1970s camps wars. He moved between Libya, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, then to Europe.
After the 1972 attack, Oudeh lived in Eastern Europe and moved back to Lebanon early 1975. When the Lebanon civil war broke out later that year, he participated for a few months, then moved to Jordan. He changed residence to Ramallah in the West Bank following 1993 Palestinian Israeli Oslo peace accords.
When his memorise on Munich was published, the Israelis banned him from returning to Ramallah following a trip to see his doctor in Amman. He finally settled in Syria - the only country that would take him, and the most militant regime in the anti-peace Arab bloc.
Oudeh narrowly escaped assassination in what he claimed to be a Mossad operation in a hotel lobby in Warsaw in 1981. Despite being shot several times in his left wrist, chest, stomach and jaw, he chased his assassin (whom he claimed to be Palestinian double agent), to the hotel entrance where he collapsed.
He remained defiant to the end. In his last interview with Aljazeera 1999, he said he would do Munich all over again as he had no regret. “Today, I cannot fight you anymore,’’ he said in a statement to the Israelis shortly before his death of a kidney failure last week, “but my grandson will and his grandsons too.”
Abu Daoud is survived by his wife, five daughters and a son Daoud.