Middle Eastern Terrorism. Mark Ensalaco
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in Muammar Qaddafi's territory, the terrorists released the hostages without gaining anything in return, and then destroyed the huge jet on the ground before surrendering to Libyan authorities. It was an absolutely futile operation that only succeeded in widening the rift between George Habash, the PFLP general-secretary, who denied PFLP involvement in the operation, and Wadi Haddad, the master terrorist, who ordered it.
A month later, the Mossad carried out another Wrath of God killing, this time in Lillehammer, Norway. Mossad had managed to kill nine Palestinians belonging to the PFLP or Black September. None were of the highest echelon of the terror hierarchy. Black September's Mohammad Najjar and the PFLP's Mohammed Boudia were operational commanders, but not masterminds like Abu Iyad or Wadi Haddad. There was one man among the many marked for assassination whose death the Mossad's assassination squads coveted most, the elusive Ali Hassan Salameh. The Mossad attributed Munich to the Red Prince, although Abu Iyad and Abu Daoud planned the operation, selected the men who carried it out, and transported the weapons that killed the Israelis. But Salameh, who ran operations in Europe and organized Black September's early sabotage operations there, provided logistical support. The intensity of the Mossad's passion to kill him burned for years—even after Golda Meier called off Operation Wrath of God because of the operational errors the Mossad was about to commit in Lillehammer—and may have been due to Salameh's personal relationship to Yasser Arafat.17 The legend of the Red Prince may be larger than the life.
In July, the Mossad tracked a man it was certain was the Red Prince to Lillehammer. But the intelligence that led Mossad to the small Norwegian city was false; in fact, Salameh, whose survival depended on counterintelligence, may have provided the Israelis the false intelligence to expose Operation Wrath of God. But in July 1973, Mossad chieftain Zvi Zamir, who personally observed the slaughter of the Israeli Olympians at Fürstenfeldbruck, was so certain of the information that he sanctioned the action in Lillehammer.18 Mike Harari commanded the seven Mossad agents in the operation. The assassination squad acquired cars and lodging and tracked the movements of a man resembling Salameh for a full day before killing him. In what turned out to be a calamitous error, Harari dismissed one agent's doubts about the identity of the man living modestly in Lillehammer. On the night of 21 August, Ahmed Bouchiki and his wife stepped off a bus and were walking down a darkened Lillehammer street when the madness of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict violently collided with their lives. Bouchiki was not a clandestine Palestinian agent, he was a Moroccan waiter whose great misfortune was to bear a striking resemblance to the darkly handsome Salameh. Two Mossad agents fired fourteen shots into Bouchiki and left him to die in front of his wife, Torill Larsen, who was pregnant with their child.
The Mossad had murdered an innocent man. Zvi Zamir, the Mossad chief, rationalized the mistake, “this may happen in this sort of activity.”19 But this was only one of many of the assassination squad's operational errors. The day after the murder, Lillehammer police arrested two members of the squad at the airport as they attempted to flee the country. On the night of the murder an alert policeman had taken down the license number of the assassins' car as it sped from the scene; the Mossad agents had failed to exchange cars before fleeing Lillehammer. During the interrogations the Israelis gave up critical information about the operation that led to the arrest of four more members of the assassination squad and compromised Mossad operations in Europe. The damage to Israeli intelligence operations was tremendous. In secret proceedings, a Norwegian court convicted six Israeli intelligence agents for the murder of Ahmed Bouchiki and sentenced them to various prison terms, none longer than twenty-one months.
The murder of Ahmed Bouchiki remained shrouded in official secrecy for more than a quarter of a century. The principal facts were known, but the sealed court records and the lenient sentences of the six Mossad agents raised suspicions about the involvement of Norwegian security officials. Then came another clandestine encounter between Palestinians and Israelis in Norway. In 1993, twenty years after Bouchiki's murder, PLO and Israeli representatives met secretly in Oslo to work out the details of an agreement that would lead to mutual recognition between Arafat's liberation organization and the Jewish state. Three years later, the Israeli government secretly paid compensation to Torill Larsen, Bouchiki's widow. Israel did not publicly acknowledge complicity in the crime, but Bouchiki's widow knew better: “No one pays out compensation unless they are guilty.”20
The violence of summer 1973 ended with an atrocity in one European airport and a near catastrophe in another. The atrocity occurred in Athens, where on 5 August two Palestinian terrorists opened fire in a passenger lounge on passengers awaiting a TWA flight to New York. In a shocking repetition of the Lod massacre fifteen months earlier, the terrorists wounded fifty-five and killed three before capture. Two of the dead were Americans, one a sixteen-year-old girl. Greek authorities sentenced the men to death for the atrocity, but released them in early 1974 after Palestinians seized a Greek freighter. A month after the atrocity in Athens, authorities in Rome narrowly averted a catastrophe by arresting five men who somehow had smuggled Soviet-made shoulder-launched (SAM-5) surface-to-air missiles into the Italian capital. It was a truly international conspiracy: Libya supplied the weapons, the terrorists came from Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Algeria and Libya, and their mission was to shoot down an Israeli passenger jet after takeoff from the airport.21
The Appearance of Abu Nidal
It had been a violent spring and summer. The Palestinians managed to mount terror operations despite the Israeli campaign to terrorize the terrorists. But the failure rate was high, attesting to heightened security and better intelligence in a now fully involved European theater of terror and counterterror operations. There was something else. Palestinian terrorism underwent a metamorphosis in the first six months of 1973. The two principal nuclei—Wadi Haddad's faction of the PFLP and Abu Iyad's Black September faction of Fatah—were fragmenting into dissident organizations. The failed PFLP-JRA hijacking in July was the first PFLP operation in more than a year. Black September quietly disappeared after the Khartoum operation in March and death of Najjar, Adwan, and Nasser in April. Neither the PFLP nor Black September was responsible for the operations in Paris, Nicosia, Beirut, Rome, and Athens between March and September. These were acts of Palestinian dissidents who rejected the PLO's discernible tilt toward moderation, men like Abd al-Ghafur, who was behind the Rome and Athens attacks in the spring, and Sabri al-Banna.22 Both would strike again before the end of the year—al-Banna in Paris in September, al-Ghafur in November and December, after the October War.
Sabri Khalil al-Banna adopted Abu Nidal as his nom de guerre when he joined the Palestinian nationalist movement. Abu Nidal's trajectory was similar to that of many prominent figures in Fatah or the PFLP. Exiled in Saudi Arabia, Abu Nidal moved in conspiratorial circles of young Palestinians who dreamed of liberating Palestine; he even formed a small liberation organization, but it did not survive. After the Six Day War, Abu Iyad, Arafat's intelligence chieftain, recruited Abu Nidal into Fatah. He was posted to the Sudan as Fatah's representative in Khartoum in 1969. It was a brief assignment. He was back in Jordan in 1970, but was sent to Iraq as Fatah's representative to Baghdad before the Palestinian-Jordanian confrontation. In Baghdad, the Baath regime, which seized power in a 1968 bloodletting, encouraged him to organize a radical Fatah faction to challenge Arafat. Abu Nidal was thus originally a creature of Iraqi intelligence, although in later years he transferred his loyalties to Syria and eventually Libya. In September 1973, while he was still nominally under the discipline of Fatah, Abu Nidal carried out his first terror operation.
On the morning of 5 September, the same day the Italian authorities discovered the conspiracy to shoot down an El Al jet in Rome, five terrorists claiming membership in a new organization, al-Icab (“punishment” in Arabic), seized the Saudi Arabian embassy in Paris. They took fifteen hostages, whom they threatened to kill unless Jordan complied with their sole demand: the release of Abu Daoud, who was serving a life sentence for his involvement in the February plot to take U.S. diplomats hostage in Amman. The terrorists were Abu Nidal's men. In fact, the operation's commander, Samir Muhammed al-Abbasi, was the husband of one Abu Nidal's nieces.23
Al-Icab was the first in a series of fictitious names Abu Nidal would use in the operations of what he eventually called Fatah-Revolutionary Council. The name was meant to ridicule Arafat, the chief of Fatah and the chairman of the PLO executive committee. Abu Nidal no longer considered Fatah,