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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 7: The Colonel's Crony On a cold, bright day in February 1984, two Arabs were having a long confidential conversation over lunch in a hotel in Sofia, the Bulgarian capital. One was a Palestinian, a small, round, dark-skinned man who walked with a slight limp, the result of beatings he had suffered in Jordanian jails in 1970. This was Abu Nidal's long-serving intelligence chief, Abd al- Rahman Isa. The other was a tall, elegant, sharp-witted Libyan, Ibrahim al-Bishari, Qaddafi's head of external intelligence (and, at the time of writing, his foreign minister). They had come to prepare the ground for a meeting of their principals. Abu Nidal and Qaddafi were not yet personally acquainted, but they had had dealings with each other over the years and their relationship had known a number of false starts. However, it was only a matter of time before these two mavericks of Arab politics, two men who lived by their own rules, gravitated toward each other. They had much in common -- a neurotic suspicion of the outside world, an inferiority complex -- but they also shared the belief that they were men of great destiny. Qaddafi, ruler of a handful of desert tribes on the Mediterranean seaboard, was convinced that he was born to leave his mark on Arab history. (In an interview in the late 1970s, I heard him say without a hint of irony that the model of society he had outlined in his Green Book, a small volume of eccentric maxims, should serve the whole of humanity.) In turn, Abu Nidal, a professional subversive who made it his business to challenge the established order, saw himself as the natural leader of world revolution. Behind their usually calm and reserved exteriors, both men were also extremely aggressive, ever ready to pounce. A MEETING OF MINDS In May 1984, accompanied by the faithful Isa, Abu Nidal traveled from Warsaw to Tripoli, the Libyan capital, for his first encounter with Qaddafi. It took place in the multicolored Arab tent, pitched incongruously among the billets and guardrooms of the Bab al-Aziziyya barracks, that serves as the Libyan leader's office and reception room. By all accounts, they got on famously and their talks lasted for hours. It was a meeting of like minds. Qaddafi's paranoia, his sense of being under siege, was more than usually acute at this time. A few weeks earlier, one of his security men inside the Libyan People's Bureau in London's St. James's Square had crazily opened fire from a first- floor window on a crowd of anti-Qaddafi demonstrators, killing a young British policewoman, Yvonne Fletcher. Britain broke off diplomatic relations and, after a nine-day siege of the People's Bureau, expelled the whole of its staff. Several Western leaders called for a joint strategy to combat Libyan-sponsored terrorism, prompting Qaddafi to retort defiantly that he would "hurt" countries that conspired against him. "Each country has its sensitive areas where we can put pressure!" he warned. In security matters, Qaddafi's mind was parochial: His attention was focused on the small pockets of Libyan exiles -- defectors from his Free Officers movement and from his diplomatic service, students who failed to return home, and the like -- most of whom had taken shelter in the United States, Britain, Egypt, Morocco, or the Sudan. There and elsewhere, they had formed opposition movements, ranging from the democratic to the Islamic, all largely ineffective, with names like the National Front for the Salvation of Libya; the Libyan Constitutional Union; the Libyan Democratic National Rally; and the Islamic Association of Libya. From time to time, Qaddafi sent hit men to disrupt and intimidate them and, between 1980 and 1984, managed to have no fewer than fifteen exiles murdered. His main fear was that one or another of these groups would one day secure the backing of a foreign government to mount a coup against him. It so happened that the international outcry over the killing of Yvonne Fletcher encouraged one of these opposition groups, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, to try to topple Qaddafi -- a bid that, by coincidence, reached its climax when Abu Nidal was in Tripoli meeting with the Libyan leader. The head of the National Front's military wing, a former Libyan officer called Ahmad al-Hawwas, had managed to infiltrate a group of armed men into Libya and to entrench them in a building immediately opposite the entrance to the Bab al-Aziziyya barracks. But Hawwas himself was not so fortunate. He entered Tunisia on a Sudanese passport, preparing to join his men in Tripoli, but Libyan intelligence was tipped off and he was intercepted and killed at the Tunisian-Libyan border. His armed cell in Tripoli was discovered. It was attacked by the Libyan army and overwhelmed. Abu Nidal had spent long hours with Qaddafi a day earlier, and was actually in a nearby guest villa, waiting to take his leave of Libya's intelligence chiefs before driving to the airport, when the shooting broke out. According to Abd al-Rahman Isa, who witnessed the scene, the gun battle threw Abu Nidal into a total panic. "Get me out of here!" he shouted. He calmed down only when he managed to fly out of Libya a day later. This master terrorist, who glibly sent men to their death and who had just sold his services to Qaddafi, was terrified of being exposed to any violence. The National Front's attack, abortive though it proved to be, helped convince Qaddafi that he needed someone to take on the external enemies of his revolution, the "stray dogs" as he referred to them, as well as the "imperialists" who were giving them protection and support. Abu Nidal was obviously his man. The colonel was impressed by Abu Nidal's reputation as a ruthless operator with a worldwide organization at his command -- and Abu Nidal was never modest in trumpeting his capabilities. Many Arab states have tried to recruit Palestinians into their intelligence. Dispersed about the world, skilled and educated but not always finding it easy to make a living, they are often open to recruitment. For Qaddafi, a Palestinian on the trail of a dissident Libyan in Europe or the United States might be less suspect than another Libyan. In their pursuit of exiles, his own Libyan agents had often proved incompetent and had blackened his name in foreign capitals. He now needed a professional. When, in earlier years, he had been on good terms with Arafat, Qaddafi had tried to get Fatah to do his dirty work for him, but Fatah had turned him down. The very last thing the PLO leaders needed was to be further tarnished by providing Qaddafi with "death squads." George Habash's PFLP and Ahmad Jibril's PFLP-General Command had also been approached, but they too had enough sense to refuse Qaddafi's contract. Abu Nidal, on the other hand, had no such inhibitions. In exchange for protection and facilities, he was ready to render whatever services were asked of him. He had worked for the Iraqi government against the Communists, against moderate Palestinians, and against Syria; he had worked for Syria against King Hussein. He was now ready to work for Qaddafi against the Libyan opposition and to stage spectacular operations for him against American, British, and Egyptian targets. Qaddafi felt he needed Abu Nidal. Abu Nidal, in turn, needed Qaddafi. His relationship with Syria had not fulfilled his expectations, and his expansion into Lebanon was starting to cost him a great deal of money. He reckoned that a move to Libya might, at a stroke, solve both problems. So Abu Nidal, in 1984-85, latched on to Qaddafi with great eagerness, treating him with sycophantic respect, giving him presents of inlaid swords whose blades he had had inscribed with fulsome tributes to the "Arab hero." THE WAR OF THE CAMPS The changes being wrought in his organization in Lebanon posed problems for Abu Nidal. To accommodate the new recruits who had flooded in after the collapse of the Fatah mutiny -- to feed, clothe, house, and arm them -- his organization had created a People's Army Directorate, with branches all over Lebanon. As Israel's armies, harried by the Lebanese resistance, fell back toward the border, Abu Nidal's men pushed south as far as Sidon, adding all the while to their numbers as they went along. The original tightly knit, secretive terrorist organization had suddenly come aboveground and rejoined the Palestinian mainstream. While Abu Nidal was abroad in Poland, his organization had taken on a different life and character, presenting him with a number of critical choices: What sort of movement did he wish to command and what sort of leader did he wish to be? The main impetus for the organization's transformation was the so-called War of the Camps, a pitiless struggle between Palestinians and Shi'ites, which lasted from 1985 to 1987, leaving countless thousands dead, wounded, or uprooted from their homes. Traditionally the underdogs of Lebanese society, the Shi'ites of South Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley were victims of exploitation and neglect. They endured still worse suffering when Palestinian guerrillas moved into Lebanon and brought down ferocious Israeli reprisals on their own heads -- and on those of the unfortunate Shi'ites living alongside of them. As a result of Israeli bombing, tens of thousands of Shi'ites abandoned their villages and fled north to shantytowns around Beirut. This unhappy situation led to Shi'ite mobilization under the Imam Musa al-Sadr, a charismatic cleric of Iranian-Lebanese descent who founded his Movement of the Disinherited in 1974, followed in 1975 by a self-defense force called Amal (Hope). As fellow sufferers, Shi'ites and Palestinians were natural allies, but there were tensions between them: The Shi'ites blamed the Palestinians for their plight, so when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, many Shi'ites welcomed them as deliverers from the Palestinians and their women even threw rice at the invading Israeli soldiers in a gesture of welcome. But the Israelis soon outstayed their welcome. And when they sought to impose Maronite rule on the country, the Shi'ites moved into outright opposition. Turning to Syria and Iran for help, they harassed and ambushed the Israelis, eventually forcing them back toward their frontier. The Shi'ite spirit of martyrdom made them particularly adept at suicide attacks, which took a heavy toll of Israeli lives. And once the Israelis had fallen back on their self-styled "security zone" in South Lebanon, the Shi'ites moved in to fill the vacuum. They were determined to recover their villages and fight off all newcomers -- including the Palestinians. They could no longer accept the return of an armed Palestinian presence, which, they feared, would start the whole cycle of Israeli reprisals and Shi'ite suffering again. So when Arafat started infiltrating men back into Lebanon in the mid-1980s and rearming the refugee camps -- from his point of view a justifiable measure of self-defense -- Amal laid siege to the camps and attempted to subdue them. The Palestinians put up stiff resistance. They even carried the fight into the enemy camp by shelling Shi'ite suburbs of Beirut. Violent battles ensued in May/June 1985. The War of the Camps had begun. Shi'ites and Palestinians believed their very survival was at stake. No quarter was given, and each round of fighting had its brutal accompaniment of slaughter. Defenseless civilians perished in large numbers during this terrible confrontation. Over the next two years, the fighting would die down only to flare up again, because the fundamental problem was not resolved: The Shi'ites wanted to be masters in their own house. They could not tolerate a Palestinian force able to act independently. For its part, Syria too could not tolerate the restoration of Palestinian power, which might challenge its own position in Lebanon or expose it to danger from Israel. As Lebanon was vital to Syria's security, Assad supplied the Amal group with arms --- including tanks -- with which to control the Palestinian camps. But Arafat, too, needed to protect his civilians. He was also anxious to show that the PLO was still a force to be reckoned with and that Israel's attempt to smash it had failed. Such was the dilemma confronting Abu Nidal's organization in Lebanon: Should it side with its Syrian patron against the Palestinians? Or should it defend the Palestinian refugee camps besieged by the Syrian-backed Shi'ites? In fact the organization had no choice, because events had already dictated its position. Its very success, since the Fatah mutiny of 1983, in drawing into its ranks hundreds of Palestinian fighters and dozens of political cadres, meant that it could no longer stand by and watch Amal wreak havoc on the refugee camps, and it went to their defense. The War of the Camps was in fact the catalyst that drew the organization out of its shell and caused it to fight beside Arafat's men. The years of hatred and blood that separated them were set aside. This unexpected alliance was spontaneous, forged in the heat of battle and decided by the organization's rank and file, without waiting for word from Abu Nidal. These dramatic developments owed a great deal to one man, Atif Abu Bakr, who defected from Fatah to join Abu Nidal's organization in 1985 (and whom I interviewed over several weeks in Tunis after his break with Abu Nidal). As has been mentioned, he had served as a PLO "ambassador" in Eastern Europe from 1974 to 1984 and was well known as a highly articulate political ideologue and poet. Always a radical, Abu Bakr had watched Arafat's slide toward concession and compromise with growing alarm. For him the breaking point came in November 1984, when Arafat called a meeting of the Palestine National Council in Amman, apparently signaling his acceptance of King Hussein's ideas for a settlement with Israel. A few months later, in February 1985, Arafat and Hussein signed an agreement that seemed to give the king a mandate to negotiate with Israel on the Palestinians' behalf. The radicals were outraged at what looked like a sellout. Abu Bakr went to Syria, resigned from the PLO, and joined Abu Nidal's organization -- one of many to do so at the time. For Abu Nidal's organization, Atif Abu Bakr was a very considerable catch. Not since the days of Naji Allush could it boast of an intellectual of any stature. Within a very short time Abu Bakr was assigned to the organization's top institution, its Political Bureau, and was appointed head of the Political Directorate, as well as official spokesman. But what Atif Abu Bakr really became was the spokesman for the new spirit that swept through the organization in Syria and Lebanon in the mid-1980s, at a time when Abu Nidal, flitting between Warsaw and Tripoli, was engrossed in other things. In his absence, a reconciliation began to take effect between comrades who, ever since the great Fatah split of 1974, had been bitter-at-odds. Past feuds were set aside, and recent defectors from Fatah like Atif Abu Bakr could embrace old defectors like Abu Nizar. Were they not, after all, sons of Fatah? Did they not spring from the same root? Together, Atif Abu Bakr and Abu Nizar drew into the new-style organization many men, both cadres and fighters, who had lost their bearings in the various Palestinian splits and rebellions. Committing these men to the defense of the camps against the assaults of Amal created an atmosphere of revival, of true nationalist struggle. A new joint command was set up. Breaking with the past, it wanted to put an end to intra-Palestinian killings; to give up "foreign operations"; and to build bridges to Fatah, the mother organization from which it had strayed. These men had no love for Arafat, but who actually was in charge no longer mattered. What was important, Atif later told me, was to rebuild a united resistance movement. Propaganda against Fatah, once the staple ingredient of the organization's communiques and publications, was abandoned and the old accusatory language was dropped. In Abu Nidal's magazine, the PLO, which had hitherto been considered irredeemably treacherous, was now described as a "Palestinian house" that all those could enter who wished to confront the common enemy. Such were the views that Atif Abu Bakr passionately promoted. A parallel change took place on the military side. Swollen with new recruits, the People's Army formed five regional commands, covering Lebanon from far north to far south. Still financed (by now rather reluctantly) by Abu Nidal, it became a very visible body, creating infrastructures that could provide its fighters with food, uniforms, and weapons, as well as medical services and political education. Instead of the assassin armed with a bomb or a sniper's rifle, the organization now had men who could drive armored vehicles or could fire missiles, former Fatah officers with years of experience behind them and considerable military skills. The People's Army became the second largest Palestinian fighting force in Lebanon, second only to that of Fatah itself. It was estimated that in 1986 it was costing about $1.5 million a month to run. Instead of being a small, closed, clandestine outfit that Abu Nidal could direct by remote control, the organization was developing into a mass movement with its own strong leaders and cadres. A new power base was being formed inside Abu Nidal's outfit. Swept along by their own enthusiasm, the reformers believed that Abu Nidal would welcome the chance to lead a now popular and powerful faction that had won a new acceptance among Palestinians because of the "national role" it was playing. But they had forgotten the nature of the man and did not yet grasp what he was up to in Libya. They were very soon to be disabused. As we shall see in due course, Abu Nidal was to use the move to Libya to destroy them. Abu Nidal felt that the transformations that had occurred in Lebanon were a grave personal threat to him, so he conspired to reverse them and return the organization to its old fanatical mold. He had by now given up Poland and was traveling back and forth between Tripoli and Damascus -- but it was in Tripoli rather than Damascus that he felt wanted, appreciated, and at ease. His movements to and from Syria were undertaken with Libyan aid and approval, with Libya supplying the carrier, the money, and the passports. And astonishingly enough, they were usually undertaken without the knowledge of the Syrian authorities. The man who escorted him in and out of Syria was Muftah al-Farazani, a Libyan intelligence officer and head of the Libyan People's Bureau in Damascus, who was in direct touch with Libya's intelligence chiefs, Ibrahim al-Bishari and Abdallah al-Sanussi (the latter a particularly powerful figure because of his marriage to Qaddafi's sister-in-law). What Abu Nidal always looked for was a secure base in an Arab country and, with it, the protection of an Arab intelligence service to complement his own elaborate arrangements. When this was not forthcoming, he preferred to withdraw from the Middle East altogether and to live as a recluse abroad, as he did when he went to Poland in 1981, between his falling out with Iraq and his organization's move to Syria. DISAPPOINTMENT WITH SYRIA A key to Abu Nidal's longevity as a terrorist is the extraordinary attention he pays to his personal security. Watchfulness has become second nature, together with a morbid suspicion of everyone and everything. Constantly on the move, he can congratulate himself on never having been caught. He is skillful at disguises, cultivates a nondescript appearance, and travels on an array of Arab passports, some forged and some genuine, preferably ordinary rather than diplomatic ones, because they attract less attention. His bodyguards are totally loyal, and he has known them for years. While parts of his organization are overt and more or less visible -- in Lebanon he even boasts an official spokesman -- he himself remains well in the background, his exact whereabouts at any one time known only to a handful of his associates. It is part of his passion for secrecy that in the course of a long career, he has given only five interviews -- in 1974, 1978, and three times in 1985, which, for a man of his undoubted conceit, suggests a measure of self-denial. (However, petty vanities show through: Although he had little formal education, he likes to be called Doctor -- Dr. Sa'id in the early days, and later Dr. Muhammad.) In the early 1980s, Syria had taken him in and protected him. But the Syrians disappointed him. Even when his organization was well established there, Syria never made him feel as secure as he had felt in Iraq. In Damascus, he was not allowed to meet let alone befriend Syria's political leaders, nor could he match the close relations he had once enjoyed in Baghdad with President Bakr and Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz. He tried repeatedly to get himself officially invited to Damascus, but the Syrians continued to be evasive. Despite the services he rendered them in the terrorist campaign against Jordan, Syrian leaders refused to receive him in person. Theirs was no intimate, formally acknowledged relationship: There was no joint operations room; he had no access to Syrian embassies and diplomatic pouches. A strict ceiling was put on his activities. His organization's contacts remained restricted to General Muhammad al-Khuly's air force intelligence, the more disreputable, strong-arm end of Syria's intelligence apparatus. When he proposed coordinating anti-Iraqi operations with Syria's external intelligence service, headed at the time by General Adnan al-Hamadani, the Syrians declined. What Abu Nidal found particularly frustrating and offensive was the Syrians' refusal to recognize that he had any political legitimacy. No doubt wishing to distance themselves, at least outwardly, from terrorism, they wanted their relationship with him to remain deniable. Syria's veteran defense minister, General Mustafa Tlas, once went so far as to dismiss Abu Nidal as a CIA agent, while President Assad himself could tell foreign visitors in all candor that he had never even seen Abu Nidal. Such circumstances were not calculated to reassure him. On the contrary, Abu Nidal felt threatened, haunted by the thought that in a bid to improve their relations with the West, the Syrians might betray him to the Americans. On his occasional furtive visits to Damascus, it was clear to him that the Syrians preferred not to know he was there. Far away most of the time in the Polish countryside, he could not fully grasp what was going on inside his organization, and his secret policeman's mind brooded over the possibility of conspiracies hatching against him. He insisted on being kept informed of the most minute and trivial details. Once a week, a special messenger would arrive in Poland from Damascus, carrying the organization's mail for him to study and respond to. His colleagues Abu Nizar, Abd al-Rahman Isa, Dr. Ghassan al-Ali were shouldering the daily burden of running an increasingly complex machine. Men had to be trained and briefed and sent on missions. The work of foreign stations had to be monitored. Funds had to be accounted for and archives kept up to date. The growing militia in Lebanon had to be supplied. Accordingly, the letters Abu Nidal sent back to the leadership in Damascus caused great irritation and rumblings of discontent. He would bombard his hard-pressed colleagues with bullying memoranda. Why, he wrote on one occasion, is so-and-so spending so much on apples? The return to Damascus of the weekly messenger was an anxious moment for members of the leadership as they wondered what further importunate demands their chief might make on them. From time to time, to catch up on fast-moving events, Abu Nidal would summon his top aides to a conference at his house outside Warsaw. His harangues would be recorded on tape and would, on his instruction, be played back to those members of the command who had remained behind in Damascus. Abu Nidal's tactic was invariably to be bad-tempered and critical, to set one man against another, to play on differences between them, to reveal what X had said about Y, to stir up trouble. The return of his colleagues to their work in Damascus was always ridden with tension. In early 1985, alarmed at the growth of his organization in Lebanon, Abu Nidal decided to return permanently to the Middle East. He moved his wife and children to Damascus and took a ground-floor apartment in the same building as his chief military colleague, Abu Nizar. But not daring to remain long in any one place, for fear of drawing attention to himself, he moved again within a few months to the small town of Zabadani, some forty minutes by road from Damascus, where, away from the public gaze, he bought two adjoining houses set in a large field. For added protection, he hired half a dozen Alawite peasants, said to be relatives of his mother, to work the land and look after the property. Abu Nidal's wife, Hiyam, did not like the isolation, especially as he was away a good deal, traveling continuously between Poland and Libya. Late in 1985, a violent incident took place that was to have a dramatic impact on their relationship. Hiyam and her brother, Hussein al-Bitar, who lived in Jordan, jointly owned a substantial house and garden in Amman that was valued at a million dollars. Although the property was registered in their names, Abu Nidal claimed it was his, and he may indeed have helped finance its purchase. A bitter family quarrel ensued. Tiring at last of the arguments, Abu Nidal decided to resolve the matter once and for all -- by killing his brother-in-law. Because relations between Jordan and Syria had by now been patched up, he thought it wiser to mount the operation from Kuwait rather than from Damascus. Accordingly, three assassins, traveling on Jordanian passports, were sent into Jordan from Kuwait. On November 24, 1985, Hussein al-Bitar and his five-year-old son, Muhammad, were murdered. In a characteristic communique, Abu Nidal brazenly claimed that Bitar had been killed because he worked for Jordanian intelligence and supported Yasser Arafat. These killings led to a traumatic emotional separation between Abu Nidal and his wife. She demanded a divorce, but he would not consent to it. They continued to live in the same house but began to lead separate lives. Inside the organization, some people said that she stayed because of the children, others that she put up with him because a good deal of the organization's money was deposited in banks in her name. In any event, she started traveling, taking their three children on trips abroad, often to Austria and Switzerland, simply to get away. THE MOVE TO LIBYA It was about this time that Abu Nidal moved triumphantly to Libya. His relationship with Qaddafi really took off in 1985, but it had not always been cloudless between them before. A decade earlier, in 1975, Abu Nidal had sent some junior cadres, mainly students and teachers, to live covertly in Tripoli and Benghazi, where they were to spread the word and distribute his literature. In 1977, when Libya and Egypt came to the brink of war, these people supported Libya and some even volunteered to be sent to the front, a display of loyalty that induced the Libyans to allow Abu Nidal's organization to open an office on Umar al-Mukhtar Street in Tripoli. Perhaps more to the point, Qaddafi was then on poor terms with Fatah, and especially with Abu Iyad, following a row they had had when they were both being entertained by President Boumedienne in Algiers. Qaddafi had urged Fatah to adopt his Green Book as its ideological bible. But Abu Iyad, as he told me later, could not help laughing at the suggestion. "It's no book at all," he told Qaddafi. "Whoever wrote it for you did you a great disservice!" Qaddafi was so angry that in 1977-78 he cut off his aid to the PLO, which was then running at $12 million a year in cash and another $50 million in stores and equipment. Another, perhaps more important, source of coolness was Fatah's refusal to fall in with Qaddafi's request to kidnap or kill a prominent Libyan opposition figure, Abd al-Mun'im al-Huni, one of the original Free Officers and a former head of Libyan intelligence, who had fallen out with Qaddafi and taken refuge in Egypt and whose head the colonel wanted. So for a moment in 1977-78 Abu Nidal's people were in favor in Tripoli. But this did not last long. When, as we shall see, Abu Nidal started killing PLO moderates in 1978 -- Sa'id Hammami was killed in London in January and Ali Yassin in Kuwait in June -- Fatah retaliated by attacking the organization's Tripoli office in July, killing two of Abu Nidal's men. (It was said that this was done. with the complicity of Libya's minister of the interior, Colonel Khwaldi al-Humaidi, whose sympathies were with Fatah.) The Libyans decided to close down the organization's office and evict its members. Cells they had formed were dismantled. To try to patch up relations, Abu Nidal paid a flying visit to Tripoli on December 30, 1979, to see Libya's prime minister, Abd al-Salam Jallud, but he was not invited to see Qaddafi. In spite of his tiff with Abu Iyad, Qaddafi had no interest in seriously alienating Arafat or in muscling in on Iraq's turf, for Abu Nidal was, at that time, thought of as an Iraqi creature. Abu Nidal had to wait until 1982 for another chance to make his mark in Libya -- and once again it was as a result of a breakdown in Libyan-Fatah relations. During Israel's siege of Beirut, when the Palestinians were holding out under intense bombardment, Qaddafi sent Arafat a now famous telegram in which he urged him to commit suicide rather than allow Israel to expel him. Arafat replied that his fighters were ready for the supreme sacrifice provided that Qaddafi joined them. Acidly, he added that his present circumstances would not have been so desperate had Qaddafi delivered the weapons he had promised. Affronted, Qaddafi cooled toward Arafat, and when the Fatah mutiny occurred in 1983 and a Syrian-based "National Salvation Front" emerged, grouping most of Arafat's Palestinian opponents, Qaddafi was quick to lend it his support. Conditions were now propitious for Abu Nidal's reentry into Libya. This was the background to his arrival there in 1985. Now it was done properly. Abu Nidal began by appointing Hamdan Abu Asba (code-named Azmi Hussein), a cadre from the Intelligence Directorate, as his personal liaison officer with Libyan security. Asba was followed in Tripoli by Ali al-Farra (code-named Dr. Kamal), one of Abu Nidal's most trusted associates: His residence in Libya signaled that Abu Nidal had now made Libya his principal base. More cadres from other directorates were soon in place. Libyan planes and embassies, passports, diplomatic pouches, and communications were put at Abu Nidal's disposal. And as the relationship expanded and grew warmer, Qaddafi gave Abu Nidal villas and apartments in Tripoli, housing outside the capital, and two farms -- all free of charge. Most of these properties had been expropriated from members of the Libyan opposition who had fled abroad. The Libyans were generous with air tickets, travel expenses, and hospitality of all sorts, putting up in hotels or private villas members who were passing through. A year later, in 1986, Libyan intelligence also provided the organization with international telephone lines, then a precious commodity because, after the American attack on Libya of April 1986, direct dialing was discontinued and all outgoing calls had to be routed through an operator. The Libyans not only provided the lines but also paid the bills. More significantly, from 1985 onward the Libyans helped the organization transport weapons into Libya to store them there; also, to transport weapons out of Libya and hide them in caches in Europe, Africa, and Asia. In some cases arms were handed by the Libyans to members of the organization when they were already on board aircraft at Tripoli airport; in other cases, arms were sent abroad by Libyan diplomatic bag and handed to members of the organization at Libyan embassies. For all practical purposes, Abu Nidal had ceased to be an independent operator. His main places of residence and of work, as well as those of his organization, and the facilities that made his sort of work possible were gifts from Libyan intelligence. He had become so closely involved with Libyan intelligence that it had become impossible to tell them apart. A pet idea of Qaddafi's was the National Command of Arab Revolutionary Forces, which he set up at this time in an attempt to assert his leadership of radical movements throughout the area. This was the body through which other Palestinian factions, such as Ahmad Jibril's or Abu Musa's, were obliged to deal with the Libyan government. In contrast, Abu Nidal's organization dealt direct with Libyan intelligence. It was the only Palestinian organization to do so. Abu Nidal was quick to grasp that Libya had very poor resources for intelligence gathering. Staffed by badly trained amateurs, its networks were virtually useless. Its officers were lazy and easily became dependent on others to do the work for them. As one source put it: "If you said to the Libyans, 'I will get you information about Chad,' they would stop all inquiries of their own and wait for you to hand them a file on a plate." So in addition to the surveillance, harassment, and assassination of the Libyan opposition abroad, Abu Nidal put his organization to work collecting information on Libya's behalf. Immersing himself in the task, he was soon to gain virtual control of Libya's intelligence apparatus. For Abu Nidal, the years 1985-87 were a time of fruitful ambiguity in which he found himself situated between Syria and Libya. But there was no doubt which of the two he preferred. Qaddafi had invited him into the very heart of the Libyan system, where Abu Nidal loved to be. The Libyans allowed him to organize and proselytize in the resident Palestinian community, to conduct an energetic publicity campaign for his organization -- in short, to be politically active. Qaddafi and Abu Nidal had now become partners. Insiders who attended their many meetings at this time reported that they hugely enjoyed each other's company and happily spent their time together abusing their enemies -- before plotting how best to destroy them.
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