Читать книгу Middle Eastern Terrorism - Mark Ensalaco - Страница 8

Chapter 1

No One Heard Our Screams or

Our Suffering

In the spring of 1967, Lyndon Johnson was agonizing over the escalating war in South East Asia. It had been nearly two years since he announced the fateful decision to commit U.S. combat forces in South Vietnam in order to defeat the Viet Cong guerrillas fighting to liberate South Vietnam and unify it with the Communist North. Johnson, who had assumed office after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, and went on to a landslide victory in the 1964 presidential election, saw his presidency destroyed by an intractable guerrilla war in the jungles of Vietnam. But by the spring of 1967 he was becoming concerned about a guerrilla war in the deserts of the Middle East and the possibility of a conventional war between Israel and the Arab states encircling it. Palestinian guerrillas were regularly conducting guerrilla raids against Israel from Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. In May, the Egyptian president mobilized Egyptian forces, expelled the United Nations peacekeeping force deployed in the Sinai Peninsula, and closed the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping. “The danger implicit in every border incident in the Middle East,” Johnson wrote after leaving office, “was not merely war between Israelis and Arabs but an ultimate confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States.” Johnson urged restraint on Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, but the president understood that the Egyptian provocations constituted a cause for war: “I used all the energy and experience I could muster to prevent war. But I was not too hopeful.”¹ Under the exigent circumstances, to ask for Israel's forbearance was to ask for too much. On the morning of 5 June, Israel launched a massive preemptive strike against the Egyptian air force, destroying virtually all its Soviet-made combat aircraft on the ground. Over the next six days Israeli troops engaged Arab armies on three fronts. By the time the Israelis complied with UN Security Council Resolution 242 demanding an end to the fighting on 10 June, Israeli forces had occupied Egyptian territory in the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza strip, Syrian territory in the Golan Heights, and Jordanian territory on the West Bank and Jerusalem, giving Israel sovereignty over the site of its ancient Temple and one of Islam's holiest places, the Al-Aksa Mosque.² The Israeli victory in the Six Day War demoralized the Arab states, but it radicalized the Palestinian national movement and marked the onset of an era of terrorism directed against Israel, moderate Arab states and, inevitably, Europe and the Unites States. By the time Johnson left office in January 1969, Palestinian terrorists had launched a full-scale assault on civilian aviation intended to compel the world to consider the plight of the Palestinian people.

Origins

Palestinians refer to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 as al-nakba, the catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced as result of the creation of the Jewish state, the ensuing war between the Arabs and Israelis, and an Israeli policy of expulsion.³ As Jews—many of them Holocaust survivors—toiled to build a viable democratic state, the Palestinians chafed under Israeli occupation or languished in sprawling refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon or in the émigré communities throughout the Middle East. In the decades after the founding of Israel, and especially after the Arab's ignominious defeat in the Six Day War, thousands of Palestinians rushed to become fedayeen—“men of sacrifice” in Arabic—in the ranks of several guerrilla organizations later affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Founded in 1964, the PLO came to be identified with Yasser Arafat, its perennial chairman, and associated with the international terrorism committed under the banner of Palestinian nationalism after the Six Day War. The reality is more complex. Arafat actually resisted leading his guerrilla movement fully into the PLO until 1969, five years after its creation, when he was in a position to dominate it. By then another Palestinian organization had already committed the first acts of international terrorism.

Born in Cairo in August 1929 to Palestinian parents as Mohammed Abdel Rahman Raouf Arafat, Yasser Arafat would emerge as the acclaimed leader of the Palestinians before his fortieth birthday. Yet he lived only briefly in Palestine in the mid-1930s, as a young child when his father sent him to live with relatives in Jerusalem after the death of his mother.⁴ Arafat returned to the Egyptian capital in 1937 and spent his formative years there. Soon after he entered the university to study engineering in 1947, he became engaged in the politics of the Palestinian émigré community, participating in Palestinian student organizations and smuggling weapons into a Palestine still under the British mandate. When Israel declared independence and war erupted between the Arabs and Jews in 1948, Arafat set off to fight with the irregular forces of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, where he distinguished himself by his valor. The Arab defeat left Arafat with some inveterate judgments about the inclination of Arab states to betray their Palestinian brothers. The coup that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power in Egypt in 1952 did not substantially alter his thinking. In 1956, when Egypt went to war against combined forces of Israel, Great Britain, and France, Arafat was called up with other Egyptian reserve officers and sent to Port Said to clear mines. But a year after the Suez Crisis he left—or was compelled to leave—Egypt for Kuwait.

It was in Kuwait where Arafat and other Palestinian exiles incrementally formed the Palestine Liberation Movement, or Fatah, a process complete by 1959.⁵ With Arafat was a tight group of close collaborators that included Khalil al-Wazir, who went by the name Abu Jihad, and Salah Khalaf, who took Abu Iyad as his nom de guerre. (Both men would be killed for their politics, al-Wazir in 1988 by Israeli commandos led by a future Israeli prime minister, Khalaf in 1991 by a rival Palestinian terrorist group.) Arafat called his movement Fatah, the Qur'an's word for “conquest,” by inverting the Arabic acronym for the Palestine Liberation Movement, Harakat al-Tahrir al-Watani al-Filastini. But despite the allusion to Islam and his earlier connection with the Muslim Brotherhood, Arafat was a secular Palestinian nationalist who eschewed ideology in order to broaden Fatah's appeal. For Arafat and the men around him the armed struggle to liberate Palestine took priority over all else. Fatah's guiding principle approached heresy in 1959 when pan-Arab nationalism was at its zenith. Embodied by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, the pan-Arab dream envisioned the liberation of Palestine, but only after the unification of the Arab nations made the military defeat of Israel practicable. Arafat inverted the logic of pan-Arabism. Whereas Nasser insisted that Arab unity was necessary for the liberation of Palestine, Arafat countered that the war to liberate Palestine would produce Arab unity: “an armed Palestinian revolution is the only way to liberate our homeland…. Only the idea of the armed struggle can bridge ideological differences and accelerate the process of unification.”⁶ The triumphs of revolutionary movements in China in 1949, Cuba in 1959, and Algeria in 1962 gave the Palestinian fedayeen reasons to believe in the efficacy of guerrilla warfare. (Each of these revolutionary states would provide Fatah substantial material support for the coming struggle.) Fatah was to become the preeminent guerrilla movement, Arafat the acclaimed leader of the Palestinians and eventually president of the Palestine National Authority, a title he held until his mysterious death in November 2004.

Nasser was aware of the Palestinian discontent with the hesitancy of the Arab states to confront Israel. Nasser, who came to power in the 1952 military coup that ousted King Farouk, emerged as the icon of secular Arab nationalism after he seized control of the Suez Canal and survived an assault by British, French, and Israeli forces in 1956 to retake it. Nasser could not forsake the Palestinian cause, but he was careful to subordinate it to his own grandiose vision of pan-Arab unity. Subordination of the Palestinian cause was critical because, unless controlled, the Palestinians would prematurely provoke war between Egypt and the militarily superior Israel. A master strategist who was ever mindful of other Arab leaders' ambitions to replace him as the symbol of the Arab nation, Nasser responded by attempting to coopt the Palestinian cause. This was the origin of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO.

In January 1964 Nasser convened the first Arab Summit to plan for an eventual war with Israel. Although Nasser avoided the Palestinian question during the summit, he invited Ahmed Shuqayri, a Palestinian diplomat, to attend. At the conclusion of the summit, Shuqayri took the urging to continue consultations with Arab leaders as a mandate to create a separate Palestinian entity.⁷ At the end of May, Shuqayri summoned Palestinian leaders to a conference in East Jerusalem to proclaim the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO was thus the creation of the old guard. The PLO charter provided for a Palestinian National Council (PNC), its supreme legislative body, and an executive committee to be elected annually. Shuqayri was the obvious choice for chairman. But although the Palestinians now had a distinct Palestinian entity, two issues were left unsettled—the PLO's relations with the Arab states and with Fatah and other guerrilla organizations committed to the liberation of Palestine by force of arms.

For Nasser and the other heads of state there could be no doubt about the imperative to subordinate the nascent PLO to the Arab states and to deny the Palestinian guerrillas freedom of action to confront Israel. That war with Israel was inevitable was never in doubt. But Nasser and the other heads of state demanded patience from the Palestinians while the Arab armies amassed weapons and forces for a conventional war. Palestinian impatience posed as great a challenge as the Palestinian demand for autonomy, because guerrilla raids into Israel from Syria and Jordan created the risk of Israeli retaliation and therefore the risk of war. In order to gain some measure of control of the Palestinian fedayeen, the Arab states pledged funds, weapons, and training to field the Palestine Liberation Army (PLA), but its under-strength units were deliberately scattered among the Arab states and integrated into the command structure of the Arab armies. The PLA was as much Arab as Palestinian. When the Israelis launched the preemptive war in June 1967, the PLA saw almost no action. Arafat understood that the Arab states created the PLO not to advance the Palestinian struggle but to restrain it. But the mere existence of the PLO posed a formidable challenge to Fatah and Arafat's personal ambitions to dominate the Palestinian cause, because Arab recognition of the PLO bestowed legitimacy upon it. It became imperative for Fatah to take action to wrest the initiative from the nascent PLO and its liberation army. So, on New Year's Day 1965, Fatah's guerrilla forces—which Arafat called al-Asifa, the Storm—mounted their first attack against Israel. The war to liberate Palestine from Israeli occupation—and to provoke a war between the Arab and Jewish states—was reality.

Over the next two and a half years Fatah conducted hundreds of ineffectual guerrilla raids. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) repelled Fatah's incursions. But Fatah's strategy was not so much to inflict casualties on the Israelis or cripple the Israeli economy as to forge a Palestinian identity guided by the spirit of resistance and provoke Israeli retaliation that could precipitate the war that would reverse the catastrophe of 1948. Palestinian attacks, in fact, contributed to the May crisis and the June War. But the defeat of the Arab armies in the Six Day War actually strengthened Arafat, who intensified his appeal to Palestinians to liberate the new territories lost to Israeli conquest. Fatah was not alone. By the mid-1960s there were several guerrilla organizations pleading for arms and funds from Arab states. Most of them were small and ineffective. But the Six Day War was a catalyst for the Palestinian fedayeen. The conversion of the Arab Nationalist Movement into the PFLP in late 1967 was one of its most important consequences.

George Habash and Wadi Haddad created the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM) in Beirut in 1951, almost a decade before Arafat, al-Wazir, and Khalaf founded Fatah. Born into a relatively wealthy Greek Orthodox family in 1925, Habash witnessed his family's expulsion from Lydda, known as Lod in present-day Israel, in 1948. Three years later Habash graduated from medical school at the prestigious American University in Beirut with a specialty in pediatrics.⁸ Habash's determination to destroy the Jewish state motivated him to found the ANM. But as its name implied, Habash's ANM shared Nasser's views about Arab, and not merely Palestinian, national unity. The ANM did not form a separate Palestinian branch until 1961. Like Fatah, ANM mounted raids against Israel before the Six Day War and, like Fatah's operations, its attacks were inconsequential. Then came the Six Day War. Within months of Israel's victory, Habash converted the ANM into the PFLP. The PFLP was the fusion of the ANM and several small guerrilla organizations, the most notable the Palestine Liberation Front, formed in 1961 by Ahmed Jabril, a Palestinian who served as a captain in the Syrian army. With the transformation of the ANM into the PFLP came a radicalization in ideology. The PFLP adopted Marxism-Leninism and organized itself along classic Leninist lines. Habash became secretary general, but his Marxism did not run deep. The most important feature about the Marxist rhetoric was the call to establish alliances with revolutionary forces worldwide. In the coming years, this would translate into operational alliances with European and Japanese terrorist organizations.

The formation of the PFLP marked the beginning of a struggle for control of the PLO and the onset of a campaign of international terrorism in the cause of Palestinian liberation. The defeat in the Six Day War discredited the PLO almost as much as it discredited the Arab states. PLO chairman Ahmed Shuqayri was the first victim. Six months after the Israeli victory, the PLO executive committee replaced him with Yahya Hammouda, who proved to be as ineffective as Shuqayri. Arafat's hour was coming. Fatah's reputation was not damaged by the dismal performance of the Arab armies against the Israelis. On the contrary, because the defeat weakened the disciples of Nasser, it strengthened Arafat. Arafat was careful to cultivate a mystique about himself. The Palestinian leader managed to evade capture by Israeli intelligence during his forays into the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank, and Arafat's Fatah guerrillas crossed into Israel from Jordan to mount attacks. Fatah propaganda exaggerated the impact of the guerrilla raids, forcing other guerrilla organizations to press the attack and distort the truth about advances in the armed struggle. Arafat sought deliberately to embody the Palestinian nation in the popular perception, even though the effort to create a cult of personality conflicted with Fatah's principle of collective leadership. All this worked to his advantage. But Arafat benefited most from an Israeli operation to destroy the guerrillas in their enclave in Jordan.

In March 1968—the same month Lyndon Johnson astonished Americans with his decision to not seek reelection—some 15,000 Israeli troops supported by aircraft, artillery, and tanks assaulted Palestinian guerrilla bases near the Jordanian town of Karameh. The Israeli force was some fifteen times larger than the combined number of Fatah, PFLP, and PLA fedayeen amassed in Jordan. Rather than retreating in the face of superior enemy forces, Arafat ordered his men to stand their ground. Although the Israeli forces inflicted heavy casualties—killing more than one hundred Palestinians—Arafat's fedayeen managed to kill 29 Israelis and wound many more before the Israelis withdrew when the Jordanian army came to the defense of Fatah. In the popular perception, Fatah had forced an Israeli retreat, a feat of arms the combined armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan had never accomplished. The battle of Karameh transformed Arafat into the most credible leader of the Palestinians. In February 1969, Arafat was elevated to the chairmanship of the PLO.

The battle of Karameh forced the PFLP, as the principal opposition to Fatah, to take the offensive to restore its diminished image. The PFLP did not distinguish itself in the confrontation with the IDF, although PFLP secretary-general Habash bore no direct responsibility for his men's performance; he was in custody in Damascus when the Israelis moved against the guerrilla bases in Jordan. Nonetheless, while Fatah stood and fought, the PFLP fled to the mountains with the PLA. Withdrawal in the face of a superior enemy was sound guerrilla tactics, but it was politically damaging. All Palestinian guerrilla organizations were captive to the logic of armed struggle, which dictated that victory in battle is the measure of political legitimacy. To prove its militancy the PFLP made the ominous decision to attack Israel on its vulnerable “external front.” Fatah had launched the guerrilla war of national liberation in 1965; the PFLP now launched an international terror campaign.

The Popular Front's Campaign of Air Piracy

On 23 July 1968, three PFLP terrorists hijacked an Israeli El Al flight en route from Rome to the Ben Gurion International Airport in Lod and directed it to Algeria.⁹ The El Al hijacking was the first by a Palestinian terrorist organization and one of the longest in the history of air piracy—negotiations for the release of the hostages and the jet dragged on for 39 days. The PFLP action produced something no isolated guerrilla raid in Israel could produce, an international incident.

Terrorism is violence, but the violence is invariably symbolic. The symbolism was obvious. El Al is the national airline of the Jewish state, and attacking it was tantamount to attacking Israel. For Palestinians eager to see harm inflicted on Israel in retaliation for their sufferings, the PFLP's audacious action was cause for rejoicing. The decision to redirect the jet to Algeria had symbolic importance as well. The PFLP consciously entangled the Algerian government in the Palestinian struggle. The Algerian war of independence was the source of inspiration to the Palestinian fedayeen, and Algeria, which remained in a formal state of war with Israel, actively supported the guerrillas, principally Arafat's Fatah. Although a PFLP spokesman in Beirut insisted that the PFLP did not forewarn the Algerian government of the operation and would later demand that Algeria explain its reasons for resolving the crisis without consulting with the PFLP, it obviously was counting on the Algerian regime to abet an act of terrorism. Algeria's foreign minister, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, rebuked the PFLP for the action, but Algerian authorities took custody of the hostages and moved them a hotel.¹⁰

The day after the hijacking, Algerian authorities released nineteen passengers. Two days later they released ten more, all women and children. After their release, the passengers came close to praising their treatment. “The food was almost too good,” said an Israeli flight attendant after her release.¹¹ But Algerian authorities refused to release the remaining seven passengers and five crew members on the pretext of conducting an investigation into the hijacking. The explanation was disingenuous in the extreme. By refusing to release the last hostages while the PFLP issued demands for the release of more than one thousand fedayeen imprisoned by the Israelis, Algeria implicated itself in the crime of air piracy. Israel demanded action from the United Nations and threatened to take action itself. Some Israeli politicians demanded retaliation by attacking Algerian civilian airliners on the ground.

In the end, it was not the threat of military action but the threat of an international boycott of Algeria, and Israeli concessions, that resolved the crisis. On 12 August, the International Association of Airline Pilots announced its members would refuse to fly to Algeria. The PFLP strategy to isolate Israel by making airline travel dangerous backfired. Although the Algerian government denounced these pressures, its position was untenable. While the Algerians held out, the Italians attempted to mediate. Unless Algeria was prepared to incur the wrath of the Palestinians by simply releasing the passengers, the only apparent hope for a resolution of the crisis was some movement by the Israelis. The PFLP demand for the exchange of more than one thousand fedayeen for the hostages was unconscionable. But as the crisis neared a second month, the Israelis modified their position. It was not an exchange of prisoners for hostages that was unacceptable, only the number of prisoners and the appearance of a quid pro quo. At the end of August the press leaked word that Israel was prepared to make a “humanitarian gesture” after the hostages and the aircraft were repatriated. Then, on 29 August, Palestinian guerrillas ambushed an Israeli patrol on the confrontation line on the Suez Canal, killing two Israelis and capturing a third. If the Israeli government needed another incentive to resolve the Algerian crisis, this was it. On 1 September, Algeria allowed the remaining hostages to fly to Israel via Rome. Israel made good on its pledge of a humanitarian gesture by quietly releasing 16 fedayeen held prisoner in Israel.

The hijacking initiated a terror campaign against civilian aviation that became more and more lethal over the next several years. Just after the hijacking, the PFLP called a press conference in the Beirut office of the al-Anwar newspaper. Ghassan Kanafani, the PFLP spokesperson, whom the Israelis would assassinate in July 1972, did all the speaking, but he repeatedly deferred to the man seated beside him. That man was Wadi Haddad, head of the PFLP Special Apparatus.¹² Known as the Master, Haddad was among the founders of the ANM and later the PFLP. Like Habash, the PFLP secretary-general, Haddad was the son of Greek Orthodox parents and graduated from the American University with a degree in medicine. These two men were close. In 1956 both went to the Jordan Valley to lend their medical services to the United Nations Relief and Works Administration, an agency set up to attend to the flood of Palestinian refugees. There Jordanian officials became aware of Haddad and arrested him. It was a premonition: Haddad would make it his mission to overthrow the Jordanian monarchy as a prerequisite to the destruction of Israel. By the early 1960s Haddad was conspiring in Damascus. But while Habash was busying himself with political matters, Haddad worked to create a military strike force. He was among the first to advocate military operations against Israel. The ANM guerrilla operations were Haddad's. When those proved ineffective, and when Fatah gained ascendancy after the battle of Karameh, Haddad turned to air piracy—and to terror.

It is not known whether Habash knew of the El Al operation in advance, since he had been in custody in Damascus since March. Haddad's special apparatus organized his escape to Jordan two months after the last hostages left Algeria. What is certain is that as Haddad intensified the campaign against civilian aviation culminating in a spectacular operation in the fall of 1970, Habash endorsed Haddad's operations. The idea, said Habash, was “to turn passengers into hostages, blow them out of the sky, attack them in the terminals.” Habash would not reverse his position until 1974, well after the Soviet Union, which had adopted the Palestinian cause, publicly condemned hijacking.¹³ But Haddad never abandoned the strategy and continued to organize hijacking operations until failed operations in Entebbe in 1976 and Mogadishu in 1977 forced Habash to expel him from the PFLP. Haddad died the following year, but the disciples of the Master would sustain his campaign of aviation terror well into the 1980s, when Islamic fundamentalism was already replacing Palestinian nationalism as the ideological inspiration for violence.

The El Al operation was, in fact, the beginning of a lethal campaign to take hostages, blow passengers out of the sky, and attack them in the terminals. Two days after Christmas 1968, PFLP terrorists killed one passenger and wounded several others in attack on an El Al jet on the tarmac at the airport in Athens. Two days later, Israelis retaliated with a devastating air strike on Beirut International Airport, destroying thirteen passenger aircraft on the ground. On 18 February 1969 the PFLP attacked again, strafing an El Al aircraft in Zurich, killing a passenger and wounding four others. Six months passed without another major incident; then, at the end of August, PFLP terrorists led by Leila Khaled, a twenty-four-year-old woman who would soon become famous, hijacked a TWA flight after takeoff from Rome, diverted the plane to Damascus, and destroyed the jet on the ground after forcing the passengers off. The PFLP—with the connivance of the Syrian government—held two Israelis hostage for six weeks until Israel, in another humanitarian gesture, released two captured Syrian pilots.¹⁴ The PFLP followed this with a September grenade attack on an El Al office in Munich that left two dead and an identical attack in Athens in November that killed a four-year-old boy. In December, airport security in Athens thwarted a PFLP attempt to seize another flight in Athens, but in February 1970 the PFLP raked the transit lounge at the Munich airport with gunfire, killing one El Al passenger and wounding many others.

The operations demonstrated a great deal about the PFLP's operational capabilities and commercial aviation's security vulnerabilities. Haddad proved that his special operations apparatus could strike in major European cities: Athens (where aviation officials routinely decried as unconscionably lax security), Zurich, Munich, and Rome. No airline was safe from attack. Although the Israelis would prevent Palestinians from hijacking El Al flights after the 1968 Algiers incident, they could not protect passengers and planes from ground attack in foreign cities, and soon the PFLP would demonstrate its capability to strike passengers in an Israeli airport. The August 1969 TWA hijacking proved the PFLP would not refrain from assaulting American commercial airlines. It was attacking on the external front, and it was beginning to attack Israel's U.S. and European allies. The PFLP operational capability was obvious, but the purpose behind the strategy was perplexing, even to some of its own fedayeen. If attacking El Al was tantamount to attacking Israel, then the operations were a continuation of the guerrilla war against Israel by other means. The attacks proved that the fedayeen were not impotent despite Israel's supremacy in conventional arms and dramatized the Palestinian problem even if they inevitably damaged the Palestinian cause. And inflicting casualties on Israeli passengers produced the psychological effect of exacting revenge for slain fedayeen and Palestinian civilians. But Haddad's strategy was more ambitious. The assault on civilian aviation was intended to isolate Israel, to strangle its economy by terrorizing pilgrims to the Holy Land, and to coerce commercial airlines to abandon their lucrative routes between the United States and Europe—and Israel.

The Destruction of Swiss Air 330

Haddad's assaults on aircraft raised the profile of the PFLP, but they also deepened the ideological rifts within it. Naif Hawatmeh, a young and charismatic member of the PFLP, broke ranks with Habash and Haddad over the strategy of air piracy. Hawatmeh's Marxism ran deeper than Habash's, and his orthodoxy led him to repudiate the hijacking operations as the desperate acts of elite commandos insulated from the masses. In February 1969, the same month of the attack in Zurich, Hawatmeh formed the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and set up operations in Jordan. Hawatmeh was a revolutionary who never wavered in his conviction that the destruction of Israel demanded the overthrow of reactionary Arab regimes. Hawatmeh's strident calls for the overthrow of King Hussein's monarchy in Jordan would have terrible consequences by the end of 1970.

The defection of Ahmed Jabril was more consequential for international terror. Jabril, who had merged his Palestine Liberation Front with the PFLP, drew the opposite conclusion about terrorism. In 1969, Jabril also broke away from the PFLP to form the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command in order to be free to act independently. On 22 February 1970, Jabril's PFLP-General Command went into action. On that day, bombs exploded aboard an Austrian Airlines jet en route to Israel from Frankfurt and a Swiss Air flight to Israel from Zurich. Although the Austrian Airlines jet was damaged, the pilot managed to land it. The pilot of Swiss Air 330 was less fortunate.

Fifteen minutes after takeoff from Zurich en route to Israel, the copilot of Swiss Air 330 calmly radioed the control tower with a report of an in-flight emergency: “I suspect there's been an explosion in the aft compartment.”¹⁵ The pilot struggled to put the Coronado jet back on the ground safely and swung out over Lake Lucerne. By then the cockpit was filling with dense, acrid smoke. The pilot nearly delivered his passengers to safety. Ground controllers watched the jet approach the airport, but then turn north instead of east. The crew was flying blind. It was the copilot's voice on flight 330's final transmission: “We are crashing. Good-bye everybody, good-bye everybody.”¹⁶ Swiss Air flight 330 crashed in a Zurich suburb, killing all 47 passengers and crew aboard. Eight Americans died in the worst act of terror up to that time. It did not take investigators long to determine that a bomb had brought down Swiss Air 330. The forensic science of proving airplane sabotage—and fixing responsibility—was still new in 1970; it would be well advanced by 1988 when a bomb destroyed Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The evidence suggested the bomb, which exploded at 14,000 feet, was detonated by a barometric pressure devise, and that the bomb—disguised as a small radio manufactured in East Germany—was placed on board the jet along with mail bound for Israel. Compounding the tragedy was the fact that the crime was so simple—terrorists simply mailed in a bomb.

The PFLP-General Command claimed responsibility for the destruction of Swiss Air 330, but almost immediately disavowed it. The atrocity was such an unconscionable escalation of the war against civilian aviation that even other Palestinian organizations repudiated it. The PLO officially gave solemn assurances that it “strongly condemns such barbaric actions” and “no commando contingent would have carried out such an action.” Arafat's Fatah went so far as to send its condolences to the families of the victims.¹⁷ The condemnation may have been disingenuous or it may have evinced serious disagreements within and between the fedayeen organizations about terror. But the reality was that George Habash's threat—“to turn passengers into hostages, blow them out of the sky, attack them in the terminals”—was now real in each of its dimensions. Terrorists had taken the first passengers hostage when the PFLP hijacked jets to Algiers and Damascus in 1968 and 1969; they would seize jets and hostages thirteen more times before Haddad's death in 1978. Terrorists had attacked passengers in European terminals five times since Christmas 1968; they would strike airports in Athens and Rome in 1973, in Paris in 1975, in Istanbul in 1976, and in Rome and Vienna in 1985. Now Jabril's PFLP-General Command had blown the passengers of Swiss Air flight 330 out of the sky. A year later, in January 1971, authorities in London averted the mid-air bombing of an El Al flight when they discovered a young Latin American woman with explosives in her carry-on luggage. In August 1972, the PFLP-General Command managed to put a bomb aboard an El Al flight out of Rome. The bomb exploded but did not destroy the jet.¹⁸ Terrorists would blow jets out of the sky again in 1974 and 1988. Regardless of the doctrinal disputes among the Palestinian factions over the strategy of terror, the Palestinian national movement was becoming equated with international terrorism.

Skyjack Sunday

The PFLP assault on civilian aviation began in the waning months of the Johnson administration in July 1968, but by the time Jabril's PFLP-General Command destroyed Swiss Air 330, Richard Nixon was president. Nixon had won the November 1968 election after a tumultuous year in the United States. In January the war in Vietnam took a dramatic turn after the Vietnamese mounted the famed Tet Offensive and opened a terrible political rift in American society. In March Johnson announced his decision to return to his ranch in Texas rather than stand for election to another term; in April an assassin cut down Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the influential civil rights leader; in June an angry young Syrian, Sirhan Sirhan, murdered Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles, only moments after voting returns in the California primary made him the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. Although the Middle East conflict was not the most urgent issue on the Republican administration's ambitious foreign policy agenda, Nixon could not ignore the escalating tensions on the ceasefire line between Egypt and Israel. The wave of terrorism further complicated an already complex region.

Nixon adopted a more active Middle East policy than Johnson's, and viewed movement on the complex array of issues as part of a global Cold War strategy.¹⁹ As the Nixon administration approached the end of its first year, secretary of state William Rogers announced a peace plan based on Security Council Resolution 242, passed in November 1967 as the United Nations reaction to the Six Day War. The Rogers plan was doomed from the outset. The Arab League, meeting in Khartoum in August 1967, when the sting of the defeat was still acute, swore itself to three “No's”: No negotiations with Israel, No recognition of Israel, No peace with Israel. Even Nixon admitted he believed the Rogers plan, because it envisioned Israel's return of the occupied territories, “had absolutely no chance of being accepted by Israel.” Henry Kissinger, Nixon's ambitious national security advisor, was skeptical of what he derided as the “sacramental language” and “mystical ambiguities of Resolution 242.”²⁰ But by the early fall of 1970, the administration was confronted with crises along the confrontation line between Egypt and Israel and in Jordan that compelled the administration to attempt to broker a ceasefire.

Clashes between Israel and Egypt along the Suez in the so-called War of Attrition were intensifying and, worse, the Soviet Union had begun arming Egypt with advanced surface-to-air-missiles to counteract Israel's air superiority. The White House soon suspected the Soviets were deploying advisors to operate them. The crisis threatened a repetition of Israel's preemptive strike in 1967. The administration succeeded in convincing Egypt, Jordan, and Israel to agree to a tenuous ceasefire on 7 August, but the chances the ceasefire would hold were nil. By early September both the Egyptians and the Israelis were accusing each other of breaches of the truce. But even though Egypt and Israel continued to exchange fire in violation of the August agreement, the Palestinians viewed even the dimmest prospect of meaningful negotiations between the Arab confrontation states and Israel as a betrayal of the Khartoum's “Three No's.” Habash was explicit about it: “We do not want peace! Peace would be the end of all our hopes.”²¹ Those hopes now turned on the overthrow of the Jordanian monarchy in the belief captured in an incendiary slogan—the road to Tel Aviv leads through Amman.

By the fall of 1970, Palestinian militancy was beginning to shake the foundations of the Jordanian monarchy. The presence of the armed PLO factions on Jordanian soil posed a danger for the very existence of Hussein's kingdom. Fedayeen incursions into Israel from Jordan put Jordan in Israel's line of fire. Moreover, the PLO was a force unto itself, a state within the Jordanian state. There were hundreds of violent confrontations between the Palestinians and the Jordanian population and army by 1970. Worse still, the PFLP and the DFLP openly militated for the overthrow of the Jordanian monarchy. Arafat, acting as both chairman of the PLO and chief of Fatah, was nearly as provocative. The hostility was more than verbal: in June 1970 the PFLP ambushed the Jordanian monarch's motorcade in Amman. By early September, with the Jordanian army and Palestinian guerrillas virtually at war, the king, whose grandfather was assassinated by a Palestinian in 1951 for his supposed collusion with Israel and the West, began to contemplate action to rid himself of the PLO. Meanwhile, the Mossad made an attempt on Haddad's life to rid Israel of the escalating threat of terror. In July 1970, Mossad agents fired rocket-propelled grenades into Haddad's Beirut apartment. Although the Mossad could not have known it at the time, the attack came as the Master was meeting with one his most experienced air pirates, Leila Khaled, to plan the PFLP's most audacious hijacking. Haddad and Khaled were not seriously wounded; Haddad's wife and eight-year-old son suffered minor cuts and burns. Undaunted, Haddad moved ahead with the planning of the most infamous simultaneous skyjacking in history until 9/11.

On 6 September 1970, Skyjack Sunday, squads of PFLP terrorists managed to board four New York bound flights and hijack three of them.²² Two Palestinians took control of Pan Am flight 93 only minutes after the Boeing 747 left the ground in Amsterdam. Instead of crossing the Atlantic, the jet crossed Europe and landed in Beirut, where seven more terrorists boarded it and Lebanese airport personnel refueled it. Then the hijackers ordered it on to Cairo. The terrorists threatened no harm to the 152 passengers and 17 crew members. It was more like theater than terror. Passengers described the terrorists as “perfect gentlemen,” who politely explained their intention to destroy the plane once it was on the ground. One crew member wondered whether the men were serious. But when the plane touched down the Palestinians ordered an evacuation of the plane and passengers scrabbled for escape chutes. The men who had rigged the explosives were barely off the jet when it exploded in flames. For the passengers aboard Pan Am 93 this was the end of the ordeal. The next morning all flew on to New York.

For the passengers aboard TWA flight 741 and Swissair 100 the hijacking was just the beginning of what proved to be a violent month in Jordan. The Boeing 707 left Frankfurt with 141 passengers and 10 crew members en route to New York. Fifteen minutes after takeoff, as the jet crossed West Germany's frontier with Luxembourg, two Palestinians seized it and ordered it to Dawson Field, a remote airstrip on a desert plateau 30 miles from Amman, the Jordanian capital. Swiss Air flight 100 out of Zurich was over France when two more Palestinians commandeered the DC-8at almost the same moment.. Like those aboard the American jet, the 143 passengers and 12 crew members were suddenly en route to Dawson Field. As the pilot put his jet down he had to avoid the TWA jet already on the ground.

The two terrorists on El Al flight 219 failed in their mission to divert the jet to the Jordanian desert. Thirty minutes after the Boeing 707 left Amsterdam en route to New York with 148 passengers and 10 crew members, Leila Khaled and Patrick Arguello jumped into the aisle of the first class compartment and rushed the cockpit. Israeli intelligence knew Khaled's identity from the August 1969 TWA hijacking. That this young Palestinian woman managed to board an El Al flight demonstrated her resolve. She had undergone plastic surgery to alter her appearance and was traveling on a false Honduran passport posing as Arguello's Latin wife. Arguello was a U.S. citizen educated in Chile and living in Nicaragua. Not only had these two managed to board the jet, accomplices managed to place weapons aboard it. But the security failures prior to the departure of El Al 219 ended the moment Khaled and Arguello tried to commandeer the flight.

Arguello, armed with a pistol, rushed the cockpit door and shot an air steward who threw himself against it. An Israeli sky marshal shot him where he stood. Arguello, convulsing outside the cockpit, died before the plane made an emergency landing. (In a communiqué released the same day, the PFLP cynically charged Israel with a serious violation of international law by allowing El Al personnel to carry firearms aboard a civilian aircraft.) Khaled, who had leaped into the aisle holding two hand grenades, was supposed to hold the passengers and crew at bay while Arguello broke into the cockpit, but another marshal rapidly disarmed her and wrestled her to the cabin floor. The crew diverted the plane to London's Heathrow Airport, where British authorities took Khaled into custody, angering the Israelis, who claimed jurisdiction over air pirates for crimes aboard Israeli aircraft. In another seventy-two hours the British would come to regret their entanglement in the affair.

Haddad's operation on Skyjack Sunday was a triumph. Although the Israelis thwarted the seizure of El Al flight 219, the PFLP commandeered three jets, destroyed one, and held two others in Jordan with nearly three hundred hostages. Flush with bravado, the PFLP explained that it had hijacked the jets to manifest its abhorrence of the August cease-fire agreement Egypt and Jordan conceded to Israel and the United States. The PFLP seized the Pan Am and TWA flights—symbols of American global presence—to punish the United States for its support of Israel; it went after the El Al flight simply because the Palestinians were at war with Israel. Haddad's commandos had more pragmatic reasons for hijacking Swiss Air 100: the release of the three fedayeen serving twelve-year prison sentences for the February 1969 attack on an El Al jet in Zurich. Because Germans were aboard the flight, the PFLP demanded the release of three more Palestinians imprisoned for the September 1969 attack on an El Al office in Munich. And it reiterated its demand for the release of Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert Kennedy. Once Leila Khaled fell into British hands, the PFLP also demanded her release and the body of her fallen comrade. This was just the opening round of demands. The PFLP would reveal its specific demands for the release of fedayeen imprisoned in Israel only after the terrorists in England, Switzerland, and West Germany went free.

The PFLP's position was formidable. It held two multimillion-dollar aircraft and more than three hundred hostages of many nationalities. PFLP spokesmen threatened to destroy the jets—although not to kill the hostages—in seventy-two hours, at 10 p.m. New York time, on Wednesday, 9 September. The hostages sat confined to their seats in the sweltering desert heat. PFLP guerrillas encircled Dawson Field; the Jordanian army encircled the PFLP. It was a dangerous confrontation, but the Jordanian army was powerless to rescue the hostages without endangering their lives. On Monday, the PFLP released more than half the hostages, mostly women and children who could not tolerate the conditions. They were free but not safe. They made the overland journey to the capital in a country descending into civil war; in Amman, fierce fighting in the streets forced them to take shelter in the basement of the hotel where the Jordanians had put them up. But the terrorists still held more than 150 Israeli, American, British, West German, and Swiss nationals. The crisis was just beginning.

President Nixon was relaxing at his house in San Clemente for Labor Day weekend when the PFLP seized the airliners. Terrorists were holding an unknown number of Americans hostage and threatening the destruction of the aircraft within seventy-two hours, yet the president's thinking ran to geostrategic considerations. Nixon recorded in his memoir that after the hijackings “it seemed likely that a serious showdown was going to be unavoidable.” Kissinger, the national security advisor, was of a like mind. As Kissinger saw things, the United States “faced two problems, the safety of the hostages and the future of Jordan.” But the future of Jordan mattered most to him: the survival of the man Kissinger patronizingly called the “tough little king” was a strategic imperative. Here the United States had options.²³ Nixon ordered U.S. naval forces in the Mediterranean to move into striking distance of Jordan to deter Syrian and Iraqi intervention in defense of the Palestinian fedayeen, and he discreetly indicated that the United States would favor an Israeli attack to save Jordan and crush the Palestinians. The threat of a U.S. and Israeli attack could at least buttress King Hussein. But the United States could not guarantee the safety of the hostages—the Pentagon advised that it could not organize a rescue operation—and the president and his national security advisor refused to bargain for their lives. “Israel had a policy of never yielding to blackmail,” Kissinger wrote later; “our own view was roughly the same.” The reality was that Israel's policy was not that rigid; Israel made “humanitarian gestures” after the release of Israeli hostages in 1968 and again in 1969. The Nixon administration's fidelity to a doctrine would be challenged again—with dire consequences—before Nixon left office. The Swiss and the West Germans, however, saw no wisdom in risking innocent lives in defense of an abstract principle. The Swiss immediately announced their intention to comply with the demand for the release of the three fedayeen held in Swiss custody, and the West Germans gave assurances they would trade Palestinian terrorists for West German tourists a few days after the Swiss announcement. But both governments refused to release the Palestinians until all the hostages were released, regardless of nationality. No one was certain about the position of British prime minister Edward Heath. Haddad knew how to influence his thinking.

British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) flight 755 departed Bombay en route to London on 9 September with 117 passengers and crew. The flight was scheduled to make stopovers in Bahrain and Beirut before proceeding to London. The BOAC jet never arrived in London. PFLP terrorists boarded it in Bahrain and commandeered it during its final approach to Beirut. It was the second time in three days that a hijacked jetliner approached the airport in the Lebanese capital. To heighten the drama, the terrorists ordered the pilot to circle the city for a full hour before putting down to refuel. By the time the plane landed, both the British ambassador and the Lebanese transportation minister were on the radio urging the terrorists to release the women and children aboard the jet. This the terrorists were not willing to consider: “We are leaving with everybody” they warned “or we are blowing up the airplane with everybody.” It was the first—and last—explicit threat to the passengers. After refueling in Beirut, the plane made the short journey to Dawson Field outside Amman. The pilot, a twenty-two-year veteran, remembers one of the terrorists pondering aloud as he took off for Jordan: “Let's see what Heath does now.”²⁴

The United States, Switzerland, West Germany, and Britain were already negotiating through the International Committee of the Red Cross when the third jet arrived in Jordan with 117 more hostages. The passengers aboard BOAC flight 755 brought the number of hostages back up to nearly 300. A Red Cross mediator convinced the PFLP to push back its original deadline by another seventy-two hours, but even the Red Cross was confused about the exact time those hours expired. The guerrillas surrounding the jets began to ease the restrictions on the hostages. The flight crews spoke at news conferences, small groups of hostages walked around the jets, photographers photographed them, and journalists spoke with them. It was an international media spectacle Haddad would never again achieve. But conditions on the jets were horrendous. Food was scanty, the heat was intolerable, toilets overflowed. On Thursday, the fifth day of the ordeal for the TWA and Swiss Air passengers, an American passenger gave birth to another hostage. The terrorists did not overtly threaten the hostages—a PFLP spokesman threatened to destroy the planes, but did not repeat the threat uttered in Beirut to blow up the planes with the hostages aboard them—but the tension was palpable.

Israel's position was critical, because even after the Swiss, West Germans, and British announced the fedayeen would go free, the fate of the remaining hostages depended on Golda Meir, who had become prime minister when Levi Eshkol was struck down by a heart attack in 1969. Meier would confront the taking and killing of hostages throughout her term in office. On 11 September, the PFLP released 88 hostages, moved another 23 to hotels in Amman, and offered to free all women and children for the release of the seven fedayeen in Switzerland, West Germany, and England. The same day, Israel made vague statements about an agreement “in principle” to make an exchange. The hostage crisis outside of Amman appeared to be moving toward resolution, but appearances were deceiving. The Palestinians, alarmed by the menacing deployments of Israeli and U.S. forces, and engaged in intensifying combat with Jordanian troops, decided to act. On 12 September, the PFLP released all but 54 of the hostages. But then, thirteen hours before the deadline, the guerrillas destroyed the empty jets one by one as news photographers captured some of the most dramatic images in the history of terrorism in the media age. The world would not see anything like this until 9/11.

The destruction of the jets stunned Arafat, who was by then struggling to maintain the unity of the fedayeen militias and to deny the United States and Israel justification for an attack. Arafat, as PLO chairman, suspended the PFLP from the PLO executive committee, but he would have to relent because he could not afford to lose the PFLP with the Palestinian guerrillas virtually at war with the Jordanian army. The reaction in London was different. The day after the jets exploded into flames, and after intense discussions within the cabinet and between the United States and Great Britain, Her Majesty's Government announced it would free Leila Khaled when all the remaining hostages came home. That was still weeks off.

For the 54 hostages left behind, the squalor of the jets was replaced by the squalor of the Wahdat refugee camp. The U.S. State Department could not be certain, but reports indicated that 37 or 38 of the hostages were American. Their captors still did not threaten them with death; a PFLP communiqué stated only that it would hold them indefinitely as prisoners of war. This was a different kind of threat—interminable captivity—Americans would face in the 1980s in Lebanon. A Palestinian refugee camp was not a safe haven. On 17 September, what had been armed clashes between the Palestinians and Jordanians erupted into full-scale civil war. The same Jordanian army that had come to the defense of the Palestinians at Karameh two years before launched a full-scale assault on PLO positions. The ensuing combat was terrible. Over the next ten days, International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) mediators attempted to sustain negotiations over the fate of the hostages but, by the third week of September, ICRC officials acknowledged there had been no direct contact for days with the guerrillas holding the hostages. The guerrillas were on the defensive.

On 26 September, the Jordanians proudly announced troops loyal to the king had rescued 15 hostages from the Wahdat refugee camp; the PFLP predictably announced it had freed them. The next day, the PFLP released 33 more hostages. Now the PFLP held only six hostages, one fewer than the seven fedayeen whose release they demanded. On 28 September, as the violence spiraled out of control, Egyptian president Nasser convened an emergency meeting of the Arab League to end the internecine violence in Jordan. When envoys were unable to broker a settlement, Nasser summoned the king and the chairman of the PLO to Cairo to work out the details of a fragile truce. But neither the truce nor Nasser survived what the Palestinians regard as “Black September.” Already frail, Nasser collapsed and died of a heart attack on 28 September. The internecine violence of Black September killed Nasser, and his dream of pan-Arabism died with him.

The next day the PFLP released the remaining six hostages. Leila Khaled and her comrades imprisoned in Switzerland and West Germany went free soon after. Years later, the BBC tracked down Khaled and asked her about Skyjack Sunday and the decision to free her. “No one heard our screams and our suffering,” she said; “all we got from the world was more tents and old clothes. After 1967, we were obliged to explain to the world that the Palestinians had a cause.” Asked about the negotiations, Khaled remembered that the terrorists had an advantage. “They could not do anything but accept the demands. We just wanted these governments to recognize that these people had a legitimate struggle. I think the European governments recognized us in a situation when we had power. It was a good step for us because [it showed] that governments could be negotiated with and that we could impose our demands.”²⁵

For Khaled and the leadership of the PFLP the obligation to explain to the world that the Palestinians had a legitimate struggle justified mass hostage-taking. The tactic was reprehensible, but it was effective because hostage-taking propelled Western governments into an insuperable moral dilemma. The British prime minister and his counterparts in Israel, Europe, and the United States understood that appeasement of the terrorists would embolden them. But despite the declared policy to reject negotiations at all costs, the potential costs in human lives because of inflexible adherence to the policy were too great. Confronted with an onslaught against civilian aviation, governments would have to tighten airport security to prevent terrorists from boarding aircraft, or they would have to form elite counterterrorist units to assault hijacked planes and kill hijackers. This was not a dilemma for governments alone. Even in the days before instantaneous broadcast of news via satellite, the inevitable news coverage of the crisis in Jordan intensified the pressure on the governments to capitulate to terrorist demands. Governments were in a moral dilemma, so too were the sentinels of a free society—the new organizations. The ethical debate about media coverage of terrorist operations is a direct consequence of terrorists' determination to manipulate the news. Because terrorism is inherently newsworthy, the reality is that media organizations cannot simply decline to cover terrorism. The terrorists understand all of this perfectly well. The hijackings were a means to broadcast a set of demands and advance a set of political objectives. In the media age, terrorism is politics by other means.

Arafat's Terror Option

September 1970, Black September, was a terrible ordeal for Arab unity: the Palestinians were killed not by Israelis but by their Jordanian brothers. The truce between the Palestinians and Jordanians, called out of respect for Nasser, did not hold. Fighting inevitably resumed. Before the last Palestinian enclaves were eliminated in July 1971, PLO fighters suffered appalling casualties; estimates fall in the range of five to fifteen thousand killed.²⁶ King Hussein's Bedouin army had driven Arafat and the PLO from Jordan, but the PLO was vengeful, not vanquished.

In August and again in September 1971, senior PLO leaders met in Damascus, Syria, and endorsed the strategy of international terrorism George Habash and Wadi Haddad had initiated in 1968. Guerrilla attacks against Israeli border positions had accomplished nothing. And now the PLO was consumed with avenging the betrayal of Jordan and the moderate Arab states. Wadi Haddad's assault on civilian aviation at least forced Western governments to negotiate with the Palestinians over the lives of passengers and crews, if not yet to resolve the broader political question of the political status of the Palestinian people. International terrorism became an option in the absence of real military capabilities or a commitment to political settlement. Except for Arafat, whose attitude mattered most, the PLO leaders did not pause to consider the possibility that the strategy would actually damage Palestinian aspirations by creating the perception that the Palestinians were criminals undeserving of a state of their own. But PLO chairman Arafat faced a dilemma. If he opposed the terrorist option, the PFLP and smaller groups could act autonomously, but that entailed the risk of fracturing the unity of the PLO and losing power. And Fatah itself was divided over terror. Abu Iyad, head of Fatah intelligence, raised his voice in defense of terror, although he was careful to characterize his actions as revolutionary violence. When the moment came to decide, Arafat absented himself from the meeting. It was act of moral ambiguity that did not absolve the future president of the Palestinian National Authority of complicity in terrorism.²⁷ Arafat merely adapted the adage of Mao—a revolutionary he admired—to the circumstances of the Palestinian revolution: if power proceeds from the barrel of a gun, Chairman Arafat was intent on controlling the gun. At the conclusion of the Damascus conference, the chieftains of the PLO militias decided to intensify the campaign of terror. For the next few years, until the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, terror would have a new name.

On 28 November 1971, a Palestinian assassination squad murdered Wasfi Tel, the Jordanian prime minister, in the ornate lobby of the Sheraton Hotel in Cairo where Tel was attending a meeting of the Arab League. It was a gruesome spectacle. No one, not even Tel's bodyguards, noticed the two Palestinians who followed Tel into the Sheraton, and no one sensed the danger until one of them, Essat Rabah, fired five gunshots into the Jordanian politician at point blank range. As Tel lay bleeding to death, a second Palestinian, Mozar Khalifa, stooped down and licked the blood flowing out over the marble as the crowd watched on aghast, and he claimed the act in the name of Black September. “One of the Butchers of the Palestinian people was thus executed,” is how Abu Iyad expressed it, “Black September, the underground organization set up early that autumn, had just carried out its first operation.”²⁸ It was the first anyone had heard of Black September; it would not be the last.