Middle Eastern Terrorism. Mark Ensalaco
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of Palestine that Palestinians had been conditioned to embrace, but it was a realistic glimpse at the only possible future—a Palestinian ministate on the West Bank and Gaza coexisting with Israel.
In June, the same month the PFLP and Fatah mounted their deadly attacks, Arafat convened a meeting of the Palestinian National Council (PNC) in Cairo. The PNC was supposedly the supreme legislative body of the PLO, but in practice Arafat dominated the PLO by controlling the executive committee as its chairman. The PNC was useful to him only to authenticate his decisions. Now Arafat convinced the PNC to accept the principle of PLO authority over any piece of Palestinian territory liberated from Israeli occupation. It was shrewd maneuver. Foremost in Arafat's mind was the possibility that Kissinger might actually succeed in convincing Israel to restore the occupied West Bank to Jordan, foreclosing the possibility of a sovereign Palestinian state governed by the PLO. Kissinger was already making headway. Egypt was already showing signs of its willingness to back away from the principle that the PLO was the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people endorsed by the Arab League the previous November in Algiers. In July, Sadat recognized King Hussein's right to speak for the one million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Jordan. Arafat's proposal was controversial, but it gained the support of Fatah's major leaders. Abu Iyad, for one, realized that the changed dynamics forced the PLO to end its “all or nothing” policy.3 Arafat struggled to convince Palestinians that the new policy was not capitulation. Instead he proclaimed the declaration to be the centerpiece of a new policy to liberate Palestine in stages, implying any territory liberated, or ceded in negotiations, would become the staging ground for the guerrilla war of total liberation.
Arafat's enemies within the PLO, led as always by George Habash, the PFLP secretary-general, were not deceived by the rhetoric of liberation in stages. Habash grasped that Arafat was staking his hopes on the negotiations despite the efforts of Israel and the United States to exclude the PLO from the talks. Worse still, the negotiations were based on Security Council Resolution 242, which called for Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in the 1967 Six Day War and the right of Israel “to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.” Habash's thinking conformed to the PLO's official line—“We can by no means accept that the end of the aggression of 1967 should come at the price of confirming the aggression of 1948”—until Arafat succeeded in changing that line.4 The PNC vote caused a schism. Immediately following the PNC meeting in Cairo, George Habash broke ranks with the Fatah-dominated PLO and, in October, convened the first meeting of the Front for the Rejection of Capitulationist Solutions, or the Rejection Front, in Baghdad. Ahmed Jabril brought his PFLP-General Command into the new Rejection Front as did the leaders of smaller fedayeen organizations. Abd al-Ghafur and Abu Nidal, who had been working to sabotage the peace process for more than a year already, aligned themselves with the Rejection Front without formally joining it. It was no coincidence that Habash called the meeting in Baghdad. Iraq would become a principal backer of the Rejection Front, together with Libya and Yemen. The schism in the PLO would have deadly consequences. Over the next few years, the Rejectionists would assassinate PLO moderates and their Arab allies and would mount a series of international terror operations. In fact, the first deadly attack came even before the Rejectionists met in the Iraqi capital. There had not been a major international terrorist operation since Abd al-Ghafur organized the December 1973 atrocity at the Leonardo Da Vinci airport in Rome. The eight-month lull ended in a few moments of sheer terror over the Ionian Sea on a clear evening of 8 September 1974.
The Destruction of TWA 841
TWA flight 841 arrived in Athens after strict passenger screening in Israel had put it forty-five minutes behind schedule. Security in Israel was tight; it should have been rigorous in Athens. The previous August, terrorists had killed three in the passenger terminal there. But Athens was notorious for its security breaches. For the fedayeen, Greece was the transit point for weapons transfers to Europe. Athens was the first of three stops before TWA flight 841 was to reach its final destination in New York. Thirty minutes after leaving the Greek capital, the captain reported the flight reached its cruising level. It was his final transmission. The crew of Pan Am flight 110 en route to Beirut from Rome witnessed the final moments of TWA flight 841.
The captain of Pan Am 110 was the first to catch a glimpse of TWA 841 seven miles away approaching from the east some 3,000 feet below Pan Am 110. It was a beautiful evening over the Ionian Sea. The visibility was unlimited, and the scattered clouds below did not obscure the sea. All was routine. He looked away for a moment and in that instant the bomb that destroyed TWA 841 exploded. When he saw TWA 841 again the plane was climbing steeply, one of its engines was falling away, fuel leaking from the wing was leaving a whitish vapor trail, and luggage blown out of the rear baggage compartment was forming a cloud of debris in the wake of plane's and fluttering back to earth. The climb was so steep that in those moments it took the two planes to close from seven miles to a mile and a half, TWA 841 was nearly level with Pan Am 110. Then TWA 841 rolled over to the left, plunged into a steep descent, and began to spiral slowly toward the sea. It passed behind Pan Am 110 and from its passengers' and crew's field of vision. No one saw the impact with the water.
The crash of TWA 841 killed all 79 passengers and 9 crew members aboard the plane, 17 of them American. The next day, a U.S. warship recovered 24 bodies and enough wreckage for the FBI and the National Transportation Safety Board to determine the cause of the disaster. That same day, Abd al-Ghafur's Nationalist Arab Youth Organization for the Liberation of Palestine claimed responsibility for the destruction of the jet. The organization's communiqué reported a Chilean national of Palestinian descent detonated the bomb killing him and a number of Mossad agents who were aboard the plane. If the claim was true, this was the first time Palestinian terrorists had resorted to a suicide bombing. No one has ever confirmed that Israeli agents died aboard TWA 841; it is certain that seven children and two infants were killed when the plane plunged into the sea.5
TWA 841 was Abd al-Ghafur's attempt to embarrass Arafat on the eve of the Arab League summit in Morocco in October. It was also al-Ghafur's final act of terror in a campaign that began the previous spring. Four days after the TWA disaster, Fatah assassins killed al-Ghafur in Beirut on Arafat's orders.6 Arafat denounced the terror operation in Paris and Rome in September and December and vowed to punish the men responsible. But Arafat ordered al-Ghafur's death not for terrorism but for breach of discipline. Arafat did not denounce Black September's terror when it served his aims. His calculations were different now. Abu Iyad, who as intelligence chief kept in contact with the more radical PLO factions, later lamented al-Ghafur's assassination because, he said, it turned internal disputes about strategy into a violent struggle for power.7 Iyad was especially worried that al-Ghafur's assassination would prompt his confederate, Abu Nidal, to seek revenge. In fact, Abu Nidal had already resolved to assassinate PLO moderates. In June, Fatah intelligence had thwarted the assassination of Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, the man who accompanied Abu Iyad to Baghdad to confront Abu Nidal after the seizure of the Saudi embassy in Paris. For whatever reason, Abu Nidal believed Mahmoud Abbas's death was imperative. No one doubted that Abu Nidal's ultimate aim was the assassination of Arafat himself. In October, a month after the TWA atrocity, a Fatah tribunal tried Abu Nidal in absentia and sentenced him to death. Fatah never carried out the death sentence. Instead, Abu Nidal did most of the killing.
That same month, October, the Arab League reconvened in Rabat, Morocco, to consider the state of the Arab world. Eleven months earlier, during the Algiers summit, the League recognized the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Arafat could count the declaration as a diplomatic triumph. But the Algiers declaration was under attack. King Hussein, with Kissinger's firm support, held out for recognition of his kingdom's right to represent the interests of the nearly one million Palestinians living in Jordan. Anwar Sadat, who was by then committed to U.S. mediation, had endorsed this reinterpretation of the Algiers declaration in July. Arafat was determined that Arab League reaffirm the PLO's—and Arafat's—exclusive right to speak for all Palestinians. The Arab heads of state who traveled to Rabat in October were keenly aware of the risks of angering the PLO. In the weeks before the Arab League summit, Moroccan intelligence arrested a number of Palestinians who entered the country under aliases. Abu Iyad had sent them to assassinate King Hussein, but wild rumors about a conspiracy to assassinate any representative