Vengeance

Vengeance is a true story that reads like a novel. It is the account of five ordinary Israelis, selected to vanish into “the cold” of espionage secrecy — their mission to hunt down and kill the PLO terrorists responsible for the massacre of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

This is the account of that secret mission, as related by the leader of the group — the first Mossad agent to come out of “deep cover” and tell the story of a heroic endeavor that was shrouded in silence and speculation for years. He reveals the long and dangerous operation whose success was bought at a terrible cost to the idealistic volunteer agents themselves.

The “hero” Avner, was a Mossad agent who was asked by Golda Meir to resign the agency to lead a team of men in the attempt to take the lives of the 11 men that were responsible for the Black September terrorist group’s act of killing Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.

Vengeance is a profoundly human document, a real-life espionage classic that plunges the reader into the shadow world of terrorism and political murder. But it goes far beyond that, to explore firsthand the feelings of disgust and doubt that gradually came to torment each member of the Israeli team, and that in the end inexorably changed their view of the mission — and themselves.

Although the author had to rely on a single source for some sections of the book, he is honest about this. When there are questions about his interpretation, he explains the different theories in the footnotes.

A special addendum “Notes on a Controversy” and footnotes that follow the main text in this volume ad to the credibility of this book. Questions raised about the author’s perspective and sources are also answered in these two sections.

380 pages