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ABU NIDAL: A GUN FOR HIRE -- THE SECRET LIFE OF THE WORLD'S MOST NOTORIOUS ARAB TERRORIST |
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Chapter 10: Invisible Strings The case for suspecting a possible link between Israel and Abu Nidal rests on a body of evidence, much of it inferential and conjectural, some of it more substantial. In the previous chapters I discussed the possible involvement of Israeli agents, principally North Africans, in the murder of Palestinian moderates generally attributed to Abu Nidal. I then sought to identify the senior men inside the organization who might be directing these agents and otherwise manipulating operations in Israel's interest. IMMUNITY FROM ATTACK A curious aspect of Abu Nidal's activities, especially in Lebanon, also attracted my attention and fed my suspicions. Since the late 1960s, Israel has repeatedly bombed, shelled, raided, and overrun the positions of its Palestinian and Shi'ite opponents in Lebanon -- whether they be Fatah, the PFLP, the DFLP, the PFLP-General Command, Hizballah, or others. Israel has had a largely free hand in Lebanon. It controls the skies over Lebanon, and even on the ground in the south, there is little to stop it. Hardly a month passes without the publication of an Israeli military communique announcing a raid against "terrorist positions," which usually ends with the ritual formula "Our planes returned safely to base." Since the 1970s, Israel has also regularly sent ground forces on punitive missions north of its self-styled security zone, established in southern Lebanon in 1978. And as we have seen, it has also sent hit teams to many countries to seek out and kill prominent Palestinians. Most of these attacks are described as preemptive, intended to keep the enemy off balance. If the Palestinians do from time to time manage to slip a punch through Israel's defenses, massive retaliation always follows: It is Israel's official policy that attacks on it must never go unpunished -- and with one curious exception, they never do go unpunished. Abu Nidal has very largely been left alone. Despite his attacks on the El Al counters at airports in Rome and Vienna, his murderous assaults on synagogues in Istanbul and several European cities, and other anti-Jewish crimes, his organization in Lebanon and Libya has never seriously been hit by the Mossad's assassination squads or by the Israeli air force, which has so extensively bombed other Palestinian positions. That Abu Nidal should be left to kill Jews with impunity is an extraordinary -- indeed outrageous -- departure from Israeli policy. A German expert on counterterrorism told me in London in 1990, "Those that the Israelis want to destroy, they destroy, even if it means sending in assassins. But what have they ever done to Abu Nidal in fifteen years? He seems more like a protected species that the Mossad wants to keep alive!" Abu Nidal's large establishment near the village of Bqasta, east of Sidon, in Lebanon, known as the Cadres School, is in fact a military camp, standing alone and exposed in the mountains. It presents an unmistakable target from the air. Only once, in the summer of 1988, has the Cadres School been attacked, when an Israeli precision bomb hit a single tent, killing eight female trainees but leaving intact dozens of other buildings housing Abu Nidal's troops and staff. Before a split within Abu Nidal's ranks that would make them fear each other, the top men in his organization moved about southern Lebanon unprotected, as if they knew they were not at risk from Israel. They slept in unguarded houses and, in spite of their rhetoric about being threatened by "hostile services," lived perfectly normal lives. This complacency reigned even though everyone knew that the organization had hit Israel's ambassador in London in June 1982, to say nothing of the Istanbul synagogue and other Jewish targets. There have been no victims of Israeli reprisals among Abu Nidal's top leadership. OPERATIONS IN THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES Another aspect of Abu Nidal's activities puzzled me. Palestinian nationalists from the socialist left to the Islamic right regard the intifada in the occupied territories as the great national battle, a unique effort, after years of passivity, to liberate the territories. Abu Nidal has struck targets in nearly all parts of the world -- Bangkok, Australia, Peru. Yet he has not thrown a stone in the occupied territories, either before or during the intifada. In all the years I have been talking to people from the territories, no one has ever heard of a single operation -- no matter how trivial -- attributed to Abu Nidal. Eight-year-old children throw stones at Israeli troops. Old women brave tear gas. Abu Nidal does nothing. Palestinians from the territories hardly know his name, because he has committed no men, donated not a penny, done nothing at all -- absolutely nothing -- to support their struggle against Israeli rule. When the United National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU), the umbrella organization running the intifada, was set up in 1988, Abu Nidal's publications considered it an extension of Arafat's PLO and ignored it completely. Abu Nidal's inattention to the Palestinian cause is reflected in the structure of his organization. The Intelligence Directorate's Committee for Special Missions -- which mounts assassinations -- employs dozens of cadres and has unlimited funds. The Organization Directorate's Palestine/Jordan Committee has almost no funds or facilities and was for a long time manned by only two persons -- Samir Darwish, who was sent on a mission to Peru, where he was arrested, and Fadil al-Qaisi, who died in London after undergoing heart surgery. Throughout the entire intifada, Abu Nidal has given no additional resources to the Palestine/Jordan Committee and mounted no operations in southern Lebanon, like those by other Palestinian organizations, to harass the Israelis. In 1988, Atif Abu Bakr called for a special session of the leadership to see what could be done to help the intifada. Abu Nidal sabotaged the meeting by discussing such trivia as whose wife had been seen at the hairdresser's? Who had lunched at a fancy restaurant in Switzerland instead of making do with a sandwich? And who had thrown away a kilo of perfectly edible tomatoes at the training camp? Far from supporting the intifada, Abu Nidal has deliberately interfered with it, as, for example in the case of the mysterious Lt. Col. Ma'mun Mraish. Universally known in the Palestinian underground as Ma'mun al-Saghir, Mraish was one of Fatah's ablest and most active officers. He was based at its clandestine naval station in Greece, where, in association with Abu Jihad, he was principally concerned with moving men and weapons into the occupied territories. The Mossad had every reason to want him dead. But there was a further dimension to Mraish. Palestinian sources say that he had excellent contacts with the Soviets and had given them information, and even sensitive technical equipment, which he was well placed to acquire. The CIA must therefore have been on his trail as well. On August 20, 1983, a hot summer's day, in a coastal suburb of Athens, a gunman riding pillion on a motorcycle came abreast Mraish's car and killed him outright with a burst of machine-gun fire. The PLO concluded that either the Mossad or the CIA was responsible. But the Russians did not let the matter rest. They considered Mraish their man and wanted his killer. They investigated the case for several months and concluded that Mraish had been killed by Abu Nidal. They presented their evidence to Atif Abu Bakr, then head of Abu Nidal's Political Directorate, and demanded an explanation. Was Abu Nidal aware, they asked, of the risks he was running by killing Soviet agents? When I interviewed him in Tunis after he had defected from Abu Nidal, Atif Abu Bakr told me that he had confronted Abu Nidal with the Soviet accusation and that to his great surprise, Abu Nidal had said they were right, he had killed Mraish to get back at Fatah. But he made it clear, Abu Bakr added, that he did not want his part in the affair to come out. Many Palestinians knew that Mraish was one of the most effective links between the PLO and the West Bank, and Abu Nidal, therefore, did not want it to be known that he had killed him. It was not only in the occupied territories that Abu Nidal's behavior seemed to me suspect. It is well known that southern Lebanon, north of Israel's security zone, has for years been home to a number of rival parties and militias of widely differing composition and ideology -- Shi'ite, Druze, Nasserist, communist, Ba'athist, pan-Syrian, as well as the various Palestinian factions -- which often clash as they seek to defend their turf. Men from several of these groups have told me that whenever one Palestinian faction clashed with another, Abu Nidal's men would fire at both sides, provoking further conflict. Abu Nidal has also used similar tactics against the two Shi'ite factions, Amal and Hizballah. Sidon is the major port of southern Lebanon. It is presided over by the "Nasserist" leader Mustafa Sa'd, whose city lives next to, and in reasonable amity with, the large PLO-dominated refugee camp of Ain al-Hilwa. Yet a defector from Abu Nidal's organization told me that Abu Nidal repeatedly sent masked men to infiltrate the refugee camp at night, to throw grenades and wreak havoc there, and at the same time plant bombs in Sidon, as if to incite hostilities between the PLO camp and Sa'd's militia. In the summer of 1990, these tactics were uncovered and several of Abu Nidal's members were expelled from both Sidon and Ain al-Hilwa. Former officers of Abu Nidal's People's Army told me that Abu Nidal himself used to instruct his people in Lebanon to report to him on the strength, dispositions, and operations of other forces in Lebanon, and particularly the Syrian army. The Syrians once intercepted a messenger carrying reports back to Abu Nidal. Why and for whom, they wanted to know, was Abu Nidal collecting information about them? A former member of Abu Nidal's Justice Committee told me that when Mossad agents were captured by the organization, they would usually be killed almost at once, often on the very day of their arrest. The standard practice is to keep such prisoners alive long enough to extract as much information as possible from them. If a prisoner is killed before he has talked, then the killing is usually to prevent him from talking. My informant suspected that someone had been planted in the Justice Committee to kill off captured Mossad agents before they could confess. THE CASE OF ZIYAD ZAIDAN AND FATHI HARZALLAH In July 1989, Abu Nidal's People's Army, his militia in Lebanon, learned that a two-man Mossad cell was operating in the big Palestinian refugee camp of Ain al-Hilwa, near Sidon. One of these Mossad operatives, Ziyad Zaidan, voluntarily confessed his links with the Israelis to the head of security of the People's Army in South Lebanon, who was code-named Sufyan. He said he wanted to clear his conscience and wash away the stain on his past. He was prepared to die for the terrible wrongs he had done to the Palestinian cause. He told Sufyan that he had been captured by the Israelis near Sidon during the 1982 war, taken to Israel, jailed, recruited, trained, and sent back to Lebanon as a spy. Zaidan revealed that he and his colleague, Fathi Harzallah, a relative from the West Bank town of Tal, near Nablus, had worked for the Mossad in South Lebanon since 1982, interpreting aerial photographs taken by Israeli reconnaissance aircraft. They would be sent films (he had one with him at the time, which was several meters long) of the Ain al-Hilwa camp and other locations, on which individual buildings were numbered in red. His job was to identify the buildings and tell the Israelis who was living and working there and when they were most likely to be at home. He told Sufyan that over the years, he had radioed to Israel, using a cipher he had been given, no fewer than seven thousand messages and that he had been responsible for scores of Israeli air raids on Lebanon and for hundreds of Palestinian casualties. He said he was making good money at it. Zaidan had returned to Israel two or three times for debriefing and further training. He would be told by radio where to wait on the shore for a small boat with frogmen in it to pick him up, usually before dawn. In the case of trouble, Zaidan and his colleague Harzallah could raise a white flag on a certain rooftop and be whisked away by an Israeli helicopter or be rescued from the beach by an Israeli patrol boat. Abu Nidal's cadre Sufyan was immensely excited by Zaidan's confession. His first thought was that the cell could be "turned" against the Mossad. At the very least, Zaidan and Harzallah could serve as bait to draw onto the shore an Israeli boat or aircraft, which could then be shot up or captured. Immediately, he took Ziyad Zaidan to see Wasfi Hannun, head of Abu Nidal's People's Army Directorate, who referred the case to Mustafa Awad (Alaa), Abu Nidal's highest-ranking intelligence officer in Lebanon, who was in constant touch with Dr. Ghassan al-Ali and with Abu Nidal. Alaa seemed indifferent to Zaidan's story, even bored by it. He said Sufyan's suggestion of playing back the cell was foolish. It would never work. Puffing calmly on his pipe, he tried to give Sufyan the impression that uncovering a Mossad cell, complete with film and intercepted messages, was routine, unimportant. Alaa did suggest, however, that Zaidan's partner, Fathi Harzallah, be brought in and made to confess his role in the affair, on pain of imprisonment or death. When Harzallah was confronted, he admitted he was frightened of Israeli reprisals against his two wives and children if he quit. But if he did agree to be turned, he wanted the organization to pay him the $1,500 a month he said he was getting from the Mossad. Harzallah's family and connections in the West Bank seem to have been more heavily involved as collaborators with Israeli intelligence than were Zaidan's. Some years earlier, Fathi had gone to the United Arab Emirates in search of work and had been recruited by Jordanian intelligence. Then, he said, a man from his hometown had come to see him and suggested that if he returned home, the Mossad, in view of his background in intelligence work, would give him an even better deal than Jordan had done. He complied and was recruited and was then sent to Lebanon to work with Zaidan. Though Alaa discouraged the idea, Sufyan and Zaidan went to the trouble of convincing Fathi to let himself be played back against the Israelis. He finally agreed to cooperate. Within a day or two of this decision, the Mossad sent Zaidan a radio message summoning him to Israel, only the third such message he had had in the seven years he had been working for the Mossad. Sufyan argued that this was a good opportunity to kill or capture whoever the Israelis sent to pick up Zaidan. He drew up a plan, which he submitted to Alaa, and proposed that if the organization did not have the military resources needed for the operation, another Palestinian group, such as Jibril's PFLP-General Command, would be glad to help. A day later and without telling Sufyan, Alaa, on direct orders from Abu Nidal, suddenly arrested Fathi Harzallah and charged him with working for the Mossad. The local PLO, which as usual was watching Abu Nidal's operations, learned of Harzallah's arrest and what he was charged with. It immediately arrested Zaidan, the man it knew to be his colleague -- even though it was Zaidan who had first confessed and had indicated his readiness to be turned. Alerted by the arrest of their agents, the Israelis aborted their planned landing. The operation was blown. Within a month of Zaidan's original confession, any hope of exploiting the Mossad's intelligence failure had collapsed completely. Palestinian sources with direct knowledge of the case pointed to several suspicious features: Alaa's skepticism and seeming lack of interest; the fact that, a year after Fathi Harzallah's arrest, Abu Nidal had still not released anything about his trial or punishment and had not shared with other Palestinian organizations information it may have gathered about Mossad methods, about other links Harzallah may have had, or about the estimated damage done to Palestinian security by the cell; when Zaidan first approached Sufyan, he remarked that he had hesitated a long time before turning himself in, because of his suspicions about Abu Nidal's organization: Its methods of work, its tradecraft, and its communications, he said, were uncomfortably similar to those of the Mossad, in which he and his fellow agent had been trained; finally, that Alaa, on orders from Abu Nidal, had aborted the operation suggested complicity with Israeli intelligence. Sufyan was convinced by Abu Nidal's suspect handling of the case that it was time for him to leave the organization. THE CASE OF MUSTAFA IBRAHIM SANDUQA Sanduqa, as we have seen, was in charge of the Committee for Revolutionary Justice, the body responsible for prisons, interrogation, torture, and executions. He had previously served as the minute-taker at meetings of the Political Bureau and Central Committee and was married to one of Abu Nidal's nieces. In October 1989, a certain Yusif Zaidan (no relation to Ziyad Zaidan) emerged as yet another link to the Mossad. Yusif Zaidan was a German-trained scientist who, on graduation, had joined the PLO's Scientific Committee, first in Beirut, then in Baghdad. When Abu Nidal split from Arafat in 1974 and took over the PLO's Iraqi-based assets, Zaidan made the switch as well and was employed in Abu Nidal's Scientific Committee -- a career that, until that point, was not unlike that of Dr. Ghassan al-Ali, the British-trained chemist who was head of the Secretariat and who is widely suspected by intelligence sources throughout Europe of being the high-level link to Mossad. In November 1989, Yusif Zaidan disappeared in Lebanon. I was told by my sources that Abu Nidal immediately suspected that he had been kidnapped by his new principal rival, the breakaway Emergency Leadership, which Atif Abu Bakr had formed that month. A man was sent from Sanduqa's Justice Committee to attempt to penetrate the Emergency Leadership and locate Zaidan. The attempted penetration was discovered, and Sanduqa's man was arrested and interrogated in June 1990 -- by none other than our old friend Sufyan, the defector from Abu Nidal's organization, who was now representing the Emergency Leadership. The interrogation was done conscientiously, without torture or undue force, according to Atif Abu Bakr, and was videotaped, so that it could be shown in Palestinian camps in South Lebanon (as part of the Emergency Leadership's campaign against Abu Nidal). Sanduqa's man confessed 1) to working for Mossad; 2) that his case officer was none other than Mustafa Ibrahim Sanduqa; and 3) that his mission had been to find Yusif Zaidan, to help him escape, and if he couldn't, to kill him. The Emergency Leadership concluded that it had stumbled on a Mossad cell inside Abu Nidal's organization, the members of which included not just Zaidan and Sanduqa but the biggest fish of all, Sulaiman Samrin, otherwise known as Dr. Ghassan al-Ali. Yusif Zaidan and Dr. Ghassan had been friends since the early 1970s, in the days of Fatah's Scientific Committee. PLO intelligence sources confirm that there had been security worries about both of them, because it was feared that they might have been contacted by the Mossad during their student years. They had, in fact, been transferred by the PLO from Beirut to Baghdad, to remove them from the center of PLO operations. But when Abu Nidal took them over in 1974, he instead promoted them. Dr. Ghassan, in particular, rose rapidly. The Emergency Leadership concluded that when Yusif Zaidan disappeared and was presumed kidnapped, both Dr. Ghassan and Mustafa Ibrahim Sanduqa must have feared that they would be exposed if Zaidan talked. So Sanduqa's man was sent to find Zaidan, to free him or kill him. Atif Abu Bakr's assumption, which he put to me, was that the Israelis had in Dr. Ghassan al-Ali and Mustafa Ibrahim Sanduqa agents at the highest level in Abu Nidal's organization, well placed to carry out, as we shall see, the mass executions by Abu Nidal of his own fighting men in 1987-88. The Emergency Leadership issued a communique declaring that those torturing and killing the organization's members on spying charges were themselves Mossad spies. THE UTHMAN BROTHERS According to my sources Faruq Uthman was an actual link between the Mossad and Abu Nidal. His brother, Nabil Uthman, was for many years a member of Abu Nidal's Organization Directorate, at one time responsible for the Palestine/Jordan Committee. In the late 1980s, he became Abu Nidal's undercover representative in Kuwait. According to PLO intelligence sources, Nabil's brother, Faruq, has, since the early 1970s, been a Mossad agent, working in the occupied territories and abroad; he is said to have betrayed scores of Palestinian families to the Mossad. Faruq Uthman's minder, according to Atif Abu Bakr, is a Mossad officer who is said to have helped plan the killing of Majid Abu Sharar, an important and influential Fatah official, in Rome in 1981; the raid on PLO headquarters in Tunisia at Hammam al-Shatt in 1985; and the killing of Abu Jihad, Arafat's deputy, in Tunis on April 16, 1988, by an Israeli assassination squad. In this last operation, the Mossad officer worked with Faruq Uthman. According to Tunisian intelligence sources, Faruq was in Tunis between April 1 and April 17, 1988, traveling on a forged Egyptian passport. On April 17, the morning after the killing of Abu Jihad, he flew from Tunis to Malta, then from Malta to Libya (on a Jordanian passport, said to be the one he normally uses), to visit his brother, Nabil, Abu Nidal's man, and stay in one of Abu Nidal's safe houses in Tripoli. Abu Nidal knew about Faruq Uthman's background from his cadres, but he did nothing. He said he did not want to embarrass Faruq's brother, Nabil, and told one of his members that offering hospitality to a Mossad agent might one day prove useful.* THE CASE OF MUHAMMAD KHAIR Muhammad Khair was a Palestinian from Gaza, born in 1961, who had been a student in Turkey. Abu Nidal trusted him, and in 1986, when the organization was based in Syria, he was put in charge of the archives of the Political Directorate. But Atif Abu Bakr, then head of this directorate, told me that he disliked Khair's dry manner and his habit of trapping his comrades in unguarded talk so that he could write reports about them. Abu Bakr transferred Khair to Beirut. A short while later, the organization arrested a Mossad agent in Beirut. Muhammad Khair was told to interrogate him, but instead he killed him immediately, so that he had no chance to tell what he knew about the Mossad. This aroused the suspicions of Khair's colleagues. He was arrested and interrogated in turn -- and confessed that as a student in Turkey, he had committed some misdemeanor and been jailed. The Mossad heard about him and, upon his release, had recruited him. Khair surprised his interrogators by admitting that one of his tasks had been to kill Atif Abu Bakr by poisoning his coffee. When Abu Bakr was told about this, he was intrigued. Why should the Mossad want to kill him? He was not a terrorist. He was against terrorism and, since 1985, had endeavored to distance the organization from criminal activities and focus it instead on political work. Spurred by the War of the Camps, he had engineered a political and military transformation in the nature of the organization, much to Abu Nidal's displeasure. When Muhammad Khair was asked about this in Beirut, he replied: "That was just it. The organization had been a criminal gang before Atif tried to politicize it. From Israel's point of view, he had made it far more dangerous. That is why they wanted him dead." MASSACRES AND SENSELESS TERROR Abu Nidal's massacres of the late 1980s, which I shall describe later, pose one of the greatest riddles of his career. How did an organization whose numbers rarely exceeded a few hundred decide to kill half its members? As we shall see, Abu Nidal in Libya gave the order for the mass liquidation and his faithful henchmen Dr. Ghassan al-Ali, of the secretariat, and Mustafa Ibrahim Sanduqa, of the Justice Committee, carried it out in Lebanon. Some sources told me that Abu Nidal gave the order for these murders when he was drinking heavily. They said that it was then, usually late at night, that he suffered most acutely from paranoia and feared plots against himself -- fears that may have been deliberately fed by men like Dr. Ghassan. Yet the internal tensions in his organization were in fact not so fierce that he would have needed to kill these men to save himself. On the contrary, it was because of these awful killings that Atif Abu Bakr finally rebelled against him and, with others, broke away in late 1989. However, among former members of the organization, the explanation most frequently heard for Abu Nidal's murderous behavior is that he wanted to destroy the autonomous group that had emerged in Lebanon in 1985, regain full control, and go underground in Libya. Whichever way one looks at it, to kill several hundred young men is still an extreme solution, not wholly explicable by Abu Nidal's circumstances at the time. When Atif Abu Bakr and I discussed the killings, he said that Israel had directed Abu Nidal, either directly or through Dr. Ghassan and a few others, to exterminate the organization's best men. "The men they killed were the cream of the organization," he told me, "the best officers and the bravest fighters." Atif Abu Bakr was also amazed to discover that some of the most able agents of the Intelligence Directorate had also been killed. "Undoubtedly, the greatest service Abu Nidal rendered the Israelis was to massacre more than six hundred Palestinian fighters," he concluded. Then, after the start of the intifada in December 1987, Abu Nidal mounted a series of operations (which I shall describe in "Foreign Affairs") that had no other apparent purpose than to undermine the uprising and damage the Palestinians' interests in countries that had always been friendly to them. A car bomb in Cyprus in 1988 killed and wounded fifteen people and alienated Cypriot opinion; bomb attacks in the Sudan eroded support for the Palestinians in a country that had long and fervently defended them; explosions in Athens and the attack on the City of Poros cruise ship dealt a heavy blow to Greek sympathy for the Palestinian cause; the killing of Saudi diplomats did nothing to win friends in Riyadh; and taking French children hostage on board the Silco did not endear the Palestinians to French opinion. But before I examine these incidents, there is one other case that contributed to Abu Iyad's belief that Abu Nidal was working for the Israelis or being manipulated by them. This was the Argov affair, the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London, which provided the pretext for Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982. THE ARGOV AFFAIR All his life, Menachem Begin had wanted to absorb into the "land of Israel" the territories, conquered by Israel in 1967, that he liked to call Judea and Samaria but are are known as the West Bank. Contrary to Begin's wishes, the local Palestinian population did not want Israeli rule and looked for deliverance to Yasser Arafat's PLO, which was at that time encamped in Lebanon. Begin believed that for Israel to make the West Bank part of "greater Israel," the PLO in Lebanon had to be smashed. Begin entrusted the destruction of the PLO to his violent defense minister, General Ariel Sharon, who had made a reputation for boldness, brutality, and even recklessness. In 1981, Sharon devised a plan whose main objectives were to invade Lebanon and destroy the PLO; boot out the Syrian expeditionary force that had been there since 1976; and put in power in Beirut the Christian militia leader Bashir Gemayel, who had been groomed as an Israeli vassal. With Syria neutralized and Lebanon under Israeli control, Israel could integrate the West Bank into a "greater Israel" without internal or external challenge. That was Begin's vision and Sharon's plan. The circumstances for the enterprise seemed favorable. Israel was overwhelmingly strong, its Arab neighbors weaker and more divided than usual. Egypt, the largest of the Arab states, had made peace with Israel; Syria was isolated and on bad terms with both Iraq and Jordan. Internationally, its name was mud as a result of the massacre at Hama in February 1982. After its five-year struggle against the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, Syria was in no shape to fight. As for the PLO, the main focus of Begin's obsessive hatred of the Palestinians, its quarrelsome militias were badly led, poorly armed, and deeply penetrated by Israeli agents. The PLO was an ineffective military force. Another important factor for Israel was the sympathy and support it enjoyed in Washington from President Ronald Reagan and his secretary of state, Alexander Haig, an excitable soldier-politician who had presidential ambitions and was keenly aware of Israel's muscle in American politics. But Israel lacked a pretext to invade its defenseless northern neighbor. Haig told Sharon Israel needed "a major, internationally recognized provocation" before it attacked Lebanon. For months, Begin and Sharon tried to provoke the Palestinians into an armed action to justify a large-scale Israeli attack. Five times between July 1981 and June 1982, Israel massed troops on the frontier -- and five times called them back because the Palestinians refused to fight: In those eleven months, not a single shot was fired by Palestinians across Israel's northern border. It was the same with the Syrians. On December 14, 1981, probably to goad Assad into action, Begin extended Israeli law to the Golan Heights, captured in 1967. Assad knew that if he made a military move, Israel would seize the pretext to hit him. So he did nothing. What was Israel to do? Begin and Sharon were frustrated. It was at this moment -- of keen apprehension by the Arabs and furious impatience by the Israelis -- that Abu Nidal -- deliberately, Abu Iyad believed -- supplied the provocation Israel so badly needed. On June 3, 1982, one of his gunmen shot and seriously wounded Shlomo Argov, Israel's ambassador to Britain, outside the Dorchester Hotel in London. The gunman and two accomplices were arrested by the British police. They were Nawaf Rosan, an Iraqi passport holder, and Hussein Sa'id and Marwan al-Banna, who carried Jordanian passports. Banna turned out to be a distant cousin of Abu Nidal. Certainly, Begin knew that Abu Nidal had nothing to do with the PLO, that he was Arafat's most bitter enemy. But Israel was not about to hesitate over such a detail. "Abu Nidal, Abu Shmidal," scoffed Israel's chief of staff, Rafael Eitan, in a famous phrase. "We have to strike at the PLO!" On June 4 and 5, Israeli aircraft bombed West Beirut, while long-range artillery and naval guns pounded Palestinian refugee camps, causing hundreds of casualties. On June 6, Israeli ground forces surged across the frontier. Begin's Lebanon war had begun. In the first seven weeks, according to UN figures, seventeen thousand Lebanese and Palestinians, mostly civilians, were killed. Abu Nidal claimed to be a Palestinian patriot, yet how could his people possibly benefit from bringing Israeli bombs and shells raining down on their heads? It might be argued that he wanted Israel to destroy the PLO, so as to leave the Palestinian field open to him. But this theory hardly bears examination. It is true that Abu Nidal had moved his organization to Syria, intending to infiltrate from there into Lebanon, which for him was a prize because of its large Palestinian population, a constituency he hoped to capture from Arafat. But an Israeli invasion of that country, the expulsion of large numbers of Palestinians, and a Lebanon under Israeli or Maronite control certainly would not have furthered his Palestinian ambitions. At this volatile moment in Middle East affairs, it is unlikely that Abu Nidal would choose to kill Argov -- and provoke an entirely predictable Israeli response -- without strong outside encouragement. It seemed to me obvious that either he did the job for one of his sponsors -- Iraq, Syria, possibly Israel -- or that he was manipulated, wittingly or unwittingly, into doing it. The Israeli writer and editor Uri Avnery, in his book My Friend, the Enemy, writes that Syria put him up to it to provoke the Israelis into destroying Arafat so that Syria could create a new PLO under its control. But from 1976 onward, and especially in the prelude to the war in 1981-82, Syria had done all it could to deny Israel a pretext for invading Lebanon. Syria's efforts to tame the Palestinians, including its controversial and widely condemned use of force against them, were intended to keep them from provoking Israel's attack. The cautious Assad, militarily weak and fearful of Begin's bellicose mood, would do anything to avoid a war with Israel. To suggest that Syria had orchestrated the attack on Argov ignores Syrian fears and policies at that time. A somewhat more plausible case can be made that Iraq instigated the attack on Argov. The argument is that, ensnared in his war with Iran, Saddam Hussein was looking for an honorable excuse to declare a unilateral cease-fire. An Israeli invasion of Lebanon might provide such an excuse. In fact when Israel invaded, Saddam immediately called for a cease-fire in the Gulf. The Iranians ignored him and the war continued, but there are flaws in this argument, too. By June 1982, Abu Nidal was already on exceedingly bad terms with Saddam and would hardly have wanted to help him. He was busy moving his base out of Baghdad and trying to ingratiate himself with the Syrians -- who also happened to be Iran's allies. Abu Nidal had a fine nose for the subtleties of Arab politics. He would not have done such an explosive job for Saddam and chance outraging Assad, his prospective patron, by putting at risk Syria's national security, which is what a war in Lebanon would do. It is also possible that the Mossad manipulated Abu Nidal into providing the pretext for the invasion that Begin and Sharon so badly wanted. Isam Sartawi, who never missed a chance to declare that Abu Nidal was an Israeli agent, was certain that Sharon had directly ordered the attack. A flaw in this argument is that Abu Nidal would not have wanted to offend Syria on Israel's behalf any more than he would have wished to do so on Iraq's behalf. And would Israel have wished to kill or wound its own London ambassador as a pretext to invade Lebanon? Such crude cynicism is hardly attributable even to the right-wing extremists who were then in power. However, one of my best Western intelligence sources says that Israeli penetration agents might have received general instructions to mobilize Abu Nidal's organization into providing Israel with the pretext it needed. The attack on Argov may have been an individual initiative resulting from some such general instruction. That the operation seems to have been thrown together in a hurry lends some support to this view. The attack showed no sign of Abu Nidal's usual careful planning. No provision appears to have been made for the hit team to escape. And against all the organization's rules, a resident "sleeper," Marwan al-Banna, Abu Nidal's distant cousin, who was a genuine student rather than a trained terrorist, was roped in to help -- and is now, with his accomplices, two of Abu Nidal's student- members, serving a thirty-year prison sentence in Britain. The attempted assassination of his ambassador remains an unlikely expedient for Begin, but perhaps not so unlikely for someone like Dr. Ghassan al-Ali. Although the Argov affair attracted world headlines, it was not the only such incident at the time. Basil, then one of Abu Nidal's field commanders in Lebanon, told me, when I interviewed him in a seaside hotel in Tunis in 1990, that on the eve of the Lebanon war, someone higher up in the organization had urgently ordered him to mount cross-border operations against Israel. To Basil at the time, it seemed crazy to provoke Israel, but he obeyed orders, even though ground operations against Israel were not what the organization was used to. He started training a raiding party, but the Argov affair and the Israeli invasion happened before he could act. He and his men scampered back to the Bekaa Valley, out of Israel's reach, in time to save their skins. The Argov case was not the only occasion on which Abu Nidal, whether deliberately or not, served as agent provocateur in Israel's interest. On July 28, 1989, an Israeli helicopter-borne commando unit entered South Lebanon and kidnapped Sheikh Abd al-Karim Ubaid, a leading member of the Shi'ite organization Hizballah, greatly increasing tension in the region. Groups holding Western hostages threatened to kill them if Ubaid was not released -- and indeed, on July 31, Colonel Robert Higgins, of the U.S. Marine Corps, who had been kidnapped in South Lebanon in February 1988 when attached to the United Nations truce-supervision organization, was hanged in retaliation. Everyone in the Bekaa was on the alert, fearing Israeli military action. At this delicate moment, orders came from Abu Nidal to mount operations against the Israelis within forty-eight hours. Isam Awdah (code-named Zakariya Ibrahim), second-in-command of Abu Nidal's People's Army, came especially from Sidon to the Bekaa to convey these orders to Basil, then Abu Nidal's military commander in the Bekaa. "I found the request amazing," Basil told me. "Somebody was obviously trying to start a war. Abu Nidal was trying to give Israel an excuse to strike. "Aware how tense things were, I refused to obey the orders. I then learned that the organization had approached other military groups in the area, notably the militia of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party [a pan-Syrian movement active in Lebanon] with the same request for action, but that they too had refused." One such episode, I reflected, could perhaps be explained away, but here were two occasions, one in 1982 and the other in 1989, when Abu Nidal's organization had been used to precipitate a conflict from which Israel alone stood to gain. In 1982. Abu Nidal may not have been aware of the instructions given to Basil. He was in Poland when these events took place, while his organization was in a sort of halfway house between Baghdad and Damascus, making it perhaps more vulnerable to manipulation, perhaps by Dr. Ghassan, the man who many Palestinians believe serves the Mossad's purposes within Abu Nidal's organization. When, in Algiers in 1987, Abu Iyad asked Abu Nidal about the Argov operation, he answered evasively and seemed unhappy to be reminded of it. Abu Iyad's impression was that Abu Nidal had not been fully in control at the time. Argov's wife, apparently no sympathiser of Begin's Likud coalition, later, in a newspaper article expressed dismay at the use Begin had made of the attempt on her husband's life. In any case, the provocation that Haig said was necessary had occurred and the invasion went according to Sharon's plan. Palestinian forces were routed and the refugee camps overrun. There were many deaths; Syria's air force and its air defenses in the Bekaa Valley were shattered; Israeli troops linked up with Bashir Gemayel's militiamen, and Beirut was bombed and besieged. Arafat's fighters were forced to withdraw from Lebanon, and they dispersed throughout the Arab world. Bashir Gemayel was elected president as Israel's proconsul. Though it proved nothing about why Argov was shot, no one benefited more than Israel from the ambassador's unfortunate predicament -- before, that is, things in Lebanon started to go wrong. From the earliest days of the Israeli state, the techniques of intelligence, of both conventional and irregular warfare, have been used to consolidate the Zionist enterprise and frustrate its enemies. Ruse; deception; the penetration of the Arab environment; the disruption of Arab military programs; the diversion of Arab military force by abetting unrest among minorities such as the Kurds; the secret alliances with neighboring non-Arab powers such as Iran and Ethiopia; the massive use of reprisal and preemption as in South Lebanon; the ceaseless struggle to quash any and every manifestation of Palestinian nationalism -- these have been the staples of Israeli policy for over forty years. Against this background, I thought it not inconceivable that Abu Iyad was right, that Abu Nidal, the archterrorist, had been subtly manipulated in what might one day come to be seen as one of Israel's greatest intelligence coups. _______________ Notes: * More than two years after Abu Jihad's murder, the London journal Middle East International reported, on October 12, 1990, that Muhammad Ali Mahjubi, the Tunisian police commissioner at the time of the killing, had been arrested. Press reports recalled that the police patrol on permanent duty outside Abu Jihad's house was absent on the night of April 16. Mahjubi was said to have been in contact with a woman who owned a fashionable hairdressing salon, much patronized by the wives of senior Palestinian officials, who was also put under arrest at the same time as Mahjubi and for the same reason -- as a suspected Mossad agent.
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