Text: Sports Illustrated Article: Abu Mazen funded Munich Massacre

The Mastermind: Thirty years after he helped plan the terror strike, Abu
Daoud remains in hiding -- and unrepentant

By Alexander Wolff Sports Illustrated Issue date: August 26, 2002
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/si_online/news/2002/08/20/sb2/

Following the Oslo Accords of 1993, the mastermind of Black September's
Munich attack enjoyed a certain respectability. Mohammed Daoud Oudeh, a.k.a.
Abu Daoud, sat on the Palestinian National Council, where in 1996 he joined
a majority in voting to revoke the clause in the PLO charter calling for
Israel's destruction. Though Israel had long known of his role at Munich --
Mossad was believed to have been involved in a 1981 assassination attempt in
which he was shot six times -- he even carried an Israeli-issued VIP pass
that allowed him to shuttle between his home in Amman, Jordan, and the
occupied territories.

All that changed in 1999 after Abu Daoud openly acknowledged his role in the
Olympic attack, both in his memoir, Palestine: From Jerusalem to Munich,
published in Paris, and in an interview with the Arab TV network al-Jazeera.
Germany issued an international arrest warrant on Abu Daoud, and Israel
canceled his travel credentials, barring him from the Palestinian lands he
had spent his adult life trying to liberate. In the U.S., former senator
Howard Metzenbaum (D., Ohio) -- who had watched the Munich crisis unfold on
TV with his neighbors in suburban Cleveland, the parents of Israeli-American
victim David Berger -- led a campaign to keep U.S. bookstores from stocking
Abu Daoud's memoir. (Arcade, which owns the U.S. rights, still hasn't set a
publication date for an English-language version of the book.)

In late July, SI's Don Yaeger went to the Middle East to find the
72-year-old Abu Daoud. After five days in Syria, where he met with leaders
of several Palestinian groups, including the Palestinian Authority, PA
president Yasir Arafat's Fatah faction and the militant Hamas, Yaeger
received a call from Abu Daoud, who said he was in Cyprus. Abu Daoud, who
would not reveal where he resides -- saying only that he lives with his wife
on a pension provided by the PA -- agreed to answer written questions. Among
his claims, in his memoir and to SI, are these:

Though he wasn't involved in conceiving or implementing it, "the [Munich]
operation had the endorsement of Arafat." Arafat is not known to have
responded to the allegations in Abu Daoud's book. In May 1972 four Black
Septembrists hijacked a Sabena flight from Brussels to Tel Aviv, hoping to
free comrades from Israeli jails. But Israeli special forces stormed the
plane, killing or capturing all the terrorists and freeing every passenger,
leaving Arafat, by Abu Daoud's account, desperate to boost morale in the
refugee camps by showing that Israel was vulnerable.

Though he didn't know what the money was being spent for, longtime Fatah
official Mahmoud Abbas, a.k.a. Abu Mazen, was responsible for the financing
of the Munich attack. Abu Mazen could not be reached for comment regarding
Abu Daoud's allegation. After Oslo in 1993, Abu Mazen went to the White
House Rose Garden for a photo op with Arafat, President Bill Clinton and
Israel's Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. "Do you think that ... would have
been possible if the Israelis had known that Abu Mazen was the financier of
our operation?" Abu Daoud writes. "I doubt it." Today the Bush
Administration seeks a Palestinian negotiating partner "uncompromised by
terror," yet last year Abu Mazen met in Washington with Secretary of State
Colin Powell.

The German assertion that the team's two senior commandos had infiltrated
the Olympic Village in the weeks before the attack isn't true. Abu Daoud
speculates that the Germans found this story useful, to make the attack seem
like an inside job and divert attention from their poor security measures.

While he doesn't regret his role in the operation, Abu Daoud told SI, "I
would be against any operation like Munich ever again. At the time, it was
the correct thing to do for our cause. ... The operation brought the
Palestinian issue into the homes of 500 million people who never previously
cared about Palestinian victims at the hands of the Israelis." Today, he
says, an attack on an event like the Olympics would only damage the
Palestinians' image.