An excerpt from Roone Arledge‘s posthumous memoir.
“We need bodies,” Lesgards yelled. “Start making calls.”
Marvin dialed John Wilcox, one of our producers. “Find your crews,” he said. “Get them over here.” Then he called my suite, where my daughter Susie answered and dutifully relayed my instructions not to disturb me.
“Your father’s gonna want this call,” Marvin said. “Wake him.”
“This better be good,” I yawned, coming on the line.
“It’s the worst … thing you can imagine,” he replied. Marvin told me as much as he knew, and what had been geared up thus far. I told him to find McKay first thing. I wanted Jim to host. [McKay was in Munich to cover track and field and gymnastics.] And then Howard Cosell and Peter Jennings [who was then an ABC News Middle East correspondent on loan to Sports for the Olympics], and to get them into the Village.
“How about Schenkel?” Marvin asked.
“I’ll talk to Chris,” I said. [Chris Schenkel was the main ABC Sports host for the Olympics.] “And one more thing, Marvin. Have Jacques call New York and book as many satellite hours as we can get.”
I was putting on my pants when the phone rang again, Jacques saying we could have “the bird” starting at 1 p.m. I said I’d be over in twenty minutes, then called ABC chairman Leonard Goldenson in his hotel suite, where he’d been laid low by a high fever the day before. He gasped when I told him about the Israelis.
“I’d like to stay live till this thing’s over,” I said. “I’ll need the network.”
“You got it,” he said.
….
“Anyone get hold of McKay?” I asked.
“We sent his driver over to the Sheraton to tell him he’s on standby,” Geoff said. “But that was more than an hour ago. I expected to hear from him by now.”
A production assistant waved one of the console phones. “For you, Geoff. It’s McKay.”
“Tell him he’s gonna anchor,” I said, “and to get over here.”
Jim turned up shortly. He’d taken a sauna and an icy shower and had just slipped on yellow swimming trunks for a dip in the Sheraton’s pool when he’d seen a phone and, on impulse, had called in.
“Glad you did,” I said. “You may have a long day coming up.”
…The day slowly settled into a strange routine. Jim described events on the monitor while eating popcorn. Reports drifted in. …
I passed each new scrap into Jim’s earpiece, following the pattern we’d developed over many programs: phrases, not sentences; soft, not loud; encouragement, not alarm.
Inwardly, though, I’d begun to be alarmed. The 3 o’clock deadline had passed, and there’d been no shots but also no announcement of a deal. I told Marvin Bader, who’d made many well-placed friends during the nearly three years he’d been in Munich, to work his sources. He called a contact in the Olympic press office. The Germans had promised something to get the deadline moved to 5 o’clock, but he couldn’t find out what. He made another call, to a Lufthansa ticket agent he knew out at Reim, Munich’s main airport. There was no sign that the terrorists were about to be flown out.
An hour and a half dragged by. Peter was relating the history of Black September on the air; how it had acquired its name (from the month, in 1970, when King Hussein drove Yassir Arafat’s guerillas from Jordan); the number and location of previous attacks. The “commandos,” in Peter’s judgment, were unlikely to shed more blood.
I kept watching the monitor and the clock. At 4:50, ten minutes before the latest deadline, I saw movement on the roofs of the buildings around the Israeli quarters. Men in track suits were creeping across them. They weren’t athletes; athletes don’t carry sniper rifles. At 5:10, other men appeared, also in track suits, crawling toward the ventilator shafts of 31 Connollystrasse. They had short-barreled automatic weapons, the kind that are used for close, interior combat.
Jim narrated the action: “One of the terrorists is at the door of the balcony … a balcony not too unlike the one Martin Luther King Jr. walked on and met his death…. His head is sticking out. You might wonder, why doesn’t a sniper take off that head right now? Well, presumably his colleagues are inside and they would execute their hostages if that was done. Therein lies the problem….
“There you see an athlete holding a canvas bag in which is obviously a machine gun. He’s not an athlete, he’s a policeman. And the bulletproof vest quite apparent there in the stiff-appearing front he has. There you see a gun being removed from its bag….
“There’s that head at the door again. It’s become such a terribly tantalizing symbol…. What’s going on inside that head? In that mind?
“A man on the roof in a red athletic suit. We now see just the tip of his head, he seems to be inching forward. See the arrow? We’re placing that arrow superimposed in our studio over the live picture. It’s just a little bit to the left of the point of that arrow. That man in the red athletic suit has a gun with him. It would appear that some sort of operation is under way very, very slowly and delicately.”
Howard reported in: “More cars pulling up beneath the underpass … police getting out … submachine guns and pistols plainly visible.”
Then Wilcox: “They can shoot the Arab guard dead, at will. He’s an open target.” Then Peter: “I have a strong feeling this is going to turn out badly.”
…We kept waiting for word. Fifteen minutes … 30 … 45. At Olympic headquarters, they were reviewing the day for the media in half-hour increments, halting between each one for French, then English translation. German thoroughness, God almighty!
Finally, at 3:17 a.m., Reuters removed all our doubts.
“FLASH! ALL ISRAELI HOSTAGES SEIZED BY ARAB GUERRILLAS KILLED.” We could go with it.
“Official,” I whispered to Jim. “All hostages dead.”
He turned to look straight into the camera. For the first time that day, he appeared truly tired. “I’ve just gotten the final word,” he said. “When I was a kid, my father used to say our greatest hopes and worst fears are seldom realized. Our worst fears were realized tonight….” He paused. Then, “They’re all gone.”
