All Quiet on the Orient Express

Starred review from August 30, 1999
The subtitle nearly says it all: on September 5, 1972, young men from a PLO faction called Black September infiltrated the Olympic compound and took Israeli athletes hostage, threatening to kill them all unless Israel and Germany released more than 200 prisoners. After a day on worldwide live TV, the terrorists and their captives were enticed to journey to F rstenfeldbruck airport, where Bavarian police staged a disastrous rescue operation and then a poorly managed firefight--all the hostages, one German and five Palestinians died. After some soul-searching, Israel mounted secret campaigns to assassinate the Black September leaders it held responsible. Portrayed here as inventive, effective and deliberately cruel, the Israelis of these operations (among them current Prime Minister Ehud Barak) "were trying to make it clear they could wipe out anyone, anywhere." (They also wiped out an innocent Palestinian waiter in Norway.) Reeve (The Millennium Bomb; The New Jackals) has written a splendid, disturbing and gripping account of these events and the world's reactions. He has interviewed (or caused to be interviewed) all surviving participants, from Israeli officers and athletes to the one surviving Black September gunman, Jamal Al-Gashey: a spate of quotes lets Reeve reconstruct, day by day and sometimes minute by minute, decisions and reactions on all sides, from the terrorists' initial planning to the German authorities' alleged coverups and the families' later grief. The film of the same title, based on the same set of interviews, took this year's Oscar for Best Documentary. Reeve's narrative also stands among the best of its kind. 36 photos not seen by PW.