by ROBERT BECKHUSEN
The 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid is best remembered in America for the “Miracle on Ice” hockey victory over the Soviet Union. Less known is how scared the U.S. military was of terrorist attacks.
Today, it’s normal for major games to have snipers and sweeping, expensive surveillance hardware. This was far less common in 1980, but tragic events in Germany eight years prior had set events in motion.
During the 1972 Summer Olympics, the Palestinian terrorist organization Black September murdered 11 Israeli athletes and coaches in Munich. Determined to prevent another terrorist attack, the Lake Placid Olympic Organizing Committee asked the Pentagon to set up an electronic dragnet around the winter games.
Congress quickly freed up money for American troops to help protect more than 1,000 Olympians from nearly 40 countries. Adding to the tense atmosphere, the United States was threatening to boycott the upcoming Summer Olympics in Moscow. (It eventually did.)
“The entire … operation was conducted in an atmosphere charged with intense media concentration, in a multi-national ‘community’ of some 1,600 individuals, many from nations whose political ideologies are at variance with those of the United States,” U.S. Army officials explained in a subsequent review of their mission.
“It is safe to say that there are those who would have enjoyed any incident, regardless of how trivial, which would have resulted in embarrassment to the host nation.”
