I was a smooth bottom baby when that happened, so I'm not an expert.... However, I believe that the retaliation by the Mossad was immediate, and was more in the vein of justice than vengeance.
מבצע זעם האל
History
Two days after the
Munich massacre at the
1972 Summer Olympics, Israel retaliated by
bombing ten PLO bases in Syria and Lebanon. Prime Minister
Golda Meir created Committee X, a small group of government officials tasked with formulating an Israeli response, with herself and
Defense Minister Moshe Dayan at the head. She also appointed General
Aharon Yariv as her Advisor on
Counterterrorism; he, along with
Mossad Director
Zvi Zamir, took the principal role in directing the ensuing operation. The committee came to the conclusion that, to deter future violent incidents against Israel, they needed to assassinate those who had supported or carried out the Munich massacre, and in dramatic fashion.
Pressured by Israeli public opinion and top intelligence officials, Meir reluctantly authorized the beginning of the broad
assassination campaign.
[3] Yet when the three surviving perpetrators of the massacre were
released just months later by West Germany in compliance with the demands of the
hijackers of Lufthansa Flight 615, any remaining ambivalence she felt was removed.
[4] The committee's first task for Israeli intelligence was to draw up an assassination list of all those involved in Munich. This was accomplished with the aid of
PLO operatives working for Mossad, and with information provided by friendly European intelligence agencies.
[5] While the contents of the entire list are unknown, reports put the final number of targets at 20–35, a mix of Black September and PLO elements.
[nb 1] Once this was complete, Mossad was charged with locating the individuals and assassinating them.
Critical in the planning was the idea of
plausible deniability, that it should be impossible to prove a direct connection between the assassinations and Israel.
[6] In addition, the operations were more generally intended to terrorize Palestinian militants. According to
David Kimche, former deputy head of Mossad, "The aim was not so much revenge but mainly to make them [the Palestinian terrorists] frightened. We wanted to make them look over their shoulders and feel that we are upon them. And therefore we tried not to do things by just shooting a guy in the street – that's easy ... fairly."
[7]
It is also known that Mossad agent
Michael Harari led the creation and direction of the teams,
[8] although some may not have always been under government responsibility. Author
Simon Reeve explains that the Mossad team – whose squad names are letters of the
Hebrew alphabet – consisted of:
...fifteen people divided into five squads: "
Aleph", two trained killers; "
Bet", two guards who would shadow the Alephs; "
Het", two agents who would establish cover for the rest of the team by renting hotel rooms, apartments, cars, and so on; "
Ayin", comprising between six and eight agents who formed the backbone of the operation, shadowing targets and establishing an escape route for the Aleph and Bet squads; and "
Qoph", two agents specializing in communications.
[9]
Having the Mossad merc Soros, while delightful, beneficial to the world at large
I don't think the current leader ship has this the
Chutzpah