Middle Eastern Terrorism. Mark Ensalaco
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longest in U.S. history, was seeking a second term. Nixon's foreign policy agenda was ambitious. Henry Kissinger, who would become both national security advisor and secretary of state in the second Nixon administration, was simultaneously pursuing détente with the Soviet Union, making overtures to the People's Republic of China, and negotiating the extrication from Vietnam. But by the time Nixon and Kissinger negotiated “peace with honor” in the Paris peace talks with the Vietnamese delegation in 1972, which led to a complete U.S. withdrawal the following year, the crisis in the Middle East had worsened. Egypt and Syria acted to reverse the humiliation of 1967.
This was also the year of Black September. Black September struck out with a vengeance to compel the world to understand the Palestinian conflict would not be confined to the Middle East. Terror seeped into Europe, and Americans fell victim to terror. The organization that congealed in the bloodshed in Jordan nearly assassinated King Hussein's envoy in London only a week after it murdered his prime minister in Cairo. In February it sabotaged a West German electrical installation and a Dutch natural gas plant. In March it attempted its first hijacking, and at the end of May it attacked a petroleum refinery in Trieste. Black September would attack four more times at different points of the compass before its final operation in March 1973: Europe in September, Asia in December, the Middle East in February, and North Africa in March.
Black September
The principal figures in Black September—Abu Iyad, Mohammed Najjar, Abu Daoud, and Ali Hassan Salameh—were all were powerful actors in Fatah.1 Abu Iyad, a founder of Fatah, was chief of Fatah's intelligence, Jihaz al-Razd. Mohammed Najjar was Abu Iyad's chief of operations until the Israelis killed him in April 1973. Abu Daoud commanded Fatah guerrilla forces in Jordan before the Jordanians expelled them. Ali Hassan Salameh was Abu Iyad's deputy and would eventually become chief of Arafat's security detail, Force 17, until the Israelis killed him in January 1979. Abu Iyad never acknowledged his connection to Black September, and his public statements about the terror organization are almost undecipherable. “Black September was never a terrorist organization,” he wrote in his memoir, “it acted as an auxiliary to the Resistance, when the resistance was no longer in a position to fully assume its military and political tasks…. Its members always insisted that they had no organic tie with Fatah or the PLO. But I knew a number of them, and I can assure you that most of them belonged to various fedayeen organizations.” The fact is that Abu Iyad not only knew many of the members of Black September, he recruited them—Abu Iyad was the organic link to Fatah. That Black September did not commit acts of terrorism was a question of semantics because, said Iyad, “I do not confuse revolutionary violence, which is a political act, with terrorism, which is not.”2
Abu Daoud's public statements about Black September were made in February 1972 while he was under a sentence of death for conspiracy to seize the U.S. embassy in Amman. “There is no such organization called Black September,” Daoud confessed in a televised spectacle, “Black September is only the intelligence apparatus [of Fatah] Jihaz el-Razd.”3 Daoud named Iyad, Najjar, and Salameh in his public confession, but uttered not a word about Yasser Arafat. Because these men formed the circle around Arafat, Arafat himself was at the epicenter of Black September, even if he was not specifically aware of the details of Black September's operations. This was Arafat's cynicism at its worst. Black September was the concession Arafat made to Fatah's radicals to the dismay of the movement's moderates. One of those moderates, Khalad Hassan, swears he was secretly negotiating a rapprochement between the PLO and Jordan with Wasfi Tel in Egypt when Black September murdered the Jordanian prime minister.4
One of the more intriguing figures in Black September was Ali Hassan Salameh. Palestinian militancy was in his lineage. He was only seven when his father, Sheikh Hassan Salameh, died fighting to prevent the Catastrophe in 1948 and became legendary for his sacrifice. The sheikh's son would live up to the family's reputation and eventually share his father's fate. Ali Hassan Salameh took the nom de guerre Abu Hassan, following the practice of affixing Abu, “father,” to his family name, but Israeli intelligence called him the Red Prince. Prince because of his opulent lifestyle, red because of the blood on his hands. Salameh was flamboyant—he had a flare for the good life and a passion for beautiful women. (His second wife, Georgina Rizk, a Lebanese Christian, won the Miss Universe pageant in 1971.) After joining Fatah, he became Abu Iyad's deputy in Fatah intelligence and, eventually, Commander of European Operations in Black September. After Black September ceased terror operations, Arafat made Ali Hassan Salameh chief of Force 17.
The Central Intelligence Agency knew of Ali Hassan Salameh's connection to Fatah intelligence well before Black September's appearance, and the agency worked with him after Black September murdered Americans.5 Some time in 1969, Robert Ames, a CIA case officer in Beirut, made contact with Salameh in an effort to establish an informal—and deniable—back channel between U.S. intelligence and the PLO. It was a prudent move, although this sort of back channel violated assurances the Nixon administration later offered the Israelis that the United States would not recognize the PLO. Ames and Salameh met face-to-face in Kuwait in early 1970, months before the Jordanian crisis and more than a year before Fatah set up Black September. Ames, fluent in Arabic, apparently established a rapport with the Palestinian. The men had mutual interests in establishing contact, but their interests were not identical, and they did not have the final authority to reach an accommodation. Salameh, whose contacts must have been sanctioned by Arafat, was interested in a political opening to the United States. Ames was acting in the much more limited interest of the United States in gathering intelligence about threats to Americans and American interests. Arafat could offer intelligence through Salameh in the hope of making a diplomatic breakthrough.
The contact between Ames and Salameh—and between U.S. and Fatah intelligence—would result in a back channel security arrangement, but not until 1974 after Black September actually murdered U.S. diplomats. At the end of 1970, Salameh broke off contact with the CIA, after a senior CIA officer attempted to recruit him in Rome with an offer of a $1 million. The CIA's clumsy effort to buy an asset would have its consequences. Over the next three years, Salameh was directly involved in some, although not all, of Black September's terror operations. It was Salameh who organized the assassination of Wasfi Tel in November 1971 and the attacks in West Germany, Holland, and Italy in early 1972. He then became involved in the planning of a late summer operation in the heart of Europe, an operation that more than any other, including even Haddad's Skyjack Sunday hijackings, defined the threat of terror in the 1970s in the mind of most Americans.
The appearance of Black September was ominous because it meant another killer was roaming in search of victims. But the appearance of Black September did not mean the disappearance of the PFLP. Actually, the PFLP struck first in 1972.
The Lod Massacre
Wadi Haddad never sought the approval of the PLO to conduct terror operations, just as he never heeded the organization's chastisements. George Habash, the nominal secretary general of the PFLP, was in prison in Damascus when Haddad organized the first hijacking, and in Communist China on Skyjack Sunday. Haddad was his own man. George Habash alternated between deep-throated threats against passengers and cautiously phrased denials of responsibility, but by 1971 Haddad commanded the loyalty of his own faction within the PFLP. At the end of February, Haddad's men resumed the offensive.
On 22 February, five PFLP terrorists broke into the cockpit of a Lufthansa Boeing 747 soon after departure from New Delhi en route to Athens.6 It was only weeks after the Black September attack on the West German electrical plant. The year 1972 was to be a year of reckoning for West Germany. The terrorists ordered the crew to continue across the Arabian Sea and put down in Aden, in what was then South Yemen, where they could count on the tacit collaboration of the radical government. There the terrorists rigged the plane with explosives and began to issue demands laced with threats against the 175 passengers and 15 crew members. First, the terrorists demanded release of the Black September assassins who murdered Wasfi Tel in Cairo in November 1971. Then they demanded the release of Sirhan Sirhan, the man who assassinated Robert F. Kennedy in June 1968. The PFLP later denied ever having demanded the freedom of Kennedy's assassin, but it issued the denial after it learned that Joseph Kennedy, III, son of the slain presidential candidate, was among the hostages the terrorists had already released.7 The prominent