See How They Run (20 page)
Anna Lascher. The Weapons Expert. Came from Britain’s MI6, where she was also a linguist. Expert in the use of small arms and explosives. Anna Lascher was part of the British team’s security force at the Munich Olympics.
Alix Rothschild. The Actress. Former model and Hollywood actress. Recruited by Michael Ben-Iban, at first solely as a money-raiser among wealthy American, Israeli, and French Jews. Was a spectator at the Munich Olympics. Mother and father killed at Dachau and Buchenwald, respectively. Came to Moscow to be the group’s spokesperson. (Also, see story on Dr. David Strauss.)
Arthur Silver. The Newspaperman. Former subagent for OSS, then for the CIA in both France and Germany. Met Nazi-hunter Michael Ben-Iban on several occasions and was very impressed by the man. Attended Munich Olympics as journalist for the New York Times.
Malachi Ben Eden. The Weapons Expert. Former Shin Beth agent. Once named “Father of the Year” by a Jerusalem newspaper. Also, a ruthless guerrilla fighter.
Shlomo “Sam” Herschel. The Dentist. Entire family of nineteen members killed at Dachau. Arrested in Argentina after “avenger-style” strangulation of former SS Colonel in back of furniture delivery truck. Arrested in Paris for similar “avenger-style” murders. Never brought to trial on any of these charges.
Marc Jacobson. The Medic. Youngest member of the Dachau group at twenty. Lived in Israel (Hayelet Ha-Schachar Kibbutz) on and off since he was ten years old. Attended UCLA, where he was a premed student. Minored in advanced weaponry. Plus … Code name: Storm Troop Minor—the cover team. Code name: Blitzkrieg—the attack team. Code name: Eagle—the setup team … twenty-nine members in all.
During their final dinner together at Lev Ginzburg’s dacha, Alix found herself being called upon to stand at the table, to make a toast that brought on sadness, joy, cheering, and confusion.
“For century after century,” she said with a glass of red wine up to her eye, “our nation has learned from catastrophe. Now I fear the others must learn something from this terrible lesson.
“May this be the final lesson, please God.
L’Ch’aim! Chazack v’amotz!”
Tears were in her eyes when Alix sat down. Mixed in with all of her confusion, she was thinking about David. Alix missed David more than she would have believed possible. For the first time in her life, she thought, she had actually become dependent on someone other than herself.
The entire group was bedded down by nine-thirty that night.
Starting at 3:30
A.M
., they began to leave for Moscow. Traveling separately, they boarded the Russian-Latvian Rail-road. They got into sputtering Fiats and fuel-spewing Russian trucks. The Medic and the Nurse rode motorcycles like two young students going to the Olympics.
Twenty-nine highly efficient commandos were now speeding toward Moscow, a city of some eight and a half million.
“It was like no commando unit that had ever entered a large civilian community during peacetime,” a London news magazine would say.
“It augured house-to-house fighting. Night fighting. The ultimate terrors that have become inevitable during the last third of our century.”
Very early on the morning of July 17, a blond fifteen-year-old girl named Marina Shchelokov, a prizewinning member of the Soviet Komsomol youth group, tramped through the black, rain-slicked Moscow Hills.
Behind the willowy girl runner, a convoy of Russian Army motorcycles rode slowly and noisily Their steady
putt putt putt varoom, varoom
disturbed the peace for several hundred yards in any direction.
Still, the motorcycle headlamps made purplish circles and shooting stars against the slanting rain and dark sky. It was all very pretty and moving.
Hundreds of sopping-wet Russians from nearby suburbs lined the muddy roadside, clapping and whistling for the local girl. It was very much like an American Legion or VFW parade in a small American town.
The petite teenager held the Olympic flame tightly in her right hand. As a surprisingly deep-voiced Marina Shchelokov had explained to Komsomol selection committees and at subsequent Communist Party gatherings, the tradition behind the Olympic flame was a rich and beautiful one. Since 1936, the flame had been transported by some form of relay from Mount Olympus to the site of the Olympics. The eternal flame was the symbol of friendship at the Olympics. For Moscow, the flame had already been carried thousands of miles from Olympus, where it had been lit by six vestal virgins.
And now it was all five-foot one-inch, ninety-seven-pound Marina’s. For her one-kilometer—approximately nine-minute—run Marina Shchelokov
was
the twenty-second Olympiad.
Her one-kilometer run wasn’t a particularly inspiring time for the idealistic Komsomol girl, however.
First of all, there was a cold stinging rain in her face and on the blue satin runner’s uniform that she’d labored for weeks to make for herself.
Then there was the steep uphill nature of her particular section of the run. Last though, and worst of all, there was the laughing and the cynical joking by the young Russian soldiers propped up on their husky black motorcycles.
As she ran into the rain, chin thrust out, bare arms stiff and tired, Marina wondered to herself if a glimpse behind other scenes at the grand and mighty Olympics might not be equally disillusioning. Getting her own little peek behind the pageantry, she wondered what all the rest of it was really like.
Such a sad and defeatist way to think, Marina finally decided. Why couldn’t people just look for the best in things, rather than the worst? Why was she beginning to think like a jaded Westerner herself?
The comrades from her hometown were clapping anyway: her school friends and neighbors.
She passed her father, who was beaming with tremendous pride. Her mother and small bratty brother were grinning like
matriochki
dolls from underneath the family umbrella.
In spite of the rude soldiers, in spite of the rain and the steep, unfriendly hill, it was a spectacularly glorious moment The young Russian girl felt a sudden rush of adrenaline that threatened to lift her straight up into the sky.
Marina Shchelokov looked into the eternal flame and tears rolled down her already wet and makeup-smeared cheeks. She was so proud of what she was doing, so proud of Russia, she almost couldn’t believe it.
The pretty fifteen-year-old had just reached the shadowy apex of her last hill when she tripped and fell.
Marina’s right knee simply buckled and she found herself performing an unexpected head-over-heels somersault.
She landed hard next to the roadway and her running suit was ruined in the mud. A heavy black motorcycle skidded right past her and fell on its side.
Through blue eyes stained with tears, Marina saw all sorts of concerned people racing toward her from the road-side. She saw her father running as fast as he could. The young soldiers were jumping off their motorcycles. The flame was still burning brightly, though.
Finally, the fifteen-year-old girl put her head down to rest on the glistening mud. Blood from the bullet wound under her blond hair mixed in with the rainwater.
Marina Shchelokov was the first to die.
Alix was spending her first petrifying day in Moscow.
Over the course of two years, there had been a hundred-odd drafts and different versions of the ultimatum. World conditions—especially the Middle East balance—shifted at least that many times. Strategies were changed. Only one factor seemed to remain constant.
This was the group’s obsession to get the points of the demands set down with precision and accuracy.
It was an obsession to make certain that the important document would finally communicate, or at least
record
, the truth about the Nazis and the Jewish people.
The indictment was to have begun:
“For two thousand years, the world has attempted every possible overt and covert method to try to destroy one nation of people, the nation of Jews.”
Now Alix and Arthur Silver, the Newspaperman, carefully reworked the opening words. They had to get the opening just right.
Perfect
.
The tiny hotel where they were lodged was appropriately anonymous and out of the way. The hotel was owned by a Russian jeweler who had married a Jewish woman, then had seen her taken away to a labor camp in Minsk.
Seated at a worktable from which they could see a snatch of royal-blue Moskva River, Alix and Arthur Silver reworked the important opening.
They polished the section of the indictment pertaining to Nazis in modern-day Germany.
They worked on the long section that dealt with the slave-labor camps inside Russia.
Finally, Alix and the Newspaperman agreed on the shortened version that Alix was to read before the TV cameras.
Then they were ready.
After a snack of cold soup, smoked fish, and sour bread, Alix stood before Arthur Silver. Suddenly she was struck with the fear that she wasn’t going to be good enough to deliver the demands: Alix’s body felt cold and unnatural. She wished she hadn’t eaten anything. She wished she were anywhere else but this cramped, very foreign room.
“Now you have to help me rehearse,” she finally said.
“Do you take criticism well?” the Newspaperman asked.
“You have to be very tough with me. I have a tendency to be a lazy performer. I don’t concentrate as well as I should.”
Arthur Silver nodded. There was no doubt that he would be the judge of all that.
Alix cleared her throat, then she delivered the opening five minutes of the demands. Finally she stopped. She seemed afraid. As vulnerable as a small child.
“So far? The beginning? Not very good,” she said. “You have to be truthful no matter what.”
Arthur Silver knew that he wasn’t easily impressed. He had a well-earned reputation for crankiness, for inflicting his absurdly high standards on anyone who worked with, or even around him.
There was something quite startling happening here, he considered. It was more a gut feeling than something he could intellectualize. There was something about the
presence
of this woman.
She was beautiful, yes. But she was also very human. He recalled the films he’d seen her in: Schlesinger’s, Coppola’s, Frankenheimer’s. She’d improved in each one. With a stab of sadness, Arthur Silver thought about what a truly great actress Alix Rothschild might have become.
“I feel … that you are telling me the truth,” the Newspaperman finally said. “You believe what you are saying, and I can feel that.
Here
. In my stomach. My anticipation for tomorrow has never been greater than it is right at this moment. You made me shiver just then, Alix.”
Once they were inside the Russian Olympic Security Headquarters, David Strauss and Harry Callaghan were led down gray corridors ringing with Big Brother Muzak, strongly suggesting a prophetic scene from
Brave New World
.
They were brought to a wood-paneled conference room with a wall of dark brown windows looking out on a central garden full of dogwood trees in full summer blossom.
David’s eyes drifted through cigarette smoke, across heavy beards and dark glasses. The sadness and gloom over the murder of the torchbearer Marina Shchelokov hung over the room.
Gathered together in the tense conference room were representatives from the world’s intelligence community: Israel’s Mossad; the CIA; France’s SDECE; MI6 from England; West Germany’s BND; and the KGB and GRU, of course. Also in the room were grave-looking ambassadors from Egypt, Syria, and Libya, in addition to several Olympic Committee members in bright-colored blazers with their five-wheel pocket emblem.
With the possible exceptions of Kim Philby and Melinda and Donald Maclean, every important intelligence person in Moscow was inside the sleek, modem conference room.
On specially prepared prep sheets, David read that
Moscow’s Olympic City is one of the world’s ten largest. … That it is the world’s most densely populated city. … That the Olympic Village itself is virtually helpless against any sort of organized terrorist attack
.
“Or even a half-assed one,” Harry Callaghan muttered under his breath.
For the first time, the terrifying potential of the plot hit David hard. Something about the faces he’d seen walking through Olympic Park brought it home to him with sledge-hammer force.
A nattily dressed, blond Russian man finally called the security meeting to order and attention. This man was Valery Kupchuck, thoroughly Westernized after three years’ duty, first at the Court of St. James, then in Washington, D.C.
A gracious public speaker, the gray-blond Russian now began to deliver a clear, concise report on the actual state of Olympic Village and environs that Friday afternoon.
“Up to this point”—Kupchuck’s serious eyes made steady contact all around the room—“we have tried to keep information you are about to hear a top-level secret, of course.
“As you might expect, the situation here at the Moscow Olympics is quite singular and extraordinary with respect to security threats and security precautions.
Even for the Soviet Union
, the situation is extraordinary, ladies and gentlemen.
“Thus far, for example, there have been more than 120,000 recorded threats made by telegram, letter, phone, and even in person. The threats are running approximately
forty to one
over those reported at Montreal.”
Valery Kupchuck paused. “That is accurate data. Forty to one over Montreal. The most serious threats investigated and uncovered thus far … a professional demolition squad. Eleven fellaheen, apolitical street-fighter types—undoubtedly a reaction to the Jewish group. GRU picked them up at the National and Metropole Hotels this Monday past. The fellaheen had antipersonnel grenades and handguns. Very nasty men and women.
“A cadre of black nationalists was stopped at Sheremetyevno yesterday morning. These six were unarmed, but
wanted
in. America. Also yesterday, two armed Jewish men from New York City were detained.”