Ulrich K. "Ricky" Wegener (b. August 22, 1929) was a renowned German police officer and a founding member of the counter-terrorist force GSG 9. The man tasked with creating the tactics and strategies that would be used by Germany's first exclusively counter-terrorist force, Colonel Wegener was the Bundesgrenzschutz (Federal Border Protection, now German Federal Police) liaison officer with the German Interior Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, at the time. Wegener was an eyewitness to the botched attempt to rescue the Israeli hostages held by Palestinian terrorists at Munich in 1972, and was delegated to create an elite counter-terrorist unit by the (West) German government after the disaster. Counter-terrorist units were still a relatively unheard of form of combating terrorism and the only truly established groups at the time were Britain's Special Air Service and Israel's Sayeret Mat'kal. Toward this end, Colonel Wegener went to train for a time with both groups, assimilating many of their methods into the tactics he would later set down for GSG 9. Wegener’s time with the SAS is well documented, but his training with Sayeret (and a rumoured participation in the rescue of the Israeli hostages in the Operation Entebbe) is more shrouded in mystery since Israel rarely acknowledges any cooperation with Germany. It is rumored, however, that Colonel Wegener was one of the commandos injured in the Entebbe raid performed by Sayeret in 1976. Wegener was also the GSG 9 commander at the liberation of the hostages of the PFLP on the Boeing 737 Landshut, operated by Lufthansa as flight 181, in Mogadishu, Somalia, in the night from the 17th to the 18th October 1977. For details of the hijacking see RAF. Wegener is currently a member of the KÖTTER GmbH & Co. KG Verwaltungsdienstleistungen Security Committee.
