Middle Eastern Terrorism. Mark Ensalaco

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СКАЧАТЬ In fact, the CIA had already renewed its overtures to PLO moderates the previous year. In September 1972, immediately after Black September's horrific failure in Munich, Robert Ames, the CIA's operative in the Middle East, sent a cryptic message to Ali Hassan Salameh, the Red Prince: “My company [CIA] is still interested in getting together with Ali's company [the PLO]. The Southern company [Israel]…knew about our contacts.”³⁶ The CIA would have its opportunity to reestablish communications with Salameh in less than a year, when Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly in New York.

      At the end of the month Walters met with PLO moderates in Rabat, Palestinian dissidents took the first of two actions to poison the atmosphere for the coming negotiations in Geneva. On 25 November, three Palestinians hijacked a Dutch KLM Boeing 747 bound for New Delhi from Beirut with 288 passengers and crew. Although it made political sense for Israel and the United States simply to blame the PLO for all terror, the PLO denounced the hijacking. The new reality of renegade terror further complicated already complicated matters. The men who hijacked the KLM flight claimed to belong to the Nationalist Arab Youth for the Liberation of Palestine, a new organization whose command structure Western intelligence was just beginning to piece together. But the hijackers revealed their connection to earlier terror operations when they issued their sole demand: release of the terrorists captured during the failed operation to attack the residence of the Israeli ambassador and hijack an Israeli passenger jet in Cyprus in April. To make the demand more forcefully, the hijackers ordered the crew to fly to Nicosia after a stopover in Damascus to take on fuel. But the Cypriot president refused to be intimidated, and the terrorists ordered the plane to Abu Dhabi and released the hostages without winning the release of their comrades. In a familiar pattern, the terrorists opted for surrender in an Arab state they knew would not dare punish them for air piracy, much less terrorism.

      The KLM hijacking was an act of solidarity between fedayeen. Captured terrorists knew their comrades would never forsake them—freedom was a hijacking away, experience taught them. Few governments obstinately refused to surrender to terrorist blackmail, and most saw humanitarian and political reasons for exchanging the guilty for the innocent. The September operation in Paris was different. Abu Nidal's men demanded the release of Abu Daoud from a Jordanian prison, but the deeper motive for the operation was to embarrass Arafat. After the October War, sabotaging PLO diplomacy became even more urgent. Nixon and Kissinger understood the October War as creating conditions for negotiations that would ultimately lure Egypt away from the Palestinian cause. With the Geneva talks set to begin at the end of December, Arafat prudently decided adapt to the radically changed geopolitical circumstances. The official PLO began convoluted internal debates about the necessity of endorsing the Geneva talks, if for no other reason than to prevent the devolution of the occupied West Bank to Jordan on the basis of Security Council Resolution 242. The renegades viewed things differently and vowed to keep the fires of Palestinian revolution burning. In December Abd al-Ghafur, the dissident who had organized a series of Libyan-backed operations beginning in the spring, put his own torch to the plans for the Geneva peace conference. He struck in Rome.

      The Pan Am Massacre

      Italian authorities knew the Eternal City was the crossroads for Palestinian terrorists. The JRA terrorists who attacked the Ben Gurion International Airport in Lod in May 1972 acquired their weapons in Rome. Abu Iyad and Abu Daoud rendezvoused in the city six weeks before the Munich Olympics operation. In April, Italian authorities arrested two Palestinians planning an attack in the Leonardo Da Vinci airport. In September, they arrested five terrorists who planned to shoot down an Israeli passenger jet there; their trial was actually set to begin in mid-December, around the time the United States and the Soviet Union originally planned to convene the Geneva peace conference. In mid-December Rome was on alert for a terror attack. It was then and there that Abd al-Ghafur sent his men into action.

      On 17 December, five terrorists arrived at the Leonardo Da Vinci Airport aboard a flight from Madrid. The men acquired weapons outside the terminal from accomplices and then approached a security check point where passengers were filing through newly installed metal detectors on the way to connecting flights. The attack began there just before 1 P.M. Drawing their weapons, the terrorists broke into two assault squads, one to kill at random, the second to secure an avenue for escape. Two Palestinians opened fire through the thin fuselage of a Pan Am Boeing 707 standing at the gate, then charged the plane, hurling phosphorus grenades into the cabin. Passengers scrambled for emergency exists as the jet exploded into flames. Twenty-nine passengers, ten of them American, were burned to death in the conflagration. The second squad rushed onto the tarmac to commandeer a Lufthansa jet, shooting two Italian security guards dead and taking seventeen passengers and crew hostage. The ground attack was over in only twenty-two terrifying minutes. Then began the terror of the Lufthansa hostages.³⁷

      The terrorists forced the pilots into the air and on to Athens, where the plane landed that evening. While Italian authorities were left to put out the fires, tend the wounded, and identify the dead, Greek authorities were thrust into tense negotiations. The Palestinians never identified their organization, but told Greek authorities “we love liberty, especially Palestinian liberty.” Their only demand was like the one made in the name of the National Arab Youth for the Liberation of Palestinian a month earlier: the liberation of the men captured in the Athens airport attack in August. The demand came with a threat. “We are going to conduct a slaughter at the Athens airport,” one of the terrorists told the tower. If the carnage in Rome was not enough to convince Greek authorities the seriousness of the threats, the Dutch pilot, Captain Joe Kroese, dispelled any doubts. “They're serious…they've already killed four”—and they were threatening the life of a fifth hostage—“They're going to shoot him.” But before authorities could arrange for an Arab speaker to calm the terrorists, the sound of gunfire came over the cockpit radio. “It's too late” was all the pilot could say.

      In fact, the pilot was hearing simulated executions. The terrorists had not killed four or five but only one hostage, an Italian airport employee they selected at random. “He was sitting there all alone,” another passenger later told authorities. The hijackers “asked him, even very politely, to come to the galley” from his seat in the rear of the plane. “He walked up calmly. Nobody had any idea of what was about to happen.” Nobody except the terrorists. Another passenger could see through an opening in the curtain that he was pleading for his life. One of the terrorists shot him twice at point blank range. This was the first hostage murdered aboard a hijacked jet since the PFLP initiated the campaign of hijackings in 1968. That same night, the Palestinians ordered the crew to fly them to Kuwait. They left the body of the murdered Italian hostage on the tarmac in Athens as proof of their love of liberty. The incident ended in Kuwait City thirty hours after it began in Rome with the explosion of automatic weapon fire and grenades. After arrival, the terrorists simply surrendered.

      The year 1973 ended as violently as it began with terror claiming victims along a wide arc from the Holy Land to the Old World. But the illogic of terror was shifting. The conflagration in Rome served a very different purpose than previous operations. The purpose of the hijacking of the El Al flight in July 1968 was to raise Palestinian morale by demonstrating the fighting spirit of fedayeen at a moment when the Arab armies and Palestinian guerrillas felt dispirited. The Skyjack Sunday operations two years later were intended, in Leila Khaled's words, to demonstrate to the world that the Palestinians had a legitimate cause at a moment when the world would offer no more than tents and old clothes. The purpose of Black September's Munich Olympic operation was to force the world to be alarmed by the consequences of neglect of the Palestinian national aspirations. But the purpose of this latest outrage was not to embolden Palestinians by harming Israelis or to force indifferent or hostile Western powers to alter their foreign policies, its purpose was to damage Arafat and to destroy an incipient peace process that would promise less than the destruction of the Jewish state and a complete reversal of the Catastrophe of 1948. And to succeed in this, Palestinian extremists would strive to prove to the world that Palestinians were incapable of moderation.

       Chapter 4

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