Middle Eastern Terrorism. Mark Ensalaco
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imprisoned Abu Daoud and expected that once freed Daoud would join his dissident Fatah faction. Rumors flew that a senior member of Fatah, perhaps even Abu Iyad himself, had betrayed Abu Daoud in Amman at the behest of Arafat, who opposed the embassy operation. But there was another motive. The Paris operation was organized to embarrass Arafat, who was in Morocco attending a meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement. By fall 1973, Arafat was already trying to remake himself in the image of a statesman. Abu Nidal was determined to strew wreckage in his path in the interest of the new Baath regime in Iraq. The terrorists made this clear in a statement that denounced “Arab regimes that disguised themselves behind progressive slogans but move in the line of surrender.”24
The hostage crisis in Paris lasted forty-eight hours. As evening fell on 5 September, the terrorists apologized to the French for conducting the operation on French soil, and then demanded a jet to fly them and their hostages to an Arab country, any Arab country. As dawn broke on 6 September, they threatened to begin killing the hostages at intervals, but either their resolve was weak or their orders were firm—deadlines for the beginning of executions came and went without a killing. At one point the terrorists speaking through journalists acting as intermediaries told French authorities they wanted to avoid “another Munich.” The incident was becoming more and more bizarre. The Iraqi ambassador entered the Saudi embassy on the morning of 6 September to offer himself as a hostage. That same evening, Syrian president Hafez al-Asad offered the terrorists a Syrian jet to fly them out of France. A compromise was in place. The terrorists released ten hostages but took Saudi nationals with them to the plane that would take them first to Cairo for refueling and then to Damascus. The plane never arrived in Syria, but diverted to Kuwait. That was not the end of it. The terrorists forced the pilots back into the air and into Saudi airspace. Over the Saudi capital, they threatened to throw the Saudi hostages from the plane unless the Saudi monarch pressured Jordanian monarch to release Abu Daoud. The threats changed nothing. After a short flight the terrorists returned to Kuwait City, where they released the hostages and surrendered on 7 September.
Abu Iyad, in his memoir five years after the Paris incident, denounced the operation as “a completely senseless exploit.”25 In fact, it infuriated Arafat, who issued a statement from Rabat denouncing the operation and promising to bring those responsible to account. After the closure of the Non-Aligned Summit, Arafat dispatched Abu Iyad and a trusted moderate, Mahmoud Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, to Baghdad to confront the renegade Abu Nidal. Abu Iyad might have believed it feasible to subject Abu Nidal to Fatah discipline, but what he learned in Baghdad should have been a warning. Iraqi intelligence officials present at the meeting revealed that Iraq set the Paris operation in motion, and Abu Nidal merely carried it out.26 The alliance between Iraq's Baath regime and Abu Nidal's Fatah-Revolutionary Council would prove fatal for PLO moderates. Over the next few years, Abu Nidal acted more as a contract killer than as an international terrorist, systematically assassinating PLO and Arab moderates and Syrian rivals in pursuit of Iraq's national aspiration to become the center of the Arab political universe. In June 1974, Fatah intelligence discovered Abu Nidal's plot to assassinate Abu Mazen and sentenced Nidal to death for treason in absentia. In 1991, Abu Nidal ordered the assassination of Abu Iyad in Tunis as punishment for his drift to moderation.
Less than three weeks after the Saudi embassy operation, Abu Daoud walked free with hundreds of other Palestinian fedayeen. But neither Abu Nidal nor Iraq could claim credit when Jordan's prison gates swung open. King Hussein granted general amnesty to Palestinians at the behest of Egypt and Syria, who needed the Palestinian guerrillas for operations in an imminent war with Israel.
The Yom Kippur War
Israel's victory in the June 1967 Six Day War was deeply humiliating to Egypt, which lost the oil fields of the Sinai Peninsula to Israeli occupation. Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president who had come to power after Nasser's death during the 1970 Jordanian crisis, could not accept the status quo. By late 1971, Sadat was signaling his preference was for a negotiated return of the occupied Egyptian territory, and he beckoned the United States to frame an agreement with Israel. In April 1972, Egypt began to communicate to Washington through a secret back channel, and in July Sadat announced Egypt's expulsion of 15,000 Soviet military advisors.27 But the Nixon administration, then heavily engaged in the Paris Peace Talks aimed at ending the Vietnam War, and bent on prying Egypt out of the Soviet sphere of influence, did not vigorously pursue Sadat's overtures. In April 1973, three months after Kissinger and Le Duc Tho initialed the Paris Peace Agreement, Sadat gave a speech warning of war. By September, the Egyptian and Syrian high commands had finalized plans to a two-front war on Israel. The events of October 1973 would alter the entire Middle Eastern political terrain.
Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in Judaism, fell on 6 October in 1972. That day, Egyptian and Syrian forces launched Operation Spark. Eighty thousand Egyptian troops crossed the Suez Canal, overwhelming the 500 Israeli troops dug in on the canal's western bank. To the north, 1,400 Syrian tanks engaged the 180 Israeli tanks positioned in the Golan Heights. It was a spectacular intelligence failure for both the Mossad and the CIA that nearly translated into a military catastrophe for Israel. Despite signs that the Egyptians and Syrians were massed for an attack, U.S. intelligence concluded that the Arab states would not risk another defeat by the superior Israeli forces. Nixon, who was in the throes of the Watergate crisis, admitted surprise: “I was disappointed by our own intelligence shortcomings, and I was stunned by the failure of Israeli intelligence.” Israel was thrown back on the defensive. The IDF suffered substantial losses of men and materiel during the first three days of the fighting, and on 9 October appealed to Washington for a massive shipment of weapons to mount a counteroffensive. Nixon did not hesitate to come to Israel's defense. For the Republican president the “disturbing question mark…[was] the role of the Soviet Union.”
But Nixon had other worries. An appeals court had ruled in favor of the Watergate special prosecutor's subpoena for secret Oval Office tapes that would reveal the president's culpability in the cover-up of the Watergate break-in; the vice president was forced to resign on the same day the Israelis appealed for arms and, as the war entered a dangerous phase on Saturday 20 October, Nixon ordered the “Saturday night massacre” firing of the Watergate special prosecutor. The next day, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to the text of UN Security Council Resolution 338, calling on the belligerents to “terminate all military activity immediately,” and to begin negotiations “aimed at establishing a just and durable peace in the Middle East.” As important, the Super Powers agreed to host a peace conference, which would eventually be scheduled to begin on 17 December in Geneva. The Security Council passed Resolution 338 on 22 October and set a 12-hour deadline for termination of hostilities. From the onset of the crisis Nixon adhered to the simple principle that the United States should not impose a diplomatic cease-fire: “it would be better to wait until the war had reached a point at which neither side had a decisive military advantage.” The reasoning was straightforward: “only a battlefield stalemate would provide the foundation on which fruitful negotiations begin.”28
Israel and Egypt accepted the terms of Resolution 338, but that did not end the fighting. Israel alleged Egyptian violations of the cease-fire and pressed ahead with an attack on the Egyptian Third Army Corps, which it had already driven back across the Suez, encircling the Egyptian elite troops. The United States and the Soviet Union quickly brokered another cease-fire agreement on 24 October. To monitor it, Anwar Sadat requested deployment of an international peacekeeping force. The Soviets responded by proposing that the United States and the Soviet Union deploy armed peacekeepers in the Sinai, and threatened a unilateral deployment of Soviet forces when Nixon rejected the proposal. Nixon's response to Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev was stark: “we must view your suggestion of unilateral action as a matter of the gravest concern involving incalculable actions.”29 To help the Soviet leader calculate the incalculable, Nixon ordered U.S. conventional and nuclear forces on alert. Hostilities concluded the next day.
The CIA and the PLO
Anwar Sadat waged war to compel the United States to broker a peace that would restore the Sinai to Egypt. In fact, the October War was the catalyst for Kissinger's famous shuttle diplomacy that produced a series of agreements between Israel and Egypt, culminating in Sadat's historic—and heroic—visit to Jerusalem in November 1978 and the