Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team.

JONAS, George (Steven Spielberg).

Item Number: 100754

New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.

First edition of the book that inspired the Steven Spielberg film Munich. Octavo, original half cloth, illustrated. Signed by George Jonas and Steven Spielberg on the front free endpaper. The film Munich produced and directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth. It is based on the book Vengeance, an account of Operation Wrath of God, the Israeli government’s secret retaliation against the Palestine Liberation Organization after the Munich massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympics. It received five Academy Awards nominations: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Editing and Best Score. In 2017, the film was named the sixteenth “Best Film of the 21st Century So Far” by The New York Times. Name opposite the title page, near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Lawrence Ratzkin.

Vengeance is a true story that reads like a novel. It is the account of five ordinary Israelis, selected to vanish into "the cold" of espionage secrecy -- their mission to hunt down and kill the PLO terrorists responsible for the massacre of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. This is the account of that secret mission, as related by the leader of the group -- the first Mossad agent to come out of "deep cover" and tell the story of a heroic endeavor that was shrouded in silence and speculation for years. He reveals the long and dangerous operation whose success was bought at a terrible cost to the idealistic volunteer agents themselves.