Middle Eastern Terrorism. Mark Ensalaco
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Название: Middle Eastern Terrorism

Автор: Mark Ensalaco

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Историческая литература

Серия:

isbn: 9780812201871

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СКАЧАТЬ September's Munich operation figured prominently on the Mossad hit list, but the chieftains of Black September—Abu Iyad, Mohammed Najjar, Abu Daoud, and Ali Hassan Salameh—were the' principal targets. The Israelis never managed to kill Abu Iyad; he would be killed by a dissident Palestinian he had recruited into Fatah; Sayaret Matkal, Israeli special forces, killed Najjar in Beirut in 1973; the Mossad seriously wounded Abu Daoud in 1981, but he survived and, a decade after the assassination attempt, voted as a member of the Palestinian National Council to rescind the clause in the PLO charter calling for the destruction of Israel.30 Ali Hassan Salameh, whom the Israelis called the Red Prince, frustrated the Israeli assassination squads until 1979; in fact, Israeli intelligence committed one of its most damaging blunders in 1974 when it killed a man it mistook for the Red Prince in Norway. Committee X also marked Wadi Haddad, the “Master” of PFLP operations, for death. The Israelis, who attempted to assassinate him as early as 1970, never managed to kill him; he died of cancer in 1978. Mohammed Boudia was the chief of PFLP operations in Europe and superior to the infamous Carlos the Jackal; the Israelis planted the bomb that killed him in his car in Paris in June 1973. Basil al-Kubaisi managed logistics for the PFLP; the Israelis killed him in Paris in April 1973.

      Committee X's assassination squads struck within weeks of Munich, killing men who did not suspect the Mossad was hunting them. On 16 October 1972, the Israelis tracked Wael Zwaiter to Rome and shot him to death in the lobby of his apartment building. On 8 December, a Mossad assassination squad killed Mahmoud Hamshari in Paris. This time the assassination was more imaginative. Hamshari's killers placed a bomb under his telephone table and detonated it when he identified himself to a caller posing as a journalist interested in interviewing him. In January 1973, the Mossad killed Hussein Abad al-Chir in Cyprus by detonating a bomb placed under his bed. None of these men were directly involved in the Munich atrocity; indeed, there are doubts about their involvement in Black September. The Israelis had reason to believe that Zwaiter, PLO representative in Rome, had been involved in the El Al hijacking in July 1968. Hamshari was an intellectual, not a terrorist operative, but the Mossad believed he had had a hand in the Munich operation; the Israelis were certain al-Chir was the PLO contact with the Soviet KGB.31 These were only the first in a series of assassinations—and counter-assassinations—in a dirty war that would continue through 1973 and into 1974.

      At the end of the year, Black September mounted its second major operation, on the other side of the world from the first. On 28 December, four Palestinian terrorists raided the Israeli Embassy in Bangkok.32 They seized six Israeli diplomats, among them the ambassador to neighboring Cambodia, who happened to be visiting. They issued the usual demands: the release of 36 imprisoned comrades. The terrorists' sense of solidarity was inclusive: the name of Kozo Okamoto, the Japanese Red Army survivor of the Lod massacre, figured on the list. The Munich incident was still vivid in the memories of the Israeli and Thai governments. Golda Meir, whose intelligence agency was just beginning to hunt down those responsible for Munich, reasserted the Israeli government's policy of non-negotiation. The government of Thailand, embarrassed by the breach of security, made a daunting show of force by encircling the embassy with security forces. As important as the Israeli and Thai reaction was that of Egypt. President Sadat had refused to become embroiled in the Munich incident. His refusal to grant the Black September commandos safe passage to Cairo not only contributed to the tragedy at Fürstenfeldbruck, but damaged his diplomacy. By the end of 1972, Sadat was interested in gaining support for a negotiated return of the Sinai, lost to the Israelis in the Six Day War.

      The intervention of the Egyptian ambassador proved critical. Whatever encouragement the terrorists may have taken from the release of the three survivors of the Munich, the deaths of the other five must have weighed heavily on their minds. With no other viable options, the four Palestinians accepted the Egyptian offer of safe passage and surrendered without harming their captives. Everyone took away different lessons from the Bangkok incident. For governments confronted with the threat to their diplomats—this included the Nixon administration—Bangkok taught the efficacy of absolute refusal to strike deals with terrorists. For the terrorists, Bangkok taught the futility of threats and the imperative to kill.

      Abu Iyad and Ali Hassan Salameh had shifted tactics from hijacking airliners to seizing embassies. The change was first evident in Munich. Instead of seizing random passengers, Black September would pursue high officials and dignitaries. There was another critical change in strategy. Black September's major operations after Bangkok—an embassy takeover in Amman in February that failed and one in Khartoum in March that succeeded—revealed its perception of its real enemy, the United States.

       Chapter 3

      Much Blood Will Flow, Not All of It Ours

      The year 1972 was a year of terrible violence; 1973 would be worse. The year began triumphantly for Richard Nixon, who took the oath of office for a second time in January. The electoral returns the previous November seemed to vindicate the career of one of the more controversial politicians in recent decades. Within days of his second inauguration, Nixon addressed the nation to announce that Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnamese envoy, had initialed the Paris Peace Accords, which ended the Vietnam War and earned the two men the Nobel Prize for Peace. But 1973 would be a year marked by scandal in Washington and violence in the Middle East. Within weeks of his second inauguration, the president would confront the same wrenching moral dilemma the Israeli prime minister faced the previous September. The Israeli Mossad was engaged in an escalating dirty war of counterterrorism against the PFLP and Black September, and renegade organizations backed by Iraq and Libya launched a wave of terror operations in Europe to destroy any appearance of Palestinian moderation. Not a month passed without terrorist or counterterrorist violence. Moreover, it was almost inevitable that Egypt, Syria, and Jordan would seek to reconquer the territory they lost to Israel in the Six Day War. By the end of the year, while Nixon's presidency crashed down around him as a consequence of the Watergate scandal, the fourth Arab-Israeli war would bring the United States and the Soviet Union into a confrontation and would reshape the political terrain in the Middle East.

      Black September's Final Operations

      The campaign of Palestinian terrorism and Israeli counterterrorism had by now escalated into low-intensity warfare. The resolution of the hostage incident in Bangkok in December 1973 seemed proof that governments could compel terrorists to back down simply by refusing to capitulate to their demands. The Israelis were actively engaged in a covert counterterrorism of reprisal killings and preemptive assassinations. Operation Wrath of God, the Mossad's covert campaign of assassinations of the PLO middle echelon, had claimed its first two victims in October in Rome and December in Paris. In January, the Mossad struck again, killing Hussein Abad al-Chir in Cyprus. The operation was almost identical to the one that eliminated Mahmoud Hamshari in Paris the previous month; the Mossad's avengers placed a bomb under al-Chir's bed. The next day, Black September struck back in Madrid, assassinating Baruch Cohen, a Mossad agent who recruited Palestinian university students in Spain as Mossad informants.1 Abu Iyad, whose life depended on counterintelligence, discovered Cohen's operations and ordered his assassination.

      The violence was only beginning. On 20 February, the Israeli armed forces assaulted two Palestinian refugee camps near Tripoli, Lebanon—Badawi and Nahr al-Bard—where PFLP trained fedayeen. The Israeli commandos killed 40 in the raid. The following day, as the Israeli forces were completing the operation in Lebanon, Israel's acute security concerns caused a catastrophe. The waste of innocent life marked the Arab-Israeli conflict from the beginning. Palestinian terrorists found justification for killing innocent Israelis, Israeli soldiers rationalized the deaths of innocent Palestinians as collateral damage. But what happened in the skies over the Israeli-occupied Sinai Peninsula claimed more lives than any terrorist act up to that time. On 21 February, the pilot of a Libyan airliner en route to Cairo became disoriented in one of North Africa's blinding sandstorms. Before the pilot realized the error in navigation, the plane had strayed into Israel's security zone over the occupied Sinai where Israeli fighter jets intercepted it. Israeli efforts to hail the pilot were to no avail. СКАЧАТЬ