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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 8: Murder of the Moderates Ben-Gurion said that whoever
approaches the Zionist problem from
a moral aspect is not a Zionist.
The PLO? A bunch of traitors
penetrated by a few patriots. As I charted Abu Nidal's career in Iraq and his subsequent moves to Syria and Libya, he seemed to me at first a classic case of a Palestinian faction leader who, in search of safe haven, had turned mercenary, and then, in search of financial independence, had turned gangster. I reviewed the information I had gathered. Iraq had "created" him when it wanted the leadership of Arab radicalism but had dropped him during its war with Iran. Syria had taken him on to fight its terrorist war against Jordan but had lost him to Libya, which had used him against its "stray dogs" and other external enemies. All three Arab "sponsors," hostile to an independent PLO, had also used Abu Nidal to keep Arafat in check. Abu Nidal himself posed as the supreme rejectionist, a diehard opponent of the negotiated settlement with Israel that the "capitulationist" Arafat had been angling for since 1974. But it was evident that he was also running an extortion racket, with little reference to the Palestine cause. In fact most of his operations seemed to do the Palestinians harm. The man was a puzzle. I couldn't understand what drove him. Widening the scope of my inquiries, I left Tunis and its hothouse politics of defectors and guerrilla fighters to consult sources in Europe and the Middle East. I interviewed intelligence and police officers, as well as journalists and politicians, people who for one reason or another had a professional interest in the Israeli-Palestinian war because some of its battles had been, and continue to be, fought on their territory. What view did they have of Abu Nidal and his organization? I heard two quite different explanations. The conventional view was the one Abu Nidal advanced -- that he represented one extreme pole of the internal Palestinian debate, which had raged for twenty years, about whether a compromise with Israel was possible or even desirable. But a second opinion put forward by some of my sources was more sensational -- and more in line with Abu Iyad's allegations: Abu Nidal was a tool of the Israelis, either because his organization had been penetrated by the Mossad (much as the Mossad had penetrated every other Palestinian faction, at one time or another, over the past twenty-five years) or because he himself had been recruited. The argument was usually stated like this: In theory, Israel and Abu Nidal are bitter enemies; in practice, their anti-PLO objectives and operations are so similar as to suggest an operational relationship. In this view, Abu Nidal was less a product of intra-Palestinian disputes than of Israel's long-running war against the Palestinians. Whatever jobs he might have done for Arab sponsors, and they had been numerous and nasty, he had done many other jobs from which Israel alone appeared to "benefit." Hard evidence remained scant, but as I discovered, the subject was gossiped about a good deal. A senior Jordanian intelligence officer, now retired and living in Amman, told me, "Scratch around inside Abu Nidal's organization and you will find Mossad." Much of this man's career had been spent liaising with Israeli intelligence and running agents against Palestinian organizations. It is not widely known that Israel and Jordan worked together from the late 1960s to contain what they saw as a common threat from the Palestinian guerrillas. The Jordanian intelligence officer supplied no evidence to support his remarks, but his view is typical of the widespread gossip that surrounds this supposition in Mideast intelligence circles. The grave crisis of 1970-71, in which King Hussein put down the Palestinian rebellion, greatly strengthened the Israeli- Jordanian intelligence relationship. As my Jordanian source explained, the guerrillas shook King Hussein's throne; they called on Syrian tanks for support; they assassinated Hussein's prime minister, Wasfi al-Tal. It was not surprising that Hussein should look to Israel as a counterweight to Syria during the crisis itself, and afterward coordinate with it the intelligence war against the fedayeen. Most Palestinians thus found themselves controlled by two powers, Israel and Jordan, whose excellent intelligence services wanted to contain Palestinian militancy and penetrate the various Palestinian groups beyond their borders. When the Black September terrorist movement emerged in the early 1970s, Israel, Jordan, and other affected states had a further strong incentive to plant agents in Palestinian networks and training camps to monitor, and if possible abort, hostile operations. The intriguing hint dropped by the Jordanian intelligence officer about a Mossad-Abu Nidal connection was put more strongly by some of my other sources. A German security officer engaged in counterterrorism, whom I interviewed in London in April 1990, told me, "Israel needs to control men such as Abu Nidal. It must neutralize him. If it can make use of him, so much the better. Any intelligence service would do the same if it could." But this, of course, was still only an opinion based on a general observation. Then a French government expert on international terrorism, with considerable Middle East experience, said to me in the course of a long interview in 1991, "If Abu Nidal himself is not an Israeli agent, then two or three of his senior people most certainly are. Nothing else can explain some of his operations. But," he added, "the tracks are well covered and proof will be hard to find." Among such people it was widely assumed that there was some overlap, some common ground between Abu Nidal and the Mossad. Some thought the penetration was at a low level; some believed that senior men had been recruited, perhaps even Abu Nidal himself and members of his extended family. A former CIA officer, who had served as station head in several Arab countries and whose attitude toward the Arab-Israeli conflict was detached and professional, was more explicit: "It's as easy," he said, "to recruit the man at the top as it is someone lower down the ladder. It's quite likely that Mossad picked up Abu Nidal in the late 1960s, when it was putting a lot of effort into penetrating the newly formed Palestinian guerrilla groups. My guess is that they would have got him in the Sudan when he was there with Fatah in 1969. Once they had set him up, funded, and directed him, he would have had nowhere else to turn. If he had tried to quit, he would have been a dead man. "The British could not have done it, or the French, or the Americans. Only Israel would have had the professionalism and the motivation to nurture and control him over twenty years." This sort of argument from an intelligence professional sounded plausible, but once again proof was absent. On the whole I tended to discount Palestinian evidence on this subject as surely biased. One Palestinian who had had plenty of time to study Israeli methods was Abu Ali Shahin, a veteran guerrilla fighter who was captured by Israel in the West Bank in 1967 for setting up a clandestine cell and who spent the next seventeen years in Israeli jails -- the first thirteen years and ten months, he told me, in solitary confinement. When I interviewed him in Tunis in August 1990, I found him to be a small, strong man of about sixty, with a thick mustache, round glasses, and patient, fathomless eyes. His hatred for Israel ran deep, but nevertheless he seemed capable of objective judgments. Once he was out of solitary confinement, he was able to question other prisoners about their experiences. "Israel," he told me, "makes great efforts to 'turn' prisoners in jail, using all sorts of pressures and inducements. It also recruits Palestinian students who leave Israel to study at Arab universities, most of whom are instructed to penetrate Palestinian organizations and report back. Israel has a permanent interest in penetrating Palestinian groups, Abu Nidal's organization among them." THE NEED TO PENETRATE The principle of penetration is well established. It is a commonplace of intelligence work that effective counterterrorism or counterinsurgency vitally depends on intelligence from inside the enemy camp. Ever since it resorted to armed struggle in the mid-1960s, the Palestinian guerrilla movement has been too dangerous to be left alone. All the major players in the region, and a good many outside it, have found it necessary to monitor and control its activities -- in other words, to try to penetrate it. Some guerrilla groups are penetrated almost openly. In Fatah, for example, can be found a pro-Iraqi faction, a pro- Egyptian faction, a pro-Syrian faction -- and, if not a pro-Israeli faction, then a good many Israeli agents. Abu Nidal's organization, jealous of its secrets, is harder to penetrate, but for obvious reasons, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Fatah, and Israel all seek to penetrate it and, probably, have often succeeded. Penetration agents from most of the Arab countries abound in all the Palestinian groups. Arab states need to control the Palestinians for three main reasons. The first is security. Because Israel usually responds to Palestinian attacks by retaliating violently against Arab countries that shelter Palestinians, Arab states need to keep abreast of Palestinian activities to protect themselves against reprisals. The second is prestige. The ordeal of the Palestinians is so large a part of contemporary Arab consciousness that every Arab ruler wants to be seen as the Palestinians' champion. The third reason has to do with inter-Arab feuds. The Palestinians are so often used by Arab regimes against one another that at one time or another, most Arab states have sought to control the PLO. When they have failed to do so, states like Syria or Iraq have set up their own Palestinian factions to use against their rivals or against the PLO itself. But no state in the region is more obsessed with the Palestinians than Israel. As a former Israeli intelligence officer explained to me, Israel has targeted Palestinian groups of all political colors for the past quarter of a century. To have done otherwise would have been self-destructive neglect of national responsibility. For this purpose, Israel has mainly drawn on the large Palestinian population that came under its rule after the Six-Day War of 1967, over which it exercises powers of life and death. Whether bought or coerced, Palestinian agents have been taken on in large numbers by the Shin Bet, Israel's security service, and by the Mossad, its intelligence service, and have been used both to crush resistance in the occupied territories and to infiltrate guerrilla groups outside. Ze'ev Schiff, a respected Israeli military correspondent, reported in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz on August 21, 1989, that informants or collaborators in the territories -- the sort of people who, during the intifada, have been the victims of often savage killings by fellow Palestinians -- were estimated to number about five thousand. As early as 1967, an Israeli recruitment drive for Palestinian agents was aptly named Operation Flood because of the large numbers netted. "The Israelis go in for quantity," my Jordanian intelligence source told me. "They try to recruit almost every Palestinian student traveling to an Arab country. This way they can't lose. If a student agrees to work for them, they have gained an informer. If he refuses, they don't let him back into the occupied territories and they are therefore rid of yet another Palestinian!" These young Palestinians come under great pressure. Unless they cooperate, they risk not seeing their families again. Often, they are the only breadwinner in the family and simply have no choice but to return. So they start reporting to the Mossad through the post-office box addresses they are given. Thanks to information from such agents, Israel was able, in the late 1960s, to stifle at birth the guerrilla war the Palestinians hoped to wage against it and to keep on top of the Palestinian problem ever since. DEATH OF AN AGENT RUNNER In Cyprus in the spring of 1991, and after elaborate negotiations, I was able to interview a retired Fatah intelligence officer, a tall, thin man with a long nose and doleful eyes, who claimed he had lured a Mossad agent runner, Baruch Cohen, to his death in Madrid in 1973. Cohen had set up a Europe-wide network of Palestinian student informers, which he used to penetrate guerrilla movements. The Fatah officer first explained how the trap had been baited. In 1972, when he was studying in Spain on a stipend from his brother in Kuwait, Fatah had instructed him to write to his parents in the occupied territories to say that he was so short of money that he was thinking of giving up his studies. Fatah knew that Mossad censored the mail and, on learning of his financial straits, would consider him a potential recruit. Sure enough, shortly afterward, in October 1972, the Palestinian was telephoned by a man calling himself Sami Haddad, who, speaking to him in Arabic with a Jerusalem accent, said he was a friend of his brother in Kuwait. They arranged to meet at the Plaza Hotel in Madrid. "He was a small, kindly man," the former Fatah officer told me, "and he began merrily enough, joking and talking, telling me how much of a financial burden I was to my brother and mentioning the complaints I had made to my parents. I talked to him as if I really believed he was a family friend. Then he turned serious and suddenly told me that he belonged to Mossad. He asked me to work for him." Although the Palestinian had been set up to solicit just such an approach, his feelings got the better of him. He had left the West Bank before the 1967 war and had had no previous contact with Israelis. He leaped to his feet and said he could not continue the conversation. "Sit down!" Sami Haddad said scornfully. "I have a letter for you from your father." "You're a liar! My father can't write." The letter was written in the hand of his younger brother, a boy in sixth grade who used to write his father's letters for him. "Your family is in our power," Haddad told him. "You are responsible for their lives. If you want them to stay alive, you had better do as I tell you." Pretending to be suitably intimidated, the Palestinian agreed to supply Haddad with the information he wanted -- which was mainly about the activities of Palestinian students and student groups in Spain and about the PLO office in Madrid. He reported to him regularly about these matters over a three-month period. At one of their secret meetings, Sami Haddad told the Palestinian that he had been recalled to Tel Aviv to investigate the Red Front, a spy network of left-wing Jews and Arab nationalists said to be in Syria's pay. But according to the retired Fatah officer, Fatah agents in Madrid, who had been keeping Haddad under surveillance, learned that his real destination was not Tel Aviv but Brussels, where he was based at the Israeli embassy. They also discovered that his real name was Colonel Baruch Cohen and that he had been involved in the murder of two PLO representatives in Europe -- Wa'il Zu'aitar, in Rome in October 1972, and Mahmud al-Hamshari, in Paris in December. My informant told me that Fatah then decided to kill Baruch Cohen on his return to Madrid. The Palestinian met Cohen again in mid-January, when Cohen instructed him to go to Lebanon in order to penetrate one of the Black September cells operating from Beirut. They agreed to meet again on January 26 to go over the details at La Palmera Cafe, on Jose Antonio Street. But this time the Palestinian had brought along an accomplice armed with a pistol, who waited at a newspaper kiosk near the entrance to the cafe. When Cohen stepped out of the cafe, he was gunned down at close range. The two Palestinians escaped. But such PLO successes were rare. Abu Iyad told me they had managed to kill six Mossad agents over the years but had lost many more men themselves. It was, he said, an unequal struggle. FROM PENETRATION TO MANIPULATION As the Baruch Cohen case showed, Israeli penetration of Palestinian organizations was common, but it was clearly not the whole story. Most intelligence sources I consulted agreed that it was standard practice to use penetration agents not simply to neutralize or destroy the enemy but to try to manipulate him so that he did one's bidding without always being aware of doing so. If the exercise was successful, the enemy's organization became an unwitting extension of one's own. For practitioners of counterespionage, this was the stuff of dreams. Israel, my intelligence sources argued, was bound to see an extremist Palestinian like Abu Nidal as someone to be provoked or manipulated because of the damage he could do inside the Palestinian movement. His rejectionist views made him an obvious instrument to use against Arafat and the PLO. If he could be encouraged to kill Arafat loyalists, so much the better. Gerard Chaliand, a French expert on irregular warfare, explains in his book Terrorism: From Popular Struggle to Media Spectacle (1978) how a state can sometimes play on the internal contradictions of a guerrilla or liberation movement by manipulating even a small fraction of it. He cites the example of PIDE, the Portuguese secret police, which engineered the assassination of Amilcar Cabral, leader of the anti-Portuguese movement in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, by manipulating members of Cabral's own PAIGC party. The Black Guineans were promised independence on the condition that they got rid of the half-caste Cape Verdians, of whom Cabral was one. There are numerous examples of such devious tactics in the struggles waged by intelligence services against insurgents in many parts of the world. But the fact that manipulation of liberation movements has occurred elsewhere does not amount to evidence in the case of Abu Nidal. Nonetheless, it gave me a lead. I determined to take a closer look at the spate of murders of moderate Palestinians, focusing in particular on five well-known Palestinian "doves" -- Hammami, Yassin, Qalaq, Khudr, and Sartawi -- killed in London, Kuwait, Paris, Brussels, and Portugal between 1978 and 1983, allegedly by Abu Nidal. Was there any evidence, I wondered, of an Israeli involvement in these killings? There was plenty of evidence of Israeli penetration of Palestinian groups, but as the retired Israeli general in military intelligence had told me, manipulation was another matter. THE BOMB AND THE BULLET Throughout their recent history, many Palestinians have been killed by both Israel and their fellow Arabs. In more than forty years of bloodletting, Palestinians have died in the 1947-48 war that led to the creation of Israel; the 1967 war, in which Israel conquered the rest of Palestine; the showdown with King Hussein of Jordan and the "pacification" of Gaza by General Ariel Sharon, both in 1970-71; the battles in Lebanon against the Maronites and against Syria in 1975-77; Israel's two invasions of Lebanon, in 1978 and 1982; the intra-Palestinian fighting at the time of the Fatah mutiny of 1983; the War of the Camps between Palestinians and Shi'ites in 1986-87; Israel's repression of the intifada from 1987 onward and its repeated bombing of Palestinian settlements and positions up to the present time; and of course, the punishment inflicted on the Palestinians, in Kuwait and elsewhere, for their stance in favor of Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf war. In addition to these "battlefield" deaths, the resistance has suffered many assassinations. As was clear from the list I drew up at the start, many of its brightest people have been gunned down or blown up in cold blood either by Israel or by Abu Nidal. Yasser Arafat has so far escaped assassination -- although he has had a number of narrow escapes, notably during the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982 and, again, in 1985, when Israel bombed his Tunis headquarters. In the meantime, the murder of so many of his associates has crippled the PLO. I started by reviewing the political background to the murder of the moderates. Abu Nidal's split from Fatah, the most damaging factional dispute in its history, occurred in October 1974, at a crucial moment in the fortunes of the resistance movement. Yasser Arafat had persuaded Arab leaders to recognize the PLO as the "sole legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people; he had tamed Black September activists and largely put an end to PLO terrorism; he had gone on to address the UN General Assembly and won observer status for his organization. His efforts to persuade his followers to substitute political action for armed struggle strongly suggested that he wanted a peaceful settlement with Israel. As we have seen, for both Israeli and Palestinian hard-liners this program was a deadly threat, and over the following years, Arafat found himself caught between two fires, neither of them friendly. The Israeli right considered that any concession to Palestinian nationalism undercut the legitimacy of the Zionist enterprise and threatened the integrity of the "land of Israel." What such hardliners found especially dangerous was that Arafat had managed to alter the world's perception of the Palestine problem from an Arab-Israeli border conflict, involving some displaced refugees, to a struggle for self-determination by a national liberation movement. The more sympathy Arafat won for the PLO, the higher his international profile, the more urgent it became for Israel and its friends to stop him. When the Labor party's Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister, Israel's attitude toward the Palestinians was negative enough: Rabin had no interest in encouraging PLO moderates and opposed the establishment of a Palestinian state. But the policy became one of violent and unflinching rejection once Menachem Begin came to power in May 1977. However strenuously Arafat sought to steer his movement toward moderation, Begin was determined to give him neither an ounce of recognition nor an inch of territory. Begin, and his successor Yitzhak Shamir, saw Palestinian moderates as their real enemy because, by mobilizing international and Israeli opinion in favor of a peace settlement, they risked forcing Israel into negotiations that might lead to territorial concession. Israel has made no secret of its utter refusal to deal with the PLO, as successive American administrations have discovered in their efforts to promote Middle East peace talks. In 1986, Yossi Ben-Aharon, the influential director-general of the prime minister's office and Yitzhak Shamir's political adviser, was candid about Israel's policy toward the PLO. There is no place for any division in the Israeli camp between Likud and Labor. There is in fact cooperation and general understanding, certainly with regard to the fact that the PLO cannot be a participant in discussions or in anything.... No one associated with the PLO can represent the issue of the Palestinians. If there is any hope for arrangements that will solve this problem, then the prior condition must be to destroy the PLO from its roots in this region. Politically, psychologically, socially, economically, ideologically. It must not retain a shred of influence ... Israel's strategy to destroy the PLO by all possible means has included sending specially trained commando units to assassinate Palestinian leaders and waging a full-scale war in Lebanon in 1982 to liquidate Arafat's organization physically. It was therefore not implausible that if it could, it would use Abu Nidal to kill key men in Arafat's camp. An alliance of rejectionists was not inconceivable. Just as Israel considered the PLO a menace to be rooted out, so Abu Nidal branded Arafat a traitor for considering the "surrender" to Israel of 80 percent of Palestinian territory, condemning most Palestinians never to return to their original homes. Before 1974, Abu Nidal had been a rallying point for Arafat's left-wing critics within Fatah. After 1974, he became something more deadly: He split the Palestinian movement, identified it with terrorism, and then silenced the moderates by killing them. He justified his position to his followers by preaching that Arafat and his Fatah colleagues were the "enemy within" -- an enemy that, he said, was more dangerous to the Palestinian revolution than the external Zionist enemy. Fatah, he thundered, was run by traitors who threatened to wreck the revolution by working for a "peaceful solution" with Israel. It was absolutely essential to prevent any such "surrender." The treacherous "enemy within" had to be struck down. In their parallel anti-PLO activities, to what extent did Israel and Abu Nidal act independently of each other and to what extent were their efforts coordinated? This, my intelligence sources said, was the puzzle every service was anxious to crack. I reflected that in the murders of the Palestinian moderates, alternative explanations could be found. For example, if Abu Iyad's suspicions were correct, Abu Nidal may have killed Palestinian doves because Israel wished to eliminate Palestinian moderates who had made an impression on Western leaders; but he may also have killed them because he believed they were traitors who consorted with the Israeli enemy. It could be argued, however, that the successful manipulation of an apparently hostile organization was usually possible only under the cover of an alternative explanation. If some of these moderates had not been abused and vilified in Abu Nidal's own magazine as traitors to the Palestinian revolution, killing them, if the killings were indeed manipulated from outside, could not have been justified by Abu Nidal as the apt response to treachery. Moreover, Abu Nidal's violence made it easier for Israel to depict all Palestinians as terrorists and murderers and to define the PLO as an outlaw group with which no peaceful dealings could be contemplated. This fitted in well with the Israeli view that the PLO should never be allowed to escape from the terrorist stigma or be accepted as a partner in the peace process. "How can you negotiate with a man who wants to kill you?" was a familiar Israeli query. THE CAMPAIGN OF MURDER On January 4, 1978, a single bullet to the head killed Sa'id Hammami, Arafat's dovish "ambassador" to London. The lone gunman spat at him and called him a traitor as he fired, and ran off. A few weeks earlier, in November 1977, Egypt's President Sadat had visited Israel-- a bold initiative hailed in the West as a breakthrough but condemned by many Arabs as a betrayal. Arafat, too, condemned Sadat, but so hesitantly that Arab rejectionists suspected him of wanting to go to Israel himself. Everyone knew that he had encouraged Hammami, his man in London, to put out peace feelers to the Israeli left. For Abu Nidal and his Iraqi backers, such contacts were treachery and Hammami deserved to die. Hammami was one of the most eloquent Palestinian advocates of peaceful coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis. From 1975 onward, he had held a series of meetings with Israeli peace campaigners, notably with the editor and writer Uri Avnery, whose book My Friend, the Enemy (1986) gives a moving account of these furtive but unfruitful encounters. Hammami's was the first in a series of terrorist murders that, over the next five years, killed the most thoughtful and persuasive Palestinian spokesmen in the West. Clearly, now that Arafat was ready to talk peace, someone was out to wreck his diplomacy and leave him powerless. As a result moderates in the Palestinian movement were scared into silence. Few now dared pursue contacts with the Israeli left: The hit-and-run attacks had shown how vulnerable these PLO doves were, and that protecting them was hardly a priority of European police forces. Nevertheless, the British police established that Hammami's killer was Kayid Hussein (sometimes known as As'ad Kayid), a Tunisian member of Abu Nidal's organization, registered in London as a student. On February 13, 1978, a little more than a month after Sa'id Hammami's murder, a meeting was held in London to honor him. One of the speakers was Claude Bourdet, a leading member of the wartime French resistance, founder of the underground paper Combat, and no stranger to intelligence operations. He concluded his address with the following words: Could it not be that the masterminds behind Sa'id's death -- not the people who pressed the trigger and protected the murderer, not even the people who ordered the murder, but possibly those who, by cunning and deceit, by subtle intoxication of less subtle brains -- contrived a situation where the organizers of the murder were led to believe that they were doing a service to the Arab, to the Palestinian cause ... There are many ways of provoking a killing. Other than doing it. Other than ordering it. It would not be the first time in history that extreme radicals are manipulated by foreign agents -- in ways they themselves are unable to understand. Bourdet's suggestion that Hammami's killer might have been manipulated by foreign agents is, of course, pure conjecture, but the foreign agents he had in mind were the Israelis, as he told some of those who attended the memorial service. Here was an experienced Frenchman, I reflected, who shared Abu Iyad's suspicions. Both Arab and Israeli rejectionists had reason to want Hammami dead. Abu Nidal and Iraq's leaders detested him for his language of reconciliation. I learned from Abu Bakr that in the months before Hammami's death, Abu Nidal's organization had demanded that he call a press conference to denounce Arafat. Hammami had refused. But Israel's hard-liners also loathed him for his advocacy of a two-state solution and his impact on British opinion. It was clear that Abu Nidal's man had done the deed with Iraqi approval. But had Israel, by manipulation, given the murderous process a nudge? So far as I could see, there was no evidence for it and the mystery remained unsolved. On February 18, 1978, a few days after the service for Hammami, Abu Nidal struck again. Two of his men burst into the lobby of the Hilton Hotel in Nicosia and shot to death Yusuf al-Siba'i, editor of the Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram and a confidant of President Sadat, whom he had accompanied to Jerusalem. The aim was to punish Sadat and give him a taste of what he, too, might expect. Defectors from Abu Nidal's organization told me in Tunis that the operation had been mounted by Samih Muhammad Khudr (code-named Zuhair al-Rabbah) -- one of Abu Nidal's most dangerous foreign operatives, of whom more will be heard -- in close coordination with Iraqi intelligence. This sounded plausible as Iraq was then taking the lead in ostracizing Egypt for its contacts with Israel. Once they had killed Siba'i, the gunmen seized hostages at the hotel, then demanded and were given a Cyprus Airways plane, which flew around the region looking for a place to land. But on being turned away everywhere, the plane returned to Larnaca. In the meantime, Sadat had sent in a force of Egyptian commandos to overpower the gunmen and free the hostages. The Cypriots resented this foreign interference. When the Egyptians landed, they were engaged by the Cypriot National Guard, which killed fifteen of them in an hour-long battle. As Cyprus and Egypt exchanged bitter recriminations, the gunmen released their hostages and surrendered. It seemed to me a good example of Abu Nidal's disruptive abilities. THE KILLINGS OF YASSIN AND QALAQ A few months later, three more prominent PLO "ambassadors" were attacked. On June 15, 1978, Ali Yassin, Fatah's representative in Kuwait and a noted moderate, was shot to death in his home; on August 3, 1978, Izz al-Din Qalaq, PLO representative in France, a cultured, soft-spoken, and dedicated Palestinian who had made a considerable impression on French opinion, was murdered in Paris; and two days after that, on August 5, gunmen attacked the PLO office in Islamabad, killing four people but missing Yusif Abu Hantash, the PLO representative. The PLO immediately blamed Abu Nidal and Iraq. The killing of Yassin aroused particular fury. "I never wanted to kill Abu Nidal until the day he murdered Ali Yassin," Abu Iyad told me. (He added that he had attempted to have him killed several times -- on one occasion he actually took the weapons into Baghdad himself, on one of his official visits. But Iraqi intelligence guarded Abu Nidal as securely as it guarded President Bakr or Saddam Hussein.) Yassin had been everyone's friend -- he had been Abu Nidal's friend, too, and had even kept him supplied in Baghdad with cars and gifts of electrical appliances from Kuwait. To the Palestinian movement, his murder seemed wicked and incomprehensible. To avenge Yassin, Fatah went to war, firing rockets at the Iraqi embassy in Beirut on July 17, 1978, and, two days later, storming Abu Nidal's office in Tripoli, Libya, killing two of his members. On July 24, Fatah planted a bomb outside the Iraqi embassy in Brussels, and on July 28 the Iraqi ambassador in London escaped an attempt on his life. On July 31, Sa'id Hammami's brother, Ahmad, tried to seize the Iraqi embassy in Paris, whereupon members of the embassy staff opened fire, killing a French police inspector. Then, on August 3, 1978, Qalaq was killed in Paris (together with Adnan Hammad, brother of Nimr Hammad, the PLO representative in Rome, who happened to be paying Qalaq a visit). Qalaq's office was above a cafe. On his way up to his office, he waved to a student he recognized sitting at a table. It was his killer. When Qalaq realized that the student was coming up after him, he tried to barricade himself by moving a cupboard against the door. But the killer broke the door down and pushed the cupboard aside. As in the case of Hammami, the assassin was overheard calling him a traitor before shooting him and running off. Qalaq's killer was the same Tunisian, Kayid Hussein, who had killed Hammami in London, who had then moved to Paris and registered in a language school. Who, I wondered, was responsible this time? Was it Iraq, or was some other party involved? A partial answer was to emerge a few months later. Early in November 1978, an Arab summit was convened in Baghdad to condemn Egypt for signing the Camp David accords with Israel. For the occasion, Syria and Iraq were temporarily reconciled. As he prepared to leave for Baghdad, Syria's president, Assad, decided to take Arafat and Abu Iyad with him, so that they too could make their peace with Iraq's president, Bakr, and his deputy, Saddam Hussein, and put an end to the Iraqi-PLO war caused by Iraq's support for Abu Nidal's murders of PLO moderates. Bakr gave a reception at his home for the visiting Arab delegations and was persuaded to invite Arafat, although he was still not on speaking terms with him. At some point in the evening, Bakr could contain himself no longer. According to an eyewitness (Khalid al-Fahum, a veteran Palestinian politician, who told me the story), Bakr marched up to Arafat and screamed at him: "All right! We killed Hammami! Yes, we did it. But as for the others, we were not involved. We had nothing to do with their deaths!" It is hard to see what Bakr would have had to gain from lying. Killing opponents was something he and his deputy, Saddam Hussein, did every day. They were not shy about it. In denying responsibility for the killings of Yassin and Qalaq, Bakr was probably telling the truth. Abu Iyad later told me that Iraq's intelligence chief, Sa'dun Shakir, and the foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, also strenuously denied any Iraqi involvement in these killings and that he was inclined to believe them. In 1987 when, as we shall see, Abu Iyad had a night-long confrontation with Abu Nidal in Algiers, arranged by Algerian intelligence, Abu Nidal would admit to killing Hammami, but he also repeatedly denied having had a hand in the murders of Yassin and Qalaq. Even inside his highly compartmentalized organization, defectors later told me, there was puzzlement about these murders, with different directorates blaming each other. If neither Iraqi intelligence nor Abu Nidal ordered the killings, who did? Perhaps there was a hint here of outside intervention. Qalaq, in Paris, and Yassin, in the Gulf, were men who preached peace and urged a settlement with Israel -- one that would involve Israel giving up territory. They were both eloquent exponents of Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, of a two-state solution, ideas that were anathema to the Likud, the governing coalition in Israel. Certainly, they did not fit Begin's standard smear of the PLO as "the blackest organization -- other than the Nazi murder organizations -- ever to arise in the annals of humanity." THE KILLING OF ALI HASSAN SALAMEH Whether or not the Israelis had had a hand in the murder of Qalaq and Yassin, they were soon killing other Palestinians without the help of anyone. Within a few weeks of the Baghdad summit, on January 22, 1979, an Israeli car bomb in a Beirut street killed Fatah's security chief, Ali Hassan Salameh (also known as Abu Hassan), together with four of his bodyguards and five passersby. Another powerful blow had been struck in Israel's war against the PLO. The rumor was that Israel was exacting revenge for Salameh's role in Black September operations five years earlier. The able young Salameh had been Abu Iyad's deputy in rasd al-markazi, the counterespionage outfit Fatah had set up in 1967, but he had broken with Fatah during the Jordanian crisis of 1970. He then took over one of Black September's "tiger cub" groups and managed to throw a small bomb at some oil storage tanks in Trieste on August 5, 1972 -- whereupon he was secretly contacted by a number of oil companies with offers of protection money. In fact, no further operations of the sort were being planned, but Salameh dutifully reported the offers to his former colleagues in Fatah, who took note of his honesty. This was one of the reasons that Arafat later brought Salameh back into Fatah and put him in command of his personal bodyguard, the unit that came to be known as Force 17. The new, prestigious job in Fatah, together with optimism about a peaceful settlement after the 1973 war, led to a dramatic change in Salameh. On Fatah's written instructions, he began an intelligence relationship with the CIA station chief in Beirut, with the result that the former Black September terrorist who had once wanted to attack American targets now became the guardian of the American embassy in Beirut during the civil war and the overseer of the safe evacuation of American civilians in 1976. To complete his entry into the conservative beau monde, Salameh took as his second wife a stunning Lebanese beauty queen and a former Miss Universe, a Christian girl named Georgina Rizk. U.S.-PLO relations grew closer still when Jimmy Carter decided to support the Palestinian "homeland" that Arafat himself was asking for. Salameh went twice to stay at CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, where he gave his hosts an in-depth personal assessment of Arafat, the first time CIA officers had heard such testimony from someone so close to the PLO leader. Salameh explained that the PLO was funded by Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and Palestinian capitalists -- and not by Moscow -- and that it was prepared to guarantee that a future Palestinian state would not be communist or terrorist or a dictatorship of any sort. The Palestinians, he told the CIA, were ready for friendship with the United States, and they were certainly not interested in destroying Israel. According to my Western intelligence sources, Israel opposed this U.S.-PLO friendship. I was told that as soon as Israel learned of Salameh's contacts at Langley, the Israelis decided to kill him -- not because of his earlier Black September activities but because he had become the PLO's liaison man with the CIA. (For a fictionalized account of Salameh's story, see David Ignatius's novel Agents of Influence.) THE KILLING OF NA'IM KHUDR After a pause, the killing of PLO representatives was resumed. Na'im Khudr, the PLO representative in Brussels, like Hammami, Yassin, and Qalaq, a prominent moderate, was shot dead on June 1, 1981. He happened to be the only Christian among PLO ambassadors, and an ex-priest in the bargain. Abu Nidal was generally blamed for the murder. However, the former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky says bluntly that the Mossad killed Khudr. In his book By Way of Deception (1990), he writes: "On his way to work, a dark-complexioned man wearing a tan jacket and sporting a pencil mustache walked up to Khader [Khudr], shot him five times in the heart and once in the head, walked off the curb, climbed into a passing 'taxi' and disappeared. Although Arafat didn't know it then, the Mossad had struck." Khudr was killed at a time when Menachem Begin, Israel's prime minister, was greatly concerned with Lebanon. Having removed Egypt from the Arab front line by the 1979 peace treaty, Begin now wanted to bring Lebanon into Israel's orbit, and thus neutralize Syria. The Mossad had for some years been grooming a Lebanese Christian warlord, Bashir Gemayel, to be Israel's proconsul in Beirut. In the spring of 1981, Begin began a series of aggressive maneuvers in Lebanon -- the shooting down of two Syrian helicopters in April; the heavy air and naval bombardments of Palestinian positions in May and June -- which he clearly hoped would draw the Syrians and the Palestinians into a fight. In fact he had to wait until June 1982, when an attempt on the life of Israel's ambassador in London gave him the pretext he needed for a war in Lebanon, which he hoped would allow him to realize his strategic plan. Khudr, the PLO's man in Brussels, was one of several Palestinian leaders at that time who understood how vital it was not to give Begin reasons to invade Lebanon. Khudr had telephoned a diplomat at the Israeli embassy in Brussels, asking for a meeting to explore ways of defusing the dangerous Lebanese situation. But this was the last thing the Israeli government wanted to do, for as we have seen, the main fear of Israeli hard-liners such as Begin -- a fear shared by his successors -- is not PLO militancy but PLO moderation, which might, under pressure of international opinion, force Israel to negotiate and therefore make territorial concessions. In his book, Ostrovsky says that Khudr was murdered by a Mossad hit man precisely because he was trying to prevent a war in Lebanon -- a war the Palestinians feared but one that the Mossad and its political masters wanted, in order to destroy the Palestinians and make their man, Gemayel, president. Ostrovsky is not a careful writer, hardly, it would appear, any sort of writer at all: He enlisted the Canadian writer Claire Hoy to help him with the writing. But no one, so far as I know, has ever denied that he worked for the Mossad or that his lengthy account, in the first part of the book, of his recruitment and training is anything but authentic. The Israeli government tried strenuously to suppress his book and sued him in New York to stop its publication. In Israel's Secret Wars (1991), two highly respected authors, Ian Black and Benny Morris, say that Ostrovsky's book embarrassed the Israelis. "If an intelligence agency cannot manage to keep its own innermost secrets ... how effective can it be?" they write. It is therefore hard simply to dismiss Ostrovsky's claim that the Mossad killed Khudr. Yet sources from inside Abu Nidal's organization assured me without doubt in the summer of 1990 that the man who actually gunned down Khudr in Brussels was not an Israeli but a member of Abu Nidal's organization. His name was Adnan al-Rashidi (code-named Hisham Hijah), and the murder weapon was smuggled into Belgium by a Tunisian, Muhammad Abu al-Jasim, and given to Adnan al-Rashidi by an unknown cut-out. Assuming the defectors I interviewed were correct, here then was a possible case of the kind of collaboration between the Mossad and Abu Nidal that Abu Iyad had been trying to tell me about, assuming that Ostrovsky's Mossad assassin was in fact al-Rashidi. On this theory the Mossad had either planted its man in Abu Nidal's organization or, by complicities higher up the chain of command, had managed to influence Abu Nidal's target selection.
But there were still too many loose ends. The possibility that al-Rashidi was Ostrovsky's Mossad hit man depended too much on hearsay evidence and was far from watertight. Ostrovsky might have had a lapse of memory, or my defectors might have misled me. In any event, a single example of a possible Mossad-Abu Nidal link was not enough to prove the case. Maybe it had happened only once. There was a further twist to the Khudr story, which made me even more skeptical. On August 29, 1981, three months after Khudr's death, two of Abu Nidal's gunmen stormed a synagogue in Vienna. They killed two Jews and wounded nineteen others. They were arrested and interrogated by the Austrian police. According to the Israeli writer Yossi Melman, in The Master Terrorist: The True Story of Abu Nidal (1987), the Austrians sent a photograph of one of the gunmen they had arrested to the Belgian police team investigating the Khudr murder. Eyewitnesses, who had seen Khudr gunned down in Brussels, identified his killer as one of the gunmen in the Vienna synagogue. In the two years before the storming of the Vienna synagogue, Abu Nidal had attacked several other "soft" Jewish or Israeli targets in Europe. Most of these attacks had failed. On November 13, 1979, for example, an attempt to kill Efraim Eldar, the Israeli ambassador to Portugal, failed. On November 20, 1979, an attempt to bomb an exhibition about Jerusalem, staged at a Salzburg hotel by the local Jewish community, had also failed. On March 3, 1980, an attempt to kill Max Mazin, a prominent member of Madrid's Jewish community, had also gone wrong: In an apparent case of mistaken identity, the killer gunned down a Spanish lawyer, Adolfo Cottello, who happened to live or work in the same building. If there was any truth to the rumors that Israel had penetrated and was manipulating Abu Nidal's organization, then these failures could have been deliberate. But on July 27, 1980, two grenades thrown by Abu Nidal terrorists at a group of Agudat Israel schoolchildren in Antwerp killed one Jewish youngster and wounded twenty-one others. And in Vienna, on May 1, 1981, Heinz Nittal, a prominent member of Vienna's Jewish community, head of the Austria-Israel Friendship Society and a friend of Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, was murdered. If Israel had agents inside Abu Nidal's organization and influenced its target selection, why had it not stopped such criminal violence against Jews? It seemed to me wholly implausible that the Israelis would condone or overlook the killing of Jews. People accept that Palestinians kill Palestinians and that Russians kill Russians, but Jews are not known to kill Jews. There was a case in Baghdad in 1950 -- well documented in Abbas Shiblak's book The Lure of Zion (1986) -- when Israeli agents bombed Jewish targets to stampede the Jewish population of Iraq into fleeing to Israel. But this was an isolated case.
There was no way that I could see in which the attack on Jewish schoolchildren in Belgium could be fitted into the theory of Abu Nidal as an Israeli agent. Clearly, if the Israelis had penetrated his organization, they could not have controlled it entirely. It was possible of course that Abu Nidal, while unable or reluctant to attack Israeli targets, had targeted non-Israeli Jews to impress his Arab followers that he was nonetheless anti-Semitic and the Israelis could do nothing to stop him. There was, however, a strange feature of the affair: The Israelis had done nothing to punish Abu Nidal. Attacks on Jews or on Israelis did not usually go unpunished. In fact, it was Israel's declared policy always to retaliate. It was a bewildering puzzle. It seemed to me that the murder in Vienna of Heinz Nittal, a prominent liberal Jew who had expressed sympathy for the PLO, might be a somewhat different matter. By 1980-81, there were signs in the Jewish diaspora of mounting disenchantment with Begin and his aggressive hard-line tactics. Jewish personalities of international renown, like Nahum Goldmann, Philip Klutznick, Pierre Mendes-France, and Bruno Kreisky, were openly critical of Israeli policy. To men like Begin and his defense minister, Ariel Sharon, the Jewish-born and peace-campaigning Chancellor Kreisky, with his friendship for the PLO, his meetings with Arafat, and his advocacy of Palestinian statehood, was a traitor to the "greater Israel" cause. Even if Jews were not known to kill Jews, I reflected, it was just possible that Israelis might kill a Jew they thought was a traitor, and that is what Begin thought of Kreisky. So the Israelis might have sent Abu Nidal after Kreisky's friend, the dovish Heinz Nittal, as a warning as to what constituted acceptable Jewish behavior. Although pure speculation, this seemed to me not implausible. THE KILLING OF ISAM SARTAWI After the murders of Hammami, Yassin, Qalaq, and Khudr, Dr. Isam Sartawi was the only prominent dove left in the Palestinian movement, a perfect example of the species loathed equally by Israeli hawks and Arab rejectionists. He had repeatedly and publicly accused Abu Nidal of being an Israeli agent. In an interview with the distinguished French daily Le Monde on January 22, 1982, Sartawi was bold: Abu Nidal is not a maximalist serving the cause of the rejection front, but a renegade in the service of Israel. The Austrian security services have established, without any doubt, that a right-hand man of Abu Nidal not only killed the municipal councillor Heinz Nittal on May 1, 1981, and attacked the synagogue in Vienna in August, but also murdered, on June 1, Naim Khudr, the representative of the PLO in Brussels ... Who but Israel could be interested in eliminating our leaders? Who was interested in discrediting the Palestinian resistance by committing crimes of such a scandalously anti-Semitic nature? We do not ask ourselves these questions anymore since the members of the Abu Nidal group whom we hold in Beirut have admitted to having been recruited by the Mossad in the occupied territories. In great agitation, Sartawi repeated this charge to me when I interviewed him a year later in Algiers, at the Palestine National Council meeting of February 1983. He claimed that Fatah had arrested some of Abu Nidal's men in Beirut and that they had confessed to having been recruited by the Mossad in the West Bank. He was certain that Abu Nidal or the Mossad -- or the Mossad through Abu Nidal -- would try to kill him. To make matters worse for him, at the PNC meeting Arafat had disavowed him and his dovish views, which were too extreme even for Arafat, and had not allowed him to speak. I well remember the scene, because I was standing beside Sartawi at the side of the hall. Faruq Qaddumi, the PLO's "foreign minister," delivered a hard-line political report that rejected everything Sartawi stood for. Listening to Qaddumi, a white-faced Sartawi turned to me and exclaimed (with doubtful syntax), "Are you now disgusted enough!" This once popular man was now alone. No one came up to talk to him. He may have known then that he was doomed -- alone, out in the open without protection or political cover, and pursued by killers from both camps. In contacting the Israeli peace camp, Sartawi had acted under Arafat's instructions, but he may have gone too far. On April 10, 1983, as Sartawi was chatting in the lobby of a hotel at Albufeira, Portugal, with other delegates attending a meeting of the Socialist International, an assassin killed him instantly with a shot to the head. A few hours later in Damascus, Abu Nidal jubilantly claimed responsibility for the death of "the criminal traitor Sartawi." Whether or not Israel had had a hand in his murder, there was as usual an alternative explanation. A few months before his death, Sartawi had received a letter from Abu Nidal asking when he planned to meet his Israeli contacts in Vienna. Abu Nidal wanted to arrange to have them killed. Sartawi tipped off the Austrian police: Fatah was then cooperating with the Austrians, and with other European police forces, to frustrate Abu Nidal's terrorism. When two of Abu Nidal's gunmen flew to Vienna, they were arrested, and Sartawi helped the Austrians with their interrogation. Abu Nidal was enraged. Sartawi had not always been a dove. For years he had been a close friend of Abu Nidal and had shared his rejectionist views. In 1948, his family had fled from Acre, near Haifa, to Iraq, where he began his medical studies, later becoming a heart surgeon in the United States. But after the Arab defeat of 1967, he left America and joined the guerrillas in Jordan, fighting at Karameh in March 1968. In 1969, Sartawi broke from Fatah and set up a group that he called the Action Committee for the Liberation of Palestine, with funding first from Iraq and then from Egypt, which led some Palestinians to believe that he had sold out to Arab intelligence services. At this stage of his life, both his language and his actions were extremely violent. In January 1970, he mounted an attack on a busload of El Al passengers at the Munich airport. But by the early 1970s, Sartawi underwent a conversion and became for the rest of his life an ardent advocate of Arab- Israeli coexistence. He worked with PLO and Israeli peace activists and appealed to such people as Austria's Chancellor Bruno Kreisky and the king of Morocco. He argued that the Arabs could not challenge Israel with conventional military force or with guerrilla warfare. Such attempts were bound to fail. Only dialogue and links to forces inside Israel could bring peace to the Middle East, a peace that might at last give the Palestinians a state of their own. In 1987, during a meeting between Abu Iyad and Abu Nidal in Algiers, Abu Iyad would bring up Fatah's main grievance: the long list of PLO men murdered by Abu Nidal -- or, as he believed, by some secret hand inside his organization. Abu Iyad later told me what he and Abu Nidal had said: "'Why did you kill Isam Sartawi?' I asked him. 'He was your lifelong friend!' I told him I believed this was an operation in which the Israelis had pulled the strings. The whole affair stank of penetration and manipulation -- the way the weapons had been smuggled in, the escape of the killer, the arrest of a young accomplice traveling on a false passport whom the Moroccans could not charge with the murder. 'I know Israel is playing games with you,' I told him." Abu Iyad told Abu Nidal that he began to suspect Israeli penetration when a Moroccan intelligence officer had given him a list of Abu Nidal's members in Spain -- nineteen names in all -- and said his source was the Mossad. Abu Iyad then checked out the list himself and found it accurate: Seventeen of the men on it, most of them students, were still living in Spain; two had graduated and returned home. Abu Iyad told me: "I was amazed by Abu Nidal's answer. 'Yes,' he had responded calmly. 'You are right. Israel has penetrated us in the past. I discovered this from my Tunisian and Moroccan members. Israel used to plant them on me. But let me tell you that I send my own North African members -- the ones I really trust --to France to turn and recruit Israel's North African agents! The flow of intelligence is sometimes to my advantage. These people have supplied me with truly astonishing information.' "'Take for example the Sartawi case. They gave me all the detailed information I needed for the operation!'" As he recollected their conversation, Abu Iyad could still hardly believe what he had heard: "Israeli agents were present in his organization. They had fed him information. He admitted it! His matter-of-fact tone astounded me. He added that he was trying to liquidate the Israeli agents one by one. That is what he said!" Though the admissions implied no more than penetration, Abu Iyad was convinced they also indicated collaboration between the Mossad and Abu Nidal. Abu Iyad told me that he had thought about Israel's manipulation of Abu Nidal with North African agents. He knew for a fact that Khudr had been killed by a Tunisian member of Abu Nidal's organization. So had Hammami and Qalaq. "We stopped terrorism in 1974," he insisted, "but the Israelis did not, although they convinced the world of the contrary. They continued to attack us. Sometimes they did so quite blatantly, as when they killed Abu Jihad in Tunis in 1988. More often they mounted operations that could be read in different ways. I must admit it confused us. On several occasions we weren't sure whether Abu Nidal or Mossad was responsible." The Mossad agents that Abu Iyad had in mind were probably trained in Morocco, where the Moroccan government and the CIA run an unusual intelligence school that specializes in Palestinian affairs. I learned about this school from several intelligence sources, both Arab and Western. They told me that the CIA, which works closely with Israel on Palestinian matters, had brought the Mossad into the arrangement as well. The students are mostly young North Africans who are recruited in Europe and brought back to the Moroccan school to be trained as spies. They are put through courses on the various Palestinian factions, studying their leading personalities, their structure, ideology, and operations -- so that by the end of the course, they are able to use the arcane jargon of these organizations. All the principal groups -- Fatah, the PFLP, the Democratic Front, the PFLP-General Command, the Arab Liberation Front, and Abu Nidal's organization -- are studied. Once their course is completed, the youths are taken back to Europe and instructed to hang about in cafes, meet other Arabs, and speak to them in the language they have been taught. The hope is that they will eventually get taken on by the groups they have learned to mimic, so that the Moroccans, the CIA, or the Mossad can use them. Some of the graduates of the school become informers, some plan operations, and some are even schooled to become ideologues for the groups on which they are planted. Some are killers. ABU DAWUD ESCAPES DEATH There was one further case I learned about. It was an attempted murder rather than a murder, and it did not involve a dove. But it seemed relevant to my inquiries. On July 27, 1981, a month before the attack on the Vienna synagogue, the prominent Fatah commander Abu Dawud narrowly escaped death in Warsaw. In Tunis in 1990, he gave me his account of the incident. He had been Abu Nidal's friend, he told me, since their early days in Saudi Arabia but had broken with him over the killing of Yassin and the other PLO representatives. In July 1981, he had gone to Warsaw on Fatah's behalf for talks with the Polish authorities and booked in at the Hotel Victoria on Friday, July 27. But as it was too late to see anyone that day, he had gone to take a sauna in the health club before wandering upstairs to the cafe on the first floor. It was a quiet place, he said, but it was frequented by prostitutes. "I noticed as I came in that the place was full of Arabs. I learned later that they were a party of thirty Iraqi intelligence officers on an official visit. Rather than sit at a corner table as I usually do, I sat at the first empty table I could see. I didn't want them to think I was trying to pick up a girl. "I had just ordered a coffee and a bottle of mineral water when two men came bursting through the door. One pointed me out to the other, who rushed up and started firing at me when he was about six feet away. His first shot went through my hand. The next broke my jaw -- I had to keep my mouth shut for five months while it was being rebuilt. A third and fourth went through the fleshy parts of my body. "The Iraqi intelligence officers in the cafe pretended they had seen nothing and never offered to help me." Abu Dawud chased the gunman as far as the hotel entrance but failed to catch him. Bleeding profusely, he collapsed on a sofa in the lobby and waited for nearly two hours for a Polish ambulance to take him to a hospital -- where there was a further long wait before he received medical attention. The next day, the Poles moved him to a clinic that belonged to the ministry of the interior, where he stayed for ten days before going on to East Germany to convalesce. He later learned that the Poles had arrested his would-be assassin but had released him a day later on receiving a payment of $200,000 from Abu Nidal's Polish company, Zibado. Abu Dawud continued his story: "The man who pointed me out in the cafe was one of Abu Nidal's boys. I recognized him. But who was my attacker? I was curious to find out. I didn't think he could be a Palestinian member of Abu Nidal's organization, because I knew most of them. I had trained many of them myself in various militias. And what was the motive? There seemed no obvious reason to kill me. Unlike Hamrnami, Abu Nidal couldn't accuse me of having dealings with the Israelis! So why me?" About eleven months later, Abu Dawud happened to be in Iraq, where he took a room at the Baghdad Hotel. Hearing he was there and thinking that he had come to kill him, Abu Nidal sent one of his henchmen, Dr. Ghassan al-Ali, to sound him out. Abu Dawud pretended that he did not suspect Abu Nidal of involvement in the shooting. He asked after his health and said he would like to see him. "Abu Nidal is a crafty devil!" Abu Dawud continued. "To put me to the test, he sent my would-be assassin to sit in the hotel lobby to see how I would react. There he was, large as life, a small, dark man with curly hair, reading a newspaper and wearing the same suit he had worn when he shot me. "Some Palestinian friends had come to see me at the hotel, so I sounded them out discreetly about the identity of the man in the lobby. I learned that he was a Tunisian who posed as a businessman but in fact worked for Abu Nidal. "There he was, eyeing me warily from behind his newspaper. I decided I would try and capture him. I approached, but he saw me coming and started running. I gave chase, but once again, as in Warsaw, he got away. "The moment Abu Nidal heard what had happened, he left Baghdad for his farm in the north and did not reappear until he was certain I had left the country. There is no doubt in my mind of his involvement in the affair. No one else could have sent his man to point me out in the Warsaw hotel, and no one else could have bribed the Poles to let my attacker escape." Abu Dawud asked everyone he could about the Tunisian who had tried to kill him. He told me that the Tunisian had been recruited by the Mossad in Paris, sent first to Israel for training and then on to the CIA's intelligence school in Morocco, where he was taught Abu Nidal's theories and jargon. He was then sent to Paris, where he was picked up by Abu Nidal's people and recruited. Abu Dawud believed after an extensive investigation that the Israelis had planted the Tunisian on Abu Nidal. The real question in his mind was who in the organization had chosen to kill him and ordered that particular agent to mount the attack. He had no doubt that the Mossad had someone high up in Abu Nidal's organization, perhaps at the very top. I asked him who it was, but he couldn't tell me. The interesting thing was, Abu Dawud added, that Abu Nidal did not tell even his closest associates that he had ordered the attack. Abu Dawud learned later that the secret was shared with only two people: the man responsible for selecting and researching the target -- very probably Dr. Ghassan, of whom more will be heard -- and the Tunisian hit man. The youth who had identified him at the hotel in Warsaw had been brought in at the last minute. He had worked as a courier for Abu Nidal and knew Abu Dawud well. "My Tunisian attacker is now living in France," Abu Dawud told me. "I know this and so does French security. He has recently left Abu Nidal's organization." Although I was still by no means satisfied with the evidence I had collected, it seemed to me that there were grounds to pursue the hypothesis that a terrorist outfit like Abu Nidal's was most dangerous not when it was operating on its own account but, as Claude Bourdet might have put it, when it was systematically manipulated by more sophisticated minds, with their own ruthless agenda.
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