Operation Wrath of God: The Secret History of European Intelligence and Mossad’s Assassination Campaign with Aviva Guttmann - Thomas and Diann Mann Israel Lecture Series
Join the Melton Center for Jewish Studies at The Ohio State University for Aviva-Guttmann's Book talk: Operation Wrath of God: The Secret History of European Intelligence and Mossad’s Assassination Campaign - 2026 Thomas and Diann Mann Israel Lecture Series
In this talk, Dr Aviva Guttmann discusses her most recent book, which examines the role of European intelligence in one of the most spectacular targeted killing operations of Mossad. This covert operation, called Operation Wrath of God, was organised in response to the 1972 Munch Olympics Massacre. The operation consisted of ten missions to kill Palestinians who were directly or loosely associated with Palestinian terrorism. Aviva’s research reveals for the first time that European intelligence played a vital role in the organisation and execution of Operation Wrath of God. Her research is based on unprecedented access to archival records from a secret intelligence-sharing liaison called Club de Berne. Aviva will advance two arguments. First, European intelligence was key for Israel to organise and carry out its covert actions. Second, because intelligence cooperation was so beneficial for all the parties, the Europeans let Mossad operate and tolerated the use of its shared intelligence to kill Palestinians suspected of terrorism involvement. In other words, the extensive advantages that the European agencies gained through intelligence-sharing led them to turn a blind eye towards, or even tacitly support, Israel’s Operation Wrath of God assassinations on their respective territories. This advances our understanding of the international relations of intelligence agencies.
Speaker: Dr Aviva Guttmann is a Lecturer in Strategy and Intelligence at Aberystwyth University. She is the author of The Origins of International Counterterrorism (Leiden, 2018) and the recently published Operation Wrath of God: The Secret History of European Intelligence and Mossad’s Assassination Campaign (Cambridge, 2025). The book received very strong media attention with news stories published in The Guardian and Haaretz and excellent reviews among others in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, and The London Review of Books. She is currently editing the Oxford Handbook of Women in Intelligence, with over 40 contributors from around the world. She has co-edited a book on Estimative Intelligence in European Foreign Policymaking (Edinburgh, 2022) and published widely in intelligence and international security. She is the founder and chair of the Women’s Intelligence Network (WIN), which connects and promotes women scholars and practitioners in the field of intelligence studies. Before joining Aberystwyth, she was a Marie Curie Senior Researcher and a Research Associate in the War Studies Department at King’s College London. She further has four years of work experience in Security Sector Reform in Geneva (Switzerland) and Abuja (Nigeria). She is regularly consulted by national and international media to comment on current affairs.
Supported By: Thomas and Diann Mann Lecture Series on Jews, America, and Israel
