What Happened to Operation Wrath of God: The Secret History of European Intelligence and Mossad's Assassination Campaign?

Aviva Guttmann's "Operation Wrath of God: The Secret History of European Intelligence and Mossad's Assassination Campaign," published by Cambridge University Press on August 7, 2025, significantly reshapes the historical understanding of one of Mossad's most infamous operations. The book delves into the covert campaign launched by Israel's intelligence agency, Mossad, to assassinate individuals believed to be responsible for the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre, an operation widely known as 'Operation Wrath of God' or 'Operation Bayonet'.

Previously, narratives often portrayed Mossad's campaign as a largely solitary and ruthless endeavor. However, Guttmann's meticulous research, drawing on unique access to unredacted documents from the Club de Berne archive, reveals a crucial and previously underreported dimension: the active and extensive cooperation of various European intelligence agencies. This secret coalition of intelligence services, operating independently of official foreign policy constraints, supplied Mossad with vital information about Palestinian targets and tacitly supported Israeli covert actions on European soil. This cooperation helped anticipate and thwart numerous Palestinian terrorist plots, some of which are revealed for the first time in the book.

The genesis of Operation Wrath of God was the tragic Munich Massacre, where eleven Israeli Olympic team members and a West German policeman were killed. In response, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir authorized a targeted assassination program against members of Black September and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). A key turning point that brought some of these secret operations to light was the 1973 Lillehammer affair in Norway, where Mossad agents mistakenly killed an innocent Moroccan waiter, Ahmed Bouchikhi, instead of their intended target, Ali Hassan Salameh. Despite the international criticism and public backlash that followed, Guttmann notes that the Club de Berne relations did not falter; in fact, the network expanded, indicating a quiet acceptance of Mossad's operations among European intelligence circles.

The consequences of these revelations are significant for understanding Cold War intelligence dynamics and the ethical complexities of counter-terrorism. Guttmann's work reconstructs a hidden world where state relations were pursued through clandestine channels, often bypassing public scrutiny and official diplomatic policies. The book highlights how European agencies, while not directly carrying out assassinations, provided the intelligence infrastructure that enabled Mossad's campaign, effectively making them accomplices in extrajudicial killings on their own territory.

As of March 26, 2026, Aviva Guttmann's book is a very recent publication, having been released in August 2025, and has already garnered critical attention, including reviews published in January 2026. Its findings are still being absorbed by historians and the public, prompting new discussions on intelligence ethics and international cooperation. More broadly, cooperation between European intelligence and Israel continues in the present day, as evidenced by joint efforts in November 2025 to expose and disrupt Hamas terror plots across Europe. This ongoing collaboration underscores the enduring, albeit evolving, nature of these intelligence relationships, even as the historical record of past operations is continually re-examined.