Middle Eastern Terrorism. Mark Ensalaco

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СКАЧАТЬ knew better: “No one pays out compensation unless they are guilty.”²⁰

      The violence of summer 1973 ended with an atrocity in one European airport and a near catastrophe in another. The atrocity occurred in Athens, where on 5 August two Palestinian terrorists opened fire in a passenger lounge on passengers awaiting a TWA flight to New York. In a shocking repetition of the Lod massacre fifteen months earlier, the terrorists wounded fifty-five and killed three before capture. Two of the dead were Americans, one a sixteen-year-old girl. Greek authorities sentenced the men to death for the atrocity, but released them in early 1974 after Palestinians seized a Greek freighter. A month after the atrocity in Athens, authorities in Rome narrowly averted a catastrophe by arresting five men who somehow had smuggled Soviet-made shoulder-launched (SAM-5) surface-to-air missiles into the Italian capital. It was a truly international conspiracy: Libya supplied the weapons, the terrorists came from Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Algeria and Libya, and their mission was to shoot down an Israeli passenger jet after takeoff from the airport.²¹

      The Appearance of Abu Nidal

      It had been a violent spring and summer. The Palestinians managed to mount terror operations despite the Israeli campaign to terrorize the terrorists. But the failure rate was high, attesting to heightened security and better intelligence in a now fully involved European theater of terror and counterterror operations. There was something else. Palestinian terrorism underwent a metamorphosis in the first six months of 1973. The two principal nuclei—Wadi Haddad's faction of the PFLP and Abu Iyad's Black September faction of Fatah—were fragmenting into dissident organizations. The failed PFLP-JRA hijacking in July was the first PFLP operation in more than a year. Black September quietly disappeared after the Khartoum operation in March and death of Najjar, Adwan, and Nasser in April. Neither the PFLP nor Black September was responsible for the operations in Paris, Nicosia, Beirut, Rome, and Athens between March and September. These were acts of Palestinian dissidents who rejected the PLO's discernible tilt toward moderation, men like Abd al-Ghafur, who was behind the Rome and Athens attacks in the spring, and Sabri al-Banna.²² Both would strike again before the end of the year—al-Banna in Paris in September, al-Ghafur in November and December, after the October War.

      Sabri Khalil al-Banna adopted Abu Nidal as his nom de guerre when he joined the Palestinian nationalist movement. Abu Nidal's trajectory was similar to that of many prominent figures in Fatah or the PFLP. Exiled in Saudi Arabia, Abu Nidal moved in conspiratorial circles of young Palestinians who dreamed of liberating Palestine; he even formed a small liberation organization, but it did not survive. After the Six Day War, Abu Iyad, Arafat's intelligence chieftain, recruited Abu Nidal into Fatah. He was posted to the Sudan as Fatah's representative in Khartoum in 1969. It was a brief assignment. He was back in Jordan in 1970, but was sent to Iraq as Fatah's representative to Baghdad before the Palestinian-Jordanian confrontation. In Baghdad, the Baath regime, which seized power in a 1968 bloodletting, encouraged him to organize a radical Fatah faction to challenge Arafat. Abu Nidal was thus originally a creature of Iraqi intelligence, although in later years he transferred his loyalties to Syria and eventually Libya. In September 1973, while he was still nominally under the discipline of Fatah, Abu Nidal carried out his first terror operation.

      On the morning of 5 September, the same day the Italian authorities discovered the conspiracy to shoot down an El Al jet in Rome, five terrorists claiming membership in a new organization, al-Icab (“punishment” in Arabic), seized the Saudi Arabian embassy in Paris. They took fifteen hostages, whom they threatened to kill unless Jordan complied with their sole demand: the release of Abu Daoud, who was serving a life sentence for his involvement in the February plot to take U.S. diplomats hostage in Amman. The terrorists were Abu Nidal's men. In fact, the operation's commander, Samir Muhammed al-Abbasi, was the husband of one Abu Nidal's nieces.²³

      Al-Icab was the first in a series of fictitious names Abu Nidal would use in the operations of what he eventually called Fatah-Revolutionary Council. The name was meant to ridicule Arafat, the chief of Fatah and the chairman of the PLO executive committee. Abu Nidal no longer considered Fatah, or the PLO, revolutionary. Abu Nidal admired the imprisoned Abu Daoud and expected that once freed Daoud would join his dissident Fatah faction. Rumors flew that a senior member of Fatah, perhaps even Abu Iyad himself, had betrayed Abu Daoud in Amman at the behest of Arafat, who opposed the embassy operation. But there was another motive. The Paris operation was organized to embarrass Arafat, who was in Morocco attending a meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement. By fall 1973, Arafat was already trying to remake himself in the image of a statesman. Abu Nidal was determined to strew wreckage in his path in the interest of the new Baath regime in Iraq. The terrorists made this clear in a statement that denounced “Arab regimes that disguised themselves behind progressive slogans but move in the line of surrender.”²⁴

      The hostage crisis in Paris lasted forty-eight hours. As evening fell on 5 September, the terrorists apologized to the French for conducting the operation on French soil, and then demanded a jet to fly them and their hostages to an Arab country, any Arab country. As dawn broke on 6 September, they threatened to begin killing the hostages at intervals, but either their resolve was weak or their orders were firm—deadlines for the beginning of executions came and went without a killing. At one point the terrorists speaking through journalists acting as intermediaries told French authorities they wanted to avoid “another Munich.” The incident was becoming more and more bizarre. The Iraqi ambassador entered the Saudi embassy on the morning of 6 September to offer himself as a hostage. That same evening, Syrian president Hafez al-Asad offered the terrorists a Syrian jet to fly them out of France. A compromise was in place. The terrorists released ten hostages but took Saudi nationals with them to the plane that would take them first to Cairo for refueling and then to Damascus. The plane never arrived in Syria, but diverted to Kuwait. That was not the end of it. The terrorists forced the pilots back into the air and into Saudi airspace. Over the Saudi capital, they threatened to throw the Saudi hostages from the plane unless the Saudi monarch pressured Jordanian monarch to release Abu Daoud. The threats changed nothing. After a short flight the terrorists returned to Kuwait City, where they released the hostages and surrendered on 7 September.

      Abu Iyad, in his memoir five years after the Paris incident, denounced the operation as “a completely senseless exploit.”²⁵ In fact, it infuriated Arafat, who issued a statement from Rabat denouncing the operation and promising to bring those responsible to account. After the closure of the Non-Aligned Summit, Arafat dispatched Abu Iyad and a trusted moderate, Mahmoud Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, to Baghdad to confront the renegade Abu Nidal. Abu Iyad might have believed it feasible to subject Abu Nidal to Fatah discipline, but what he learned in Baghdad should have been a warning. Iraqi intelligence officials present at the meeting revealed that Iraq set the Paris operation in motion, and Abu Nidal merely carried it out.²⁶ The alliance between Iraq's Baath regime and Abu Nidal's Fatah-Revolutionary Council would prove fatal for PLO moderates. Over the next few years, Abu Nidal acted more as a contract killer than as an international terrorist, systematically assassinating PLO and Arab moderates and Syrian rivals in pursuit of Iraq's national aspiration to become the center of the Arab political universe. In June 1974, Fatah intelligence discovered Abu Nidal's plot to assassinate Abu Mazen and sentenced Nidal to death for treason in absentia. In 1991, Abu Nidal ordered the assassination of Abu Iyad in Tunis as punishment for his drift to moderation.

      Less than three weeks after the Saudi embassy operation, Abu Daoud walked free with hundreds of other Palestinian fedayeen. But neither Abu Nidal nor Iraq could claim credit when Jordan's prison gates swung open. King Hussein granted general amnesty to Palestinians at the behest of Egypt and Syria, who needed the Palestinian guerrillas for operations in an imminent war with Israel.

      The Yom Kippur War

      Israel's victory in the June 1967 Six Day War was deeply humiliating to Egypt, which lost the oil fields of the Sinai Peninsula to Israeli occupation. Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president who had come to power after Nasser's death during the 1970 Jordanian crisis, could not accept the status quo. By late 1971, Sadat was signaling his preference was for a negotiated return СКАЧАТЬ