The truths that each of the best-picture nominees left on the cutting-room floor:

ON THE SUBJECT of “Munich,” there’s been much hand-wringing. Was it good for the Jews or bad for the Jews that Israeli assassins were portrayed as conscience-stricken? Can serious moral issues and box-office success be effectively melded by a middlebrow entertainer such as Steven Spielberg? Were Palestinians portrayed too sympathetically -- or not sympathetically enough?

But one thing that was never questioned in the movie or in the commentary that followed was the competence of the Mossad, Israel’s much-admired intelligence agency. The killers may have been good or bad, right or wrong, queasy, guilty or confused -- but they always got their man.

But is that, in fact, the full, true story? Where, for instance, was the story of Lillehammer? Why was it ignored?

“Munich” accurately portrays how, within days after the 11 Israeli Olympic athletes were killed in September 1972, Mossad agents fanned out across Europe on orders of Prime Minister Golda Meir to exact revenge. They killed their first man in Rome in October. In less than a year, they killed nearly a dozen more Palestinians they believed were linked to terrorism.

One of the targeted men was Ali Hassan Salameh, a Black September leader who had helped mastermind the Munich killings. Salameh, a playboy and a womanizer, had been dubbed the “Red Prince” by the Mossad, according to authors Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman.

In the summer of 1973, the Mossad became certain that it had finally located Salameh in Lillehammer, a ski resort in southern Norway, and on July 21, 15 Mossad agents arrived there. They followed their target for several hours to make sure he was the right man. Then, as he and his pregnant wife walked back to their apartment from a local movie theater (where they had seen “Where Eagles Dare,” starring Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton) two of the agents approached and shot him 10 times at close range with silenced Berettas.

Unfortunately, they killed the wrong man. The man they thought was Ali Hassan Salameh was actually Ahmed Bouchiki, an innocent Moroccan waiter. Yes, the two looked alike. Yes, both spoke French. But they were nevertheless different men.

Worse yet, the agents failed to cover their tracks and, in the end, six of them were arrested. Incriminating documents were found, along with the keys to several European safe houses.

The Mossad had built a reputation for competence beginning in 1960, when it plucked Adolf Eichmann from a Buenos Aires street and brought him to Israel to stand trial. But to this day, Lillehammer stands out as the agency’s most egregious (publicly known) failure. At least some reference to it would have been appropriate in Spielberg’s version of the Munich story.