EYE FOR AN EYE . . . Steven Spielberg's new film tells the story of how Israel hunted down the Palestinian terrorists who killed 11 of its athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The ensuing cycle of revenge persists to this day.

I had come to Tel Aviv to interview another man called Raphael Eitan, a former chief of staff of the Israeli Army, who was about to become a candidate in the country's forthcoming general election. It was only after Rafi responded to a question from a colleague accompanying me, who enquired about his most memorable moment in the service of the state of Israel, that the penny dropped and we both realised the real identity of the man talking to us.

"Probably the Eichmann operation is what I'm most proud of, " Eitan replied, before launching into the story of how he and his Mossad secret service team had been sent to Argentina in 1960 to kidnap the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann and bring him back to Israel for trial. "I had him here, this close to me, with a gun at his head, " recalled Eitan, holding up his hand a few inches from his face. "I could have killed him but I was under orders to bring him back alive, " he shrugged, clearly disappointed at being deprived of the opportunity to deliver the coup de grace to Eichmann there and then.

By then Eitan was an elderly man, small and stocky, bespectacled and partially deaf from an old wound received during Israel's 1948 war of independence. It was difficult to associate the figure sitting before me with his near legendary reputation as the ice-cold-ruthless hit man par excellence of Israel's famed Mossad intelligence service - a man whose operational maxim was said to be: "If you are not part of the answer, then you are part of the problem."

At the time of our encounter, Eitan had officially retired from his deadly undercover trade; his only continuing involvement, he insisted, was occasional lecturing on counterterrorism in places like Belfast or at the home of the SAS in Hereford, England.

As deputy operations chief at the Mossad, Rafi Eitan had, for decades, been the master in this murky, violent and dangerous trade. Theirs is a shadowy world about which little is really known, but one that film director Steven Spielberg has set out to explore in his latest cinema offering, Munich.

The picture tells the powerful story of an Israeli Mossad assassination squad sent out to retaliate for the kidnap and murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics by Palestinian "Black September" terrorists. Not surprisingly, Munich has bitterly divided opinion over both its historical accuracy, and the political and moral issues that it wrestles with.

Michael Bar-Zohar, a former member of the Israeli Knesset and a leading authority on terrorism and intelligence issues in the country, believes there are "very big flaws" in the story. "It's based on a book, Vengeance, which is about a shady character, who claims he was one of the main Mossad hit team members, but turns out to be little more than a security man at Ben Gurion airport, " Bar-Zohar says scathingly, echoing a view held by those select Israelis intimately familiar with the workings of their own intelligence community.

But while the veracity of Munich's storyline might be open to question, it nevertheless serves as a disturbing and contentious reminder of how covert hit squads are tasked with "taking out targets" in today's war on terror. Just when, if ever, are such operations justified? How much control do governments have over their secret intelligence assassins on the ground when the fighting gets dirty and up close? At what point does any nation draw the line on such missions, often executed outside the law and on the sovereign soil of another country? And, isn't it simply the case that killing the killers inevitably leads to a vicious eye-for-an-eye cycle in which both sides become morally reprehensible? The events depicted in Munich marked something of a watershed for the Mossad, says Eitan Haber, who for nine years served as chief of staff to Israel's former prime minister, Yitzak Rabin, who was

himself assassinated by an Israeli religious student in 1995 after telling a Tel Aviv rally that "the path of peace was preferable to the path of war".

"Today it's difficult for people to understand the atmosphere that Munich created. The massacre was more than a shock, it was a real trauma for us, " says Haber, who, throughout his political career, was an insider close to the heart of the Israeli security and intelligence apparatus. "It was the first time since the end of the second world war that Jews were killed on German soil, slaughtered like chickens without any defence."

Haber says that the Black September group's Munich strike revealed not only how "unprepared" Mossad's global network was, but also how it had failed to effectively penetrate Arab and Muslim terrorist networks across Europe. Up until then most of Black September's operations had been directed against Arab regimes such as that in Jordan. "After Munich, we realised that this was some kind of new al-Qaeda style organisation of its day, " observes Michael Bar-Zohar, "a kind of underground within an underground, which was going to attack and murder Israelis anywhere."

It was something of an irony that the Mossad, the spy agency whose motto reads: "By way of deception, thou shalt do war", should itself be deceived by the expectation that trouble would more likely come from within its own neighbouring turf of Gaza and the occupied West Bank or surrounding Middle Eastern back yard, than from further afield.

In response to this damaging oversight, dozens of Israeli intelligence operatives were dispatched to Europe in the wake of the massacre to strengthen Mossad operations and bring the agency up to speed with their enemy's future intentions and targets.

Meanwhile, back in Israel, the government, headed by prime minister Golda Meir and backed by Mossad chief Zwi Zamir, was about to take unprecedented steps that would set in motion a new and controversial counter-terrorism policy. "The Cabinet decided to do something first and foremost to take revenge, then to deter all those who wanted to attack us, " recalls Haber.

THE result was the formation of a top secret counterterrorist panel chaired by Meir and defence minister Moshe Dayan, which became known as "Committee X". "It was like a tribunal to which Mossad chief Zwi Zamir would bring the evidence, the proof against the one that we wanted to execute, " explains Haber. "We wanted to show the terrorists that as the old musical song goes, 'Anything you can do, we can do better.'" What followed over the next few years was a series of shootings, booby-trap bombings and commando raids across Europe and the Middle East that killed a number of senior Palestinians the Mossad had identified as being involved in the Munich massacre. Among them was Yasser Arafat's second cousin and key Black September organiser, Wael Zwaiter.

On October 16, 1972, as Zwaiter entered the dimly lit corridor leading to the door of his Rome apartment, two Mossad assassins stepped from the shadows and pumped 14 bullets into him. It was the first of many "successful" operations, is said to have cost the Mossad around dollars-350,000 to execute and would lead to its growing reputation for carrying out daring if controversial undercover assassinations, kidnappings and hostage rescue operations.

Most missions aimed at killing terrorists would be undertaken by the "Metsada", a highly secret department within the Mossad which operates combatants. Within the Metsada is the "Kidon" (a translation of the word "bayonet"): a specially trained elite assassination unit.

Each hit team is said to comprise four members. One acts as the "target locator" and is tasked to keep tabs on the victim's movements. Another is the "transporter", charged with getting the team safely away from the killing area. The remaining two will be the "shooters", or those that will execute the "hit".

Such teams were encouraged to be imaginative and strike in creative ways, thus ensuring that terrorists knew they had been "touched". If, for example, the assassinations took place when the terrorist leaders were inside their own security cordons, it sent out a clear message that they should never feel safe.

The only problem was that not all of those targeted by the hit teams were guilty. On July 21, 1973, more than a year after the initial deployment of the Mossad execution squads, Ahmed Bouchiki, an entirely innocent Moroccan working as a waiter in Lillehammer in Norway, was gunned down by two Israeli agents carrying the Mossad handgun of choice, the Beretta .22 calibre pistol, as he left a cinema with his pregnant wife. Bouchiki had been mistaken for Ali Hassan Salameh, a Black September leader known throughout the Arab world as the Red Prince and allegedly one of the masterminds behind the assault on the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic village.

After a breakdown in the unit's cover, six Mossad team members were subsequently arrested. Five of them, convicted for killing Bouchiki, were sentenced from two to fiveand-a-half years in prison, but were released by the Norwegian authorities in just under 22 months.

Meanwhile, Ali Hassan Salameh was still at large, as were other terrorists on a list of priority targets constantly updated and supplied by Mossad chief Zwi Zamir. By now, the stakes were higher than ever in what had quite literally become a cutthroat business.

Some accounts of the operations carried out at this time say that often, two assassination teams worked simultaneously towards the same targets but under very different orders and parameters. One team utilised staff operations officers and would be managed through standard Mossad headquarters procedures. A second unit, like the one portrayed in Spielberg's film, consisted of trained specialists financed by, but set outside the control of, the Israeli government, thus allowing a degree of what has been described as "plausible deniability" should the team's cover be blown.

This again is a notion that Michael BarZohar sees as a fanciful cinematic device, rather than an accurate representation of the actual modus operandi adopted by Mossad units working on the ground in Europe at the time. "To say that any of these teams operated outside government control is absolute and total nonsense. They would necessarily have to have been cleared by Golda Meir before undertaking any operational activities, " Bar-Zohar insists.

More than anything, it is Spielberg's depiction of the assassins as men etched by doubt over the morality of killing for justice that angers those who know what makes Mossad's hit men tick. Time and again these insiders will tell you how such men had "total belief" in what they were doing, or saw their job as "a mission to defend the people of Israel".

As Rafi Eitan himself is said to have once observed: "We are like the official hangman or the doctor on death row who administers the lethal injection. We are simply fulfilling a sentence sanctioned by the prime minister of the day."

But can the justification for killing another human being, even one responsible for the worst imaginable evil, ever really be that clear-cut, that simple and beyond reproach? "The whole point about our fight against terrorism is to kill the killers, " insists Bar-Zohar. If they were soldiers, he says, operating only against military targets, then they would be carrying out a war of liberation. "But when they kill innocent athletes or women and children, why should we have any moral hesitation?" he asks.

INsuch a perspective, there are no grey areas. Israel might never have officially acknowledged having a policy of targeted assassinations, but in the 30 or so years since the Munich massacre, the Mossad has continued to strike back whenever and wherever Jews and Israeli citizens have been threatened.

These days, according to Israeli observers, most retaliatory actions are carried out in Gaza, after rockets are fired by Palestinian militants into Israel. In the main these are helicopter missile strikes against preplanned targets such as bombers or militant leaders like the wheelchair-bound Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin, who was blown apart by just such a rocket attack.

The reality, however, as human rights groups like Amnesty International will testify, is that Israeli undercover squads like those from the "Shimson" (Samson) or "Duvdevan" (Cherry) special forces units also continue to target Islamic and Palestinian militants across the West Bank and Gaza as a matter of routine.

Further afield, exacerbated by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorist threats against Jewish and Israeli civilians are once again on the rise, as indeed they are against Americans and Europeans. In 2002 in the Kenyan coastal town of Mombasa, an explosives-laden landcrusier rammed into the reception hall of the island's Israeliowned Paradise Hotel, killing 50 people and seriously injuring 80 more.

Around the same time, two shoulderfired missiles nearly downed an Israeli passenger plane bringing tourists back to Tel Aviv from Kenya. Only by chance did 275 people escape an atrocity on the scale of Lockerbie.

Some intelligence analysts say it's more than likely that members of Mossad's Kidon assassination units and other agents were on their way to Mombasa in search of the perpetrators within hours of the hotel massacre. Whether true or not, there are those who believe that retaliatory actions against such attacks should never be restricted by international borders, or the territorial and legal constraints of any foreign state.

"If the CIA kills some al-Qaeda operative in Afghanistan or Yemen, do you think they really care about the niceties of where it happens?" replies Bar-Zohar, when I put it to him that such breaches of international law might only exacerbate an already volatile situation.

"If tomorrow they catch Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, Timbuktu or Scotland they'd be delighted to kill him, " he continues.

Those in favour of a continued policy of such targeted assassinations or "focused preventive actions", as they are sometimes clinically described in military circles these days, are adamant that 30 or so years ago, at the time of Munich, it was a mistake to see such terrorism as simply an Arab-Israeli problem. In these post 9/11 times, such people say, the world has learned the cost of being reasonable with terrorists; evenhandedness, they insist, doesn't work.

A similar response also underpins the bulk of the criticism by many Israelis and others from the same no-quarter lobby about Spielberg's Munich. "I'm very disturbed by the film because this is going to become the truth for hundreds of millions of people who see it, " believes Bar-Zohar. "To take a true story and distort it because he wants to appear even-handed and please everybody is a big mistake that will hurt Israel a lot."

As if criticism of the film Spielberg has called his "prayer for peace" was not enough for the director, last month Mohammed Daoud, the Palestinian mastermind of the Munich Olympic attack who to this day has survived the Mossad's retribution, also spoke out against the film. "If he really wanted to make it a prayer for peace he should have listened to both sides of the story and reflected reality, rather than serving the Zionist side alone, " says Daoud, speaking from the Syrian capital, Damascus. "Some of the Munich athletes had taken part in wars and killed many Palestinians. Whether a pianist or an athlete, any Israeli is a soldier, " Daoud proclaimed.

Hurt, and the fear of hurt, is perhaps what in the end lies at the root of the need to strike back harder and more ruthlessly than one's enemies. Both sides in the ArabIsraeli conflict have shown themselves more than capable of inflicting such pain for almost as far back as it is possible to remember.

In the end, such entrenched bitterness can only result in more victims. And where there are victims, there will almost always be retaliation and revenge.

Munich is released on January 27. David Pratt's new book, Intifada: The Long Day Of Rage, is published next month by Sunday Herald Books.