Zvi Zamir, who because the director of Israel’s Mossad spy company led a violent marketing campaign to crush Palestinian terrorism after 11 Israelis have been killed on the 1972 Munich Summer time Olympics — and who a yr later relayed a warning to his authorities that Egypt and Syria have been about to begin the Yom Kippur Battle however was not taken significantly — died on Jan. 2. He was 98.
His dying was introduced by the workplace of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The announcement didn’t say the place he died.
“Zamir led a decided and initiative-taking method within the State of Israel’s struggle towards Palestinian terrorism, which was strengthening at the moment,” Mr. Netanyahu’s workplace mentioned in a press release.
Terrorism was an growing concern for Israel when Mr. Zamir was named the Mossad’s director in 1968. No incident crystallized that menace greater than the assault by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September on the Israeli delegation at its dormitory within the Olympic Village in Munich on Sept. 5, 1972.
Early in a daylong siege, two Israelis have been killed and 9 have been taken hostage.
Prime Minister Golda Meir despatched Mr. Zamir to Munich. However he needed to watch helplessly as inexperienced snipers moved into place for a rescue operation, which was delayed when West German authorities gave in to the terrorists’ calls for: They supplied helicopters to move them and the hostages to the Fürstenfeldbruck army airfield, after which, presumably, to Cairo.
“Then I noticed a scene I’ll always remember for the remainder of my life,” Mr. Zamir mentioned within the 2017 documentary sequence “Mossad: Secret Service of Israel.” “With their arms and toes tied to one another, the athletes trudged previous me. Subsequent to them, the Arabs. A deathly silence.”
Later, on the airfield, the place the Germans deliberate to ambush the terrorists, Mr. Zamir lay beside one of many snipers. “They have been utilizing previous rifles with out telescopic sights,” he recalled within the documentary. “With out something. It broke my coronary heart.”
Within the ensuing firefight, all of the hostages and 5 of the eight terrorists died. The three surviving terrorists have been captured, however they have been launched a couple of weeks later after Palestinian guerrillas hijacked a Lufthansa flight with 20 passengers and crew aboard.
Till Munich, Mr. Zamir mentioned, Mrs. Meir had been reluctant to approve plans to kill Palestinian operatives in Europe as a result of she thought — incorrectly — that European governments would take efficient motion towards them.
“In a few of my conversations with Golda,” Mr. Zamir informed the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2006, “she expressed her concern that our individuals could be concerned in unlawful actions on European soil. It was certainly unavoidable, however unlawful.”
However after the Israelis have been killed, Mrs. Meir put Mr. Zamir answerable for a marketing campaign, known as Operation Wrath of God, to destroy the Palestinian terror community that had discovered it straightforward to function from Europe.
In that operation, Israeli brokers killed a lot of terrorists over at the very least a decade, together with the mastermind of the Munich assault, Ali Hassan Salameh, who died in a bombing in Beirut in 1979, 5 years after Mr. Zamir left the Mossad. An earlier try and kill Mr. Salameh led to an embarrassing mistake: the killing of a waiter in Norway.
Mr. Zamir mentioned that vengeance for the Munich killings was not the Mossad’s motive.
“What we did was to concretely forestall terrorism sooner or later,” he informed Haaretz. “We acted towards those that thought that they might proceed to perpetrate acts of terror.
“I’m not saying that those that have been concerned in Munich weren’t marked for dying,” he continued. “They undoubtedly deserved to die. However we weren’t coping with the previous; we targeting the long run.”
Zvicka Zarzevsky was born on March 3, 1925, in Lodz, Poland, and immigrated together with his household when he was a child to what was then often called the British Mandate of Palestine. His father drove a horse-drawn wagon for an electrical firm. In line with one account, he modified his surname on the request of a instructor who couldn’t pronounce Zarzevsky.
He started his army profession as a young person with the Palmach, a Jewish underground protection power, and he was later a battalion commander throughout Israel’s struggle of independence. He rose throughout the Israel Protection Forces to the rank of main basic and headed the forces’ southern command, which defends the biggest area of the nation.
He additionally served because the I.D.F. attaché in London earlier than being named to run the Mossad in 1968 by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol.
Mr. Zamir twice sounded the alarm about an impending assault in 1973 by Egypt and Syria, due to crucial data supplied by a high-level informant: Ashraf Marwan, a disgruntled son-in-law of President Gamal Abdel Nassar of Egypt, who had been feeding high-value intelligence to the Mossad since 1970.
“Zamir was tremendously efficient,” Howard Blum, the writer of “The Eve of Destruction: The Untold Story of the Yom Kippur Battle” (2003), mentioned in a telephone interview. “He ran an agent — with a handler — like we’d run an agent within the Kremlin. It was a coup.”
Uri Bar-Joseph, the writer of a e-book about Mr. Marwan, “The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel,” informed The Weekly Customary in 2016 that Mr. Zamir had seen Mr. Marwan as “the most effective supply we now have ever had.”
In April 1973, Mr. Marwan despatched an pressing message to his handler utilizing the code phrase for imminent struggle, “radish,” Mr. Blum wrote in The New York Occasions in 2007. Mr. Zamir left Tel Aviv to satisfy Mr. Marwan in a protected home in London.
The assault, Mr. Marwan informed Mr. Zamir, would begin on Might 15. Israel responded by calling up tens of 1000’s of reservists and sending brigades to the Israeli-occupied Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights within the north.
However the assault didn’t come.
On Oct. 5, Mr. Marwan despatched one other message, and Mr. Zamir returned to London. He telephoned his bureau chief in Israel to relay what Mr. Marwan had informed him: The assault would occur at sundown on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. The bureau chief conveyed the warning to aides to Mrs. Meir and Moshe Dayan, the protection minister.
However the warning was not absolutely heeded.
At an Israeli cupboard assembly on the morning of Oct. 6, Mr. Blum reported, Mr. Dayan informed David Elazar, chief of employees of the Israel Protection Forces, “On the idea of messages from Zvicka, you don’t mobilize a complete military.”
The alarm led to a partial mobilization of the I.D.F. that would not blunt heavy Israeli losses early within the struggle, which started at round 2 p.m. and never at sundown. In line with a historic rely from the Jewish Company for Israel, 177 Israeli tanks confronted 1,400 Syrian tanks on the Golan Heights, and Egyptian forces simply crossed the Suez Canal.
Israel finally turned the tide — with weapons and different army support from the US — and prevailed by the tip of that month. But it was recognized for its early intelligence failure and the uncertainty brought on by almost shedding.
On Oct. 7, 2023, nearly precisely 50 years to the day after the Yom Kippur Battle started, Hamas and different militant teams primarily based in Gaza crossed the border with Israel — stunning Mr. Netanyahu’s unprepared authorities — and killed an estimated 1,200 Israelis. Israel has retaliated by vowing to destroy Hamas in a struggle that has up to now killed some 23,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians.
At Mr. Zamir’s funeral, David Barnea, the present director of the Mossad, mentioned that the spy company “should maintain to account the murderers who invaded the Gaza border space on Oct. 7 — the planners and those that despatched them.”
He added, “Zvicka’s spirit will accompany us on this mission.”
Mr. Zamir left the Mossad in 1974. He turned the chief government of a development and civil engineering firm and later served because the chairman of the Institute for Petroleum and Geophysics Analysis and the Israel Petroleum and Power Institute.
Details about survivors was not instantly accessible.
The Mossad’s post-Munich operation was the topic of the 2005 movie “Munich,” directed by Steven Spielberg. Mr. Zamir, who was portrayed by Ami Weinberg, disliked it, telling Haaretz that it was a “cowboy movie” that deserved “opprobrium.”
“The ‘sages’ behind the movie don’t clarify the blow, the shock that Munich delivered to all our conceptions,” he mentioned. “These issues have been pushed out of the movie to be able to make room for operational depictions primarily based on the director’s fertile creativeness.”
