Believing What You Read

By Thomas Griffith

Wouldn't it be great to read a bona fide first-person account of how Israel's secret service hunted down and killed the Arab gunmen who murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich? What a bestseller it would make! Simon & Schuster spent $125,000 for the U.S. publishing rights and ordered a 50,000 first printing of Vengeance, subtitled The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team. But even before the book was published a month ago, widespread doubts were raised about its authenticity.

When asked by the New York Times why books are published whose facts cannot be completely confirmed, Michael Korda, editor in chief at Simon & Schuster, replied, "We operate on a different basis than a newspaper. We don't have a staff of hundreds of reporters to check every book we publish. We start from the assumption that it's the author's book. If it isn't libelous, the weight of responsibility is to let the author tell his story." Korda's candor may come as a shock to laymen who think of newspapers as being edited in a hurry, with facts assembled as best they can be on short notice, while a book is slowly gestated, relentlessly checked, permanently bound and meant to endure. But the rush is on at a number of publishers to put out books that become bestsellers by making headlines. The w book jacket of Vengeance calls it "perhaps the most sensational headline-making book of the year."

Alas, sometimes the headlines are the wrong kind. Random House recently shredded copies of a biography of Barbara Hutton to escape a costly libel suit. Howard Hughes' fake autobiography earlier proved that hot book ideas can be too good to be true.

Vengeance is S & S's second attempt to market a dubiously documented story. Five years ago, a writer named Rinker Buck approached the company with the story. Buck and his Israeli informant were offered a $60,000 book advance, with $20,000 as down payment. But when Buck went off to Europe to check the facts, he found many discrepancies in the Israeli's account: "He was changing his story daily."

After telling his editors of his concerns, Buck decided he was ethically unable to do the book. So Peter Schwed, then chairman of the editorial board of S & S, recommended that the book be turned into a spy novel ("That's a simple way of presenting something you are nervous about presenting as fact," he told the Wall Street Journal). Two novelists declined the job.

Schwed has since retired and had nothing to do with Vengeance--the same story from the same secret agent but with a new writer. It was offered by a small Canadian publisher to Michael Korda, who jumped at it. Korda is the nephew of Film Producer Sir Alexander Korda. Articulate, aggressive and imperturbably assured, he makes so little secret of his ambition for recognition that friends consider it part of his Hungarian charm. Among his own bestsellers is Power! How to Get It, How to Use It, a book neither as trashy nor as clever as it sounds. Hype is Korda's natural gift ("My argument is with people who do not view the world cynically," he once said). He published an "as told to" book by an aging mobster, Joseph Bonanno. Critics complained that it romanticized the Mafia and objected to its title, A Man of Honor. The title was Korda's, who later explained, "It does not affirm that Simon & Schuster thinks he is a man of honor, but that that is what he claims to be."

Such hype is also the problem with Vengeance. Its author, George Jonas, a Canadian writer and radio producer, satisfied himself that the Israeli's story could be believed, though he is less sure that the supposed secret agent, code-named "Avner," was, as he claimed, leader of the mission. In his foreword, Jonas acknowledges that much of the tale rests on the unverified claims of one man and concedes that the book uses "reconstructed" dialogue. None of these caveats is suggested in the title page's promise of "the true story."

"We do our best to check facts," says Korda. "But it is the writer's obligation to be accurate." Any newspaper or magazine editor who used such a justification to publish an unverified story would be lambasted, and rightly so. Korda further argues, "Accuracy is not at issue here; veracity is. Had we said, 'This is the true story of the mission by a man who claims to have led it,' we would be home free."

A fishy distinction: surely if the man didn't lead the mission, accuracy is just as much involved as veracity.