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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 13: The Great Purge Abu Nidal started to kill early in his career in Baghdad -- first in his struggle with Fatah, a parent he rejected and for whom he developed a lifelong hatred. Fatah's sentence of death on him, passed in absentia in 1974, and its murder that same year of his friend Ahmad Abd al- Ghaffur, unleashed a torrent of violence in him. If Fatah could behave like this, so could he. It was Fatah that had taught him to kill, he said, and it was fear of Fatah, of its revenge, of its penetration of his organization, of its enveloping powers, that would become his obsessive preoccupation. If one of his members so much as telephoned a Fatah office, Abu Nidal considered it treachery. EARLY BRUTALITIES From the early 1970s, Abu Nidal built his organization on brutality and fear. Scores of his members disappeared on his orders during the Baghdad years, ending up in pits at the Hit training camp or buried in cement at Center 85 in Baghdad. When the intended victim was too prominent to be murdered in Iraq, Abu Nidal would arrange to send him "traveling" on a foreign mission and have him killed abroad. Abd al-Rahman Isa, his intelligence chief at the time, recalled that Abu Nidal asked him about the location of a certain arms cache in Europe. Isa had replied that the man who knew about it was so-and-so. Pensively, Abu Nidal looked into the distance. "Wasn't he one of the members we sent traveling?" he asked. The man who had buried the weapons had himself been buried. In such cases it was usual for the organization to claim the missing man as a "martyr" and mourn his passing with an obituary notice in its magazine. No doubt Abu Nidal was influenced by the ferocious system Saddam Hussein was then putting in place in Iraq. But his casual resort to murder owed much to his own brutal paranoia. It was also a deliberate strategy: Ruthlessness, he believed, would make his enemies fear and respect him. That the victims were often innocent did not concern him. Their deaths would keep others in line. Once he began prowling in the darkness beyond the campfire of society, legal and moral restraints had no further hold on him, nor did a sense of common humanity. In the late 1970s, a well-known Palestinian engineer, Ahmad Jum'a, and his bride of a month, shopping in a Baghdad supermarket with one of Abu Nidal's cadres, were kidnapped on the street, bundled into a car, and taken to Center 85, where they were tortured and killed. Jum'a had been a founder member of Fatah's Iraqi branch but had left it in 1974 to join Abu Nidal's organization, where he had risen to some prominence. His kidnapping and death seemed motiveless: No evidence was produced against him or his wife. But the cadre with whom they had been rash enough to go shopping had recently been to Beirut, where he had met some Fatah people -- enough to arouse Abu Nidal's suspicions. For this, all three had to die. In an obscene twist, the men who kidnapped them in Baghdad took home to their own children the groceries Jum'a and his bride had bought at the supermarket. Another notorious case was that of Nabil Abd al-Fattah, whom Abu Nidal had entrusted with the key job of running his counterespionage unit in Iraq, a position from which he had sent many men to their death. Abu Nidal told his members that Abd al-Fattah hailed from Nablus, a major West Bank city, but in fact little was known about him as he had had no background in Fatah or in any other Palestinian organization. Eventually, Abd al-Fattah fell out with his chief and fled to Jordan, whereupon Abu Nidal screamed that he was not a Palestinian at all but a Jordanian, that he was in the pay of Jordanian intelligence, and that he had been planted on him. But no one dared ask Abu Nidal where he had found this man and why he had promoted him. In the early eighties, when the organization moved to Syria, Abu Nidal managed to lure Abd al-Fattah to Damascus on the pretext of renewing contact with him. He and his wife were then taken to Lebanon and killed. (His wife was Nuha al-Turk, sister of Muhammad Harb al-Turk, now serving a prison sentence in Pakistan for his part in the hijacking of the Pan Am airplane in Karachi of September 1986.) Was Abd al-Fattah innocent or was he a plant? Somewhere between the two "identities" Abu Nidal had given him, the truth was lost. And what of the dozens of people who had passed through his hands to be tortured and executed? One of Abu Nidal's more disturbing habits was to get people to do his dirty work for him and then kill them once they had served his purpose. In 1983, when the organization was expelled from Iraq, it was still holding in its prisons some twenty members who had fallen under suspicion but whose interrogation was not yet complete. What was to be done with them? If the Iraqis attempted to release them, Abu Nidal gave orders that grenades were to be thrown at once into the prison cells. Eventually, Abu Nidal moved the prisoners to Syria and then to Lebanon, where he murdered many of them. Basil, the bluff, straightforward soldier with fair hair and pink cheeks, who would not have been out of place in a British officers' mess, was a Palestinian born in 1950. He had joined Abu Nidal in the early 1970s but had refused to have anything to do with his foreign operations. Instead, he had spearheaded the organization's entry into Lebanon and, in the mid-1980s, had risen to be chief of military operations for Abu Nidal's militia, the People's Army. However, sickened by the brutalities he had witnessed, he defected to the breakaway Emergency Leadership, which we will soon learn about, that Atif Abu Bakr established in November 1989, and agreed to be interviewed by me in Tunis in 1990. We met furtively a number of times in small seaside hotels. Basil told me he had spent sixteen years with the organization, but only when he left did he grasp its real nature. Inside the organization it was considered treachery even to ask a question. Each member lived in isolation and was subject to Abu Nidal's total control. But an incident in 1985 had made Basil uneasy. Fatah had captured five of Abu Nidal's men in the Bekaa Valley and killed them. To avenge them, a Fatah office was raided and two of its men were captured and shot at once. It turned out, however, that one of them was not a member of Fatah at all but a student whose brother worked in the Fatah office and whom he had come to visit. Finding him absent from his desk, the student had sat down to wait for his brother -- only to be kidnapped and killed. "They didn't even ask the poor fellow his name before shooting him!" Basil told me. Another case of which Basil had firsthand knowledge was that of a Palestinian student from the occupied West Bank who had come to study at Damascus University. On the way, he stopped off in Jordan to see his aunt, who gave him a bag of food for her son, Faruq, who worked for Abu Nidal in Syria. The student came to the organization's office at the Yarmuk refugee camp, in Damascus, and asked to see his cousin. "He's in Lebanon," they told him. "We've got a car going there and can give you a lift." The student was arrested on arrival, given a severe beating, and accused of being a Jordanian agent. For eighteen months he was held in prison in appalling conditions. By the time they released him, his passport had expired and the Jordanians would not renew it. The Israeli stamp allowing him to reenter the occupied territories had also expired, so he could not return home. He had become a refugee. Basil was told to speak to him. "I had to explain to him that the harsh treatment he had received was only to be expected, as the organization was itself under constant threat. Forced to mouth cliches about Zionism and imperialism, I suddenly realized how little I actually believed in them! "I tried to buy him some clothes and make sure he had something decent to eat. But he was a broken man. In the end, I was left speechless at the spectacle of such needless suffering." It was cases such as this that led Basil to defect. THE JUSTICE COMMITTEE Based in the village of Bqasta in the hills above Sidon in South Lebanon, some twenty miles north of the Israeli border, the Committee for Revolutionary Justice oversees the cruel charade of interrogation, torture, and execution that in the organization passes for due process of law. This is the committee headed by Mustafa Ibrahim Sanduqa (code name Salim Ahmad), who is married to one of Abu Nidal's nieces and, as such, is a member of his extended family. It will be recalled that I had put him on my list of suspected Mossad agents, together with Dr. Ghassan al-Ali and Alaa. Several prisoners held by the committee in 1990 were guilty of nothing more serious than minor offenses against the organization. But in an outfit gripped by permanent spy mania, the most common accusation is that of treachery -- of working for a hostile service. Under torture, most prisoners confess their crime. Often, they beg to be killed, to bring their ordeal to an end. Some of Abu Nidal's stronger victims have survived imprisonment and torture, though, and have later been found innocent of the charges against them. They are usually executed anyway, to make sure word of such methods doesn't leak -- but enough has leaked for a sordid picture to emerge. In his taped debriefing, Abd al-Rahman Isa said, "Abu Nidal would summon me to his office and say very sternly, 'Information has reached me that so-and-so in our organization is a suspect!' He would then place a file on the table in front of him -- but he would neither open it nor read out anything from it. Nor would I. I would take his word for it. I believed him!" When he defected from the organization in 1989, Abd al Rahman Isa published a statement in which he declared that he had been lied to for seventeen years. He had been made to kill on the basis of an empty file on a table. However, by acquiescing in such methods, men like Isa were also signing their own death warrant. As we shall see, Isa himself would soon become a target. Methods of torture used by the committee were exceptionally barbarous, even in a region known for its disregard for human rights. They included hanging a man naked for hours and whipping him until he lost consciousness; reviving him with cold water; and rubbing salt or chili powder into his wounds. Or forcing a naked prisoner into an automobile tire with his legs and butt in the air; then whipping, wounding, salting, and reviving him with cold water; then repeating the process. On occasion, plastic melted under a flame was allowed to drip onto a prisoner's bare skin. Another method was to heat oil in a frying pan and then, while holding the prisoner steady, fry his male member. In the committee's prisons, each man was confined alone in a tiny cell, built on two levels like a step. Bound hand and foot, the prisoner could move his hands only enough to take and eat food thrown in to him from an opening in the cell wall. He could urinate and defecate only with great difficulty. (Such prisons are not unique in the area. On June 26, 1990, Israel's human rights organization, B'tselem, reported on detention centers for underage Palestinians in Jerusalem. "Almost every minor we interviewed testified that he had been beaten, usually severely -- slaps, punches, kicks, hair pulling, blows with clubs and iron bars ... " the report said. Others reported that their manacled hands were bound behind them to a pipe in an open courtyard, where they were left in awkward positions for hours in the sun and rain, and during the night. Other young prisoners reported being held for days in a dark and smelly isolation cell measuring 1.5 square meters, and containing a toilet seat. Some said they were held for hours in what they called "the closet," a very narrow cell one meter long in which the inmate can stand but cannot move. Other testimony described the "grave," a sunken boxlike cell covered by an iron door in which handcuffed inmates must sit bent over. The cell is soiled, since prisoners are not allowed out to the bathroom and excrement accumulates under them. The iron door keeps in the noisome smells.) If Abu Nidal's prisons happened to be full, and while the committee waited for its leader in Libya to confirm a death sentence, a prisoner might be placed in a freshly dug grave and have earth shoveled over him. A steel pipe in his mouth sticking out of the ground would allow him to breathe. Water would be poured in from time to time to keep him alive. When word came from Libya, a bullet would be shot through the tube, which was then removed and the hole filled up. INTERNAL MASSACRES With the passage of years, the blood shed by Abu Nidal swelled into a torrent. Dozens of men were murdered in the 1970s, when the organization was based in Iraq. Two-score and more, including women and university students, were kidnapped in Syria in the 1980s, smuggled out to Lebanon, and butchered in the Badawi refugee camp, in the north of the country. Another forty-seven prisoners being held in a jail at Aita, in the Bekaa Valley, could not be transported when the organization moved from there to South Lebanon, so they were killed en masse in 1987, without even having been interrogated. By 1986-87, beatings and torture in the organization's prisons had become routine. According to eyewitnesses, interrogators seemed hardly concerned to discover the truth about detainees or to investigate their background. Sentences were passed on the basis of confessions, and condemned men would be shot at night and buried in the woods. These killings were merely the prelude to the orgy of murder in both Lebanon and Libya that started in November 1987 and continued more or less unabated until the end of 1988, when Abu Nidal, encountering opposition from his colleagues, found it prudent to pause. In a little over a year, it is estimated that Abu Nidal murdered some six hundred of his own people, between a third and a half of his total membership, mostly young men in their early twenties -- almost as many Palestinians as Israel killed in the first three years of the intifada. These mass killings were mainly the work of the four-man team in charge of Abu Nidal's operations in Lebanon: Mustafa Ibrahim Sanduqa, of the Justice Committee, with its prisons and interrogation centers, torturers, and executioners; Isam Maraqa, Abu Nidal's thirty-five-year-old deputy, who was married to Umm Nidal's niece; Sulaiman Samrin, the powerful first secretary, better known as Dr. Ghassan al-Ali; and Mustafa Awad, known as Alaa, the violent and unscrupulous head of the Intelligence Directorate. Over three hundred men were killed in South Lebanon by these four, 171 of them on a single night in November 1987 -- on the fabricated charge of being Jordanian agents. According to a defector, a bulldozer was brought in to dig a deep trench. Blindfolded, roped together, and with their hands tied behind their backs, the men were then lined up, sprayed with machine-gun fire, and immediately pushed in for burial, some of them struggling and still alive. About 120 men then fled the People's Army and sought refuge in the Bekaa Valley with Abu Ahmad Fu'ad, the military commander of George Habash's PFLP. In an angry communique, Abu Nidal accused Fu'ad of being a Jordanian agent as well -- and, for good measure, of being in league with Yasser Arafat and the Americans. Those Abu Nidal was unable to liquidate in Lebanon he transferred to Libya and exterminated there. In the mass killings at the desert camp where Jorde was held, 165 men died in 1987-88 and were buried in communal graves. Most of these were Palestinian youngsters who had been sent from Lebanon on the pretext that they were on their way to Chad to fight alongside Libyan forces in the struggle for the contested Aouzou strip. Abu Nidal's was one of several Palestinian and Lebanese factions, friendly to Qaddafi or funded by him, that had contributed men to Libya's war effort. But Abu Nidal believed these youngsters were conspiring against him, and they never got further than the Libyan camp. According to a friend of Jorde who had also been at the camp and who later escaped, one of their executioners was driven to suicide by what he had done. Al-Hajj Abu Musa was a veteran instructor in his late fifties who had been with Abu Nidal since the Iraq days and was now with him in Libya. Over the years, Abu Musa had trained many of his recruits. He was a soldier, a killer, but in the circumstances more benign than most, and his personal following among the fighters appears to have aroused Abu Nidal's jealousy. "You know, Abu Musa," he would say to him at meetings, "there are many traitors to be found among the Palestinians -- but the highest percentage is among the over-fifties!" Abu Nidal sent Abu Musa to Libya and put him in charge of the training camp, where he had him arrested and killed -- on grounds of sexual perversion. In a sadistic afterthought, he told the Hajji's anxious wife, Umm Musa, an old peasant woman who dressed in traditional embroidered Palestinian clothes like the rural women of her generation, that her husband had been posted to Libya to prevent him from taking another wife. Abu Nidal then arrested Umm Musa, who had been like a mother to many of his young recruits, and had her thrown into jail and killed on a charge of lesbianism. Husam Yusif, the Hajji's successor as commander of the Libyan camp -- the man in charge there when Jorde passed through -- was also purged. "What people don't understand," Abu Dawud once said to me, "is that Abu Nidal takes his decisions to kill in the middle of the night, after he has knocked back a whole bottle of whiskey." But this was not an adequate explanation. For Isa, who had worked closely with Abu Nidal for twenty years, there could be no question that Abu Nidal was now insane. Abu Iyad and Atif Abu Bakr believed, as we have seen, that Abu Nidal was acting in Israel's interest -- destroying one of the best Palestinian fighting forces in South Lebanon. But whether the source of his behavior was alcoholism, madness, or the Mossad, or all three, Abu Nidal so terrorized his organization that no one could stop him. THE KILLING OF MILITARY OFFICERS In Lebanon, among the first to die in November 1987 were the organization's two best officers, Jasir al-Disi (known as Abu Ma'mun) and Ayish Badran (Abu Umar), both seasoned soldiers who had begun with Fatah, attended military courses in India and the Soviet Union, and joined the organization after the Fatah mutiny of 1983. Disi had been elected a member of Abu Nidal's Central Committee, while Badran, who had commanded the organization's forces during the War of the Camps, was appointed deputy head of the People's Army Directorate. Their death destroyed the military effectiveness of the People's Army. Basil had been Jasir al-Disi's deputy. In Tunis in the summer of 1990, at one of our meetings by the sea, he told me what had happened, his broad pink face sweating. First Disi and then Badran had disappeared, suddenly and without warning, leaving him in charge. He supposed they had been sent abroad on short notice. Then Wasfi Hannun, the head of the People's Army Directorate, came one day to his headquarters to take him to an important meeting with Isam Maraqa, Abu Nidal's deputy, and Dr. Ghassan. Hannun drove Basil into the hills above Sidon to a building that belonged to the Intelligence Directorate. As they approached, Basil saw a large contingent of guards outside, men he recognized as the personal bodyguards of Isam Maraqa and Dr. Ghassan. He greeted them warmly, but they seemed puzzled by his presence. "It was only when I got inside," Basil told me, "that I saw that I was in an interrogation center. There were electric cables for torture and a cement block for the accused to sit on, facing his interrogators. Five men, who looked as if they had been there for days, sat behind a table laden with files, thermos flasks of coffee, dirty cups, and overflowing ashtrays. The atmosphere was dense and smoky. "Isam Maraqa said they wanted to ask me some questions about Disi and Badran. What did I think of them? I answered that they were capable and experienced officers who had had good careers with Fatah before joining us and had played a full part in the War of the Camps. "Maraqa then said bluntly that they had confessed to plotting and were both in detention. They had named me as someone on whose help they hoped to count. Had they approached me about their plot?" Basil replied angrily that he considered himself one of the builders of the organization and that he was not proposing to tear down his own work. Did they imagine that he would keep quiet if he had heard even a whisper of sedition? After about half an hour's questioning they let him go. Many men then started disappearing from the units. At first Basil thought they had been transferred to Libya or sent to fight in Chad, but he was amazed to discover they were held prisoner in Sidon and brutally interrogated in the name of a supposed conspiracy. It was soon learned that Disi and Badran had been executed -- as Jordanian spies -- and that dozens of others had been shot and were buried in a mass grave near Bqasta. Badran left a widow and nine children in the village of Dummar, on the outskirts of Damascus. ASSORTED VICTIMS In my interviews with ex-members of the organization whom I was able to track down in Tunis, Malta, Cyprus, and Marseilles, I learned of several other cases of sudden and violent death. -- Ibrahim al-Abd, an able cadre of the Finance Directorate who had headed the organization's Zurich-based trading company, was arrested in 1987, accused of being a spy for the Mossad and the CIA, and executed. At the time, Abu Nidal was reorganizing his Swiss bank accounts to bring them more tightly under his family's control. Abd may have known too much about these funds, as did another cadre from the Finance Directorate, killed at about the same time, named Musa Rashid, who had run a finance company in Kuwait belonging to the organization. He was summoned to Libya and shot as a Jordanian spy. -- Muhammad Khair (code name Nur Muharib), a member of the Political Directorate's Political Relations Committee, was another victim of Abu Nidal's paranoia. Before joining the organization in the late 1970s, he had spent a year or two studying in Turkey, which convinced Abu Nidal that he had been enlisted by Turkish intelligence. From there, it was only a step to suppose that the Turks had introduced him to the Mossad, which encouraged him to offer his services to Jordanian and Syrian intelligence. So Nur Muharib was charged with being an agent of four intelligence services. In 1987, Muharib had met and married Fatima Skaf, a young Syrian schoolteacher from a Shi'ite family, who taught in a primary school in Damascus. Four months after their marriage, they were both arrested and, in 1988, executed. That she was a new bride, who had not known her husband for long and knew nothing of the organization and no one in it, did not spare her. When her parents made inquiries, they were told that she had been sent abroad on a mission with her husband. To this day, they are uncertain of her fate. Nur Muharib had an uncle called Mustafa Umran, a Palestinian writer and poet from Gaza, with an M.A. in Arabic literature from Cairo University. He had been a follower of the Fatah rebel Abu Musa, but in 1987 joined Abu Nidal's organization and, because of his writing skills, was given a job in the Political Directorate's Publications Committee. It was while he was working there that he came across his nephew, Nur Muharib, whom he had not seen for twenty years. When Nur was arrested, his uncle was taken as well and tortured terribly until he confessed that he was the head of a Mossad network whose special role was to indoctrinate Arabs in the subversive view that normal relations with Israel were possible. These two men, respectively in the Political Relations Committee and the Publications Committee, had climbed to well- placed jobs. They were considered comrades and revolutionaries. But from one day to the next they were accused of being spies and traitors and were exterminated. As usual, no evidence against them was ever produced. They were nonpersons. No one could say a word in their favor. Colleagues of such dead men would learn of their fate from the organization's magazine or from an internal memorandum. -- Mujahid al-Bayyari (code name Zuhair Khalid), another victim, was one of the terrorist stars of the Intelligence Directorate, a prominent cadre in foreign operations who had spent two years in a Spanish jail for traveling on a forged Moroccan passport. He had been involved, among other outrages, in the bombing of the open-air cafes in Kuwait in 1985. One day in 1986, when the organization was still in Syria, Syrian air force intelligence asked its contact man in the organization, Abd al-Karim al-Banna (Abu Nidal's nephew), if he knew of a member called Mujahid al-Bayyari; they wished to interview him. When Abu Nidal heard of these inquiries, he seemed deeply disturbed. He blustered that the Syrians probably wanted to hand Bayyari over to the Kuwaitis -- because of the bombings of the cafes -- and get paid handsomely for it. He refused to allow Bayyari to be interviewed. The fact was that in July 1979, at Nice, on the French Riviera, Bayyari had been part of an Abu Nidal hit team that, on Iraq's instigation, had assassinated Zuhair Muhsin, the head of Syria's own Palestinian faction, al-Sa'iqa. When the Syrians asked to interview Bayyari, Abu Nidal immediately suspected that they had learned of his role and were bent on revenge. He instructed Bayyari to set off a car bomb (one of his specialties) in Israel's security zone in southern Lebanon but, by chance or premeditation, the bomb went off prematurely in Sidon and Bayyari was killed. Abu Nidal then sent the Syrians a message: Would they like him to kill the leader of the Arab Liberation Front, Iraq's Palestinian faction? As one of Abu Nidal's ex-members explained to me: "Abu Nidal was telling the Syrians, 'Look, I killed Zuhair Muhsin at Iraq's behest; I'm ready to kill their man at your behest.'" The Syrians refused the trade. REASONS FOR THE PURGE How was the great butchery of 1987-88 to be explained? If Abu Iyad and others are correct, the Mossad may have instigated the purge. But as usual with such riddles, there was also an explanation to be found within Abu Nidal's own organization. For, as we have seen, Abu Nidal sensed that the organization was slipping out of his control. The one explanation, however, does not necessarily exclude the other. For years, Abu Nidal, Abu Nizar, and Abd al-Rahman Isa had been inseparable and had together built up the organization. But by 1981, Abu Nidal had gone to Poland and had spent the next few years in Europe, between Warsaw and Vienna, Zurich and Berlin, trading arms, setting up finance companies, accumulating assets, and keeping out of the Middle East. He tried to run his organization from afar with his weekly stream of peremptory memos, chiding his hard-pressed associates, criticizing them, setting them against one another. But his absence and his dictatorial methods were resented by his colleagues, who shouldered the daily burden. These early years of the 1980s were the time when, from its Syrian base, the organization developed rapidly, expanding almost tenfold into Lebanon. The men who actually ran the organization were proud of this expansion, but as we have seen, Abu Nidal was alarmed by it. For him, the new recruits were an indigestible body of men who were subverting his organization and who might even pose a serious threat to him personally. Drifting from one master to another in search of security and political direction, rough and untutored, politically inexperienced, prone to mutiny, they had had a checkered history. They had not been drilled in the organization's ten principles. They had none of the tortured loyalty to the organization of Abu Nidal's older cadres. To judge these developments for himself, Abu Nidal came secretly to Syria for a week in October 1984, and then for two weeks in January 1985, during which he held long meetings with his command. Then, on October 22, 1985, he came to Syria again and stayed there on and off for a year and five months, until his final departure for Libya on March 28, 1987. It was in this period that the internal dispute came to a head and that Abu Nidal made the brutal moves with which he eventually defeated his colleagues and regained full control. These steps included:
Slow to grasp the cumulative significance of these moves, his colleagues, with few exceptions, fell victim to Abu Nidal's superior strategy. Was there any truth to Abu Nidal's charge that his once loyal colleagues were plotting to overthrow him in the autumn of 1987? What is certain is that from 1985 onward, he met more resistance from them. Men who had run the show during his long absence in Poland, who had established the organization in Syria, taken it into Lebanon, expanded it, fought in the War of the Camps and found their nationalist bearings, now resented his attempts to reverse the current and return the organization to its old molelike existence. These colleagues did not like being forced out of Syria, nor did they appreciate the split between Libya and Lebanon, which weakened their position. They also felt the time had come to distance themselves from terrorism and demanded more of a say in policy making. Like Habash's PFLP or Jibril's PFLP-General Command or the myriad Lebanese resistance groups, they wanted to join the struggle against Israel, which, apart from its repression of Palestinians in the occupied territories, still occupied a substantial slice of South Lebanon, from which it regularly mounted raids northward. Abu Nidal blamed the problems he was facing on the new men who had entered his high command from Fatah in 1985 -- and chief among them Atif Abu Bakr, the ideologue of the new "nationalist" trend. Strikingly cadaverous in face and body, with a stern, inward-looking expression, at times didactic and at times cutting, Abu Bakr was brighter than the others, a formidable opponent, as Abu Nidal recognized. Men of his caliber wanted the Political Bureau and the Central Committee to engage in real debate, and they had an altogether different vision of the organization's future than did Abu Nidal. So the dispute smoldering in 1985-87 touched on power, money, operations, ideological orientation, relations with other groups, and decision making. The challenge never surfaced, but it was probably enough to make Abu Nidal fear that his colleagues might one day use their troops to oust him and, perhaps with Syrian help, take over the organization. Abu Nizar and Abd al-Rahman Isa had lived and worked in Syria and were on close terms with General Muhammad al-Khuly, of air force intelligence. For the paranoid Abu Nidal, this was reason enough to strike first. He was determined to "have his enemies for lunch before they had him for dinner." This could have been why he placed in key posts men who shared his vision of a wholly clandestine outfit, living by its own savage laws, and then, with their help, massacred the officers and men who alone could have given his opponents the muscle they needed to mount a serious challenge. THE FALL OF ABU NIZAR The mass killings Abu Nidal ordered in Lebanon and Libya brought these tensions into the open. Abu Nidal was clearly capable of condemning to death anyone he chose and was strong enough to ensure that the sentence was carried out. Atif Abu Bakr was determined to expose the whole macabre setup. It was imperative, he felt, to tell all the members what was going on. To remain silent was to be an accomplice to Abu Nidal's crimes. In May and June 1988, Atif Abu Bakr began addressing memoranda to members of the Political Bureau and Central Committee demanding the appointment of a committee of inquiry into the killings, an open challenge to Abu Nidal, which he was bound to resist. Abu Bakr did more than write memos: He tried to win over Abu Nizar, a founding member of the organization, a former deputy leader who was still powerful and popular enough to change the direction of the movement. Abu Nidal responded by setting a masterly trap. When they left Syria in 1987, Abu Nizar's wife and children had moved to Algeria, where Abu Nizar was posted, but they were lonely there. Abu Nizar was often away on missions. The family debated whether to move to Cyprus or even to Czechoslovakia. With feigned innocence, Abu Nidal quietly suggested to Abu Nizar that his family might be better off if they returned to Damascus, where they had lived happily for several years. Abu Nizar accepted the suggestion in good faith, managed to get Libyan passports for his family, and at the end of August 1988, sent them back to Syria. Abu Nidal then accused Abu Nizar of being a Syrian agent. For his family to return to Syria after the organization had been expelled from there meant that Abu Nizar had contacted Syrian intelligence, which approved the move. Abu Nizar and Atif Abu Bakr then made another tactical error, this time a fatal one. Not only did they have long private talks -- a seditious breach of the organization's rules -- but far worse, Atif arranged for Abu Nizar to meet secretly with Abu Iyad, the PLO's intelligence chief, in Algiers in early October 1988. In Tunis in 1990, Abu Iyad gave me an account of this meeting with Abu Nizar. It was, he said, a long, sometimes stormy, sometimes extraordinarily candid talk that began at nine o'clock one evening and continued until three the next morning. For the first two hours, Abu Nizar had sounded like Abu Nidal's official mouthpiece. Listening to him, Abu Iyad reflected that this was the man who had been Abu Nidal's closest colleague for fifteen years, his partner in terrorism and crime. "Then suddenly, as if his conscience had been aroused, his tune changed. He started telling me stories I could hardly believe. How Abu Nidal humiliated and insulted them. How he tried to dictate what their wives wore. How he meddled in absolutely everything. It was worse, he said, than living in a Chinese commune. And now, he went on, Abu Nidal had become a psychopath! "What was he to do now? How could he escape? Would I guarantee his safety? Should he defect and take as many men as he could with him? I replied that this was exactly what Abu Nidal no doubt wanted him to do. Every dictator in history liked to get rid of the strong men around him -- and then weep crocodile tears over them! "I told him he should stay on and fight. He should do something drastic to break Abu Nidal's hold. Perhaps even take him prisoner. I didn't want to say bluntly that they should kill him, but we both knew very well that so long as Abu Nidal remained alive, he would be dangerous." Somehow or other, perhaps by monitoring telephone calls, Abu Nidal heard about Abu Nizar's meeting with Abu Iyad: Direct evidence of the conspiracy he most feared and which could be punishable only by death. A few weeks after the meeting, on the morning of October 18, 1988, Abu Nidal murdered his old comrade Abu Nizar on the outskirts of Tripoli, in a spacious house in the Suq al-Jum'a district, one of three villas in a large compound that Qaddafi had put at Abu Nidal's disposal. The main bedroom, the size of a whole apartment, had its own private bathroom and kitchen. This was a room Abu Nidal sometimes slept in, and it was here, according to several inside sources, that Abu Nizar was tortured and killed. Abd al-Rahman Isa had been on a mission to the Sudan. According to what he said in his taped debriefing, he had flown back to Libya on the evening of October 17. "It was my habit when I returned from a mission abroad to go straight to Abu Nidal's office to report to him before going home, especially if I had something sensitive to communicate. "This time something strange occurred. I headed for my office and, still breathless, lifted the receiver to speak to Abu Nidal, believing he would want to see me immediately. My office was only a few minutes away from his by car. "'Hello! We're back!' I cried. "'Welcome back,' he replied in a deadly calm manner. 'We'll meet tomorrow evening.'" So Isa made for home, where his wife told him that Abu Nizar had tried repeatedly to get hold of him. This openness on Abu Nizar's part surprised Isa, because members of the organization were not allowed to contact each other -- and when he and Abu Nizar met, as they usually did when Nizar was in Libya, it was done quietly. Abd al-Rahman Isa and Atif Abu Bakr later tried to reconstruct the events of October 17-18. On the afternoon of October 17, Abu Nidal had taken Abu Nizar and Atif Abu Bakr to call on Qaddafi at home. Then they had driven out to the house of Ahmad Jibril, head of the PFLP-General Command, in a village near Tripoli. After these social calls, Abu Nidal had dropped off Abu Nizar at his hotel -- he stayed at a hotel on his visits to Libya from Algeria -- and then drove Atif to his home. They had all agreed that Amjad Ata, deputy head of the Secretariat, would come for Abu Nizar at eight-thirty in the morning to take him to a meeting and that Atif would be collected a little later, at around 10 A.M. But the next morning, no one came to take Atif Abu Bakr to the meeting. He telephoned Abu Nidal, who said he was busy and asked to postpone their meeting until the following day. All that day, October 18, Atif expected Abu Nizar to ring or drop by, as he usually did on his visits to Libya, but there was no sign or word from him. And the next morning, when Atif went to a meeting with Abu Nidal, Abu Nizar was not present. When Atif asked about him, Abu Nidal said he had returned to Algeria. At lunchtime that day, Atif telephoned Abu Nizar's house in Algeria and learned that he had not arrived there. That afternoon, he asked Abu Nidal about this, only to be told that Abu Nizar was on his way to Lebanon. "I sensed that something was up," Atif Abu Bakr told me in Tunis in 1990, "and I grew even more anxious when I discovered that Abu Nizar's things were still in his hotel room -- he had been. staying on the eighth floor of the Bab al-Bahr Hotel. They remained there until Atif Hammuda of the Finance Directorate collected them on October 25, eight days after his disappearance. "A few days later, a telegram arrived from Lebanon to say that Abu Nizar had arrived there. Abu Nidal sent me a copy, which was in itself unusual, since he was not in the habit of sending me copies of telegrams he received. This convinced me that something was amiss." Atif Abu Bakr had to go to Aden at this time and returned to Libya only some two months later, in early 1989. Abu Nizar had still not reappeared. Abu Nidal was evading questions about him, but he was beginning to make gross accusations against his former deputy, telling everyone that Abu Nizar had embezzled the organization's funds to buy property for himself and his family and that $40,000 was missing from his accounts. As there was still no proof that Abu Nizar was dead, his friends hoped he was being held in one of Abu Nidal's prisons. In April 1989, Atif Abu Bakr confronted Abu Nidal. It was now six months since Abu Nizar's disappearance, and he wanted to know if there was still some way of rescuing him. The meeting took place at night in the Andalus quarter of Tripoli, in one of the safe houses Abu Nidal sometimes used. Another villa across the road housed his bodyguards, and as they talked in the large, well-furnished reception room, four of his armed men hovered between the kitchen and the hall, occasionally looking in to see if they were needed. "I was alone," Atif told me, "and felt I had walked into a trap. There was no way out. Even supposing I managed to reach the street alive, I would not be able to get very far. "I asked Abu Nidal how he could justify the detention, perhaps even the execution, of a senior member of the organization without the knowledge or consent of the leadership. A member of the command was missing, and none of his comrades knew whether he was alive or dead! "'Are you accusing your own deputy of being an agent?' I asked. 'How will you explain that to the organization? If Abu Nizar is guilty of treachery, then so is my nine-year-old daughter!'" Atif told me he had made an effort to talk in the calm yet forthright manner he knew Abu Nidal would expect of him. Abu Nidal seemed nervous. He kept getting up and then sitting down. Atif thought he was planning to kill him. He started to argue that Abu Nizar was a Syrian agent. "But he was your deputy," Atif cried. "In charge of everything in your absence --- the weapons, the buildings, the cadres. Why should he betray you now? How could he possibly have become a Syrian agent suddenly in Algeria? It just doesn't make sense." Finally, Abu Nidal asked him point-blank if he thought Abu Nizar and Abd al-Rahman Isa were conspiring against him. Atif replied that he believed them to be as innocent as his own daughter. Abu Nidal glowered at him as if he wanted to have him killed there and then, but could not quite bring himself to do it. "At last, he let me go at midnight," Atif told me. "To placate him, I agreed to see him the next day, but I came away absolutely convinced that he had murdered Abu Nizar." A short while later, in May 1989, Atif Abu Bakr learned that Umm Nizar had written a long letter to the organization about her husband. Atif demanded to know its contents. So Abu Nidal and other members of the Central Committee came to his house and Amjad Ata agreed to read the letter aloud to the assembled company. Atif described the scene to me. "Abu Nidal sat down opposite me and watched my face throughout the reading. 'You will see that this is not Umm Nizar's language,' he said. 'It must have been written for her by an intelligence agency!' "In fact the letter was brave and to the point and was written in Umm Nizar's own hand. At one point she described how, in the search for her husband, she had gone to see Dr. Ghassan and Isam Maraqa in Sidon and how badly they had treated her and how humiliated she had felt." Atif told me: "I became very upset and tears streamed down my face. Abu Nidal got Amjad Ata to stop reading and asked me what was the matter. I said it was nothing and asked them to read on. But I was not really listening any longer. I was thinking, Is this the right moment, or should I wait a little longer? I decided it was now or never. "When Ata had finished, Abu Nidal asked me for my opinion. I then spoke clearly and simply: "'The fate of Umm Nizar is what is in store for every one of our wives! This is where we part company. You are a bunch of criminals!' "After I had had my say, Abu Nidal tried to patch things up. He said he would get in touch with me when I was less upset. But his looks were murderous."
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