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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 14: Duel to the Death In April 1987, Abu Iyad and Abu Nidal, two men who had tried to kill each other for a decade, met face-to-face in Algiers. Both were veterans of the world of intelligence, the former as the PLO's intelligence chief, the latter running his own large and well-funded service, with secret assets in many countries and an international network of hit men. They had fought many battles, but neither had scored a decisive win. They had once been friends, but their love turned to hate was a paradigm for the destructive quarrels that have plagued the Palestinian resistance movement from the beginning. The protection Abu Nidal enjoyed at different times from various Arab states made it difficult for Abu Iyad to get at him. These were countries in which the PLO had vested interests: It could not simply hit and run without offending the local powers. Abu Iyad, too, was not an easy target. He was popular in the Palestinian movement and inspired loyalty. He was also well protected. It was difficult for Abu Nidal to find an assassin to gun him down. So each sought to neutralize the other by complicated diplomacy with Arab and European states and by penetration and manipulation, the traditional crafts of intelligence. Abu Nidal's terrorism was Abu Iyad's greatest problem. His operations were so damaging to the Palestinian cause that Abu Iyad was forced to devote much time and energy to trying to stop them. He told me that since 1980, out of Abu Nidal's total of two hundred or so operations, the PLO had managed to foil about 120. "I feel we have spared the world a lot of horror. I don't particularly like mentioning these things because we don't want to be seen in the role of policing Europe!" However; events in Lebanon in 1985-86 imposed a de facto truce on the two adversaries. As we have seen, during the War of the Camps, Abu Nidal's men sided with Fatah against Amal, the Syrian-backed Shi'ite militia. It was a healing experience. With Palestinian fighters joining forces on the ground, it made no sense for their leaders to go on trying to kill each other. DIALOGUE IN ALGIERS What had made the Algiers meeting possible was the eighteenth session of the Palestine National Council, the Palestinians' "parliament-in-exile," which met from April 20-26, 1987, at the Residence des Pins, a conference center some fifteen kilometers west of Algiers. This PNC session was billed as the "Session of Unity," and the mood among the Palestinian factions was conciliatory. Arafat was now under less pressure and therefore more inclined to be flexible: The Palestinian National Salvation Front, set up by his Syrian-backed opponents, was in decline. Abu Nidal had fallen out with the Syrians. His new friends Libya and, to a lesser extent, Algeria, the conference host, were both active behind the scenes trying to patch up intra-Palestinian quarrels. Could the historic split in Fatah be mended? Could Abu Nidal and Fatah put an end to the war that had raged between them since 1974? The mediators worked hard. But each adversary feared the other's hidden agenda: Abu Nidal suspected that Abu Iyad was scheming to split his organization; Abu Iyad was convinced that Abu Nidal was plotting, with encouragement from Israel, to penetrate the PLO, brand it as a terrorist organization, and destroy it. In Tripoli before the PNC session, Arafat and Abu Iyad were due to see Abu Nidal together, but at the last moment word came that Abu Nidal would not agree to meet with Abu Iyad. He was said to be enraged by an article in the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur in which Abu Iyad was quoted as saying (erroneously, he later told me) that Abu Nidal's mother had been an Alawi servant girl. So Arafat went to the meeting alone, returning at 2 A.M. to the villa he was sharing with Abu Iyad. "He knocked on my door," Abu Iyad later told me, "and seemed upset. 'I wish I'd not gone,' he said." It seemed that Abu Nidal had demanded to appoint representatives to the PLO's two key bodies, the Executive Committee and the Palestine National Council. When Arafat demurred, Abu Nidal had used coarse language and had raised his voice, in ways Arafat found unacceptable. It took some deft mediation by the then head of Algerian intelligence, Lakhal Ayyat, and a senior Algerian diplomat, Lakhdar Brahimi (now Algeria's foreign minister), for a meeting to be arranged between Abu Iyad and Abu Nidal in a villa close to the Residence des Pins. Tactfully, the Algerians suggested that the two adversaries be accompanied only by Algerian bodyguards, to avoid the danger of a clash between their men. Abu Iyad took up the story: "I entered and saw him there -- for the first time in fourteen years. He looked pale and ill and had a mustache. Although we were both tense and cold, we shook hands and embraced. We were alone. He was modest, humble, and overly polite. We couldn't decide how to start on the painful subjects we had come to discuss." Abu Iyad said that he wanted to ask Abu Nidal about many things -- about their attacks on each other, about why he had mounted certain operations, about his hopes for the future -- and about why he had behaved so badly with Arafat. Abu Nidal replied that he had been offended by a huge guard Arafat had brought with him, who had remained in the room during their entire meeting. The man made him uncomfortable, but Arafat had not dismissed him. His main complaint was, of course, that Arafat had refused to let him join the PLO. They sparred for a long while, reviewing the history of their mutual assassination attempts. "You taught me how to kill!" Abu Nidal exclaimed. "You killed my friend Ahmad Abd al-Ghafur. I'm only following your example." Abu Iyad took him through the list of PLO representatives shot in cold blood -- Hammami, Yassin, Qalaq, Khudr, Sartawi. Abu Nidal would admit only to having killed Hammami -- because of his secret contacts with Israelis. He deserved to die, Abu Nidal declared, as an example to others. "What about the others?" Abu Iyad inquired, and when he taxed him with being penetrated and manipulated by Israel, Abu Nidal calmly admitted it. Yes, he said, Israeli agents were present in his organization. They sometimes fed him information, but he was trying to liquidate them one by one. His conversation, Abu Iyad told me, was full of wild and empty boasts. He claimed to have captured four hundred Jordanian intelligence agents and said he was going to kill them all in a single day. He had told the Algerians that he would kill five thousand Europeans if any harm befell the delegates to the Palestine National Council meeting in Algiers. He had men awaiting his orders in over thirty countries, including agents in the White House and at the Saudi royal court. He needed his vast wealth, which he put at hundreds of millions of dollars, to buy such well-placed agents. Grandly, he offered to share these assets if Fatah chose to cooperate. Bravado soon gave way to bathos. "You are the only one who really understands me," he confided. And he unbuttoned his shirt to show Abu Iyad the scars from his heart surgery. ''I'm a sick man," he said. "Months pass without my being able to leave the house. I will probably die within the year. But before I die, I want to be recognized. I want to tell the world that I've abandoned the secret life in order to enter politics." He said he considered his organization second only to Fatah in the Palestinian movement. It should therefore be represented on all Palestinian bodies, like other factions. "You have to help me achieve this," he pleaded. Now, Abu Iyad thought, the strategy was clear. Abu Nidal wanted to be let into the core institutions so as to be able to discredit the whole PLO and ensure that it never escaped the terrorist label. "But you've hated the PLO all your life," Abu Iyad countered. "You know very well that we can't have you represented inside the PLO as Fatah: The Revolutionary Council. We're not in the business of selling varieties of watermelons! We can't have dozens of Fatahs on display -- Arafat's and yours and Abu Musa's and so on. It's absurd!" Abu Nidal became angry. When he calmed down, he asked whether there was to be any concession to him at all. Abu Iyad suggested a six-month truce, during which Abu Nidal's intentions and behavior would be put to the test. "'What sort of an agreement do you want?' Abu Nidal asked me. 'Here, write it down.' He was reluctant to write himself, because he was conscious of having a very childish hand, so I took pen and paper and wrote the following: "1. a halt to all propaganda wars between us; "2. cooperation on all matters to do with the occupied territories; "3. a complete ban on all terrorist operations -- against Arabs, Westerners, and Israelis." Abu Nidal said he had to consult his members before agreeing. They set up a time to meet again. At the second meeting, at a seaside villa closely guarded by Algerian intelligence, Abu Nidal put on a great show of anger: "What sort of an agreement is this?" he asked querulously. "You want me to stop killing and mounting operations. You want me to shut up and not meddle in anything. If I agreed to all this, what would I have left to do? "Look," he argued with Abu Iyad. "You're an overt organization and I'm an underground one. Why don't we work together and complement each other?" "Fine," Abu Iyad replied, "but on condition that we give the orders." Abu Nidal seemed to consider the suggestion seriously. He proposed one last discussion session, at which his senior colleagues would join them. But no sooner had they all gathered than Abu Iyad realized he had been wasting his time. With his men in the room, Abu Nidal became abusive, mocking, and aggressive. "Let me tell you a little story about Abu Iyad," he told the meeting. "On the day of Karameh [the battle in 1968 when Israel attacked a Fatah camp in Jordan] people were frantically looking for Abu Iyad, worried that he'd been killed. 'Don't you worry,' I said to them. 'He's safe, all right! In fact, he's at my house, shivering with fear!'" Abu Iyad could hardly believe his ears. "You liar!" he cried. "You shameless liar! It was you whom no one could find." It was the last time they ever saw each other. ATIF ABU BAKR'S DEFECTION The Algiers negotiations of April 1987 proved no more than another round in the duel between Abu Nidal and Abu Iyad. Convinced more than ever that the Mossad was directing Abu Nidal's moves, Abu Iyad sought to penetrate his organization and encourage defections. He knew that an unstable internal situation would worry Abu Nidal, force him to switch his energies from foreign operations and protect himself. Some Palestinians later came to believe that Abu Iyad had planted Atif Abu Bakr, an old and crafty Fatah loyalist, on Abu Nidal as an agent provocateur as early as 1985, to provoke an internal explosion in his ranks. Abu Nidal certainly thought so when Abu Bakr broke away. I have talked at length to both Abu Iyad and Atif Abu Bakr, and I doubt this theory. Abu Bakr seemed too principled and prominent a revolutionary to lend himself to such a scheme. Abu Nidal carried out few terrorist operations in the remaining months of 1987, the period in which he destroyed his own forces in Lebanon, killings that may have been inspired in part by fear that Abu Iyad was stirring up his comrades against him. These internal massacres reached their bloody culmination in October 1988 with the murder of Abu Nizar, by which time Abu Nidal had resumed his terrorist career with the attacks in Cyprus, the Sudan, and Greece. By 1989, the brief moment of intra-Palestinian reconciliation had passed, and Abu Nidal's organization, more vicious and dangerous than ever, had returned underground. By May of that year, Atif Abu Bakr had had enough. The murder of Abu Nizar, the massacre of hundreds of fighters, and Abu Nidal's persistent resort to senseless terrorism, which greatly damaged the Palestinian cause, drove him into open rebellion. News of the mass killings could not be hidden for long, and when the men in Libya learned of the horrific happenings in South Lebanon and the Lebanon group heard of the torture and killings in Libya, Abu Nidal's members scrambled to save their skins. Dozens of fighters sought refuge with other Palestinian factions in Lebanon; dozens more fled to Syria. Some cadres escaped to Jordan, others to the Gulf, to Europe, and to Canada. From Libya, where the organization trembled under Abu Nidal's iron command, some men managed to flee to Tunisia. Among those who remained, morale was low. Abu Bakr remained for a while in Tripoli, but after hearing the letter from Abu Nizar's wife and having called Abu Nidal and his men a bunch of criminals, he broke from the organization. Like Abu Iyad, he was now convinced that Abu Nidal was an instrument of Israeli policy. He doubled the locks on his doors; recruited friends in Ahmad Jibril's organization to serve as his bodyguards; and warned Abu Nidal not to try to kill him. He let it be known that he was thinking of leaving for Moscow, Aden, or Budapest, only to learn that Abu Nidal had said he hoped it would be Budapest, because there he could kill him easily. Abu Bakr's main anxiety was for his wife and nine-year-old daughter. He feared that if he were kidnapped and his house keys taken from him, Abu Nidal's thugs might abduct his family. Whenever he left the house, he hid his keys under a stone in a garden across the road. One day, watching him from an upstairs window, his wife saw him hide the keys. She went down to recover them and that evening asked him for an explanation. "You're obviously in some danger," she said. "It would be better if you told me." Her first question was about Abu Nizar. She wanted to know what had happened to him. When Atif told her that Abu Nidal had killed him the previous October, she said she had guessed as much when she heard him talking on the telephone to Abu Nizar's wife in Damascus. Atif Abu Bakr told his wife about the secret trials, the torture and the killings, the children who had disappeared or been given to strangers to bring up. Although she had had some knowledge of her husband's work, she was profoundly shocked by what she heard. Horror at the details, or panic for her own child, affected her eyesight: She could hardly see. An eye doctor found that her pupils had become unusually enlarged. On August 28, 1989, Atif Abu Bakr managed to escape by air to Algeria and immediately made arrangements for his wife and daughter to join him there. He had procured two joint diplomatic passports for his wife and daughter, one Algerian, the other Yemeni. Speaking to her in Czech on the telephone -- a language they had learned in Prague when he was the PLO representative there -- he instructed her to take the next day's plane to Algiers, using her Algerian passport. For safety's sake, she was to arrange to be accompanied to the airport by their Libyan neighbors and by Ahmad Jibril's local representative. But a disappointment awaited her. Airport officials, probably in Abu Nidal's pay, kept her waiting for five hours as they examined her papers, until the plane finally left without her. She knew she was trapped. Defiantly, she ripped up her air tickets in front of Abu Nidal's man at the airport. "Tell Abu Nidal," she said, "that if he's spoiling for a fight, he should go fight Israel and not a woman!" Not daring to return home, she asked Ahmad Jibril's representative to take her and her daughter in for the night. Meanwhile, in Algiers, Atif Abu Bakr decided not to meet the plane from Libya for fear Abu Nidal would attempt to kill him there. So he sent someone else, who reported to him that his wife was not on the plane. He rang Ahmad Jibril's representative in Tripoli and learned to his relief that his wife and child were with him. "Speaking in Czech, I said to her, 'Follow my instructions carefully. I'm going to ring Abu Nidal's people and ask why there was a problem at the airport. I'll seem very normal. I'll tell them you are planning to leave on Sunday and ask them to make the necessary arrangements. "'In the meantime, you must leave tonight by road for Tunisia. Travel on your Yemeni passport and ask our Libyan neighbors to go with you.'" So Abu Bakr's wife left by car with her daughter and their Libyan friends, arriving safely in Tunis after a twelve-hour journey. It was only then that her eyesight returned to normal. Abu Bakr flew in from Algiers, and they were reunited there. THE EMERGENCY LEADERSHIP Abu Bakr was a commanding figure in Palestinian circles, and his defection was a serious blow to Abu Nidal. Anxious to limit the damage, he sent a delegation to Algiers in October 1989 to offer Abu Bakr Swiss visas for himself and his family, full expenses, and a cash bonus of half a million dollars if he would agree to end their quarrel. Led by a member of the Political Bureau, Shawki Muhammad Yusif (code-named Munir Ahmad), the delegation included the demoted intelligence chief Abd al-Rahman Isa. But Abu Bakr refused. Instead, he met Isa secretly and, with the agreement of Algerian intelligence, talked him into defecting as well, which Isa did in late October 1989, joining Abu Bakr in Algiers. On October 27, Abd al-Rahman Isa issued a lengthy communique devoted almost entirely to denouncing the "blind executions" of members of the organization, and especially the assassination of Abu Nizar. He called for the facts to be put before an international tribunal. On November 1, 1989, Abd al-Rahman Isa and Atif Abu Bakr issued a joint communique, which was in effect a declaration of war -- a war that at the time of writing is still raging. They announced the formation of an Emergency Leadership, with the declared aim of taking control of the organization and punishing the criminal Abu Nidal. "Our martyrs fell in the wrong wars," they declared. "The operations of Rome, Vienna, Sudan, Athens, Paris, and Karachi were senseless and did us immense harm. Our martyrs should have fought in Palestine, but Abu Nidal turned his back on the just struggle. We will never compromise with a butcher whose hands are stained with the blood of our brothers." Their agenda stated: no to intra-Palestinian killings; no to the language of blood and to futile foreign operations; yes to the PLO, the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinians; yes to full support for the intifada. Disgusted by Abu Nidal's methods, Abu Bakr, poet, thinker, and sharp-tongued radical, returned with relief to Fatah, the movement to which he had made a lifelong commitment. Abd al-Rahman Isa was a practical man, not a theoretician. He was reluctant to renounce terror unconditionally, because for twenty years he had been Abu Nidal's closest associate, the planner of many of his operations. Isa knew the real identity of the cadres; the location of the secret arms caches and bank accounts; the contents of letters Abu Nidal had exchanged with foreign governments and intelligence services. Unlike Abu Bakr, he had no nostalgia for Fatah and, as an old-style rejectionist, he could not easily rid himself of the notion that Fatah was a treacherous organization. If there was a Mossad link with Abu Nidal, Abd al-Rahman Isa apparently knew nothing about it. He was not close to Dr. Ghassan or to his own replacement, Alaa, and he may have lost his job because he was beginning to ask awkward questions. In any case, he was a loser in the internal power struggle. After Abu Nizar's murder, Isa had begun to think about his own safety. Abu Nidal had killed his right-hand man. Might he not soon turn against his left hand? Fearing Abu Nidal's vengeance, he fled to Algiers. As he had done with Abu Bakr, Abu Nidal sent several emissaries to urge Isa to return to Libya for talks. These included a prominent Egyptian soldier, General Sa'd al-Din Shazli, who had been President Sadat's chief of staff during the 1973 October War but, having fallen out with him, had taken refuge in Algeria. Isa knew enough to say no. "Let them send me Abu Nizar as an emissary," he told the general. "They claim he is still alive. If so, let me shake his hand. If I see that he is well, I'll go back!" He knew, of course, that Abu Nizar was by then long since in his grave, buried in cement under Abu Nidal's Libyan villa. On the morning of April 25, 1990, when Isa was standing alone outside his seafront villa on the outskirts of Algiers, he was attacked by three men wearing stocking masks, who tried to bundle him into a car. He put up some resistance, but they attacked him with an ax, shot him twice, and made their escape, leaving him for dead. He was severely wounded, but he lived. Surgeons at the. Algiers military hospital managed to save his sight, but they had to remove one of his kidneys. He identified his assailants: Hamdan Abu Asba, Abu Nidal's chief representative in Algiers, and his deputy, Hisham Muhammad Saqr; the third man was believed to be one of Abu Nidal's radio operators. Once Atif Abu Bakr and Abd al-Rahman Isa had published their communique setting up the Emergency Leadership, messages of support flowed in from other disgruntled members in Lebanon, Syria, and Algeria. An early recruit was Basil (or, by his real name, Ziad Sahmud), commander of the People's Army in the Bekaa region of Lebanon, who had become sickened by the mass killings of his own men. He brought other cadres with him. These were men who had escaped the purges by the skin of their teeth. They had seen their comrades slaughtered and were desperate to avoid the same fate. Armed and financed by Fatah, protected by Abu Iyad, the Emergency Leadership was soon battling it out with Abu Nidal in the refugee camps of southern Lebanon. In mid-June 1990, tit-for-tat assassinations in Rashidiyeh, a camp near Tyre housing some fifteen thousand Palestinian refugees, escalated into a gun battle in which Abu Nidal's men were routed. A fiercer engagement followed in September further up the coast, near Sidon, at Ain al-Hilweh, the biggest of Lebanon's camps, which housed 150,000 refugees. In a three-day battle, eighty guerrillas were killed and another 250 wounded as Abu Nidal's fortified headquarters were overrun. However, Abu Nidal still retained a number of strongholds, notably in the hill villages of Bqasta and Karkha, near Sidon, where some of his most sensitive committees are housed in territory controlled by the Druze leader Walid Jumblat; and in Sidon itself, where his computer center is located and several of his top cadres live under the protection of Sidon's "strongman," the Nasserist leader Mustafa Sa'd. Abu Nidal pays his "hosts" tens of thousands of dollars a month. In the summer of 1991, as this book went to press, the two sides were still skirmishing in and around Lebanon's camps, but by this time Abu Nidal had won an important round -- perhaps the biggest coup of his career -- with the murder of his old adversary Abu Iyad, in Tunis on January 14, 1991. WHO ORDERED THE KILLING? There is no doubt that Abu Nidal killed Abu Iyad, using Hamza Abu Zaid as his instrument. So much is agreed by everyone I interviewed in connection with the case. This view rests in the first place on Hamza's own confession: He told his interrogators that he had been ordered to kill Abu Iyad by a man in Abu Nidal's organization. Moreover, the terms in which he denounced his victim -- traitor, corrupter of the Palestinian revolution, "enemy within" -- are those that Abu Nidal has used to denounce Fatah over the years. At the very moment of gunning down Abu Iyad, Hamza cried out: "Let Atif Abu Bakr help you now!" -- a clear indication that Abu Nidal wanted vengeance on the man he believed Abu Iyad had planted on him to destroy his organization. During the siege in the villa, Hamza, as we have seen, repeatedly demanded that Atif Abu Bakr be brought to him, presumably so that he could kill him, too. Abu Iyad often said to me with a wry smile that Abu Nidal hated him not only because of their many attempts to kill each other, not just because Abu Iyad had kept him out of the PLO and had engineered splits and defections in his organization, but because Abu Nidal could not bear to acknowledge his debt to Abu Iyad for the help and protection he had given him in his early years. The murder of Abu Iyad must therefore be seen as a final settlement of old scores. Abu Nidal had plenty of reasons to kill Abu Iyad, but Western and Arab intelligence officers I talked to speculated about a possible "hidden hand" behind the killing -- with Libya, Iraq, and Israel among the suspects. PLO sources concede that Abu Iyad had been on poor terms with Qaddafi for several years. It was partly a matter of personal dislike, they said, and partly Qaddafi's knowledge that Abu Iyad was friendly with Abd al-Mun'im al-Huni, a former head of Libyan intelligence who had escaped to Cairo and who Qaddafi suspected was conspiring to topple him. Qaddafi had also been angered by Abu Iyad's efforts to destabilize Abu Nidal's organization, which was under his protection and which he considered an arm of his own intelligence. According to these sources, the Libyan leader would probably have given Abu Nidal his permission to kill Abu Iyad if Abu Nidal had asked for it, but they doubted that he had initiated the suggestion. Qaddafi would have feared PLO reprisals, or rousing the hostility of the Palestinian community at large. Just as Shi'ites had not forgiven Qaddafi for the disappearance in Libya, and presumed murder, of the charismatic Lebanese Shi'ite cleric Imam Musa al-Sadr in 1978, so Palestinians would not easily forgive him the death of so prestigious a Palestinian leader as Abu Iyad. While Qaddafi might not have intervened to stop the murder, his own motives would probably not have been strong enough to order it. Some press comment has suggested that Saddam Hussein, rather than Qaddafi, was behind the killing of Abu Iyad. The argument states that Abu Iyad, unlike Arafat, was not happy with the PLO's alliance with Baghdad and, for the alliance to survive, had to be eliminated. Furthermore, there have also been allegations that Abu Nidal left Libya for Iraq just before the outbreak of the 1991 Gulf war, transferring his allegiance back to his first sponsor. It is true that Arafat was much more vocal in support of Iraq during the crisis than was Abu Iyad. But there was no divergence between them on the fundamental PLO position: to uphold the principle of an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait; at the same time to reject American intervention and avoid war; to find a settlement within an Arab framework; to demand "linkage" between Kuwait and Palestine as the basis for a peaceful solution -- that is, to put Iraq's occupation of Kuwait and Israel's occupation of Arab territories on the same footing. This was the formula Saddam Hussein had proposed for a negotiated settlement of the crisis. He, too, had demanded linkage. He wanted Palestinian support, indeed whatever Arab support he could muster. In order to give his quarrel with Kuwait a pan-Arab dimension, he had posed as the Palestinians' champion from the early days of the crisis. It therefore makes little sense to suppose that he would have chosen that critical moment, with war only hours away, to kill Arafat's closest colleague. I found no confirmation of the rumor that Abu Nidal had moved back to Baghdad. According to my best informants, he spent the war in Libya, where Qaddafi, afraid of allied retaliation, kept him under tight control. According to Western intelligence sources, Qaddafi would not even allow Abu Nidal to use his radio station during the conflict, for fear that Libya would be accused of sponsoring international terrorism. Not a single act of terrorism attributable to Abu Nidal was reported throughout the 1990-1991 Gulf crisis anywhere in the world -- except for the killing of Abu Iyad. If Saddam had controlled Abu Nidal, as some have alleged, he would undoubtedly have used him against Iraq's many enemies. Of the four founding fathers of Fatah, only Arafat remains. Muhammad Yusif al-Najjar was killed by an Israeli assassination squad in Beirut in 1973; Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad) was killed by Israeli commandos in Tunis in 1988. It is not inconceivable that Abu Iyad's murder, too, and that of his colleague Abu al-Hoi, might be part of this pattern. Abu Iyad's killing took place in January 1991, on the eve of the allied attack on Iraq. Ever since Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Israel had urged the use of force against Saddam Hussein. In public statements and private advocacy, in contacts with the U.S. and other governments, in comments and reports and urgings by its friends in the media, Israel pressed resolutely for war. It opposed any concession to Saddam and any negotiation with him. It secured two crucial undertakings from President Bush: that the U.S. would accept no linkage between Iraq's occupation of Kuwait and Israel's occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and South Lebanon; and that the U.S. would destroy Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons -- otherwise Israel would do the job itself. In 1967, Nasser's mistake of closing the Tiran straits gave Israel the occasion to smash him. In 1990, Saddam Hussein in turn presented the world with a casus belli, and Israel was determined in this case to make the most of it. During Iraq's eight-year war with Iran, Iraq had acquired and developed ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, and other systems that challenged Israel's military advantage, a development Israel viewed with alarm. Hence its eagerness for war against Iraq over Kuwait. Israel knew that the destruction of Iraq as a military power would transform its own strategic environment as radically as had the defeat of Egypt in 1967 -- and this time, if the allies did the job, at no cost to itself. Israel would retain its regional monopoly of weapons of mass destruction. It would be without challenge. The United States had its own reason for going to war, to do with overcoming the Vietnam syndrome; preserving the status quo in the Arabian peninsula, which Saddam threatened to upset; controlling Middle East oil resources; and affirming American supremacy in the "new world order" emerging after the collapse of communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Israel strongly urged American intervention, and influenced America's decision to fight. Of course Iraq's Arab opponents -- Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, and the others -- also wanted Saddam weakened, removed from Kuwait, and contained behind his frontiers. They would have been happy to see him overthrown. But only helpless Kuwait wanted Iraq destroyed. Even Saddam's old enemy Assad, of Syria, knew that the destruction of Iraq would enfeeble the whole Arab world, and until the last minute he pleaded with Saddam to pull back and avoid war. Israel, however, wanted Iraq destroyed. Beyond wanting Iraq's military challenge removed, Israel wanted to resolve the Palestine problem on its own terms once the Gulf crisis was over. Israel knew that after the war, the Bush administration was likely to address the Arab-Israeli conflict more vigorously than before, and Israel would insist that the PLO would have no part in it. But in the prelude to Desert Storm, the PLO's activities posed a considerable threat to this Israeli agenda. In Baghdad, Arafat was straining to pull Saddam back from war. If he could persuade him to start withdrawing from Kuwait, or even to say he would do so, it would be far more difficult for the coalition to attack Iraq. Moreover, if Arafat could claim credit for defusing the crisis, the PLO's greatly enhanced prestige might guarantee it a place at the Arab-Israeli negotiating table. From Israel's point of view, the PLO was a problem. On January 14, 1991, as the UN ultimatum was about to expire and the world held its breath, Abu Nidal's agent Hamza Abu Zaid killed Abu Iyad and Abu al-Hoi, the heads of PLO intelligence and security. A grieving Arafat abandoned his diplomatic efforts in Baghdad and immediately flew back to Tunis to mourn his murdered colleagues. The Palestinian movement was thrown into disarray. As Desert Storm broke over Iraq, the PLO experienced yet another defeat. But what of Abu Nidal's motives? His main business was now either Mafia-style extortion and protection rackets or anti- Palestinian terrorist operations that seemed in Israel's interest. I was still unsure whether there was a Mossad connection, but if there was one, he was part of it. How could a Palestinian who had called himself a patriot cause such tremendous damage to Palestinian interests, damage that fit so neatly with Israeli interests? If Abu Iyad was right that Abu Nidal was an Israeli agent, the evidence was still circumstantial and would remain so until the Israelis themselves tell their side of the story, if they ever do. In the meantime, there were still loose ends to Abu Iyad's theory, notably Abu Nidal's operations against Israeli and Jewish targets, which Israel could not possibly condone, however much they may have lent Abu Nidal credibility in Arab eyes as a cover for his real activities. Perhaps, if Abu Iyad's suspicions were correct, these were the work of wild cards in his organization who were not in on the Mossad connection or whom he did not fully control. What complicated the puzzle further was Israel's odd behavior in not pursuing and punishing Abu Nidal as it had every other Palestinian faction. Pondering the puzzle of Abu Nidal, I remembered what so many of my sources had told me -- that for him, self was all- important, his personal security paramount. His deals with Iraq, Syria, and Libya had all been in return for protection. Protection was what he craved. He could not survive without it. In the terrorist underground he inhabited, one country could protect him better than any other: Israel was the most powerful state in the Middle East, the only one whose planes, commandos, hit teams, and intelligence agents, indifferent to national boundaries, could reach any part of the region. Israel had a long record of seeking out and destroying its enemies. Israel could easily end Abu Nidal's career if it chose to do so. But it had not done so. Why? Was he still useful? Abu Nidal needed immunity. Israel needed his services. Here, I reflected, was yet another source of Abu Iyad's conviction.
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