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January 1, 1982:
Lebanon. A packed stadium. Bombs have been positioned where the PLO leaders will be seated. Bigger bombs are outside, ready to target panicked survivors
This is Olympia 2. One crazy operation in the Greatest "Terrorist" Campaign You Never Heard About
THREAD
Lebanon. A packed stadium. Bombs have been positioned where the PLO leaders will be seated. Bigger bombs are outside, ready to target panicked survivors
This is Olympia 2. One crazy operation in the Greatest "Terrorist" Campaign You Never Heard About
THREAD
On Jan 1, PLO would celebrate anniversary of its founding. Defense Minister Ariel Sharon saw opportunity to get rid of the whole leadership in one fell swoop. On Dec 20, agents recruited by Meir Dagan placed remotely controlled explosive devices in stadium. But that was not all
An secret Israeli unit had also prepared “three vehicles - a truck loaded with a ton and a half of explosives and two Mercedes sedans with 550 pounds each.” On Jan 1, members of the FLLF would drive & park the vehicles in front of the stadium.
The vehicles “would be detonated by remote control about a minute after" the first bombs, when panic was at its height &survivors were trying to get away.” Acc to Northern Command officer, death & destruction were expected to be “of unprecedented proportions, even for Lebanon.”
Word about the secret operation was leaked to Gen Saguy & Deputy DM Zippori, who took the matter to Prime Minister Menachem Begin. An emergency meeting was convened on December 31, just one day before the planned operation.
At the meeting, Sharon, Ben-Gal & Dagan defended the operation, which represented a unique opportunity to get rid of the PLO once and for all. Zippori & Saguy objected, and noted that there was a high likelihood that the Soviet Union Ambassador would be in the stadium.
Later Saguy explained: "I told Begin it was impossible to kill whole stadium like that. What would happen next day after such massacre? Whole world would pile on top of us. It would make no difference if we never admitted responsibility. Everyone would know who was behind it.”
After hearing everyone, Begin “took the danger of a Russian threat seriously” and ordered Sharon to abort the mission. As it turned out however, the Russian Ambassador was not present in the stadium on that day, and Meir Dagan appeared to regret Begin’s decision to abort.
Years later he explained: “In the end it turned out that I was right & there was no Soviet ambass or any other foreign diplomat there.”“But what could we do?” he lamented. “The PM said abort, so we abort.There was a very complicated business afterward,getting the explosives out.”
Everything we know about Olympia (&all quotes above) come fm Ronen Bergman’s “Rise & Kill First,” book published in 2018 & based on first-hand accounts by Israeli officials involved in or who knew about the op at the time. I wrote about revelations here: https://mondoweiss.net/2018/05/remarkable-disappearing-terrorism/
Olympia 2 was canceled. However, Bergman’s book also reveals that the FLLF, the group that would have parked the car bombs in front of stadium, was created & run by senior Israeli officials & did conduct dozens of “terrorist” attacks that killed hundreds of civilians
Between 1979 and 1983, a mysterious group calling itself the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners (FLLF) would call the media and claim responsibility for dozens of car bombings that killed hundreds of civilians.
Nobody knew who the FLLF were, but Palestinians & Lebanese leaders repeatedly insisted that the group was fictitious, and used by Israel to hide its hand. Israeli officials rejected such claims & insisted that the bombings were a form of “Arabs vs Arabs” violence.
These bombings were repeatedly covered in the US press at the time, at the times on the Front Page of the New York Times (by Thomas Friedman & others) or the Washington Post. I wrote about this in the following Thread: https://twitter.com/RBrulin/status/1179358000911458305?s=20
As Bergman’s book makes quite clear, the Palestinians were right all along. The FLLF was in fact a creation of very senior Israeli officers (Ben-Gal, Dagan and Eitan) and, after August 1981, would repeatedly be used by Ariel Sharon to sow chaos in Lebanon.
Remarkably, Bergman reveals that in late 1981 Ariel Sharon used the FLLF & its car bombs (ie "terrorism") to provoke the PLO into using "terrorism" against Israeli civilians, so that Israel would have an excuse (the fight against "terrorism"!!) to invade Lebanon.
Arafat saw the trap however, and for several months ensured that the PLO did not respond to Israel’s provocations. This was the context for Operation Olympia described above.
