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by Bruce Hoffman
The Atlantic Monthly, December 1,
2001
"Do you want to know how to
eliminate terrorism? I'll tell you. In fact, I'll tell you about something
that no one else knows. Something that has never been written about. You
will be amazed, but it is true. Listen."
The speaker knew what he was
talking about. Just a few years before, he had been a terrorist—a senior
commander of al-Fatah, the largest constituent element of the Palestine
Liberation Organization and the group that was founded, in 1959, and has
been led ever since by Yasir Arafat, the chairman of the PLO. The speaker
was now a brigadier general in one of the Palestine Authority's myriad
security and intelligence services. He was an Arafat loyalist: his
fidelity as much as his competence led to his appointment to this
critically important post. We spoke when an uneasy peace still reigned
between Israel and the Palestinians, and in fact there was a degree of
cooperation between the Israeli intelligence and security agencies and
their Palestinian counterparts, which was superintended by the CIA.
Ironically, the general's job was
hunting down and rooting out terrorists. He was the archetypal poacher
turned gamekeeper. His nemeses were neither the Jews nor their Zionist
benefactors but his brother Palestinians: men who, unlike him, had refused
to swear allegiance to al Rais ("the head," as Arafat is often known among
Palestinians) and the governing Palestine Authority. These men, moreover,
were imbued with religious fervor and the unswerving belief that armed
struggle was decreed by Allah and justified by the Koran. They belonged to
a new generation of Palestinians, who had joined more-recently established
terrorist groups such as Hamas (the Arabic acronym for the Islamic
Resistance Movement) and the Palestine Islamic Jihad, and whose struggles
were directed as much against what they saw as the corrupt and reprobate
Palestine Authority as against their most reviled enemy, Israel.
We had been sitting in the
general's office, above a sweltering prison in Gaza City, talking and
drinking sweet coffee. The general was in mufti. He wore a blue suit, a
light-blue shirt, and a blue-and-gold necktie. He looked like a
middle-class businessman or an avuncular pharmacist. His office was
sparsely decorated. On the wall behind his desk was a photograph of Arafat
with his familiar stubble, attired in green military fatigues and wearing
his trademark black-and-white kuffiyeh (Arab head scarf). On the desk was
a picture of the general himself, standing beside Arafat and looking very
serious. Along the wall, on a side table, were framed photographs of each
of the general's children, greeting or being hugged by Arafat, who
appeared the kindly, elderly patron paying a surprise visit to commemorate
a birthday or celebrate some other noteworthy family event.
"Arafat and the PLO," the general
said, "had a big problem in the 1970s. We had a group called the Black
September Organization. It was the most elite unit we had. The members
were suicidal—not in the sense of religious terrorists who surrender their
lives to ascend to heaven but in the sense that we could send them
anywhere to do anything and they were prepared to lay down their lives to
do it. No question. No hesitation. They were absolutely dedicated and
absolutely ruthless."
Black September was at the time
among the most feared terrorist organizations in the world. It had been
formed as a deniable and completely covert special-operations unit of al-Fatah
by Arafat and his closest lieutenants following the brutal expulsion of
the Palestinians from Jordan in September of 1970—the event from which the
group's name was derived. Black September's mission, however, was not
simply to exact retribution on Jordan but to catapult the Palestinians and
their cause onto the world's agenda.
Black September's first operation
was the assassination, in November of 1971, of Jordan's Prime Minister
Wasfi al-Tal, who was gunned down as he entered the lobby of the Sheraton
Hotel in Cairo. While Tal lay dying, one of the assassins knelt and lapped
with his tongue the blood flowing across the marble floor. That grisly
scene, reported in The Times of London and other major newspapers, created
an image of uncompromising violence and determination that was exactly
what Arafat both wanted and needed.
He doubtless succeeded beyond his
expectations in September of 1972, when Black September perpetrated one of
the most audacious acts of terrorism in history: the seizure of Israeli
athletes at the Munich Olympic Games. That incident is widely credited as
the premier example of terrorism's power to rocket a cause from obscurity
to renown. The operation's purpose was to capture the world's attention by
striking at a target of inestimable value (in this case a country's star
athletes) in a setting calculated to provide the terrorists with
unparalleled exposure and publicity. According to Abu Iyad, the PLO's
intelligence and security chief, a longtime Arafat confidant, and a
co-founder of al-Fatah, the Black September terrorists "didn't bring about
the liberation of any of their comrades imprisoned in Israel as they had
hoped, but they did attain the operation's other two objectives: World
opinion was forced to take note of the Palestinian drama, and the
Palestinian people imposed their presence on an international gathering
that had sought to exclude them." Just over two years later Arafat was
invited to address the UN General Assembly, and shortly afterward the PLO
was granted special observer status in that international body.
The problem, however, was that
Black September had served its purpose. The PLO and its chairman had the
recognition and acceptance they craved. Indeed, any continuation of these
terrorist activities, ironically, now threatened to undermine all that had
been achieved. In short, Black September was, suddenly, not a deniable
asset but a potential liability. Thus, according to my host, Arafat
ordered Abu Iyad "to turn Black September off." My host, who was one of
Abu Iyad's most trusted deputies, was charged with devising a solution.
For months both men thought of various ways to solve the Black September
problem, discussing and debating what they could possibly do, short of
killing all these young men, to stop them from committing further acts of
terror.
Finally they hit upon an idea. Why
not simply marry them off? In other words, why not find a way to give
these men—the most dedicated, competent, and implacable fighters in the
entire PLO—a reason to live rather than to die? Having failed to come up
with any viable alternatives, the two men put their plan in motion.
They traveled to Palestinian
refugee camps, to PLO offices and associated organizations, and to the
capitals of all Middle Eastern countries with large Palestinian
communities. Systematically identifying the most attractive young
Palestinian women they could find, they put before these women what they
hoped would be an irresistible proposition: Your fatherland needs you.
Will you accept a critical mission of the utmost importance to the
Palestinian people? Will you come to Beirut, for a reason to be disclosed
upon your arrival, but one decreed by no higher authority than Chairman
Arafat himself? How could a true patriot refuse?
So approximately a hundred of these
beautiful young women were brought to Beirut. There, in a sort of PLO
version of a college mixer, boy met girl, boy fell in love with girl, boy
would, it was hoped, marry girl. There was an additional incentive,
designed to facilitate not just amorous connections but long-lasting
relationships. The hundred or so Black Septemberists were told that if
they married these women, they would be paid $3,000; given an apartment in
Beirut with a gas stove, a refrigerator, and a television; and employed by
the PLO in some nonviolent capacity. Any of these couples that had a baby
within a year would be rewarded with an additional $5,000.
Both Abu Iyad and the future
general worried that their scheme would never work. But, as the general
recounted, without exception the Black Septemberists fell in love, got
married, settled down, and in most cases started a family. To make sure
that none ever strayed, the two men devised a test. Periodically, the
former terrorists would be handed legitimate passports and asked to go to
the organization's offices in Geneva or Paris or some other city on
genuine nonviolent PLO business. But, the general explained, not one of
them would agree to travel abroad, for fear of being arrested and losing
all that they had—that is, being deprived of their wives and children.
"And so," my host told me, "that is how we shut down Black September and
eliminated terrorism. It is the only successful case that I know of."
In the years since, as terrorism
has itself become more egregiously lethal and destructive, seemingly more
intractable and unrelenting, I have thought often of that story, and I
suspect that it is a less far-fetched plan for combating terrorism than it
at first seems. The authorities in Northern Ireland, for example, pursued
a somewhat similar strategy during the years before the current
cease-fire. Hard-core IRA and Loyalist terrorists serving long prison
sentences were often given brief furloughs during holiday periods. The men
to whom this privilege was accorded were carefully selected. They were
mostly in their thirties, and therefore at a time in their lives when the
perceived immortality of youth has been superseded by the dawning
realization of death's inevitability, if not for themselves, then
certainly for their parents.
Once at home with their families,
these men, as the authorities had correctly calculated, developed a keen
appreciation of elderly parents whom they might never see again once they
were returned to prison, and also of children growing up too fast and of
still young and attractive wives wasting their lives waiting. When the men
returned to prison, they were asked if they would be interested in an
expedited release. The Northern Ireland Office relied on a combination of
factors to wean these men from terrorism: family pressure to forsake
violence and secure an early release and the men's having seen with their
own eyes how much the province had changed. To qualify for this form of
parole, the men were required to move out of segregated prison wings
(where they lived with only fellow IRA or Loyalist prisoners) and into
fully integrated cell blocks, where Protestants and Catholics mixed
freely—and nonviolently. This was a critical first step on the road to
parole, followed by vocational training (not provided in segregated
wings), counseling, and more-frequent family visits and furloughs. No one
who had taken advantage of this opportunity for early parole ever returned
to violence or to prison. The program was so successful that the option
could be offered to only a limited number of prisoners, lest the terrorist
organizations, fearing the loss of too many senior veterans and
commanders, forbid their members to participate in the program. To a great
extent, accordingly, the climate of peace that emerged in Northern Ireland
in the mid-1990s may have owed as much to the creativity and foresight of
the Northern Ireland Prison Service as to the political dexterity and
visions of Gerry Adams and David Trimble or Martin McGuinness and Senator
George Mitchell.
The lesson here is not that the
United States should host a series of mixers in the Arab world in hopes of
encouraging the young men of al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations to
forsake violence and embrace family life. Rather, the lesson is that
clever, creative thinking can sometimes achieve unimaginable ends. Indeed,
rather than concentrating on eliminating organizations, as we mostly do in
our approach to countering terrorism, we should perhaps focus at least
some of our attention on weaning individuals from violence. It could
hardly be any less effective than many of the countermeasures that have
long been applied to terrorism—with ephemeral, if not often nugatory,
results.
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