Agent who tracked down Munich Olympic killers dies

Mike Harari, the Israeli Mossad spy who directed an assassination campaign against Palestinians suspected of involvement in the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, has died at 87.

Harari, born in Tel Aviv in 1927, died there on Sunday, the Ynet website reported. He served in the notorious pre-state Haganah militia and Israel’s Shin Bet internal security agency before joining the Mossad in 1954, Ynet said.

Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich, which presented a fictionalised version of the assassinations of European operatives of the Palestinian Black September movement, depicted them as being directed by a new Mossad recruit who eventually quits the agency over moral reservations. In reality, according to several non-fiction books about the Mossad, it was veteran agent Harari who led ‘Operation Wrath of God’ against Black September. The operation was uncovered after Harari’s agents mistakenly killed a Moroccan waiter in Norway in 1973, after misidentifying him as a Palestinian militant.