Picked up a great documentary at the video store on the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorist attack, "One Day In September". Highly recommended.

Short story: eight terrorists simply climbed over a fence to gain access to the olympic village and the Israeli athlete dormitory. The security on site was unarmed. They took several hostages--one managed to make a break for it and escaped, while two were shot nearly immediately.

The German police were astonishingly, criminally inept. there were some initial negotiations; the germans had only border patrol police on hand. The army was prohibited from participating. They got 30 or so police volunteers together, none of which had any prior training--they just asked for people for experience with guns. They were preparing to storm the dormintory--a scratch team with no training!--before they called it off. The East German TV cameras were broadcasting all the movements of the police and the terrorists were watching them on the tube.

Eventually the police negotiated a move to a jet at the airport by helicopter. They had five snipers set up beforehand; unfortunately they had underestimated the number of terrorists, so there were actually eight targets. They had an undercover team on the jet that was to attempt to overpower the terrorists.

Seconds before the helos landed the team on the plane _voted_ to abort their mission.

The snipers had no radio communications; they were to simply fire when the first sniper fired. they had no target coordination. The police opened fire; the terrorist deputy commander was wounded, but a sniper was displacing at the opening bell and missed the commander. A gunbattle ensuded, with lots of lead flying.

_Two hours_ later a grenade was thrown into one of the helos carrying athletes, and a clip emptied into the atletes in the other helo. The athletes were killed.

Three terrorists survived and were arrested. A few weeks later, in an obvious setup, a Lufstansa jet with only 12 passengers on it was hijacked, and the surviving terrorists released in exchange for the hostages. The German goverment hoped to avoid future terrorist attacks by releasing the terrorists.

The Israelis have since managed to kill two of the three terrorists, as well as about a dozen others involved in the planning of the attack.

It's a great documentary on how not to do something like this. These days I think the average podunk county SWAT team would do a better job than the Germans.

This event led directly to the formation of GSG-9.

These days even a small town would have a swat team there.  Then the FBI would have the HRT,  the NSA would call the Green Berets, Janet Reno would send a team, the news would have a cross trained swat/news crew just in case things got ugly, and of course there would be the guy who always walks in front of the TV cameras with an MP-5 if full riot gear but doesn't really seem to belong with anyone.