Zvi Zamir, head of Mossad who led Operation Wrath of God, the hunt for the perpetrators of the Munich massacre – obituary

Zvi Zamir in One Day in September, Kevin Macdonald’s 1999 film about the Munich massacre, which won an Oscar for Best Documentary – Everett Collection/Alamy

Zvi Zamir, who has died aged 98, was a general in the Israeli Defence Forces before becoming Director of Mossad, Israel’s Intelligence Agency, in 1968; in this capacity he led Operation Wrath of God to hunt and kill those responsible for the Munich Massacre.

On September 5 1972, eight heavily armed militants from Black September, a faction of the PLO, stormed the building housing the Israeli delegation to the Munich Olympic Games, killing two athletes and taking nine hostages; they demanded the release of 236 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails. The Golda Meir government declined to cave in and the Prime Minister handed responsibility for the crisis to her trusted Mossad chief.

Zamir rushed to Munich, where he pleaded with West German officials to permit Sayeret Matkal, at that time one of the few military units trained in hostage rescue and counter-terrorism, to rescue the Israeli athletes. But as the German constitution prohibited foreigners from carrying out military operations on German soil, his request was rejected.

The hijackers demanded two helicopters to fly them and their hostages to the nearby Fürstenfeldbruck airfield, and a special plane to take them from there to an Arab country. The Germans agreed and planned to use snipers to shoot the hijackers when they transferred from the helicopters to the plane.

Zvi Zamir, centre, in 1948 – Wikimedia Commons

Zamir, who was flown to Fürstenfeldbruck just ahead of the terrorists and their hostages, watched with growing frustration as the Germans prepared themselves for the showdown. “The Germans were useless… useless all the way,” he recalled.

It was pitch black at the airport, but the artificial light was patently inadequate for a sniping operation. Worse, only five snipers were allocated the task of tackling eight terrorists; several of the snipers’ guns were not fitted with telescopic sights, and the snipers, deployed approximately 100 metres away from their commanders, were not issued with means of communication to co-ordinate their firing.

When the snipers opened fire they failed to kill all the hijackers in the first volley and a gunfight ensued. The three remaining terrorists tossed hand grenades into one of the helicopters; the explosion ignited the fuel tank and the handcuffed Israelis still sitting inside were burnt alive. Another hijacker sprayed the Israelis in the other helicopter with bullets.

Zamir, witnessing the disaster from the control tower, insisted on getting out to the balcony to negotiate with the terrorists. Taking with him an Arabic speaking aide they used a megaphone to shout: “Stop firing… the plane is ready for you… STOP FIRING”. But, as he recalled, “Their reply was clear… they opened fire at us on the balcony.”

German police take up position outside the apartments where Israeli athletes and coaches were being held hostage at the 1972 Munich Olympics – Bettmann

Back at the Olympic Village, Zamir telephoned Prime Minister Meir at home in Israel. “Golda, I’ve got bad news,” he said, “I’m just back from the airport… not one of the Israelis has survived.” In a later interview Zamir said: “To see this happen on German soil was a terrible sight.”

Zvi Zamir was born Zvicka Zarzevsky on March 3 1925 in Poland. When he was seven months old, the Zarzevskys settled in Palestine, then under British Mandate.

In 1942, he joined the Palmach, the elite strike force of Haganah, the clandestine military organisation of the Jewish community in Palestine. In 1946 the British arrested Zamir for his involvement in bringing illegal immigrants to Palestine and imprisoned him at the Latrun jail. On his release a year later he was made commander of the 6th Palmach battalion and took part in battles against Arabs in and around Jerusalem.

In 1950 Zamir was made commander of the Givati Brigade, and in 1953 he attended the Staff College at Camberley. On his return to Israel he was appointed commander of the infantry school, and during the 1956 Sinai campaign he served as a brigade commander.

Zamir in 1960 – Wikimedia Commons

In 1957 he took leave and enrolled as a student of geography at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Upon completing his studies he was promoted to brigadier, and after a stint as IDF’s training branch commander, in 1962 he was made OC Southern Command in charge of the Israeli-Egyptian front, which during his tenure was relatively quiet. On July 15 1966, Zamir was appointed military attaché in London, which meant that he missed the June 1967 Six Day war.

Zamir’s appointment to head the Mossad surprised many and it took him two years before he began to feel and understand the real dimensions of his job. As director of Mossad, Zamir had a hands-on style of leadership. His reports were voluminous; he never concealed anything from the government and he took responsibility for both successes and failures, typically taking the latter much to heart. Prime Minister Meir would often console him with the words: “When trees are felled, the chips will fly.”

After Munich, as Zamir recalled, “Golda wanted very much, that the terrorists [responsible for Munich] will be brought to trial. But she realised that this is impossible.” Instead, Zamir asked her for permission to kill them.

She instructed him to draw up a list of targets: they did not have to be involved in Munich or even be members of Black September to make the cut, as the objective was to wipe out the entire terrorist network in Europe. A special secret committee, “Committee X”, chaired by the Prime Minister, went through Zamir’s list and approved what became known as Operation Wrath of God.

A scene from Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich with, l-r, the intelligence officer Michael Harari (Moshe Ivgy), Zamir (Ami Weinberg) and Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen): Weinberg described the film as ‘a fairy tale… based on the director’s fertile imagination’ – United Archives GmbH/Alamy

The first to die was Abdel Wael Zwaiter, officially a translator at the Libyan Embassy in Italy but, according to Mossad, a Black September terrorist; he was shot 12 times by Zamir’s hit team on October 16 1972 in Rome.

Zamir would often fly to Europe to supervise operations and be with his people. “I spoke to [the hit team] before the mission, during the mission and afterwards too, and I knew them all,” he said in an interview.

Not all went well. At 10:40 on July 21 1973, Zamir’s assassins, tracking a man they believed to be the mastermind of Munich, Ali Hassan Salameh, killed an innocent Moroccan waiter in the town of Lillehammer in Norway. Norwegian police managed to apprehend six of the back-up team, interrogated them and put them on trial.

The “Lillehammer Affair” was an embarrassing failure and Zamir accepted full responsibility; but when he offered his resignation, Golda Meir asked him to stay on: her trust in him was absolute. Over a period of 20 years, even after Zamir’s retirement from Mossad, Israeli agents continued executing Wrath of God, killing dozens of Palestinians, including two of the three terrorists who survived Munich.

This campaign was depicted in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich, which Zamir hated, describing it as a “cowboy movie” and a “fairy tale… based on the director’s fertile imagination”. He was played by the Israeli actor Ami Weinberg.

In October 1973, Zamir’s attention shifted to preparations by Egypt and Syria to attack Israel. While Military Intelligence dismissed Arab mobilisation as a false alarm, Zamir – typically – took the threat seriously and warned of the possibility of all-out war.

In London on October 5, Zamir met Israel’s most senior spy, Ashraf Marwan, the son-in-law of the Egyptian former president Gamal Abdel Nasser. Marwan warned Zamir that “war would break out tomorrow” and provided him with maps and documents. This was too short a timescale to enable Israel to fully mobilise her forces, but it did provide the Israelis with some extra time to take measures to contain the imminent Arab attack.

The Agranat Commission of inquiry into the circumstances leading to the outbreak of the Yom Kippur war praised Zamir for bringing the message from London. Zamir later said: “The greatest achievement of Mossad during my time in charge was to provide the warning about the looming war.”

When he retired in 1978, Zamir became director-general and chairman of National Oil Refineries, a post he held for 15 years. In 1995 he was appointed a member of the Shamgar Commission set up to investigate the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

For some Zamir was “colourless”, but for others he was a model of discipline – honest, sincere and straightforward.

He and his wife Rina had three children.

Zvi Zamir, born March 3 1925, died January 2 2024

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