Times Colonist from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada • 68

Vengeance Sword of Gideon 1 CTV hoping Israel's taste for Old Testament justice will make for exciting television By Gillian George OR MILLIONS of people around the world, the memory of the unfolding tragedy at the ,1972 Munich Olympics is still vivid. Not since the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy a decade earlier did viewers remain so transfixed by their televisions and radios, hoping against hope for someone to say the horrors weren't true. But they were.

The Olympic Village had indeed been invaded by a team of anti-Israeli terrorists. While international authorities remained helpless, the terrorists captured 11 Israeli athletes, killing two immediately and murdering the remaining nine during an incredibly bungled shoot-out with German police at the Munich airport. For four hours Sunday and Monday, (Channels 6 and 8 at 9 p.m.) CTV recreates those events and their bloody aftermath in Sword of Gideon. The miniseries should keep viewers just as riveted as in 1972. But the Olympic incident in the film's opening moments is just the beginning of one of the most astonishing chapters in modern history.

Based on Toronto author George Jonas's 1984 best seller, Vengeance, the film actually concerns a massive anti-terrorist scheme that Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir allegedly put into motion after the Munich murders. The term "allegedly" must be carefully inserted here simply because, according to Jonas, Israeli authorities have consistently refused to comment on whether they actually did set up a crack commando team for the dual purpose of both exacting revenge by assassinating the Munich assassins and demonstrating an intent to do likewise to anyone planning future terrorist activities. Faithfully following the same path as Jonas's book, Sword of Gideon begins with the recruitment by a senior officer (played by Rod Steiger) in Is- Steven Bauer and Michael York in a scene from Sword of Gideon. rael's Mossad, or secret service, of a young soldier named Avner (Steven Bauer of Scarface fame). After special commando training, Avner receives his assignment personally from Golda Meir (Colleen Dewhurst).

Avner, along with a highly-skilled team (Michael York, Robert Joy and Peter Dvorsky), spent nearly every moment of the next few years travelling all over Europe and the Middle East tracking down and killing the Munich terrorists. The events portrayed in Sword of Gideon would be fascinating enough if they were mere fiction. But knowing they almost certainly happened makes the film a must-see proposition. This realization also transformed what could have been just another acting job into a haunting experience for Bauer. "We spent three months on the film, in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Rome, Montreal, New York, London and Paris, and I worked every day.

I ended up believing that the continuation of this course of action isn't the most effective way of curbing terrorism. "But, while we were shooting, I certainly thought, as the real Avner did at the time, that taking the lives of the men who had taken so many themselves was justifiable." FIVE.