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Title: Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team
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Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
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| Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team by Simon & Schuster The dark side of war | | "Vengence" is an insider's account of the formation and actions of a counter-terrorism team. Unlike the fictional Bourne series emphasis on hand to hand fighting skills, the bulk of the subject's work involved obtaining information, being smart with it, and executing the target. Who can you trust and how much of what they are saying is true was always the key question which would make the difference between being killed and making the kill. A very tense and disquieting story which reads fairly well for a non-fictional account, I recommend it to anyone interested in gaining insight into the dark side of war. | | Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team by Simon & Schuster Vivid and compelling, a book you can't put down | George Jonas's "Vengeance" is the book from which Steven Spielberg's "Munich" was derived. Both concern the Israeli hit team sent into the cold to track down and kill the authors of the 1972 massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes. While reaction to the movie focused on the moral ambiguity of it all, we see here that this is at best a minor angle in the book, and at worst, a willful distortion by critics.
The as-told-to story of Avner, the team leader's pseudonym, "Vengeance" details how the team is formed and begins work in Europe. With massacre perpetrators mostly dead, the hits are aimed at those higher up: those who hatched the plot, the leaders of international Palestinian terror.
Some, openly terrorists, live in hiding or in countries sympathetic to terror. They travel surrounded by bodyguards. These are considered hard targets. The Israeli team is not given permission to go to Arab or Communist countries.
But some are soft targets: Palestinians with covers as journalists, diplomats, intellectuals or professors, whose involvement with terror remains secret - the Sami Al-Arians of the 1970s. Trusting their covers, they live openly in cities like Paris or Rome, walk the streets alone, have fixed addresses, and generally don't carry guns or take attention-getting secret-agent precautions.
The hit team - assembled at the government's highest levels and severed from Mossad to preserve deniability - flounders at the outset. They can't locate their prey. Their big break comes through a chance contact: Avner reconnects with a childhood acquaintance, now a hanger-on of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, who, believing Avner to be a radical terrorist, introduces him to bigger wheels in the underworld of terror.
Avner discovers that terror, a big business, has developed a certain amount of outsourcing - organizations that, for hefty sums of money, secure safe houses, deliver arms, supply explosives, provide lookouts, do surveillance, arrange transportation, help with getaways and bury bodies. Providing networks terrorists couldn't possibly match, they free the latter to plan hits and getaways without worrying about logistics. The support networks also provide an extra cut-out level for the terrorists. They aren't picky about who they work for. Most important for Avner and his team - cut off as they are from Mossad and its resources - they even leak information on other terrorists' whereabouts.
Tapping into these networks - penetrating the terror world by impersonating terrorists - Avner hits the gold mine allowing his team to find and kill Israel's enemies.
At first they are so successful they marvel at how easy it is to find and kill a man. Almost too easy. Later, snags emerge. The hard-to-find people are still hard to find. A couple of missions don't go smoothly. Their Mossad liaision hints they're not moving fast enough. The team begins to press, attacking with less planning and caution. They are compelled to involve themselves - and their precious underworld contacts - in a major Israeli commando raid in Beirut, blowing the team's cover.
Their mood darkens as three team members die, two by assassination, leading survivors to wonder if they've been sold out by the very people who sold others out to them.
Yes, they contemplated the morality of it all - having to become terrorists, complete with constantly changing fake passports and shadowy changes of address - to fight terrorists. But their conclusion is that they're not like terrorists at all. Terrorists kill schoolchildren - the infamous Ma'alot massacre comes to mind - while the hit team kills terrorists, delivering justice crude, justice extralegal, but justice nevertheless. At the explicit orders of Israeli Premier Golda Meir they avoid killing bystanders, family members and anyone not on their hit list. By and large, they are successful. They go outside their orders only marginally: assassinating a Dutch hit woman who seduced and killed one team member, probably on behalf of the Palestinians, and assassinating a PLO replacement for an earlier target.
Avner's greater concerns are more specific. He is haunted by insecurity as a "yekke", an Israeli Jew with German roots, in Israel, a country dominated by "Galicianers", or Polish Jews, who, Avner feels, form a ruling clique reserving power and privilege for themselves. He and his teammates are all "yekkes", picked because they can blend in in Western Europe, but they all worry about being left hanging once their mission, and usefulness to the state, conclude. Avner's own father is a former Mossad agent, now embittered by his treatment. Avner worries the same thing will happen to them.
Gloom and paranoia set in as his teammates die. At mission end he returns to his wife and baby and decides he's had enough of this kind of life. His fears materialize when his superiors, refusing to let him go, take back $100,000 that had accrued in a Swiss bank as his pay. Avner accuses them of threatening his family in an effort to force him back into the fold - and notes his own countervailing "I know where your children go to school" threats against an Israeli security man in New York City he suspects of involvement.
Finally they leave him in peace, but penniless and forced to take menial jobs. Avner's decision to go public about his mission is clearly payback for this, a quest for recognition, and maybe for some money as well..
Avner and Jonas conclude the mission in the end presents no moral dilemma. Yes, the terror world replaces the dead terrorists and, yes, terror continues. But the people who were killed, deserved it. A message is sent that attacks on Israel and Jews no longer go unpunished, and that the Jewish state will go after those responsible, wherever and however.
He and his teammates ponder the morality of what they're doing because they are indeed normal human beings, not, unlike their adversaries, hardened killers. They ultimately believe in their mission. They see themselves as disciplined soldiers fighting for a democratic state. They fight an extralegal war because the world, again and again, has offered little or no justice for Jewish terror victims while encouraging, tacitly or actively, their murderers. In the 1970s Palestinian killers are let go, again and again, by appeasing Western governments, and commit more murders. Israel has no choice but to pursue them alone, by any means necessary, to show the world no one can strike with impunity at Jews ever again.
The book is convincing, possessed of details large and small about how teams of this sort operate. You can't help but be fascinated in learning Mossad's technique for doing a hit. Each step is developed with supreme calculation and attention to detail: small caliber, low power, quiet weapons, with safeties never used, rounds left unchambered, weapons never drawn until it's time to shoot, no shooting except to kill, and shots always fired in pairs.
Particularly convincing are details about bureaucratic infighting. The team, say, balks at participating in Beirut, not only because it will jeopardize their own work, but because, having taken the risks and done the work to plan an operation, they want to be the ones to do it and get the credit, secret though it is, inside Mossad - quite recognizable human behavior.
Overshadowing the book is the whole question of whether Avner is who he says he is, whether the book is true; is distorted; or is an out-and-out lie. Israel can't be expected to acknowledge its truth, if it's true; even few people within Mossad were party to it; and outside intelligence experts would have no way of assessing the truth of what is explicitly an ultrasecret mission.
Jonas says he believes Avner, in the end, not because of his own attempts at verification, but because Avner knew how the light switch in the lobby of a particular Roman apartment building worked. The detail most straining credibility, in my opinion, was the terror outsourcing network; it's a deus ex machina, these shadowy all-powerful guys who are on your side if you can pay them and know how to find them. And Avner stumbles over them because of a chance relationship with a childhood friend. It's so convenient, maybe too convenient. But it is still plausible.
At the end, this book is vivid and compelling, one you can't put down. | | Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team by Simon & Schuster An eye-opener on the nature of counter-terrorism | | I read "Notes on a controversy" at the end of the book first, because this justification of the text by the author deals with the issue of veracity. The book has apparently been attacked on this score, and of course the very nature of the subject excludes the possibility of total and certain verification of all the facts, but the author makes a convincing case of the techniques he used in circumventing this problem and checking out his main source's story. That story itself is gripping, not only because it describes in thriller-like fashion the actions undertaken by an Israeli hit team against the masterminds behind the killings of Israel's Olympic team in 1972, but also because of what I would call, perhaps oddly, its humanity: the personal torment felt by the members of the hit team is faithfully portrayed, and is perhaps the most unforgettable part of the narrative. One closes the book with the uneasy feeling that there really is no way to avenge, let alone deter, the monstrous deeds perpetrated by terrorist scum. But I do not share a shred of the hit team's doubts that their actions were fully justified. This book is an eye-opener on the nature on terrorism, but also on the ruthlessness demanded of those who are called to combat it. The book leaves one with few illusions about "the secret world" either, which adds to its aura of truthfulness. | | Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team by Simon & Schuster A Very Plausible Account of Events | Vengeance succeeds on many levels. It could easily stand as a classic tradecraft work about espionage operations or as a fictional spy thriller. It is action packed and a real page-turner. I was disappointed when it ended.
Terrorism succeeds, when it succeeds, by using violence to send a public message to one's opposition. It amounts to negotiation by murder and bomb blasts. The message being: "If we aren't safe, you aren't safe either." That was the message that the Black September organization sent to Israel with their 1972 Munich action, and it was the same message that the Israeli state sent back to Black September via Avner's hit team. Terrorism is warfare by symbolic violence, although it's more than symbolic if you're there when the bombs go off or the shooting starts.
As to whether all aspects of Vengeance are literally "true," I admit I have my doubts. But so what? It has verisimilitude where it counts and whether this or that specific detail is literally true or is a mishmash of several events or characters combined is largely irrelevant. The ongoing terror campaigns going on all over the world today show that the morally ambiguous world that Avner and his opposition existed in 1972 hasn't changed that much. And it probably never will.
| | Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team by Simon & Schuster Spies? Terrorists? Assassinations? The Middle East? A True Story? Yes! | The Jewish state of Israel has always had an aura of intrigue because of the reputation of the Mossad. This is a true story of a group of spies who were on a mission too difficult and high profile for the Mossad. This book is an excellent story in itself, but the fact that it is a true story makes it even more fascinating. Quite a bit of history on terrorism against Israel is given. Personally, I was ashamedly ignorant of the persecution that Israel suffered in the 60's and 70's through terrorism. This book brought to light the terror that was leveled against Israel. Jonas does an excellent job of writing, in a humble way that is uncharacteristic of many authors. The very nature of his writing lends credibility to his story. The afterward by the author is an exciting supplement to the book, giving the author's rebuttal to those who question the validity of the book. I loved the way the book unfolded, cold and slow in the beginning but slowly picking up speed and never slowing down until the last page. I look forward to seeing Stephen Spielberg's movie based on the book as Spielberg has shown in the past that he can successfully make good films that stay true to the books that they are based upon.
A reoccurring theme throughout the book is the morality behind terrorism and counter terrorism. At what point does the defender become the aggressor? America has faced this problem as well in the past few years trying to define the fine line between defense and cold-blooded war. Is counter terrorism justified? Was Israel's decision to assassinate top terrorist leaders warranted, or did these actions put the Israelis on ethical par with the murderous terrorists? The book clearly shows how the decisions of war are difficult, and there is often no straightforward moral line in such choices. There will always be dispute and debate between Moses' law of eye for an eye and Jesus' law of turning the other cheek. While both of these laws seem to be incompatible with each other, it will do humanity well to find how these two laws full of wisdom come together in some sort of compromise.
| | Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team by Simon & Schuster Product Description | | 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. "Avner" was the leader of that team, handpicked by Golda Meir to avenge the monstrous crime of Munich. He and his young companions, cut off from any direct contact with Israel, set out systematically to find and kill the central figures of the PLO's Munich operation, tracking them down wherever they lived. The mechanics, the horror, the day-by-day suspense of what they did surpass by far anything John le Carré or Robert Ludlum could imagine, as they themselves were tracked in turn (and some killed) by PLO assassins, changing identities constantly, moving from country to country, devoting their young lives to the brutal task of vengeance. 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. Vengeance opens a window onto a secret world, a book that at the same time inspires and horrifies. For its subject is an act of revenge that goes to the very heart of the ancient biblical questions of good and evil. |
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