Involvement in Vengeance
In 1981, the Canadian writer George Jonas was approached by Collins Canada about meeting with Juval Aviv, a former Mossad officer who said that he had led Operation Wrath of God, an operation to assassinate the Palestinian terrorists who carried out the 1972 Munich massacre, in which they took hostage and murdered 11 Israeli athletes. In a joint deal, two Toronto-based publishing houses, Lester & Orpen Dennys and Collins Canada Ltd, commissioned Jonas to research and write Aviv's account.
From his work he wrote Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team (1984), which depicted Aviv's character as "Avner".
According to Maclean's, which put together an 11-person investigative team to find out whether Aviv's story was true, the book generated $500,000 in advance foreign sales. After his book was published, Jonas told a journalist for Maclean's that he had spent two years and $30,000 of the publishers' money conducting research with Aviv in Europe and Israel. American RadioWorks, the national documentary unit of American Public Media, looked into the allegations as well and noted several court documents, including a memo from the FBI from 1982 and an informant agreement between Aviv and the US Justice Department, both of which refer to a past association with Israeli intelligence.
In 1984, Jonas, Louise Dennys, and the president of Collins Canada, Nicholas Harris, had told Maclean's they were satisfied that the story is genuine. Jonas told Maclean's: "To my mind, if he is not legit, then he can only be a disgruntled ex-employee of Mossad with sufficient knowledge of what has gone down in this area. As far as I am concerned, if he is not who he says he is, then that is what he is."
In 1986, the book was adapted as a made-for-television movie, Sword of Gideon, starring Steven Bauer and Michael York. It was later adapted for Steven Spielberg's Munich (2005).
The book The Men Who Would Be King: An Almost Epic Tale of Moguls, Movies, and a Company Called DreamWorks by Nicole Laporte, a reporter for Variety, refers to Aviv and his background. Laporte writes about how Steven Spielberg vetted Aviv during pre-production on the movie, Munich (2005). Spielberg assembled a brain trust of researchers and, through his connections at the White House and a Middle East diplomat, determined that, "His real name was Juval Aviv. Furthermore, Spielberg's brain trust discovered FBI files proving that he and his team were not fictitious."
Read more about this topic: Juval Aviv
Famous quotes containing the words involvement in and/or involvement:
“I recommend limiting one’s involvement in other people’s lives to a pleasantly scant minimum. This may seem too stoical a position in these madly passionate times, but madly passionate people rarely make good on their madly passionate promises.”
—Quentin Crisp (b. 1908)
“Juggling produces both practical and psychological benefits.... A woman’s involvement in one role can enhance her functioning in another. Being a wife can make it easier to work outside the home. Being a mother can facilitate the activities and foster the skills of the efficient wife or of the effective worker. And employment outside the home can contribute in substantial, practical ways to how one works within the home, as a spouse and as a parent.”
—Faye J. Crosby (20th century)