The Munich controversy...

In 1972, a little known Palestinian group calling themselves Black September sneaks into the Olympic village and holds hostage 11 Israeli athletes. They kill two and then tried to escape with the rest via the German government given aircraft.

However at the airport, a botched rescue attempt resulted in the nine dying, along with a German policeman and five of the eight kidnappers.

Israel moved immediately to exact revenge. It set up Operation Wrath of God and hunted down Palestine leaders it thought were behind the kidnapping in Munich.

The workings of one such assasination group is the crux of the latest movie by Steven Spielberg called Munich.

But the movie has been subject to much controversy in Israel and Germany.

In Israel, its secret service Mossad is not happy by the way they were portrayed in the movie. They also say the movie was factually flawed.

One of the central themes of Spielberg's Munich is the personal toll the mission takes on the team, wracked by guilt over what they were doing.

However Mossad agents, interviewed in a Channel 4 documentary on Thursday night showed little sign of agonising.

Officers K and G, though their faces are hidden in the shadows, come across as tougher and more hard-bitten than Spielberg's agents.

Officer G, asked if he ever had doubts, says:

"No hesitations. No. No. No. We believe you can say whatever you like in
discussions, but when ordered, you must follow it."

Their other argument is that the assassination campaign did not fall apart because the agents lost their nerve, as the film suggests, but because an operation went disastrously wrong at Lillehammer in Norway, when the Israelis mis-identified their target - the Black September chief Ali Hassan Salameh - and killed an innocent Moroccan waiter instead. Spielberg does not even mention Lillehammer.

Others blasted Munich saying the film equates the Israeli assassins with the Palestinian militants and tries to excuse the actions of the terrorists.

Spielberg's staff emphasise that Munich is a work of art not a documentary, but his film opens by saying it was "inspired by real events".

And the director himself says:

"These critics are acting as if we were all missing a moral compass. Of course,
it is a horrible, abominable crime when people are taken hostage and killed like
in Munich. But it does not excuse the act when you ask what the motives of the
perpetrators were and show that they were also individuals with families and a
history.... "

In Germany, the movie brings another form of flashback - it revived unwanted memories of the shockingly inept handling of events by the Germans, especially in the year when they host the World Cup.

background on Munich murder:

Black September, a Palestinian group, broke into the Olympic village in Munich in September 1972 dressed in tracksuits and armed with Kalashnikovs and took 11 Israeli athletes hostage.

Twenty-four hours later, in a botched German police rescue, all hostages, five kidnappers and a German police officer were killed. Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, launched missions, dubbed Operation Wrath of God, to track down and kill those alleged to be responsible.

The first hit was in Rome, the second in December when Mahmoud Hamshiri was killed, followed by assassinations in Cyprus, Paris, Beirut, Athens, Rome, Paris again, and Lillehammer, Norway.

Lillehammer went badly wrong: a Moroccan waiter was mistaken for Ali Hassan Salameh, alleged planner of Munich. Salameh was killed by a car bomb in Beirut in 1979.

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