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Short Summary
Main recommendation: Operation Wrath of God was Israel's post-Munich campaign of state-sponsored assassinations, in which Mossad hunted down the Black September perpetrators and PLO figures across multiple countries, deliberately abandoning international norms. The video frames the campaign as a response to the failure of international law and foreign security to protect Israeli citizens, and traces its methods, successes, a major failure in Norway, and its eventual reactivation under Menachem Begin.
Key Points
- The 1972 Munich Olympics were hosted by West Germany as a "Games of Peace and Joy," with deliberately loose security that left the Olympic village and Israeli athletes vulnerable.
- Eight Black September militants killed two Israeli athletes and took nine hostage; the standoff at Fürstenfeldbruck airport ended with all nine hostages killed after West German snipers were underprepared.
- Prime Minister Golda Meir authorized a "blood for blood" assassination campaign, with Mossad tasked with pursuing the perpetrators regardless of international borders.
- Mossad intelligence officer Michael Harari organized a structure of 15 agents split into five specialized units, with two hit executioners supported by logistics, safe-house, and surveillance teams.
- The campaign was paused in 1973 after the Lillehammer mistake exposed the operation, and was reactivated in 1978 under Menachem Begin, ending with the killing of Ali Hassan Salameh in Beirut in 1979.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions: The video describes no instructions for viewers to follow; the operational details it gives describe how the Mossad campaign itself was carried out, such as dividing agents into roles (logistics, safe houses, surveillance, and a two-person hit unit), using decoy identities (a fake Italian journalist calling Mahmoud Hamshari before detonating a phone-receiver bomb), and planting a pressure-activated bomb under Hussein Al-Bashir's mattress in Cyprus.
- The hit unit sent the target's family a bouquet of flowers and a card reading "Remember, we neither forget nor forgive" hours before a killing, and shot the target eleven times, one bullet for every Israeli athlete killed at Munich.
- The Beirut raid involved the Israeli Navy and the Sayeret Matkal commandos, with male commandos disguising themselves as women to pass street security, and killed three PLO leaders who lived in a seven-story apartment complex in Beirut.
- In Lillehammer, Norway in 1973, Mossad mistakenly killed an innocent Moroccan waiter, Ahmed Bouchiki; Norwegian police arrested six agents, and the exposure led Golda Meir to suspend the program.
- In 1979, a female agent posing as a British citizen rented an apartment overlooking Salameh's route in Beirut to study his convoy before explosives killed him on January 22, 1979, after a seven-year search.
- The video notes that one of the Munich gunmen survived in hiding, and characterizes the campaign as establishing a lasting doctrine of extrajudicial deterrence.
Bottom Line
The video presents Operation Wrath of God as a deliberate decision to answer terrorism with covert, cross-border assassination, a choice the video shows brought both lethal success and serious embarrassment.
