The first full account, based on access to key players who have never before spoken, of the Munich Massacre and the Israeli response-a lethal, top secret, thirty-year-long antiterrorism campaign to track down the killers.

1972. The Munich Olympics. Palestinian members of the Black September group murder eleven Israeli athletes. Nine hundred million people watch the crisis unfold on television, witnessing a tragedy that inaugurates the modern age of terror and remains a scar on the collective conscience of the world.

Back in Israel, Prime Minister Golda Meir vows to track down those responsible and, in Menachem Begin's words, "run these criminals and murderers off the face of the earth." A secret Mossad unit, code named Caesarea, is mobilized, a list of targets drawn up. Thus begins the Israeli response-a mission that unfolds not over months but over decades. The Mossad has never spoken about this operation. No one has known the real story, until now.

Award-winning journalist Aaron Klein's incisive and riveting account tells for the first time the full story of Munich and the Israeli counterterrorism operation it spawned. With unprecedented access to Mossad agents and an unparalleled knowledge of Israeli intelligence, Klein peels back the layers of myth and misinformation that have permeated previous books, films, and magazine articles about the "shadow war" against Black September and other terrorist groups.

AARON J. KLEIN is Time magazine’s military and intelligence affairs correspondent in the Jerusalem bureau. He received the 2002 Henry Luce Award and has been a consultant for CNN. Klein was the military-security correspondent and analyst for Hadashot and Al-Hamishmar, two of Israel’s leading national newspapers. He teaches at Hebrew University and is a captain in the Israeli Defense Forces’ intelligence.