Middle Eastern Terrorism. Mark Ensalaco

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СКАЧАТЬ diplomats came via a coded radio message instructing the Black September commando to “remember the martyrs of Nahr al-Bard,” a reference to the Palestinians killed in the Israeli operation in Tripoli in February. The Israelis who intercepted the transmission have always alleged, but never proven, that the voice was Arafat's. But the order to kill came from the highest echelon of Black September, meaning the militant core of Arafat's Fatah, and almost certainly from Abu Iyad.⁷

      After executing George Curtis Moore, Cleo Noel, Jr., and Guy Eid, the eight fedayeen surrendered to Sudanese authorities. U.S. officials put considerable pressure on Sudan's president, Gaafur Nimeiry, to prosecute the killers. The affair says a great deal about the politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and about justice. Nimeiry was deeply embarrassed by the operation and correctly suspected that Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan dictator, was behind the murder of the diplomats. Qaddafi, who was already emerging as a principal figure in the intricate web of state sponsorship of Palestinian terror, would become even more involved as a sponsor of the Rejection Front, which emerged after the official PLO opted to participate in the nascent peace process in 1974. Nimeiry had reason to expose Qaddafi. Moreover, Nimeiry felt betrayed by Fatah. He had become personally involved in the September 1970 crisis in Jordan, flying to Amman to help mediate between the Jordanians and the Palestinians. From his perspective, Arafat owed his life to the Sudanese president's intervention.

      This same ideological commitment to the Palestinian cause prevented Nimeiry from punishing the Black September terrorists who embarrassed him in his own capital. The same perverse logic applied to the Egyptians who released Wasfi Tel's assassins on narrow legal grounds. Nimeiry would have preferred not to alienate the United States. The two countries had only recently renewed diplomatic relations which were suspended after the Six Day War. The most important task of the two slain U.S. diplomats had been to achieve a full rapprochement. But passion prevailed over reason. Nimeiry, after considerable delay, forced a Sudanese court to try the diplomats' killers, although the Palestinians transformed the trial into a forum to voice Black September's grievances. On 24 June 1973, a Sudanese court found six of the eight guilty of murder. But twenty-four hours later Nimeiry released the men into PLO custody with the understanding that Arafat's security would imprison them in Beirut for the duration of their sentences. This was not the end of the incident: in one of those small ironies of the history of Palestinian terrorism, in November 1974 dissident Palestinians would hijack a British airliner to demand that the PLO free brother Palestinians.

      The Khartoum incident alerted the Nixon administration to the dangers the escalating terror campaign posed for U.S. emissaries. These were dangers Americans traveling to Israel confronted once the PFLP turned to air piracy. But apart from applying diplomatic pressures on the Sudan, the Nixon administration had few options. Its myopic efforts to frame a negotiated solution were focused on ending hostilities between Egypt and Israel. The idea of a comprehensive peace that accommodated the Palestinians fell outside the administration's strategic vision. Not until months later, after the October War, did Nixon and Kissinger even contemplate discreet communications with the PLO, though the CIA had once established contact with Arafat via Ali Hassan Salameh, the Red Prince. When Kissinger finally dispatched an envoy to speak with PLO representatives in November, he gave instructions to warn of dire consequences for future acts of violence rather than to explore prospects for meaningful dialogue.

      Operation Youth of Spring

      Even before Munich the Mossad was gathering intelligence on the senior PLO cadre and terrorists. By April Mossad agents identified the residences of three of them in an apartment building on Rue Verdun in Beirut's Fahkani district, which by 1973 the Palestinians had converted into a principality. Mohammed Najjar was the most dangerous of the three. A senior member of Fatah intelligence and an operational commander of Black September, Najjar was behind the May 1972 Sabena hijacking. And although Munich was principally the work of Abu Iyad and Abu Daoud, the Israelis were certain of Najjar's involvement. Kamal Adwan also belonged to Black September. He was a staunch supporter of terror, even after Arafat began to have second thoughts about hijackings and hostage-taking for strategic, though certainly not moral, reasons. In the wake of the PFLP-JRA massacre at Lod, Adwan had quipped “this was an ordinary attack similar to any other attack conducted by a combat unit on a settlement or military camp.”⁸ Committee X did not specifically mark Kamal Nasser for a Wrath of God assassination. But as a principal apologist for the PLO, the Israelis reviled him—as they reviled the PFLP's Ghassan Kanafani, whom they killed on a Beirut street the previous year—for his words as much as his deeds. The Israelis killed Najjar, Adwan, and Nasser on an April night in an operation with a disconcertingly idyllic code word, Youth of Spring.

      Operation Youth of Spring was a coordinated Mossad-Sayaret Matkal operation. On the night of 10 April, Lieutenant Colonel Ehud Barak's commandos came ashore on a Beirut beach in Zodiac boats and rendezvoused with Mossad agents, who rushed them to Rue Verdun in rented cars.⁹ Some of the commandos were disguised as women to deceive Lebanese police and Palestinian militants patrolling the Fahkani district; Barak, the future prime minister, disguised as a brunette woman, began the killing, shooting a guard posted outside the apartment building. A silencer muffled the shots. Then Barak's men rushed up flights of stairs to the apartments where the men slept and blew open the doors to Kamal Adwan's apartment. Barak is not reticent about telling the details in his imperfect English: “It was only the split-second hesitation of the terrorist when he sees it's (sic) civilian people, that ended up our officer shot the terrorist and not the other way around.” Adwan was racked with as many as 55 bullets. His daughter witnessed the attack “glass was being shattered on our heads and he just fell.”¹⁰ It was the same in Najjar's apartment, except that there the Israelis killed Najjar's wife, who threw herself in the line of fire to save her husband. Her son, who heard the burst of fire from the adjoining room, remembers his father cursing the Israelis—”You killed her you dogs”—an instant before they killed him. Within minutes a battle erupted in the Fahkani. As Barak's men were killing Najjar, Adwan, and Nasser, another Sayaret Matkal team was attacking the nearby headquarters of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Abu Iyad, who improbably claims he was in a nearby apartment debriefing the survivors of the Munich operation the West Germans released the previous October, heard gunfire and deafening explosions.¹¹ Out on the street the Israeli commandos came under fire from Lebanese and Palestinians.

      Operation Youth of Spring inflicted heavy damage on Black September. The Israelis killed three of the senior cadre; and almost a fourth. Abu Iyad had dined with the slain men earlier in the evening, attended a PLO central committee meeting with them, and was briefly at Nasser's apartment that night.¹² Yasser Arafat and the DFLP's Naif Hawatmeh lived within blocks of the epicenter of the Israeli assault. But the damage went beyond the body count. The deepest wounds were psychological. Iyad was convinced that the “commandos would never have been able to operate with such impunity for three hours in the heart of Beirut if they hadn't benefited from important local complicity.” In fact, the raid lasted thirty minutes, not three hours, but the nighttime assault not only shook what the PLO's sense of invulnerability, it deepened their suspicions of the Lebanese, especially the minority Maronite Christians.¹³ This was not coincidental because the Israelis came to inflame tensions between Lebanese and Palestinians as much as they came to kill Palestinians terrorists. Over the next three weeks, Palestinian fedayeen and Lebanese security forces clashed, and in May President Frenjieh ordered the Lebanese air force to bomb and strafe the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The possibility of a wider conflict was averted only through the mediation of Arab states. It was a prelude of bad times to come. In less than two years Lebanese and Palestinians would be killing each other with the same ferocity that the Jordanians and Palestinians had killed each other in September 1970.

      Israel was not winning the war on terrorism, but it was inflicting great harm on its terrorist enemies. Two days after Operation Youth of Spring, a Mossad Wrath of God assassination squad struck again in Athens, killing Zaid Muchassi with a bomb in his room in the Hotel Aristides. Muchassi was filling in for Abad al-Chir, the PLO liaison with the Soviet KGB, whom the Israelis had killed in Rome in October. Making their escape, the Israelis ran into Muchassi's KGB contact in a car СКАЧАТЬ