Middle Eastern Terrorism. Mark Ensalaco

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СКАЧАТЬ in the hope of making a diplomatic breakthrough.

      The contact between Ames and Salameh—and between U.S. and Fatah intelligence—would result in a back channel security arrangement, but not until 1974 after Black September actually murdered U.S. diplomats. At the end of 1970, Salameh broke off contact with the CIA, after a senior CIA officer attempted to recruit him in Rome with an offer of a $1 million. The CIA's clumsy effort to buy an asset would have its consequences. Over the next three years, Salameh was directly involved in some, although not all, of Black September's terror operations. It was Salameh who organized the assassination of Wasfi Tel in November 1971 and the attacks in West Germany, Holland, and Italy in early 1972. He then became involved in the planning of a late summer operation in the heart of Europe, an operation that more than any other, including even Haddad's Skyjack Sunday hijackings, defined the threat of terror in the 1970s in the mind of most Americans.

      The appearance of Black September was ominous because it meant another killer was roaming in search of victims. But the appearance of Black September did not mean the disappearance of the PFLP. Actually, the PFLP struck first in 1972.

      The Lod Massacre

      Wadi Haddad never sought the approval of the PLO to conduct terror operations, just as he never heeded the organization's chastisements. George Habash, the nominal secretary general of the PFLP, was in prison in Damascus when Haddad organized the first hijacking, and in Communist China on Skyjack Sunday. Haddad was his own man. George Habash alternated between deep-throated threats against passengers and cautiously phrased denials of responsibility, but by 1971 Haddad commanded the loyalty of his own faction within the PFLP. At the end of February, Haddad's men resumed the offensive.

      On 22 February, five PFLP terrorists broke into the cockpit of a Lufthansa Boeing 747 soon after departure from New Delhi en route to Athens.⁶ It was only weeks after the Black September attack on the West German electrical plant. The year 1972 was to be a year of reckoning for West Germany. The terrorists ordered the crew to continue across the Arabian Sea and put down in Aden, in what was then South Yemen, where they could count on the tacit collaboration of the radical government. There the terrorists rigged the plane with explosives and began to issue demands laced with threats against the 175 passengers and 15 crew members. First, the terrorists demanded release of the Black September assassins who murdered Wasfi Tel in Cairo in November 1971. Then they demanded the release of Sirhan Sirhan, the man who assassinated Robert F. Kennedy in June 1968. The PFLP later denied ever having demanded the freedom of Kennedy's assassin, but it issued the denial after it learned that Joseph Kennedy, III, son of the slain presidential candidate, was among the hostages the terrorists had already released.⁷ The prominent American escaped harm with the other passengers, but the terrorists still held the crew. Thousands of miles away, in Beirut, the PFLP discreetly presented its ransom demand to the Lufthansa office. Twenty-four hours later, the terrorists released the last hostages and surrendered to the Yemeni officials.

      The resolution of the Lufthansa incident came at a price. The West German transport minister acknowledged Lufthansa's payment of $5 million for the lives of the crew and the return of the plane intact.⁸ In previous hijackings to Damascus, Amman, and Cairo, airline executives and stockholders watched in horror as the Palestinians destroyed the multimillion-dollar jets. The West Germans avoided the monetary losses and averted the loss of life. The West German government managed the September 1970 hostage crisis in Jordan this same way. With the lives of hostages at risk, Bonn offered assurances of the release of imprisoned fedayeen, but only after British and Israeli hostages went free. When the chance of a peaceful resolution presented itself, and the decision was the West Germans' to make, the government acted to save lives. But in a few months time, the West Germans would find themselves entangled in another incident, this time on their own soil, without the option to make concessions.

      The terrorists went free soon after the passengers were released. The Yemenis, like the Algerians and the Syrians before them, saw no reason to incarcerate the Palestinian terrorists. The Egyptians, too, would eventually see the prudence of quietly freeing Wasfi Tel's assassins. West German authorities later complained about the terrorists' brief detention, despite the fact that West German intelligence already knew the identities “of at least several of them.”⁹ Several of the terrorists were, in fact, already known to Western intelligence. When the hijacked Lufthansa flight arrived in Aden, Ali Taha was there waiting for it. Taha, who went by the name of Kamal Rafat, personally took charge of the negotiations that produced the release of the hostages and the extortion of Lufthansa. Taha was known to intelligence services because he commanded all the previous PFLP air piracy operations going back to the Algiers incident in 1968.¹⁰ By now, Taha was so well known that he could not board a flight without the risk of compromising an operation. The temptation to commandeer another planeload of hostages must have been tremendous. Eight weeks later Taha succumbed to the temptation, and this desire to see action one more time cost him his life.

      In May, Black September, impressed by the spectacular PFLP operations, decided to mount its own hijacking operation. Mohammad Najjar conceived the operation, Salameh, Black September's operational commander in Europe, organized it, and Ali Taha conducted it.¹¹ In May 1972, Najjar was acting as chief of Fatah intelligence, replacing Salah Khalaf, who was quarreling with Arafat. Under the circumstances, Najjar was concerned with his standing among the more militant fedayeen. To compensate for Fatah's lack of experience with air piracy, Najjar enlisted Taha to command a combined Fatah-PFLP operation under the banner of Black September. On 8 May, Taha led three Fatah terrorists in an operation to seize a Belgian Sabena flight en route from Vienna to Tel Aviv. Taha was living dangerously. Even before the flight left Vienna, officials in Brussels warned security in Vienna of a plot to commandeer the flight. Security searched three Arabs for weapons, but inexplicably the search turned up nothing.¹² En route to Tel Aviv, Taha and three confederates, a man and two women, took control of the plane and its 101 passengers and crew in the name of Black September.¹³ Taha had defied the risks of direct participation in the operation and had narrowly escaped capture. Now, instead of directing the flight to a secure location in a friendly country like Algeria, Syria, or South Yemen, he ordered the pilot to continue Ben Gurion International Airport, the original destination. It was an act of utter contempt for the Israeli security forces. But because the risk was great the propaganda value of putting the plane down in Israel was even greater. It was a fatal miscalculation.

      Taha's audacity may have astonished the IDF, but it also gave them a tactical advantage. When the plane put down, ground controllers directed the Boeing 707 to a remote area of the airport, and Taha began direct radio communications with senior IDF officers in the control tower. Moshe Dyan, the defense minister and hero of the Six Day War, was present, but Shimon Peres, the transportation minister and future prime minister, handled the negotiations. Taha demanded a straight exchange: 101 passengers and crew for 300 fedayeen held in Israel. The Israelis should deliver the Palestinians directly to the jet; Taha would deliver them to freedom. But Peres refused to make the concession. The most the government could contemplate was the release of perhaps twenty Palestinians as a “gesture of good will,” the innocuous phrase used during the 1968 Algiers incident. In fact, the Israelis were preparing for a demonstration of force rather than a gesture of good will. As night fell on the first day of the hijacking, Israeli commandos disabled the aircraft's landing gear to prevent the hijackers' departure to a more secure location. For the pilot, Captain Reginald Levy, the Israeli action heightened the danger. After Taha threatened murder-suicide unless the Israelis repaired and refueled the jet, Levy appealed over the cockpit radio, “I think they will blow it up, they are serious.”¹⁴ In fact, the Palestinians let 10 P.M. and 5 A.M. deadlines pass without acting on their threat. The delays, and the apparent loss of will, gave the Israelis the time to organize a rescue.

      Twenty-three hours after the hostage crisis began, the Israelis communicated their intention to repair the jet in the interest of saving lives. In fact, Israel was mounting its first takedown of a hijacked airliner. The El Al mechanics who assembled beneath the fuselage were really Lieutetnant Colonel Ehud Barak's elite Sayaret Matkal commandos.¹⁵ СКАЧАТЬ