Zvi Zamir, head of Israeli spies in a critical period, dies at the age of 98
Zvi Zamir, who as director of Israel's Mossad spy agency led a violent campaign to crush Palestinian terrorism after 11 Israelis were killed at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich – and who a year later warned his government that Egypt and Syria was about to start the Yom Kippur War, but it was not taken seriously – died on January 2. He was 98.
His death was announced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office. The announcement did not say where he died.
“Zamir led a determined and initiative-driven approach in the State of Israel's fight against Palestinian terrorism, which was going from strength to strength at that time.” Netanyahu's office said in a statement.
Terrorism was an increasing concern for Israel when Mr. Zamir was appointed director of the Mossad in 1968. No incident expressed this threat more than the Palestinian terrorist group Black September's attack on the Israeli delegation in its dormitory in the Olympic Village in Munich on September 1, 2011. 5, 1972.
Two Israelis were killed and nine taken hostage during a daylong siege.
Prime Minister Golda Meir sent Mr Zamir to Munich. But he had to watch helplessly as inexperienced snipers moved into position for a rescue operation, which was postponed when the West German authorities gave in to the terrorists' demands: they provided helicopters to transport them and the hostages to the military airfield of Fürstenfeldbruck, and then, probably to Cairo.
“Then I saw a scene that I will never forget for the rest of my life,” said Mr. Zamir said in the 2017 documentary series “Mossad: Secret Service of Israel.” “With their hands and feet tied together, the athletes trudged past me. Next to them the Arabs. A deathly silence.”
Later, at the airport, where the Germans planned to ambush the terrorists, Mr. Zamir next to one of the snipers. “They used old rifles without telescopic sights,” he recalled in the documentary. “Without anything. It broke my heart.”
In the ensuing firefight, all hostages and five of the eight terrorists were killed. The three surviving terrorists were captured but released a few weeks later after Palestinian guerrillas hijacked a Lufthansa flight with twenty passengers and crew on board.
Until Munich, Mr. Zamir said, Ms. Meir had been reluctant to approve plans to kill Palestinian agents in Europe because she believed — wrongly — that European governments would take effective action against them.
“In some of my conversations with Golda,” Mr. Zamir told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2006 “she expressed her concern that our people could be involved in illegal actions on European soil. It was indeed unavoidable, but illegal.”
But after the Israelis were killed, Ms. Meir put Mr. Zamir in charge of a campaign, called Operation Wrath of God, to destroy the Palestinian terror network that could easily operate from Europe.
In that operation, Israeli agents have killed a number of terrorists over at least a decade, including the mastermind of the Munich attack, Ali Hassan Salameh, who was killed in a bombing in Beirut in 1979, five years after Mr. Zamir left Mossad. A previous attempt to kill Mr Salameh ended in an embarrassing mistake: the murder of a waiter in Norway.
Mr. Zamir said revenge for the Munich killings was not Mossad's motive.
“What we did was concretely prevent terrorism in the future,” he told Haaretz. “We took action against those who thought they would continue to commit acts of terror.
“I am not saying that those involved in Munich were not put to death,” he continued. 'They certainly deserved to die. But we weren't dealing with the past; we focused on the future.”
Zvicka Zarzevsky was born on March 3, 1925 in Lodz, Poland, and emigrated as an infant with his family to what was then known as British Mandatory Palestine. His father drove a horse-drawn wagon for an electric company. According to one account, he changed his surname at the request of a teacher who Zarzevsky could not pronounce.
He began his military career as a teenager with the Palmach, a Jewish underground defense force, and later served as a battalion commander during Israel's war of independence. He rose to the rank of major general within the Israeli army and headed the southern command of the armed forces, which defends the country's largest region.
He also served as IDF attaché in London before being appointed leader of the Mossad by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol in 1968.
Mr. Zamir raised the alarm twice about an impending attack in 1973 by Egypt and Syria, thanks to critical information provided by a high-level informant: Ashraf Marwan, a disgruntled son-in-law of President Gamal Abdel Nassar of Egypt, who had been conducting high-level provides intelligence to the Mossad.
“Zamir was extremely effective,” Howard Blum, the author of “The Eve of Destruction: The Untold Story of the Yom Kippur War” (2003), said in a telephone interview. “He led an agent – with a handler – as we would lead an agent in the Kremlin. It was a coup.”
Uri Bar-Joseph, the author of a book about Mr. Marwan, “The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel,” told The Weekly Standard in 2016 that Mr. Zamir had seen Mr. Marwan as “the best source we ever had'. had.”
In April 1973, Mr. Marwan sent an urgent message to his handler with the code word for impending war, “radish,” Mr. Blum wrote in The New York Times in 2007. Mr Zamir left Tel Aviv to meet Mr Marwan at a safe house in London.
The attack, Mr. Marwan told Mr. Zamir, would begin on May 15. Israel responded by calling up tens of thousands of reservists and sending brigades to the Israeli-occupied Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights in the north.
But the attack never came.
On October 5, Mr Marwan sent another message and Mr Zamir returned to London. He called his bureau chief in Israel to relay what Mr. Marwan had told him: the attack would take place at sunset on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. The agency head conveyed the warning to Ms. Meir's aides and Moshe Dayan, the defense minister.
But the warning was not fully heeded.
At an Israeli Cabinet meeting on the morning of Oct. 6, Mr. Blum reported that Mr. Dayan told Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff David Elazar: “You don't mobilize an entire army based on reports from Zvicka. .”
The alarm led to a partial mobilization of the IDF that failed to alleviate heavy Israeli losses early in the war, which started around 2 p.m. and not at sunset. According to a historical census by the Jewish Agency for Israel, 177 Israeli tanks faced 1,400 Syrian tanks on the Golan Heights, and Egyptian troops easily crossed the Suez Canal.
Israel eventually turned the tide – with weapons and other military assistance from the United States – and had the upper hand by the end of that month. Yet it was known for early intelligence failures and the uncertainty caused by near losses.
On October 7, 2023, almost exactly 50 years after the start of the Yom Kippur War, Hamas and other Gaza-based militant groups crossed the border into Israel – surprising Netanyahu's unprepared government – and killed an estimated 1,200 Israelis. Israel has retaliated by vowing to destroy Hamas in a war that has so far killed about 23,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians.
At Mr. Zamir's funeral, David Barnea, the current Mossad director, said the spy agency “must hold accountable the killers who invaded the Gaza border area on October 7 — the planners and those who sent them.”
He added: “Zvicka's spirit will accompany us in this mission.”
Mr. Zamir left Mossad in 1974. He became general manager of a construction and civil engineering company and later served as chairman of the Institute for Petroleum and Geophysics Research and the Israel Petroleum and Energy Institute.
Information about survivors was not immediately available.
The Mossad's post-Munich operation was the subject of the 2005 film “Munich,” directed by Steven Spielberg. Mr. Zamir, who was played by Ami Weinberg, hated it, telling Haaretz that it was a “cowboy movie” that deserved “libel.”
“The 'sages' behind the film do not explain the blow, the shock that Munich has inflicted on all our beliefs,” he said. “Those things were pushed out of the film to make room for operational depictions based on the director's fertile imagination.”