Читать книгу Middle Eastern Terrorism - Mark Ensalaco - Страница 10

Chapter 3

Much Blood Will Flow, Not All of It Ours

The year 1972 was a year of terrible violence; 1973 would be worse. The year began triumphantly for Richard Nixon, who took the oath of office for a second time in January. The electoral returns the previous November seemed to vindicate the career of one of the more controversial politicians in recent decades. Within days of his second inauguration, Nixon addressed the nation to announce that Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnamese envoy, had initialed the Paris Peace Accords, which ended the Vietnam War and earned the two men the Nobel Prize for Peace. But 1973 would be a year marked by scandal in Washington and violence in the Middle East. Within weeks of his second inauguration, the president would confront the same wrenching moral dilemma the Israeli prime minister faced the previous September. The Israeli Mossad was engaged in an escalating dirty war of counterterrorism against the PFLP and Black September, and renegade organizations backed by Iraq and Libya launched a wave of terror operations in Europe to destroy any appearance of Palestinian moderation. Not a month passed without terrorist or counterterrorist violence. Moreover, it was almost inevitable that Egypt, Syria, and Jordan would seek to reconquer the territory they lost to Israel in the Six Day War. By the end of the year, while Nixon's presidency crashed down around him as a consequence of the Watergate scandal, the fourth Arab-Israeli war would bring the United States and the Soviet Union into a confrontation and would reshape the political terrain in the Middle East.

Black September's Final Operations

The campaign of Palestinian terrorism and Israeli counterterrorism had by now escalated into low-intensity warfare. The resolution of the hostage incident in Bangkok in December 1973 seemed proof that governments could compel terrorists to back down simply by refusing to capitulate to their demands. The Israelis were actively engaged in a covert counterterrorism of reprisal killings and preemptive assassinations. Operation Wrath of God, the Mossad's covert campaign of assassinations of the PLO middle echelon, had claimed its first two victims in October in Rome and December in Paris. In January, the Mossad struck again, killing Hussein Abad al-Chir in Cyprus. The operation was almost identical to the one that eliminated Mahmoud Hamshari in Paris the previous month; the Mossad's avengers placed a bomb under al-Chir's bed. The next day, Black September struck back in Madrid, assassinating Baruch Cohen, a Mossad agent who recruited Palestinian university students in Spain as Mossad informants.¹ Abu Iyad, whose life depended on counterintelligence, discovered Cohen's operations and ordered his assassination.

The violence was only beginning. On 20 February, the Israeli armed forces assaulted two Palestinian refugee camps near Tripoli, Lebanon—Badawi and Nahr al-Bard—where PFLP trained fedayeen. The Israeli commandos killed 40 in the raid. The following day, as the Israeli forces were completing the operation in Lebanon, Israel's acute security concerns caused a catastrophe. The waste of innocent life marked the Arab-Israeli conflict from the beginning. Palestinian terrorists found justification for killing innocent Israelis, Israeli soldiers rationalized the deaths of innocent Palestinians as collateral damage. But what happened in the skies over the Israeli-occupied Sinai Peninsula claimed more lives than any terrorist act up to that time. On 21 February, the pilot of a Libyan airliner en route to Cairo became disoriented in one of North Africa's blinding sandstorms. Before the pilot realized the error in navigation, the plane had strayed into Israel's security zone over the occupied Sinai where Israeli fighter jets intercepted it. Israeli efforts to hail the pilot were to no avail. The Israelis later insisted that the pilot ignored orders to land, but there is another explanation. The French-speaking pilot apparently did not understand the commands coming over the civilian radio channel. The Israelis feared the worst. No terrorist had deliberately crashed a civilian airliner in a population center or military installation—none did until 9/11. But the Israeli authorities acted to preempt the possibility of a suicide attack on Israel's nuclear weapons installation at Dimona. It was a tragic miscalculation. The pilot of the doomed Libyan airliner had already reversed course when the Israelis fighters opened fire; 106 passengers and crew died when the plane crashed in the desert.²

That same month, Black September set in motion its third major operation after Munich and Bangkok. Like Bangkok, the mission was an embassy seizure. As Abu Iyad tells it, it was an “ambitious plan.” Coming only two months after the demoralizing failure in Bangkok, Black September needed a bold strike.³ If the plan was ambitious, it was also dangerous. The embassy was in Amman. Jordan remained hostile territory for the Palestinians, especially for Black September. whose name is an allusion to the fratricide of 1970. Jordanian intelligence was alert to the threat of Black September, whose first operation was the assassination of the Jordanian prime minister in Cairo. Jordanian intelligence was collaborating with the Israeli Mossad and the CIA. The collaboration of the intelligence agencies was important, but the brutality of Jordanian intelligence toward suspected enemies of the kingdom gave it a critical advantage. There was something else about the ambitious operation that Iyad later reported was months in planning. Black September planned to take down the U.S. embassy in the Jordanian capital and hold American diplomats hostage until the Jordanians freed imprisoned fedayeen and the Americans freed Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy's assassin. It was the first time the Palestinians deliberately targeted Americans. The Amman operation marked a critical turning point in Middle Eastern terrorism.

Because of the importance of the mission—and the urgency of success—Iyad selected Abu Daoud to take charge of the mission. Daoud commanded Fatah forces in Jordan during the confrontation with Hussein's troops in September 1970 and planned the Munich Olympics operation with Abu Iyad. Iyad considered him courageous, capable, and a close friend. That Daoud managed to enter Jordan through Iraq and set himself up in a safe house was a remarkable achievement. Actually, fifteen fedayeen operating in two squads infiltrated Amman, one to storm the U.S. embassy, the second to seize the adjacent offices of the Jordanian prime minister if the assault on the Americans failed. In fact, the entire operation failed. Daoud planned the preparation for 14 February. After putting all the elements in place, Daoud left Jordan en route to Syria. He never reached the border. Jordanian intelligence arrested Daoud and a woman posing as his wife as they drove from Amman to Damascus. It was not a chance encounter. At the same time Jordanian intelligence raided the safe houses where the fedayeen were mustering for the operation. Daoud had been betrayed by an agent within the conspiracy. The arrest of a senior figure in Black September—and Fatah—was an intelligence coup. Under interrogation Daoud made damaging statements about Black September, Fatah, and Abu Iyad.⁴ That the Jordanians tortured him is a reasonable certainty; Black September did not condemn him to death for his moral weakness under interrogation. But a Jordanian court did sentence him to death. King Hussein prudently commuted the sentence to life, fearing for his own life if the monarchy killed a Palestinian of Daoud's stature. But that was not the end of the Daoud affair. Inevitably, Black September would act to liberate him. Less than a month after Daoud's capture, Black September set in motion its fourth major operation. It had struck in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, now it would strike North Africa, demonstrating its reach to all points on the compass.

The planning for what Black September would call Operation Nahr al-Bard began in Beirut in mid-February, even before Daoud's capture in Jordan and the Israeli assault on the Badawi and Nahr al-Bard refugee camps in Lebanon. Abu Iyad was behind it, but another Fatah operative, known only as Abu Jamal—his true identity was never established—coordinated it with the most senior PLO representatives in the Sudan, Fawaz Yassin and his deputy, Rizig Abu Ghassan.⁵ Yassin, who traveled between the Sudan and Libya in the days before and after the operation, was in charge of logistics; Ghassan actually commanded the armed fedayeen who carried it out. Operation Nahr al-Bard was to be a raid on a diplomatic reception at the Saudi Arabian embassy in Khartoum, where Black September would seize the CIA's principal operative in the Middle East. The Palestinians, aware of the CIA's collaboration with Jordanian intelligence, accused the agency of complicity in the slaughter in Jordan in September 1970. Whatever the truth about CIA involvement in Jordan, the information about the man identified as the CIA's chief in the Middle East, George Curtis Moore, was false. Moore was a career diplomat, not a professional intelligence officer. He was just completing a tour as the chargé d'affaires of the U.S. mission in the Sudanese capital, and the gathering in Khartoum was a farewell reception hosted by the Saudis.

On the evening of 1 March, just as the diplomatic reception was breaking up, Abu Ghassan and seven other Palestinians, armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles and grenades, rushed the front gate and shot their way into the Saudi Arabian embassy. They killed a Sudanese policeman and wounded the U.S. ambassador Cleo Noel, Jr. and Belgian chargé d'affaires Guy Eid. In the panic of the first moments of the assault a number of diplomats managed to escape over the garden wall in the rear of the Saudi compound. The Palestinians seized many others. But their mission was not to take as many dignitaries hostage as possible, but to capture and kill Americans. Moore, Noel, and Eid were bound and beaten. Within hours, word reached Washington that terrorists again held Americans hostage.

The crisis in Khartoum compelled President Nixon to confront the same moral dilemma that the Munich attack forced on Golda Meir. It was not the first time a U.S. diplomat had been taken hostage and threatened with death. In September 1969, Brazilian terrorists abducted the U.S. ambassador to the country, Charles Elbrick. Nixon, still in his first year in office, encouraged the Brazilians to comply with the terrorists' demands for the release of imprisoned Brazilian terrorists. The Brazilian military government, known for its hard line, accommodated the White House. The Brazilians were more concerned about the prospect of the death of a U.S. diplomat on Brazilian soil than about freeing political prisoners. The U.S. ambassador went free after a few days of captivity; the terrorists and their freed comrades flew to Algeria aboard a military transport. But in 1973 Nixon was adamant in the refusal to make concessions to terrorists. The president drew the lessons from Bangkok, while ignoring those of Munich.

Golda Meir made the policy of no negotiations an article of faith: if Israelis died in Munich, their death was due to the malevolence of the Palestinians and the incompetence of the West Germans, not the intransigence of the Israelis. In Bangkok, Thai authorities reacted to Black September's seizure of the Israeli embassy with a formidable display of force. Golda Meir's intransigence and Thai armed posturing appeared to break the four terrorists holding the Israeli diplomats. The crisis unfolding in Khartoum resembled the crisis in Bangkok in that respect:the Sudanese also rushed forces to the Saudi embassy. In Bangkok unlike Munich, however, the Egyptian government saw an interest in mediating the crisis. But that apparently made less impression on the White House situation room than did Golda Meir's resolute adherence to the doctrine of no negotiation or the psychological effects of military threats.

Nixon apparently did not consider all the psychological dynamics of the hostage situation. The Sudanese made a show of force but also intervened to resolve the crisis. Sudanese vice president Mohammed al-Baghir Ahmad personally took charge of negotiations. A general, al-Baghir understood the language of force, but with the Palestinians he preferred the language of mediation. Even after he was certain Nixon would offer him nothing he could offer to Black September, al-Baghir understood the need to convince the Palestinians to keep lines of communication open. In reality he understood the need to wear the Palestinians down and erode their resolve. Then, in an unguarded remark, Nixon destroyed that possibility. Asked by a reporter to comment on the crisis as it was entering its second day, Nixon said: “As far as the United States as a government giving into blackmail demands, we cannot do so and we will not do so…. We will do everything we can to get them released, but we will not pay blackmail.”⁶ Three hours later, the eight Palestinians murdered Moore, Noel, and Eid with bursts of Kalashnikov fire in the basement of the Saudi embassy. The order to kill the diplomats came via a coded radio message instructing the Black September commando to “remember the martyrs of Nahr al-Bard,” a reference to the Palestinians killed in the Israeli operation in Tripoli in February. The Israelis who intercepted the transmission have always alleged, but never proven, that the voice was Arafat's. But the order to kill came from the highest echelon of Black September, meaning the militant core of Arafat's Fatah, and almost certainly from Abu Iyad.⁷

After executing George Curtis Moore, Cleo Noel, Jr., and Guy Eid, the eight fedayeen surrendered to Sudanese authorities. U.S. officials put considerable pressure on Sudan's president, Gaafur Nimeiry, to prosecute the killers. The affair says a great deal about the politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and about justice. Nimeiry was deeply embarrassed by the operation and correctly suspected that Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan dictator, was behind the murder of the diplomats. Qaddafi, who was already emerging as a principal figure in the intricate web of state sponsorship of Palestinian terror, would become even more involved as a sponsor of the Rejection Front, which emerged after the official PLO opted to participate in the nascent peace process in 1974. Nimeiry had reason to expose Qaddafi. Moreover, Nimeiry felt betrayed by Fatah. He had become personally involved in the September 1970 crisis in Jordan, flying to Amman to help mediate between the Jordanians and the Palestinians. From his perspective, Arafat owed his life to the Sudanese president's intervention.

This same ideological commitment to the Palestinian cause prevented Nimeiry from punishing the Black September terrorists who embarrassed him in his own capital. The same perverse logic applied to the Egyptians who released Wasfi Tel's assassins on narrow legal grounds. Nimeiry would have preferred not to alienate the United States. The two countries had only recently renewed diplomatic relations which were suspended after the Six Day War. The most important task of the two slain U.S. diplomats had been to achieve a full rapprochement. But passion prevailed over reason. Nimeiry, after considerable delay, forced a Sudanese court to try the diplomats' killers, although the Palestinians transformed the trial into a forum to voice Black September's grievances. On 24 June 1973, a Sudanese court found six of the eight guilty of murder. But twenty-four hours later Nimeiry released the men into PLO custody with the understanding that Arafat's security would imprison them in Beirut for the duration of their sentences. This was not the end of the incident: in one of those small ironies of the history of Palestinian terrorism, in November 1974 dissident Palestinians would hijack a British airliner to demand that the PLO free brother Palestinians.

The Khartoum incident alerted the Nixon administration to the dangers the escalating terror campaign posed for U.S. emissaries. These were dangers Americans traveling to Israel confronted once the PFLP turned to air piracy. But apart from applying diplomatic pressures on the Sudan, the Nixon administration had few options. Its myopic efforts to frame a negotiated solution were focused on ending hostilities between Egypt and Israel. The idea of a comprehensive peace that accommodated the Palestinians fell outside the administration's strategic vision. Not until months later, after the October War, did Nixon and Kissinger even contemplate discreet communications with the PLO, though the CIA had once established contact with Arafat via Ali Hassan Salameh, the Red Prince. When Kissinger finally dispatched an envoy to speak with PLO representatives in November, he gave instructions to warn of dire consequences for future acts of violence rather than to explore prospects for meaningful dialogue.

Operation Youth of Spring

Even before Munich the Mossad was gathering intelligence on the senior PLO cadre and terrorists. By April Mossad agents identified the residences of three of them in an apartment building on Rue Verdun in Beirut's Fahkani district, which by 1973 the Palestinians had converted into a principality. Mohammed Najjar was the most dangerous of the three. A senior member of Fatah intelligence and an operational commander of Black September, Najjar was behind the May 1972 Sabena hijacking. And although Munich was principally the work of Abu Iyad and Abu Daoud, the Israelis were certain of Najjar's involvement. Kamal Adwan also belonged to Black September. He was a staunch supporter of terror, even after Arafat began to have second thoughts about hijackings and hostage-taking for strategic, though certainly not moral, reasons. In the wake of the PFLP-JRA massacre at Lod, Adwan had quipped “this was an ordinary attack similar to any other attack conducted by a combat unit on a settlement or military camp.”⁸ Committee X did not specifically mark Kamal Nasser for a Wrath of God assassination. But as a principal apologist for the PLO, the Israelis reviled him—as they reviled the PFLP's Ghassan Kanafani, whom they killed on a Beirut street the previous year—for his words as much as his deeds. The Israelis killed Najjar, Adwan, and Nasser on an April night in an operation with a disconcertingly idyllic code word, Youth of Spring.

Operation Youth of Spring was a coordinated Mossad-Sayaret Matkal operation. On the night of 10 April, Lieutenant Colonel Ehud Barak's commandos came ashore on a Beirut beach in Zodiac boats and rendezvoused with Mossad agents, who rushed them to Rue Verdun in rented cars.⁹ Some of the commandos were disguised as women to deceive Lebanese police and Palestinian militants patrolling the Fahkani district; Barak, the future prime minister, disguised as a brunette woman, began the killing, shooting a guard posted outside the apartment building. A silencer muffled the shots. Then Barak's men rushed up flights of stairs to the apartments where the men slept and blew open the doors to Kamal Adwan's apartment. Barak is not reticent about telling the details in his imperfect English: “It was only the split-second hesitation of the terrorist when he sees it's (sic) civilian people, that ended up our officer shot the terrorist and not the other way around.” Adwan was racked with as many as 55 bullets. His daughter witnessed the attack “glass was being shattered on our heads and he just fell.”¹⁰ It was the same in Najjar's apartment, except that there the Israelis killed Najjar's wife, who threw herself in the line of fire to save her husband. Her son, who heard the burst of fire from the adjoining room, remembers his father cursing the Israelis—”You killed her you dogs”—an instant before they killed him. Within minutes a battle erupted in the Fahkani. As Barak's men were killing Najjar, Adwan, and Nasser, another Sayaret Matkal team was attacking the nearby headquarters of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Abu Iyad, who improbably claims he was in a nearby apartment debriefing the survivors of the Munich operation the West Germans released the previous October, heard gunfire and deafening explosions.¹¹ Out on the street the Israeli commandos came under fire from Lebanese and Palestinians.

Operation Youth of Spring inflicted heavy damage on Black September. The Israelis killed three of the senior cadre; and almost a fourth. Abu Iyad had dined with the slain men earlier in the evening, attended a PLO central committee meeting with them, and was briefly at Nasser's apartment that night.¹² Yasser Arafat and the DFLP's Naif Hawatmeh lived within blocks of the epicenter of the Israeli assault. But the damage went beyond the body count. The deepest wounds were psychological. Iyad was convinced that the “commandos would never have been able to operate with such impunity for three hours in the heart of Beirut if they hadn't benefited from important local complicity.” In fact, the raid lasted thirty minutes, not three hours, but the nighttime assault not only shook what the PLO's sense of invulnerability, it deepened their suspicions of the Lebanese, especially the minority Maronite Christians.¹³ This was not coincidental because the Israelis came to inflame tensions between Lebanese and Palestinians as much as they came to kill Palestinians terrorists. Over the next three weeks, Palestinian fedayeen and Lebanese security forces clashed, and in May President Frenjieh ordered the Lebanese air force to bomb and strafe the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The possibility of a wider conflict was averted only through the mediation of Arab states. It was a prelude of bad times to come. In less than two years Lebanese and Palestinians would be killing each other with the same ferocity that the Jordanians and Palestinians had killed each other in September 1970.

Israel was not winning the war on terrorism, but it was inflicting great harm on its terrorist enemies. Two days after Operation Youth of Spring, a Mossad Wrath of God assassination squad struck again in Athens, killing Zaid Muchassi with a bomb in his room in the Hotel Aristides. Muchassi was filling in for Abad al-Chir, the PLO liaison with the Soviet KGB, whom the Israelis had killed in Rome in October. Making their escape, the Israelis ran into Muchassi's KGB contact in a car outside the hotel and shot and killed him.¹⁴ In the months since the Munich massacre, the Mossad had struck five times: against Black September with the Wrath of God assassinations in Rome, Paris, and Cyprus between October and January; against the PFLP with the devastating attack on the PFLP camps in Tripoli, Lebanon, in February, and again against Black September with the audacious April assault in Beirut. The Palestinians were finding it harder and harder to mount operations in the spring of 1973.

On 15 March, French and Italian authorities arrested two Palestinians who planned to attack the Israeli and Jordanian embassies in Paris. On 4 April, Italian police arrested two more Palestinians, forestalling an attack on El Al passengers at the Leonardo Da Vinci Airport in Rome. Five days later, authorities in Cyprus arrested four Palestinians before they could mount simultaneous attacks on an Israeli Arika passenger jet and the Israeli ambassador's residence in Nicosia. The Mossad and Sayaret Matkal executed Operation Youth of Spring in the heart of Beirut the next night. Seventeen days later the Palestinians tried to retaliate. On 27 April, security officials at Beirut's international airport apprehended three more Palestinians who tried to board a plane for France with explosives. That same day a Palestinian opened fire at the El Al office in Rome, this time managing to kill an Italian clerk who had crossed the path of Palestinian terror. It was a succession of Palestinian failures punctuated by Israeli successes. In June, the Mossad struck in Paris again. This time it was a preemptive strike rather than a reprisal killing.

A Dirty War

The PFLP had not conducted a major international terror operation since May 1972, when Wadi Haddad sent the Japanese Red Army mercenaries on a suicide mission to slaughter disembarking passengers at the Ben Gurion International Airport in Lod. By 1973, tensions between George Habash, the PFLP's nominal secretary general, and Haddad, the master of PFLP terror, had begun to divide the PFLP into factions. The devastating attack on the PFLP training camps in Tripoli in February disrupted Haddad's operations. But the master had not laid down the gun. In mid-1973, Haddad was carefully expanding the PFLP terror network in Europe from safe houses in Paris and London. The man at the center of the network was Mohammed Boudia. As chief of PFLP operations in Europe, Boudia had a range of responsibilities that included the recruitment of foreign nationals to the Palestinian cause in the name of world revolution. Among his recruits was Illich Ramírez Sánchez, a megalomaniac young Venezuelan known as Carlos the Jackal, who throughout much of 1974 and 1975 would be one of the world's most hunted terrorists. The Israelis discovered Boudia's activities in Paris. Late in the morning of 28 June, Mossad planted a bomb beneath the seat of Boudia's car; the pressure of his weight detonated it, killing him.¹⁵ The assassination of Mohammed Boudia was the ninth assassination sanctioned by Committee X and the last successful killing in a series of Wrath of God killings. But it was not the last attempt on the life of a Palestinian terrorist. A month later, the Mossad struck again, this time with disastrous consequences. But first Wadi Haddad's faction of the PFLP suddenly went back into action.

On 20 July, five terrorists hijacked a Japanese Airways flight out of Amsterdam en route to Tokyo with 145 passengers and crew. The hijacking was a combined PFLP and JRA operation. JRA terrorists proved useful to Wadi Haddad at Lod in 1972, but this time the master ordered PFLP members to accompany the Japanese. The operation was a fiasco. One of the hijackers, a Palestinian woman, inadvertently exploded a grenade, killing herself and severely wounding a member of the crew.¹⁶ Miraculously, the Boeing 747 remained airworthy and the terrorists ordered the plane to fly to the Persian Gulf in search of a country that would permit the plane to land. Iraqi authorities denied permission to land at Basra, and Bahraini authorities refused to allow the plane to touch down in Manama before the United Arab Emirates decided to try to resolve the crisis in Dubai. The UAE defense minister took personal charge of the negotiations and boarded the plane after the wounded crew member and the body of the dead terrorist came off it. But the incident did not end in Dubai. The terrorists ordered the plane on to Benghazi, Libya, without issuing a single demand in Dubai. Safe 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, or the PLO, revolutionary. Abu Nidal admired the 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 Camp David Accords in 1979. The Palestinians felt betrayed. Abu Iyad, who was euphoric when the Egyptian president announced Operation Spark, was caustic now: “The October War in Sadat's eyes must indeed have been a ‘spark’…not the raging fire that the entire Arab world was hoping for.”³⁰ But Iyad was among the first to realize the war had transformed the strategic equation. The Palestinians were compelled to reconsider the policy of no negotiation with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no peace with Israel. The mere possibility of Palestinian participation in the Geneva negotiations provoked a violent schism within the Palestinian national movement. Abu Nidal's seizure of the Saudi Embassy in September was an early sign of the Rejectionist terror and internecine warfare to come. Other signs would come at the end of November and again in December.

The PLO disunity over the question of negotiations was matched by the U.S. and Israeli unity: there was no room at the peace table for Arafat's PLO. Golda Meir, whose Committee X had been systematically hunting down PLO figures in the months leading up to the October War, rejected the very notion of a Palestinian national identity. Kissinger, who assumed near total authority to conduct U.S. foreign policy while Nixon sank deeper into the mire of the Watergate scandal, was more concerned with dividing Egypt from the Arab world than with finding a just and durable peace. The Arab League, meeting in Algiers in November, tried to force the issue by declaring the PLO the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” Arafat, who had long coveted this recognition of his legitimacy, took it as a mandate to move the PLO in the direction of calculated moderation. A discreet dialogue with the United States became his best option.

At the beginning of November 1973, Henry Kissinger dispatched Vernon Walters to make contact with the PLO. Walters, a career army officer, had become a lieutenant general in March 1972 after a distinguished career as a soldier, military liaison, and covert operator. That same month, Nixon appointed him deputy director of the CIA, and the Senate confirmed him in May. When the intelligence community's involvement in the Watergate affair forced Richard Helms to resign as director of the CIA in July 1973, Walters served as acting director until September, a month before the eruption of the Yom Kippur War. In November, immediately after the war, Kissinger sent Walters to deliver a stern warning to the PLO. Walters arrived in Rabat, Morocco, in the first week of November. King Hassan arranged for his clandestine meeting with PLO moderates, Khaled Hassan, who chaired the Palestinian National Council's foreign relations committee, and Maje Abu Sharer, who directed Fatah's information department.³¹

Walters delivered a forceful message, but in his memoir he was secretive about the mission: “On one occasion the U.S. government sent me to talk to a most hostile group of terrorists…. We were able to communicate and there were no further acts of blood between us.”³² Somehow U.S. diplomats learned Walter's verbatim remarks: “The violence against us has got to stop, or much blood will flow, and you may be sure that not all of it will be ours.”³³ But for the Palestinians, who were suffering the blows of Israel's Wrath of God operation, the threat of American retaliation was less important than the prospect of a diplomatic dialogue. Kissinger had foreclosed that possibility: “at this stage, involving the PLO [in negotiations] was incompatible with the interests of any of the parties to the Middle East conflict.”³⁴ But the PLO representatives, who viewed the PLO as a legitimate party to the conflict, came away with the impression that dialogue was possible. As they tell it, Walters had some probing questions for the Palestinians about Soviet support for the Palestinian struggle, about the PLO moderates' ideas about a future democratic Palestinian state, and about the PLO's relations with Jordan.³⁵ The Palestinians left the secret meeting with expectations for future encounters endorsed by Nixon. But Kissinger had dispatched Walters to deliver a stern message, not to initiate a dialogue. The meeting did not produce a secret back channel between PLO moderates and the Department of State or the White House. Kissinger may have disdained contacts with the PLO, but the CIA saw the wisdom of an accommodation. In fact, the CIA had already renewed its overtures to PLO moderates the previous year. In September 1972, immediately after Black September's horrific failure in Munich, Robert Ames, the CIA's operative in the Middle East, sent a cryptic message to Ali Hassan Salameh, the Red Prince: “My company [CIA] is still interested in getting together with Ali's company [the PLO]. The Southern company [Israel]…knew about our contacts.”³⁶ The CIA would have its opportunity to reestablish communications with Salameh in less than a year, when Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly in New York.

At the end of the month Walters met with PLO moderates in Rabat, Palestinian dissidents took the first of two actions to poison the atmosphere for the coming negotiations in Geneva. On 25 November, three Palestinians hijacked a Dutch KLM Boeing 747 bound for New Delhi from Beirut with 288 passengers and crew. Although it made political sense for Israel and the United States simply to blame the PLO for all terror, the PLO denounced the hijacking. The new reality of renegade terror further complicated already complicated matters. The men who hijacked the KLM flight claimed to belong to the Nationalist Arab Youth for the Liberation of Palestine, a new organization whose command structure Western intelligence was just beginning to piece together. But the hijackers revealed their connection to earlier terror operations when they issued their sole demand: release of the terrorists captured during the failed operation to attack the residence of the Israeli ambassador and hijack an Israeli passenger jet in Cyprus in April. To make the demand more forcefully, the hijackers ordered the crew to fly to Nicosia after a stopover in Damascus to take on fuel. But the Cypriot president refused to be intimidated, and the terrorists ordered the plane to Abu Dhabi and released the hostages without winning the release of their comrades. In a familiar pattern, the terrorists opted for surrender in an Arab state they knew would not dare punish them for air piracy, much less terrorism.

The KLM hijacking was an act of solidarity between fedayeen. Captured terrorists knew their comrades would never forsake them—freedom was a hijacking away, experience taught them. Few governments obstinately refused to surrender to terrorist blackmail, and most saw humanitarian and political reasons for exchanging the guilty for the innocent. The September operation in Paris was different. Abu Nidal's men demanded the release of Abu Daoud from a Jordanian prison, but the deeper motive for the operation was to embarrass Arafat. After the October War, sabotaging PLO diplomacy became even more urgent. Nixon and Kissinger understood the October War as creating conditions for negotiations that would ultimately lure Egypt away from the Palestinian cause. With the Geneva talks set to begin at the end of December, Arafat prudently decided adapt to the radically changed geopolitical circumstances. The official PLO began convoluted internal debates about the necessity of endorsing the Geneva talks, if for no other reason than to prevent the devolution of the occupied West Bank to Jordan on the basis of Security Council Resolution 242. The renegades viewed things differently and vowed to keep the fires of Palestinian revolution burning. In December Abd al-Ghafur, the dissident who had organized a series of Libyan-backed operations beginning in the spring, put his own torch to the plans for the Geneva peace conference. He struck in Rome.

The Pan Am Massacre

Italian authorities knew the Eternal City was the crossroads for Palestinian terrorists. The JRA terrorists who attacked the Ben Gurion International Airport in Lod in May 1972 acquired their weapons in Rome. Abu Iyad and Abu Daoud rendezvoused in the city six weeks before the Munich Olympics operation. In April, Italian authorities arrested two Palestinians planning an attack in the Leonardo Da Vinci airport. In September, they arrested five terrorists who planned to shoot down an Israeli passenger jet there; their trial was actually set to begin in mid-December, around the time the United States and the Soviet Union originally planned to convene the Geneva peace conference. In mid-December Rome was on alert for a terror attack. It was then and there that Abd al-Ghafur sent his men into action.

On 17 December, five terrorists arrived at the Leonardo Da Vinci Airport aboard a flight from Madrid. The men acquired weapons outside the terminal from accomplices and then approached a security check point where passengers were filing through newly installed metal detectors on the way to connecting flights. The attack began there just before 1 P.M. Drawing their weapons, the terrorists broke into two assault squads, one to kill at random, the second to secure an avenue for escape. Two Palestinians opened fire through the thin fuselage of a Pan Am Boeing 707 standing at the gate, then charged the plane, hurling phosphorus grenades into the cabin. Passengers scrambled for emergency exists as the jet exploded into flames. Twenty-nine passengers, ten of them American, were burned to death in the conflagration. The second squad rushed onto the tarmac to commandeer a Lufthansa jet, shooting two Italian security guards dead and taking seventeen passengers and crew hostage. The ground attack was over in only twenty-two terrifying minutes. Then began the terror of the Lufthansa hostages.³⁷

The terrorists forced the pilots into the air and on to Athens, where the plane landed that evening. While Italian authorities were left to put out the fires, tend the wounded, and identify the dead, Greek authorities were thrust into tense negotiations. The Palestinians never identified their organization, but told Greek authorities “we love liberty, especially Palestinian liberty.” Their only demand was like the one made in the name of the National Arab Youth for the Liberation of Palestinian a month earlier: the liberation of the men captured in the Athens airport attack in August. The demand came with a threat. “We are going to conduct a slaughter at the Athens airport,” one of the terrorists told the tower. If the carnage in Rome was not enough to convince Greek authorities the seriousness of the threats, the Dutch pilot, Captain Joe Kroese, dispelled any doubts. “They're serious…they've already killed four”—and they were threatening the life of a fifth hostage—“They're going to shoot him.” But before authorities could arrange for an Arab speaker to calm the terrorists, the sound of gunfire came over the cockpit radio. “It's too late” was all the pilot could say.

In fact, the pilot was hearing simulated executions. The terrorists had not killed four or five but only one hostage, an Italian airport employee they selected at random. “He was sitting there all alone,” another passenger later told authorities. The hijackers “asked him, even very politely, to come to the galley” from his seat in the rear of the plane. “He walked up calmly. Nobody had any idea of what was about to happen.” Nobody except the terrorists. Another passenger could see through an opening in the curtain that he was pleading for his life. One of the terrorists shot him twice at point blank range. This was the first hostage murdered aboard a hijacked jet since the PFLP initiated the campaign of hijackings in 1968. That same night, the Palestinians ordered the crew to fly them to Kuwait. They left the body of the murdered Italian hostage on the tarmac in Athens as proof of their love of liberty. The incident ended in Kuwait City thirty hours after it began in Rome with the explosion of automatic weapon fire and grenades. After arrival, the terrorists simply surrendered.

The year 1973 ended as violently as it began with terror claiming victims along a wide arc from the Holy Land to the Old World. But the illogic of terror was shifting. The conflagration in Rome served a very different purpose than previous operations. The purpose of the hijacking of the El Al flight in July 1968 was to raise Palestinian morale by demonstrating the fighting spirit of fedayeen at a moment when the Arab armies and Palestinian guerrillas felt dispirited. The Skyjack Sunday operations two years later were intended, in Leila Khaled's words, to demonstrate to the world that the Palestinians had a legitimate cause at a moment when the world would offer no more than tents and old clothes. The purpose of Black September's Munich Olympic operation was to force the world to be alarmed by the consequences of neglect of the Palestinian national aspirations. But the purpose of this latest outrage was not to embolden Palestinians by harming Israelis or to force indifferent or hostile Western powers to alter their foreign policies, its purpose was to damage Arafat and to destroy an incipient peace process that would promise less than the destruction of the Jewish state and a complete reversal of the Catastrophe of 1948. And to succeed in this, Palestinian extremists would strive to prove to the world that Palestinians were incapable of moderation.