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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 12: Foreign Affairs In Libya in the late 1980s, Abu Nidal's twisted soul seemed at last fulfilled. His wealth gave him a sense of omnipotence; he had found in Qaddafi a congenial sponsor who shared his own pleasure in violence. He was eliminating potential rivals, especially Atif Abu Bakr, and had regained absolute control over his organization by extricating it from Syria, splitting it between Libya and Lebanon, and making it clandestine once more. AN UNEASY TYRANT Abu Nidal's former colleagues told me that Libya brought out the worst in him. He had always been dictatorial; now he was a tyrant. He would not allow his members to socialize with each other, not even to make contact outside their official duties. This prohibition applied even to the most senior members, such as Abu Nizar, for many years his deputy, and Abd al-Rahman Isa, his former intelligence chief. If, occasionally, Abu Nizar broke the rules and called on Isa at home, he would take the precaution of telephoning Abu Nidal to say, "Look, I spent the evening with Abd al-Rahman Isa." And Isa would do the same. Abu Nidal's obsessive fear of plots was such that an unreported meeting could mean death. Abu Nidal imposed his discipline in a thousand petty ways. He ordered that all passports, genuine or forged, be handed over to him. Even heads of directorates had to comply: No one could think of taking a trip without his personal approval. Ordinary cadres were not allowed a telephone. If one of them rented a house that had a telephone, Abu Nidal would have it removed. Members of the leadership were allowed telephones but for local calls only. Cadres sent abroad on foreign missions were warned not to venture into duty-free shops. Even the purchase at an airport of a bar of chocolate or a carton of cigarettes could, if discovered, raise a storm. On Abu Nidal's part, this was less a way to save money than to humiliate and control his members. He had a genius for ferreting out his members' trivial lapses and using them to assert his authority. He insisted on personally approving any expenditure, however small, over and above the budgets of the directorates, which he reviewed monthly. On one occasion, Atif Abu Bakr challenged the system: In Tripoli, he bought a coffee table and two easy chairs for his living room and sent the receipt for reimbursement to Atif Hammuda, head of the Finance Directorate. The timid Hammuda asked whether Abu Nidal had approved the purchase. Abu Bakr complained to Abu Nidal, who, in a characteristic switch, gave Hammuda a scolding in front of Abu Bakr. "You donkey!" he cried. "Of course Atif Abu Bakr can sign chits." All contacts between cadres in Libya and their colleagues in Lebanon went through Abu Nidal, and he was not above suppressing letters and rewriting minutes of meetings to ensure that one wing of the organization was kept in ignorance of the other. By splitting the leadership between Libya and Lebanon, he weakened it and made himself all-powerful. Half the Secretariat, half the Political Bureau, and much of the People's Army, the overt military wing of the organization, remained in Lebanon, but these bodies could do nothing without permission from Abu Nidal, in Tripoli. He personally ran the Intelligence Directorate, the Finance Directorate, and the Libyan end of the Political Relations Committee. He personally supervised the management of the desert camp, where, apart from fighters and trainee terrorists, he kept twenty-three families in air-conditioned isolation, away from their men-folk in Tripoli. He even took over the editorship of al-Tariq, the organization's in-house bulletin. Abu Nidal sought to instill in his members a solemn approach to work. Jokes were forbidden. At meetings, any attempt to discuss matters unconnected with work would be met with astonishment, even alarm, by anxious members. Yet for all this, there was something ambivalent about him. His colleagues noticed that although he was addicted to power, he seemed unable to exercise it with ease or confidence. He was nervous when forced to address more than half a dozen people at a time. In front of a larger audience, he became stilted and tongue-tied. He was unkempt and rarely slept two nights running in the same house. His wife and children were often abroad. (It was rumored that they often went to Austria to stay with the eldest daughter, Badia, whose husband, Khalid Abd al-Qadir, was Abu Nidal's secret representative in that country.) He lost weight because of the diet prescribed by his doctors for his heart complaint. His arms and legs grew thin, but his chest had an unnaturally robust look because of the bulletproof vest he wore under his jacket. He now wore a full wig of dark hair. Because of his long years underground, he no longer seemed to know how to live normally. In Libya, he went to great pains to conceal the facts of his daily life, even from his own members. They knew nothing about where he lived, where he held his secret meetings, where his weapons were stored, and where his archives were kept. For security reasons, he never entertained in his own residence. If he had a visitor for the evening, he would commandeer the house of one of his aides, whose wife would be expected to cook and serve a meal at short notice. On such occasions, he usually arrived after his guest, accompanied only by a male secretary. His bodyguards would remain outside. He tended to greet his visitors formally, waving to his secretary to take notes of the conversation. Yet he also managed to give the impression of being shy and self-conscious, speaking in a soft voice and looking down at the carpet. But he could move to the attack without warning, suddenly becoming verbally aggressive, as if to show who was in charge. And, though he seemed to live very much alone, Abu Nidal struck his visitors as clever and well informed. He read widely in Arabic and, for foreign books and articles, employed a small team of translators to produce digests for him. CONSOLIDATION IN LIBYA In the years 1987-1990, Abu Nidal concentrated his forces in Libya -- in the camps, farms, and numerous offices and residences that Qaddafi had turned over to him. The organization operated two radio stations, one linking the Secretariat to the desert camp, the other linking the Secretariat to both Lebanon and Algeria. Libya became the organization's nerve center for its foreign operations. As has been mentioned, Libyan intelligence provided facilities of all kinds -- from training to travel documents to the transport of arms to the import of equipment and supplies. There was mutual benefit in it, and much exchange of intelligence. The Libyans introduced the organization to its contacts, and vice versa. In Libya, Abu Nidal's people met representatives of the Japanese Red Army and the New People's Army of the Philippines and were encouraged to invite to Libya any foreign armed group or political party with which they hoped to establish a working relationship. Abu Nidal's relations with the Libyans were conducted through two channels: Libyan intelligence and Qaddafi himself. He had no relations with other Libyan government departments, most of which had never even seen him. No one in the organization was allowed to know the exact nature of his relationship with Libya: All communications with the Libyans passed through him. The Libyan leader treated Abu Nidal more generously than he did other Palestinians, paying him a monthly stipend to cover his expenses in Ubya and allowing him to bring in dollars and change them on the black market at something like three and a half times the official rate. Qaddafi also gave Abu Nidal lump sums to invest in Europe and elsewhere so as to generate income to meet his expenses in Lebanon, a form of support Abu Nidal preferred because it gave him independence and protection against sudden cuts. Preoccupied with his personal security, Abu Nidal instinctively clung to the intelligence and security services of his host country. He did everything possible to ingratiate himself with Abdallah al-Sanussi, Qaddafi's key man in internal security, calling him sir, like a soldier addressing his superior officer. Qaddafi, he addressed as the Leader (privately taking his members to task if they dared call him Brother Muammar), describing him with cloying hyperbole as "a latter-day Saladin." No hint of criticism of Libya was allowed to appear in any of the organization's internal reports, for fear that these might fall into Libyan hands. It would enrage Abu Nidal if anyone in the Political Bureau protested that the organization was becoming a creature of Libyan policy. He claimed that such loose talk risked destroying them all. "You keep your pride," he would say. "I have to protect you and the organization!" He would also boast that he had his hands gripped tight round the Libyans' throat and that he knew so much about them that they could never get rid of him. As if to demonstrate his sense of immunity, he would regale his colleagues with scurrilous stories about Qaddafi's love life. Members of the Libyan end of the Political Bureau and Central Committee would occasionally live for a while in Algeria, which Abu Nidal saw as a possible alternative haven should Qaddafi turn hostile. He even thought at one time of moving his wife and children there and wanted to expand relations with Algerian intelligence, which had begun in 1986. The Algerians, in turn, liked to keep in touch with all Palestinian factions and, whenever possible, help patch up their quarrels. UNDERMINING THE INTIFADA A few months after the start of the intifada in December 1987, Abu Nidal mounted three operations that would gravely damage the Palestinian cause -- consistent with the pattern of anti-Palestinian activity evident from the start of his career. Cyprus, in the eastern Mediterranean just off the Syrian coast, had long been sympathetic to the Palestinians, having supported them during Israel's siege of Beirut in 1982 and given them a haven when Arab states expelled them. Cyprus sometimes seemed more committed to the Palestinian cause than many Arab countries -- much to Israel's annoyance. On May 11, 1988, Abu Nidal's organization detonated a car bomb in Nicosia, killing and wounding fifteen people, including a Cypriot woman who was in a car behind the booby-trapped vehicle and a retired Cypriot diplomat, Andreas Frangos, who was walking nearby. To his own people, Abu Nidal claimed that the plan had been to blow up the Israeli embassy, but the car exploded two hundred yards from the embassy building, which was undamaged. In the wake of this, Cypriot opinion turned against the Palestinians, the island authorities tightened their controls over Palestinians coming in and out, and several resident Palestinians were thrown out. Four days after the Nicosia bomb, Abu Nidal's gunmen struck again, this time in the Sudan, a country even more consistently pro-Palestinian than Cyprus. In simultaneous attacks at 8 P.M. local time on May 15, 1988, a five-man hit team attacked two "soft" targets in Khartoum -- the Sudan Club, reserved for British and Commonwealth citizens, which they machine-gunned, and the Akropole Hotel, an old Greek-run establishment, where they hurled a rucksack full of grenades into the restaurant, killing a Sudanese waiter, a Sudanese general, and five Britons: Sally Rockett, a thirty-two-year-old teacher, and a family of four, Christopher and Clare Rolfe, both in their mid-thirties, and their two children, aged three and one. One of the children was beheaded by the blast. The Rolfes were Quaker aid workers who had arrived in the Sudan two months earlier, after spending three years with Somali refugees. About seventeen other people were wounded, among them an American, a Swiss, a Pole, and a Frenchman. Abu Nidal tried to justify the attacks to his colleagues by claiming they were directed at places from which Falasha Jews, escaping from Ethiopia, were taken to Israel. But anyone familiar with the area would know at once that this was absurd. The operation, which was strongly condemned by both the Sudanese government and the opposition, embarrassed the Palestinians in the Sudan, robbed the intifada of Sudanese popular support, and caused considerable problems with the authorities for Palestinian fighters who had taken refuge in the Sudan after their expulsion from Lebanon in 1982. A couple of weeks after the attacks, Abu Nidal issued a communique in the name of the Cells of the Arab Fedayeen, yet another fictitious organization, in which he claimed that the targets had been "nests of foreign spies." But the communique, several pages long, went on to discuss political and economic conditions in the Sudan as if to imply that the Sudanese opposition had been involved in the attacks. In fact, the Sudanese opposition had no interest in seeing a foreign group that resorted to contemptible terrorist methods assume the mantle of Sudanese nationalism in its name and was incensed at Abu Nidal's attempt to exploit its struggle. Five of Abu Nidal's young fanatics, aged twenty-two to thirty, were arrested and sentenced to death, but the sentences were not carried out. Sudanese public opinion, in spite of its revulsion at the outrage, could not tolerate the execution of men who called themselves Palestinian guerrillas. The Sudanese Lawyers' Association condemned the terrorists but, in lingering sympathy with the Palestinian cause, undertook their defense. On January 7, 1991, to the dismay of the British and American governments, all five Abu Nidal terrorists were released, after "blood money" was paid to the families of the Sudanese victims and a pardon allegedly secured from the families of the British victims. If, as some of Abu Nidal's former colleagues believe, the operation was inspired by the Mossad, it was a spectacular success, for it cast the Palestinians as heartless murderers and destabilized the Sudan -- which may also have been one of Abu Nidal's aims in staging it. Some of his former colleagues told me that he had "sold" the operation to Qaddafi as a means to embarrass, and perhaps even overthrow, the new government that Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi had formed a few days earlier, on May 11, 1988. This "national unity" government brought together the main political forces in the country -- al-Mahdi's own Ummah party, the Democratic Unionist Party (friendly to Egypt), and the National Islamic Front (the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, campaigning for the application of Islamic Sharia law). John Garang's southern rebels, who had for years been waging war against the Khartoum government and against the extension of Sharia law, were excluded. Qaddafi, in neighboring Libya, did not like these developments. Not only did he support John Garang, but he wished to increase his own influence in the Sudan at the expense of Egypt's and put pressure on Chad. He therefore welcomed Abu Nidal's bid to destabilize Khartoum. Abu Nidal had scores of his own to settle with the Sudan. Two years earlier, in 1986, he had sent a secret representative to Khartoum, traveling on a Libyan passport in the name of Ibrahim Hussein al-Mughrabi and posing as a businessman. His real name was Abd al-Karim Muhammad and he was a member of Abu Nidal's Political Directorate. But the contacts he made in Khartoum attracted complaints from Egypt, the PLO, and the United States, and Sudan eventually expelled him (but not before he had taken delivery of and hidden some weapons that Abu Nidal had sent him, probably through the Libyan diplomatic bag, which, my sources believe, were later used in the attacks). In a series of memos to Prime Minister al-Mahdi, Abu Nidal tried to get his man reinstated, but he was not successful, and this left him with a grievance. He had started his career as Fatah representative in the Sudan, and he was particularly sensitive to snubs from countries where he had lived and pretended to have influence. No doubt revenge helped dictate his choice of targets in the Khartoum bombings. So Abu Nidal and Qaddafi had reasons of their own to destabilize the Sudan, reasons that provided an alternative explanation for the attacks, whose main impact was to discredit the Palestinians at a time when they needed all the support they could get. At the very least, Abu Nidal had allowed other considerations to supersede his loyalty to Palestine, but it is more likely that his organization had once again been manipulated. The alternative explanation looked very much like a cover story. There was a further twist to the story. Once his five terrorists were in jail, Abu Nidal sought to bribe the Sudanese government to release them. He approached the Sudanese embassy in Algiers with an offer of $250,000 for flood victims in Sudan and dispatched two of his members to Khartoum with the money, which was accepted by a government minister and mentioned in the media. But when the envoys tactlessly raised the question of the five prisoners, an indignant Sudanese government realized that Abu Nidal's gift had strings attached and expelled the envoys. From the Palestinian point of view, Abu Nidal had managed to worsen an already bad situation. Another grave blow to the Palestinians was the grenade-and-machine-gun attack on July 11, 1988, on the City of Poros, a Greek cruise ship with hundreds of tourists on board. A five-man Abu Nidal hit team killed nine passengers and wounded another eighty. No conceivable Palestinian or Arab interest was served by such random savagery. Greece was the European country most sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, and its prime minister, Andreas Papandreou, was the European leader who had most effectively defended the Arabs against Israel's charge of terrorism. For example, at the height of the Hindawi affair in 1986, when Syria believed it had been victimized by an Israeli "dirty tricks" campaign, Papandreou welcomed Hafez al-Assad to Athens and gave him a platform from which to defend himself. Now Abu Nidal had attacked Greece and predictably, the Greeks were furious that the Palestinians had damaged Greece's all-important tourist trade and hastened the fall of the Papandreou government. Several intelligence sources I consulted were convinced that the attack on the City of Poros was a typical Mossad-inspired operation. The attack overshadowed another incident on the same day in Athens, in which a car blew up as it was heading for a ferry, killing its driver, the same Samih Muhammad Khudr who had worked in Abu Nidal's Intelligence Directorate. His fingerprints were found to match those of the terrorist who, ten years earlier in Cyprus, on February 18, 1978, had led the team that assassinated Egyptian editor Yusif al-Siba'i, and had then tried to escape by plane after taking hostages, only to be forced back to Cyprus when no airport would allow them to land. This was the incident that ended in a gun battle between Egyptian commandos and the Cyprus National Guard. At the time of his death in the Athens car bomb, Khudr was head of the Intelligence Directorate's Foreign Intelligence Committee and a veteran of several operations, including the Karachi hijacking and the bombing of cafes in Kuwait. He had also masterminded the City of Poros operation. Keys found in his car turned out to be those of his flat in Sweden, where one of his three foreign wives lived and where, according to sources in the organization, he was due to go to ground after the operation. Several of his former colleagues did not think his death was accidental. Abd al-Rahman Isa, after his defection, told Abu Iyad (as I learned from the tape of his debriefing) that Samih Muhammad Khudr's death had been engineered by Abu Nidal. He explained that the attack on the City of Poros had been planned as a suicide mission: The hit team was to have been followed on board by a car laden with dynamite timed to explode within sixty minutes. The plan was for Khudr to drive the car to the ferry, ready for loading, and then hand it over to a member of the team. But Khudr did not know that Abu Nidal had given orders to one of his men, Hisham Harb, to prime the bomb to go off within fifteen minutes -- thus ensuring it would explode when Khudr was at the wheel of the car rather than on board the ship as planned. Some sources inside the organization say that Abu Nidal killed Khudr because he had become too powerful; others say that his death was a gesture to placate Western governments that were putting pressure on Libya to stop harboring terrorists; others still, such as Abd al-Rahman Isa, claimed that Khudr had had an argument with Abu Nidal over the City of Poros operation. Khudr could not see the point of it. "What good will it do?" he kept asking. And indeed the operation can have had no purpose except to disrupt relations between Greece and the Palestinians. Khudr, apparently unaware of Abu Nidal's possible Mossad connection, was beginning to ask awkward questions, which is probably the real reason for his murder. THE SILCO COVER-UP In the late summer of 1986, a Libyan patrol boat sailing between the Libyan coast and Malta stopped and searched a converted sardine-fishing boat, the Silco. Two couples and four children were found on board. Some of them spoke Flemish, which the Libyans mistook for Hebrew, and one of the adults had a passport with an Israeli stamp. The ship was towed into Tripoli and its crew taken prisoner. Having been attacked by the United States a few months earlier, and in constant fear of hostile penetration along their two thousand kilometers of exposed Mediterranean coastline, the Libyans were more than jumpy. The seizure of the Silco was a serious mistake. So began one of the more extraordinary Middle East hostage sagas. Qaddafi, embarrassed and fearful of French opinion, did not dare announce the capture of the Silco. So he asked Abu Nidal to provide a cover story, and the latter was glad to oblige. On November 8, 1987, Abu Nidal's organization announced in Beirut that a Palestinian gunboat had captured the Silco off the coast of Gaza and that its crew of suspected Israeli spies was being held prisoner in southern Lebanon. Qaddafi didn't want the French to think ill of him, but Abu Nidal did not mind embarrassing Palestinians. By this time, the two couples and their children had settled into reasonably comfortable captivity in a Libyan seaside villa that Qaddafi had put at their disposal. They were two Belgian brothers, Emmanuel and Fernand Houtekins; Emmanuel's wife, Godelieve, and their teenage children, Laurent and Valerie; and Fernand's French girlfriend, Jacqueline Valente, and her two young daughters by another man, Marie-Laure and Virginie, whom, it later emerged, she had abducted from her former husband, Pascal Betille, just before going on the cruise. In the first year of their Libyan stay, Jacqueline Valente gave birth to a third daughter, Sophie-Liberte, this time by Fernand Houtekins. This motley group of hostages was eventually freed -- but only in installments. First to be released, on December 27, 1988, were Jacqueline's two older children, Marie-Laure and Virginie, thanks to the "intervention" of Colonel Qaddafi. Then, on April 10, 1990, Fernand Houtekins, Jacqueline, and Sophie-Liberte were released in Beirut and allowed to fly to France after an "appeal" by Qaddafi to all Muslims to free hostages and political prisoners on the occasion of Ramadan. In an obvious trade-off, and in defiance of a European Community embargo, France returned to Libya three Mirage jets that had been impounded in 1986 and President Mitterrand sent Qaddafi a personal message of thanks. His foreign minister, Roland Dumas, went so far as to praise the colonel's "noble and humanitarian gesture" -- a remark that caused some irritation in London and Washington, where it was known by this time that Qaddafi had been the kidnapper. Suppression of the truth about the Silco may have been part of the price Abu Nidal had extracted from the French in return for his cooperation. It was not until January 8, 1991, that the last four hostages, Emmanuel Houtekins, his wife, and two daughters, were released in Beirut -- having been flown from Libya to Syria and then driven to southern Lebanon, to sustain the fiction that they had been held not by Qaddafi but by Abu Nidal. In their case, too, a price was paid. President Mitterrand spoke warmly of "the major role" Qaddafi had played in securing their release, while the Belgian government agreed to free an Abu Nidal terrorist, Nasir al-Sa'id, who had served ten years of a life sentence for hurling grenades at Jewish youngsters on the Agudat Israel school bus in Antwerp in 1980. David Kohane, fifteen, had died in that attack and sixteen other young people had been wounded. There was a curious postscript to the Silco affair. On January 15, some days after the Houtekins family had been exchanged for Nasir al-Sa'id, Abu Nidal's Beirut-based spokesman, Walid Khalid, was spotted in central Brussels by a passerby, who alerted the police. Desert Storm was only days away, and the Belgian police, like other European police forces, were on full alert for fear of Iraqi-sponsored terrorism. And here was a live terrorist in their midst. Khalid was arrested. But he was swiftly released when it was discovered that he had actually been given a visa by the authorities to come to Belgium for talks with Jan Hollants Van Loocke, director of political affairs at the foreign ministry. In the embarrassing furor that followed, Van Loocke and a senior colleague resigned, the foreign minister, Mark Eyskens, narrowly survived a confidence vote in parliament, and Prime Minister Wilfried Martens, anxious to avoid a government crisis, ordered Khalid to be deported. Abu Nidal had sent Khalid to Brussels to see what more could be extracted from the Belgians, an incident typical of his dealings with foreign governments. He would mount an attack on their territory, use it to establish a relationship with their intelligence service, and then exploit the channel to press for concessions and facilities. Such blackmail, as we have seen, had made Abu Nidal rich. Apart from the abduction of Belgian citizens aboard the Silco, he had "softened up" the Belgians with four other contemptible assaults: one in 1980 on Jewish children at Antwerp; the 1981 killing of Na'im Khudr, the PLO representative in Brussels; the May 1988 kidnapping of a Belgian doctor in the Palestinian refugee camp of Rashidiya in Lebanon; and the killing in 1989 of the imam of the Brussels mosque and his assistant. The Belgians were more than anxious to buy him off. It later emerged that Abu Nidal had demanded from Belgian intelligence not only the release from jail of Nasir al-Sa'id but also a "bonus" of $30 million. It took weeks of bargaining to get this figure down to $6.6 million, paid over two years and disguised as aid for needy Palestinians, and for the package to include two scholarships for Abu Nidal's candidates. Abu Nidal was keen on student scholarships, the backbone of his foreign networks. Whether this deal has survived the political storm in Belgium over the Walid Khalid affair, I have not been able to discover. The families on board the Silco were not Mossad agents; they were kidnapped far from the Israeli or Lebanese coast, and Abu Nidal's role in the affair was only as Qaddafi's front man. When he negotiated the release of the captives, he sought nothing for the Palestinians. He wanted only benefits for himself and his Libyan paymaster. Just when world sympathy was aroused for the Palestinian children of the intifada, he managed to fill the pages of the world's press with the ordeal of French, Belgian, and Jewish children at the hands of Palestinian terrorists. Abu Nidal has had a long clandestine relationship with France. After the killing of Izz al-Din Qalaq, the PLO representative in Paris in 1978, and the discovery of a number of arms caches, the DST, France's internal security service, decided that the best way to neutralize Abu Nidal was to strike a deal with him. Several meetings took place between Abu Nidal's members and DST officers in the early 1980s, first in countries bordering on France, then in France itself. An agreement was reached in 1984 (though some sources say it was in 1985) for a secret representative of Abu Nidal to live in France to keep open a channel of communications with the DST. This representative was changed fairly often. The last one known to be there, in 1990, was Emile Saab, a Lebanese, who reported to Ali al-Farra (Dr. Kamal), Abu Nidal's Libya-based intelligence chief, who was a frequent visitor to France. In addition, the French authorities gave occasional visas to Abu Nidal's members; allowed him to set up commercial ventures; treated some of his patients in French hospitals; gave him a gift of ambulances and Peugeot cars in Lebanon; and awarded scholarships to three or four of his members for study in France. In return, Abu Nidal pledged that he would not bring arms into France, mount attacks on targets in France, or use French territory as a springboard for operations elsewhere. Of course, the French knew the truth about the Silco and other Abu Nidal operations, but they went along with the lie. It was cheaper to pay him off than to fight him. Details of Abu Nidal's agreement with the French were reported to me by former senior members of his organization who had been party to the negotiations. No French official has been willing to confirm it. Switzerland is important to Abu Nidal because much of his money is deposited there and he is anxious to protect it. He needs privileges in Switzerland: residence permits, visas, the freedom to move in and out for himself and for key members of his organization. He does his utmost to conciliate the Swiss authorities, frequently sending his representatives, Atif Hammuda, of the Finance Directorate, and Ali al-Farra, of the Intelligence Directorate, to negotiate with the Swiss. But when he feels the dialogue is flagging, he does not hesitate to use forceful measures. In 1988-89, when some of his international financial dealings were revealed (following the defection to the West of Dirar Abd al-Fattah al-Silwani, manager of his trading enterprise in East Berlin), he feared that Switzerland might be persuaded to freeze his accounts there. He immediately sent a message to Swiss intelligence threatening havoc at the Zurich airport and, in a characteristic preemptive strike, kidnapped two Swiss delegates of the International Red Cross at Sidon in October 1989. When the crisis passed, the delegates were released. His cynical tactic on such occasions is to offer to mediate with the "kidnappers," who are, of course, his own men. Abu Nidal has tried to establish more of a presence in Western Europe, but with only partial success -- and with many setbacks. For instance, after Swedish police discovered an arms cache near the Stockholm airport in 1988, they traced two Palestinian brothers, members of his organization, to the small town of Umeaa, 540 kilometers north of the capital, and expelled them in December 1990. The Italians have refused all contact with Abu Nidal and have passed harsh sentences on some of his members. He himself is under sentence of death in Italy for the attack on the El Al ticket counter at the Rome airport. Spain is still holding some of his men in jail. The French arranged a meeting in Paris between his representatives and Spanish intelligence, but the Spaniards ignored his crude efforts at blackmail. They decided that opening even the smallest window to him would merely whet his appetite for more. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Abu Nidal made Istanbul the main secret headquarters for several of his committees. He used Turkey as a place in which to store arms and move them into Western Europe. But his killing of a Jordanian diplomat in Ankara and his attack on the Istanbul synagogue roused the Turks against him. Turkey is today among his principal antagonists. Another is Britain. Its intelligence and security services have been extremely hostile and confrontational ever since his attempt to assassinate Ambassador Argov in 1982. Sources close to Abu Nidal report that he made several attempts to force the British to deal with him -- killing British diplomats in Athens and Bombay; kidnapping the British journalist Alec Collett in Lebanon; bombing British airline offices; and also offering to trade information that he had gleaned in Libya on the Irish Republican Army -- but the British rejected his approaches. Abu Nidal is said to believe that Britain heads a concerted European intelligence effort against him. But my impression is that there is little pooling of information among European states about Abu Nidal. Each country keeps to itself what it knows about him, often reluctant or embarrassed to tell others of its contacts with him. According to Abu Iyad, the PLO would dearly like to work closely with all Western governments in defeating Abu Nidal and in clearing the Palestinians from the charge of terrorism. But despite the PLO's overtures, some European intelligence services (and particularly the British) continue to ignore it. Several killers of PLO representatives in Europe have been released after serving just a few years in jail. For example, Kayid Hussein and his accomplice, Husni Hatem, the killers of Izz al-Din Qalaq, were released by the French in February 1986, after serving only half of their fifteen-year sentence. In Portugal, Muhammad Hussein Rashid, a member of the hit team sent to kill Isam Sartawi in Portugal, guffawed in court when he heard that he had been sentenced to only three years. From the PLO's standpoint, Europe has either bowed to Abu Nidal's blackmail or has chosen to rid itself of prisoners whose presence in European jails might provoke Abu Nidal into further terrorist acts to secure their release. ASALA AND OTHER TERRORISTS Abu Nidal has repeatedly boasted of alliances with other international terrorist organizations, but there appears to be little substance to his claims. According to his former colleagues, Abu Nidal had no link whatsoever with the IRA, although Libya did. His alleged relationship with the Basque separatist movement ETA was pure fantasy, limited to a single meeting in Algeria with some of its representatives. Equally, his ties with the Japanese Red Army and the French Action Directe were minimal. In Belgrade, his members paid courtesy calls on Khalid Abd al-Nasser, son of the former Egyptian president and the figurehead of Egypt's Revolution, a terrorist group that attacked Israeli and American targets in Cairo. But in making such visits, they were merely paying homage to the son of an Arab national hero rather than forging an operational connection with the son. Abu Nidal was in touch with some of the Baader-Meinhof splinter groups, but there was no collaboration or structural link. With the Mafia, he had had some small dealings over arms and forged passports, but little else. Western media reports of a closely integrated terrorist underground are greatly exaggerated. Abu Nidal did have a relationship with ASALA, the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, a small extremist group, of anti-Western, third worldist, and anti-Zionist tendencies, founded in Lebanon in the mid-1970s and further radicalized by the revolutionary militancy of the Palestinian factions it encountered there. ASALA militants hoped that killing Turks would force the Ankara government to admit Turkey's earlier responsibility for the massacre of Armenians and could lead to the creation of an independent Armenia in eastern Anatolia. Inspiration for the movement had come from an elderly Armenian, Gourgen Yanikian, who, taking belated revenge for Turkish brutalities against his family in 1915, murdered two Turkish diplomats in a hotel room in Santa Barbara in 1973. The crime stirred many diaspora Armenians into a sharper consciousness of the misfortunes that had befallen their nation. ASALA set itself up in opposition to the establishment party of the diaspora, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, which it accused of ineffectiveness. Instead, it rallied young radicals to the cause of Armenian nationalism, giving them a reason, if often a violent one, for staying within the fold of the Armenian community. By the mid-1980s, at least twenty-eight Turkish diplomats or their dependents had been killed in over twenty countries. Sharing a history of exile and dispersal, Armenians and Palestinians were natural allies. Between 1977 and 1982, ASALA and such radical Palestinian groups as the PFLP shared training facilities in South Lebanon. But the Israeli invasion of 1982 drove them out of the south, and most PLO fighters out of Lebanon altogether. Left stranded by the PFLP's departure, ASALA was then taken up by Abu Nidal's organization, with offers of financial aid and the use of its base camps in the Bekaa Valley. The relationship can be illustrated by the short career of an ASALA hit man, code-named Hagop Hagopian (the Armenian equivalent of John Smith). To some he was a dedicated patriot, to others a professional terrorist committed, like Abu Nidal, to violence and blackmail. In Palestinian circles he was known as Mujahid. He was an Armenian from Iraq who could pass as an Arab. Many Palestinians did not know he was an Armenian. Before the foundation of ASALA, Hagopian had been a member of Wadi Haddad's militant wing of the PFLP and had in fact been shot and very nearly killed in Beirut in 1976 by another PFLP member, whom he had denounced as a KGB agent. In 1982-83, Abu Nidal's top men, Abu Nizar and Abd al-Rahman Isa, introduced Hagopian to officers of Syrian air force intelligence, notably to Colonel Haitham Sa'id (who was later to be involved in the Hindawi affair), with whom they ingratiated themselves. As a result, Hagopian was given facilities in Syria and was allowed to set up a secret center for forging passports and other documents, using the well-known printing skills of Lebanese Armenians. ASALA's partnership with Abu Nidal encouraged it to undertake large-scale terrorist operations that attracted much hostile attention, not least from Armenians, and that were eventually to destroy it. In September 1982, two Armenian terrorists attacked the Ankara international airport, killing ten people and wounding eighty. One of the terrorists was captured and sentenced to death. He revealed that Hagop Hagopian had told him that Abu Nidal had supplied the weapons used in the attack. The following year, in July 1983, a time bomb exploded at Orly Airport, outside Paris, killing eight people and wounding over sixty others, most of them Turks checking in for a Turkish airlines flight to Ankara, an operation for which Abu Nidal may again have supplied the logistics. In the manhunt that followed, the French arrested Varoujan Garbidjan, the leader of the ASALA hit team, and sentenced him to long-term imprisonment. To strike back at France, a gunman believed to be Hagopian killed Colonel Christian Goutierre, a French military attache, in East Beirut in September 1986. Hagopian was rash enough to boast about the killing in an interview with an Arabic- language magazine. Some months later, in 1988, Hagop Hagopian was shot dead in Athens (which he had made his headquarters after the Syrians expelled him in 1987, at the same time that they expelled Abu Nidal). He was on his way to the airport to fly to Belgrade for a meeting with members of Abu Nidal's organization. According to the terrorist underground, Abu Nidal, anxious to demonstrate his usefulness to the French, betrayed Hagopian to them. It is said that he put the French in touch with a rival group in ASALA, which they then encouraged to finish off Hagopian. By this time ASALA had suffered a number of severe blows: the loss of its South Lebanon training facilities; splits and defections inside the organization caused by widespread revulsion at the Orly massacre; the arrest of many of its members in France; rivalry with other Armenian groups, such as the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide, very probably an unavowed offshoot of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation; the expulsion from Syria; the death of Hagopian; and finally, the diversion of Armenian attention to the struggle for Nagorni Karabakh, the beleaguered Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan. In the late 1980s, Abu Nidal and Fatah fought over the remnants of ASALA, for what could be salvaged. Hagopian's widow still lives in Greece and is said to be the only person who knows where his funds are located. THE EASTERN EUROPEAN HAVEN The familiar charge that communist Eastern Europe helped Abu Nidal and other Palestinian terrorists mount attacks in the West is overstated. The evidence from Palestinian and Western intelligence sources suggests a more ambivalent relationship, though Abu Nidal made Poland his home for several years in the early 1980s and professed great admiration for Erich Honecker's East Germany. He often went on holiday to Hungary and appears to have had three main reasons for cultivating the Eastern Europeans: First, needing secure places of residence for himself and some key members, he was anxious to conclude security agreements with Eastern European intelligence services. The argument he habitually used was that a relationship with him would give a state immunity from his operations, a form of blackmail he used against Western European states as well. Second, trading in East-bloc arms was an important source of revenue for him. Third, he wanted to undermine the close relations that the PLO had established with most Eastern European countries. Several Eastern European states concluded agreements with Abu Nidal in order to neutralize him, but there is no evidence that they cooperated with him in joint terrorist operations. Much like their opposite numbers in the West, they had state interests to defend. A committee of Czechs, Hungarians, and East Germans met monthly to pool information on terrorism, and a larger committee, on which all Warsaw Pact members were represented, also met at intervals to review the security situation throughout the bloc. To intelligence and security officers from the East, like their Western counterparts, Abu Nidal was a terrorist who had to be contained. There was hardly any ideological content in Abu Nidal's relations with Eastern Europe, or indeed much coherence in his political stance. He liked to portray himself as a Palestinian nationalist who had been influenced by the theories of Marx, but he detested the Soviet Union and frequently attacked it in his publications. He declared himself a Maoist and expressed admiration for the Chinese experiment, but he never returned to China after his brief visit there in 1972 (when he was still in Fatah) and never developed any sort of relationship with the Chinese. He sometimes used to say that Albanians were the only true Marxists left in the world, but he had no relations with them either. Abu Nidal tended to take on the political coloring of whichever group he happened to be with. With Marxists, he was one of them; with Arab nationalists, he claimed to be a nationalist; with Islamic fundamentalists, he would profess himself a strict Muslim; with Shi'ites, he swore by the Imam Ali and in South Lebanon even went so far as to alter the code names of his cadres so as to make them sound more attractive to the local Shi'ite population. When in Libya, he would endeavor to work into his communiques the name of Umar al-Mukhtar, the hero of Libya's struggle against the Italians in the 1920s. But in Eastern Europe, he found the best way to make friends was less by professing Marxism than by distributing "gifts" -- an expensive watch here, a present for someone's wife there, or simply quantities of cash all around (in dollar bills). In Poland, in particular, he found it easy to bribe his way into the centers of power. Abu Nidal's oldest relationship in Eastern Europe was with Yugoslavia, where Palestinians had been going to study in large numbers since the 1960s. When Abu Nidal broke from Fatah in 1974, he managed to poach some of Fatah's students in Yugoslavia and used them to start recruiting in earnest, causing violent clashes between his supporters and Fatah's. In April 1980, his men in Belgrade threw a bomb at a car in which Abu Iyad was thought to be traveling. Not wanting further headaches of this sort, Yugoslav intelligence decided to open a line to Abu Nidal. The Yugoslavs considered Abu Nidal a terrorist and did not approve of him. But they ignored his activities in the hope of persuading him not to forge links with separatist movements inside Yugoslavia and not to conduct his bloody feud with Fatah on their territory. He, of course, exploited such tolerance for all it was worth. From 1980 onward, he kept a secret representative in Belgrade: first Ali al-Farra (Dr. Kamal), then Iyad Muhammad (the husband of one of his nieces), then Ali Afifi, followed by others. As a result, from 1980 to 1985, Yugoslavia became the organizational center for Abu Nidal's European operations. Weapons were stored there; his teams of assassins coming in from Libya or Lebanon used Yugoslavia as a staging post on their way to other destinations; and weapons were moved from there into the rest of Europe. Inside the organization, Yugoslavia was considered "semisecure" in the sense that if its members got into trouble, the organization could usually strike an under-the-table deal with the Yugoslavs to get them out of it. Abu Nidal's relationship with East Germany began almost by accident when one of his cadres, Adnan Faris, an official in the Political Relations Committee, was spotted at the Berlin airport in 1984 and stopped for questioning. Boldly, he suggested some form of cooperation, a proposal he reported to his superiors on his return to Syria. Members of the Intelligence Directorate then visited East Germany, and the relationship commenced. At least four major contacts were made in the second half of the 1980s: In 1985, Abu Nidal paid a visit to Berlin and had a long talk with Erich Mielke, the veteran head of East Germany's all-powerful state security service, the Stasi. Not long afterward, a twenty-six-man delegation from the organization, led by Isam Maraqa (who was shortly to become Abu Nidal's deputy), attended a three-month training course in East Germany at the invitation of the Stasi. Later in 1985, another political delegation, headed this time by Fu'ad al-Suffarini, of the Organization Directorate (who was to defect to Jordan), visited East Germany. In early 1986, a twenty-man military delegation, headed by a cadre code-named Jamil, attended a weapons-and-explosives course at the 12,000-acre Stasi training camp at Mossow, south of Berlin. One of the men at the course recalled that Abu Nidal paid them a visit at that time and, addressing their hosts, spoke in fulsome terms of the East Germans as "the bravest socialists in the world." The Stasi, however, did not help Abu Nidal in any of his foreign operations, nor did East Germany ever publicly acknowledge its links with Abu Nidal. In fact it made him promise not to store weapons in East Germany or transport them across its territory or mount operations in West Berlin. It did, however, allow him to set up his East Berlin trading company, Zibado, a sort of joint venture. But when its manager, Dirar Abd al-Fattah al-Silwani, defected, information about its activities was leaked to the press and the company was closed down. To his chagrin, East Germany did not allow Abu Nidal to disrupt its close relations with Arafat's PLO. When in 1983 Arafat was besieged in the North Lebanon port of Tripoli by Fatah rebels backed by Syria, Erich Honecker sent him boatloads of arms, medicines, clothes, and foodstuffs -- all free of charge. Not only did the PLO have its own extensive contacts with the Stasi, but it also dealt directly with the East German Foreign Ministry through its embassies abroad and it had a channel to institutions of the Communist party, which supplied the PLO with some three hundred medical grants a year and one hundred scholarships. The collapse of the communist regime was therefore a blow both to the PLO and to its archenemy, Abu Nidal. In Poland, Abu Nidal had a residence and was given a score of scholarships for his students. But his relations with the Poles were ambivalent. He claimed to have high-level political contacts with them, but this was a fabrication. His only real contacts were with the intelligence and security services. Political leaders would not meet him, and half the time even the security people did not know he was there. His practice was to conceal his true identity and travel incognito. Like other Eastern Europeans, the Poles gave him safe haven in order to earn hard currency by exporting their weapons, and to prevent him from mounting operations against them or from their territory. The Hungarians became interested in Abu Nidal when one of the terrorists who took part in the Vienna airport attack of December 1985 revealed that he had flown to Budapest and then driven to Vienna by car. To prevent future trouble, the Hungarians concluded a security agreement with Abu Nidal, which was negotiated by Atif Abu Bakr, who, before defecting to Abu Nidal's organization, had been the PLO "ambassador" in Budapest, in 1983-84. As others had done, the Hungarians submitted to blackmail by allowing a dozen of Abu Nidal's students to take courses in their country and by ignoring movements of his men in and out of the country. By 1986, Budapest had replaced Belgrade as a key center for Abu Nidal's European operations. The Czechs considered Abu Nidal a terrorist and had no relations with him, although they were on good terms with Atif Abu Bakr, who had been PLO "ambassador" in Prague. Bulgaria, which Abu Nidal visited often and where he liked to hold meetings, allowed him to establish a small student presence, sold him some weapons, let his men use Sofia as a staging post, and gave him a villa near the Hotel Vitusha, where he sometimes spent part of the summer. But they were not happy when they discovered that he was smuggling weapons from Turkey through their country to European destinations. Some consignments were seized and some of his men landed in jail. The Romanians were the most hostile of all Eastern Europeans to Abu Nidal and had been ever since the killing of a Jordanian diplomat, Azmi al-Mufti, and the wounding of another in Bucharest in December 1984. Abu Nidal tried blackmailing the Romanians in every way he could, including placing bombs in their embassy in Beirut, but they refused to be cowed and arrested his members whenever possible. Abu Nidal never went to the Soviet Union in an official capacity or met with any Soviet leaders (although for added safety, or so he thought, he sometimes chose to transit through Moscow on his way, say, from Geneva to Damascus). Members of his organization used to call at Soviet embassies in Baghdad and Damascus, but these contacts ceased when the organization moved to Libya. Stung by Western accusations that Moscow supported international terrorists, Soviet diplomats were distant and cautious in their contacts with Abu Nidal, and on Palestinian issues, they made it clear that they supported Arafat's moderate line and opposed terrorism. BETWEEN IRAQ AND IRAN On March 29, 1989, a Saudi cleric, Sheikh Abdallah al-Ahbal, spiritual head of the Muslim community in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, was shot dead at his mosque in Brussels, together with his Tunisian librarian. The killing was immediately associated in the public mind with the death sentence passed six weeks earlier, on February 14, 1989, by Iran's leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, on the British writer Salman Rushdie for his irreverent treatment of the Prophet Muhammad in his novel The Satanic Verses. The Brussels imam, a moderate, had apparently not endorsed the Ayatollah's death sentence and it was supposed that this had cost him his life, presumably at the hands of Muslim fanatics. Responsibility for the murder was claimed by the Organization of the Soldiers of Justice, in a communique couched in language such as that used by Hizballah, Islamic Jihad, and other pro-Iranian Islamic groups. These were false trails: It was Abu Nidal who had ordered the killing. The assassination was part of the campaign of blackmail and extortion he was waging against Saudi Arabia, which was to earn him some millions of dollars in "protection money." He also wanted to sell Iran his services. From the moment he was evicted from Iraq in 1983, Abu Nidal wanted a link with Iran. He offered Tehran intelligence about Iraq's military dispositions; he tried to lure it with arms deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars; his men in Damascus paid regular visits to the Iranian embassy, then headed by the hard-liner Ali Akbar Mohtashemi (later to become Iran's minister of interior and later still a leader of the radical camp opposed to President Hashemi Rafsanjani), in the hope of a relationship with Iran's Revolutionary Guards; he was lavish in his praise for Iran's war effort and denounced Saddam Hussein's "fascist regime." And whenever the press reported that Iran was secretly buying arms from Israel, Abu Nidal's magazine rushed to refute the charge, as if he himself had stood accused. But the Iranians would not swallow the bait, and the invitation to Tehran Abu Nidal kept hoping for never came. Despite his efforts to court them, the Iranians believed that he was still tied to Iraqi intelligence, which had helped set him up in the first place. They did not need his help in mounting foreign operations; they did not wish to burden themselves with someone of his reputation; and they preferred to deal with groups that shared their Islamic ideology, which he did not. However, on the ground in South Lebanon, Abu Nidal's men did make some limited contact with Hizballah, and he himself claimed to be on good terms with Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, Hizballah's spiritual guide. But contrary to reports in the press, this did not lead to significant operational cooperation. There is no evidence that Abu Nidal played any part in Hizballah's numerous operations against Israel's self-styled "security zone" in southern Lebanon. Nor did Hizballah play any part in Abu Nidal's attack on the Greek cruise ship City of Poros as is sometimes alleged. Because that attack, on July 11, 1988, took place in the final stages of the Iraq-Iran war, only a few days after the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian civilian airliner over the Gulf with the loss of 290 lives, many jumped to the conclusion it was an act of revenge in which Hizballah and Abu Nidal had joined forces. But this was another false trail. Iran and its friends had no hand in the City of Poros affair, and indeed Tehran was one of the first capitals to denounce the operation. By the time Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, Abu Nidal had given up wooing Iran and was seeking to benefit from the crisis by ingratiating himself with members of the anti-Iraq coalition. But Desert Storm came and went without his entering the fray or drawing attention to himself -- save to kill Abu Iyad in Tunis on the eve of battle, a murder that many in the intelligence world believed was inspired by the Mossad, though Abu Nidal had, as usual, his own reasons for murdering his former patron.
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