Mike Harari, Mossad agent who led Black September revenge attacks, dies
A top former spy in Israel's shadowy Mossad intelligence agency, who oversaw controversial assassinations of top Palestinian militants, has died.
Mike Harari
1927-2014
A top former spy in Israel's shadowy Mossad intelligence agency, who oversaw controversial assassinations of top Palestinian militants, has died.
Mike Harari, 87, died in Tel Aviv on Sunday, reports said, after an illustrious career in which he presided over several high-profile Mossad operations during the 1970s.
The most controversial of these was Operation Wrath of God - a string of targeted assassinations, many of them in Europe, of Palestinian militants from the Black September group who killed 11 members of Israel's 1972 Munich Olympics team.
Steven Spielberg's 2005 film Munich, which presented a fictionalised version of the assassinations, depicted them as being directed by a new Mossad recruit who eventually quits over moral reservations. In reality, according to several books about Mossad, it was veteran agent Harari who led Operation Wrath of God.
The operation was uncovered after Harari's agents mistakenly killed a Moroccan waiter in Norway in 1973, after misidentifying him as a Palestinian militant. Norwegian prosecutors indicted Harari in 1998 for the murder.