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ABU NIDAL: A GUN FOR HIRE -- THE SECRET LIFE OF THE WORLD'S MOST NOTORIOUS ARAB TERRORIST |
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Chapter 9: The Organization Researching the murder of the moderates left me with the suspicion that there might be something after all to Abu Iyad's allegations. At any rate, I could see how his obsession came about. The evidence was still fragmentary, but it had begun to look as if a number of Israel's North African agents might have had a free run of Abu Nidal's organization. They kept cropping up on murderous assignments. But who directed these agents? Abu Dawud's story, which I had no reason to doubt, suggested that the Mossad had a man, or perhaps several, at the very top of the organization. Thus, I shifted the focus of my inquiries. In interviews with Arab and Western intelligence contacts, with Abu Iyad, and with defectors back in Tunis, I set about trying to make a chart of Abu Nidal's organization to see who, if anyone, was in a position to direct these North Africans who, according to Abu Iyad, had killed Khudr, Hammami, and Qalaq and had tried to kill Abu Dawud. As I discovered, it was no easy task. I had one important lead. Abu Iyad told me that French intelligence had asked him for information about a certain Sulaiman Samrin (code-named Dr. Ghassan al-Ali), a very senior man in Abu Nidal's organization who the French suspected was a Mossad agent. Who was Dr. Ghassan and what job did he do? How did he fit into Abu Nidal's elaborate structure? And how was the whole outfit run? My inquiries lasted several months. *** Some men lead from the front, others from behind the scenes, some by making themselves accessible, others by being remote. Some men dominate through personal charisma, others through fear. Some owe their power to popular vote or to a party machine, others to the armed forces. Abu Nidal rules by contempt -- bullying, browbeating, and humiliating his colleagues. He dictates not only where they live and what work they do but also what brand of cigarettes they may smoke, how much meat they may consume, what toys their children may play with, what items -- and certainly not chocolate! -- they may buy at airport duty-free shops, and even what dresses their wives are allowed to wear. Abu Nidal is especially contemptuous of the wives of the men who work for him. Once he tried to save money by buying women's underclothes in bulk for all his members' wives. A guard from the Intelligence Directorate measured the women for bras and panties, and only after great resistance from the women was the scheme dropped. When he first started out in Baghdad in the early 1970s, Abu Nidal's main instrument was a clandestine "Military Committee" that planned and directed his terrorist operations. In due course, various administrative bodies coalesced around this secret core, but it was only in 1984-85, when Abu Nidal returned to the Middle East from Poland, that the organization finally took shape. Abu Nidal's model was Yasser Arafat's Fatah, but he also borrowed from what he knew of Israel's Mossad and of Action Directe, the French terrorist group. After he was thrown out of Syria in 1987, he had to make further organizational changes to take account of his dispersal between Libya and Lebanon. Today, the organization comprises a number of executive directorates and committees through which the day-to-day work is conducted. Supervising them are three central institutions -- a small Political Bureau: a somewhat larger Central Committee, of about twenty people; and a still larger Revolutionary Council. Of these three, the Political Bureau, a mere handful of men chaired by Abu Nidal in Tripoli, is the supreme decision-making body. Hierarchically, directorates and committees are on the same level. The only difference is that directorates are bigger and comprise more than one committee. Both directorates and committees are usually headed by a member of the Political Bureau or Central Committee. From defectors and other sources, I have been able to identify Abu Nidal's principal colleagues and gain some insight into the inner workings of the organization, of which the principal subdivisions are the Secretariat, the Intelligence Directorate, the Organization Directorate, the Membership Committee, the Political Directorate, the Finance Directorate, the Committee for Revolutionary Justice, the Technical and Scientific Committees, and the People's Army. THE SECRETARIAT Abu Nidal controls his organization through the Secretariat, a command-and-control unit that he runs himself and that keeps him informed of everything in the minutest detail. The Secretariat also keeps the organization's archives, but its main function is as a communications center: All communications between different parts of the organization and all documents passing between Libya and Lebanon are channeled through it. Five cadres work in the Secretariat's archives in the South Lebanon port of Sidon and another five in Tripoli, Libya. Their task is to note, transmit, and file and to keep Abu Nidal informed. All this activity generates a great deal of paper -- most of it carried back and forth under seal by special messenger. (Routine messages are also sent by radio, and in addition, a good deal of material travels between Libya and Lebanon, via Damascus, by Libyan diplomatic bag.) The present head of the Secretariat is none other than Sulaiman Samrin (Dr. Ghassan al-Ali), the man whom, Abu Iyad told me, the French suspected of being a Mossad agent. The high-ranking defector Atif Abu Bakr described him to me as "one of the most violent and dangerous criminals in the whole organization." If Dr. Ghassan was in fact Israel's man, he was extremely well placed to manipulate the organization. He was the only person, except for Abu Nidal himself, who knew everything that happened inside the outfit. He virtually ran it. Based in Lebanon with the title of first secretary of the Central Committee, Dr. Ghassan is a lean, dark chain-smoker of maniacal energy. He drinks heavily and has gray hair and large owlish glasses. He claims to be a karate expert and watches karate films on video. He has also read Marxist economics and discusses world events in those terms. He edits the organization's in-house magazine, al-Tariq (The Path), and is its principal contributor. He greatly influences Abu Nidal and considers himself his natural heir. In 1990-91, he filled the number-three position in the organization, after Abu Nidal and his deputy, Isam Maraqa (code name Salim Ahmad). For all his power in the organization, Dr. Ghassan is also intensely unpopular and has even become an object of suspicion. He is aloof, elitist, insulting to others. But with Abu Nidal he is servile. Abu Nidal was once heard to call out, "Samrin, your sisters in Kuwait, those three whores, I hear they've done such and such ..." and Dr. Ghassan nodded meekly. Dr. Ghassan was born in the West Bank village of Silwan in 1946. He was a good student and was sent to study in Britain, where he graduated with a B.A. in chemistry and later was awarded an M.A. Although he calls himself Doctor, he has no such degree. He learned English well, married an Englishwoman, and had several children by her, including male twins. But in 1970 he went to Beirut to work for Fatah. He left his wife behind in Britain and eventually divorced her. (One of his twin sons recently died violently. He fell in love with a girl who, like himself, was studying computer science at an institute in Sidon, in South Lebanon. But she rejected him. On April 18, 1990, he shot her and then killed himself. His death was reported in Abu Nidal's magazine, where he was referred to by his code name, Kamal Hassan, no doubt to prevent readers connecting him with his father. The true cause of death was not given. He was described as a martyr, killed by enemies of the Palestinian revolution.) Dr. Ghassan's first job in the early 1970s was working on weapons development and radio communications in Fatah's embryonic Scientific Committee. When the committee moved from Beirut to Baghdad in 1974, because of the better facilities available there, Dr. Ghassan went as well -- eventually transferring his allegiance to Abu Nidal when the latter broke from Fatah. Over the next few years, he rose to become head of Abu Nidal's Scientific Committee and then, attaching this committee to the Intelligence Directorate, he moved across in the mid-1980s to head the Directorate's Committee for Special Missions, its terrorist arm. It was in this capacity that he supervised the attacks on the El Al counters at the Rome and Vienna airports in December 1985, the hijacking of the Pan Am airliner at Karachi in September 1986, and the killings at the Istanbul synagogue that same month. But if Abu Iyad was right in believing he was the Mossad's man, how could he have done such things? It was a puzzle I could not explain. It was not conceivable that an Israeli agent would mastermind an attack on a synagogue. Yet there was no doubt in my mind that Dr. Ghassan had been in charge of the Special Missions Committee at that time. The strangest puzzle of all was that the Israelis had not retaliated against him or against the organization for these attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets -- although, except in this case, they invariably sought revenge quickly and violently. This was clearly an area I needed to investigate further. The working procedure in force at that time inside the organization was for the Committee for Special Missions to produce a list of potential targets, which Dr. Ghassan and Abu Nidal would then discuss, picking out the ones that attracted them. As a defector from the organization told me, Dr. Ghassan always seemed to favor the most extreme and reckless operations. He used to speak with the greatest admiration of the Khmer Rouge, the IRA, the Red Army Faction. These were the models he held up to us. He detested any form of moderation. On the Palestinian side of things, he was totally opposed to the efforts of men like Atif Abu Bakr to bring about a reconciliation with Fatah. Instead, he seemed to encourage Palestinian discord. I formed the impression that he was a nihilist who reveled in the language of blood. Yet several of Dr. Ghassan's operations proved unsuccessful or were aborted at an early stage -- which in itself aroused the suspicions of some of his underlings. There was, for example, an attempt in late 1986 to smuggle arms into Britain -- an operation that he directed. A member of his Committee for Special Missions, a certain Dr. Ramzi Awad, who lived in Spain, drove a car into Britain with a hidden consignment of arms. He passed through customs without difficulty and got as far as London, where he was suddenly stopped in the street and arrested. The British police had evidently been tipped off. Dr. Awad was given a twenty-five-year sentence. Sources inside the organization report that on this occasion, no attack was being planned. Abu Nidal had merely wanted to hide guns in Britain for future use. For once the weapons are in place, it is no great problem to forge a passport and smuggle a man across a border to mount an attack. The weapons Dr. Awad was transporting may even have been destined for another organization: Barter is common in the terrorist underground. A bomb in London might be swapped for a machine gun in Madrid. Ten forged passports in Amsterdam might be worth as many hand grenades in Rome. In anticipation of a deal, Abu Nidal liked to accumulate supplies in different centers. If one of his sponsors, say, needed arms in Berlin, Paris, or Athens, he liked to be in a position to oblige. After the organization moved out of Syria in 1987, the Secretariat was of necessity divided between Lebanon and Libya. While Dr. Ghassan presided in Lebanon, his deputy, known as the second secretary, lived and worked in Libya. The present incumbent of this post is Samir Muhammad al-Abbasi (code-named Amjad Ata), whom Jorde saw in the Libyan camp -- a tall, dark man of about forty (in 1991), who is married to one of Abu Nidal's nieces, Salima al-Banna, by whom he has a son and a daughter. As Abu Nidal's right-hand man and confidant, he is privy to many of his criminal secrets. Ata's position gives him ultimate control over the archives and over the training camp where Jorde spent many desperate months. Amjad Ata is well prepared for these tasks. In the 1970s he was a hard-working cadre of the Military Committee in Baghdad, helping organize the hostage taking at the Saudi embassy in Paris and the clandestine movement of weapons to Greece -- then one of the organization's main centers for arms storage and distribution. In Syria in the 1980s, he headed Abu Nidal's private office before being put in charge of the Libyan end of the Secretariat once Abu Nidal settled there in 1987. Middle-level cadres of the Secretariat tend to be moved around fairly frequently, to limit possible damage from leaks and indiscretions. But this did not prevent a couple of catastrophic defections. In December 1989, Muhammad Khudr Salahat (code-named Karim Muhammad), then in his late twenties, fled with his wife and two children to Algeria, where Algerian intelligence was said to have pumped a great deal of information out of him -- but nothing, it would appear, about a possible Israeli connection. Salahat had been hand-picked by Abu Nidal to look after a top-secret section of the Secretariat's files known as the private archive. What made matters worse was that he was a nephew of Abu Nidal's wife -- a member of the family. He may have had a sense of grievance on account of an earlier episode in his career: He had spent a year in one of the organization's jails, on a charge of embezzling $125,000 from a larger sum that, for safekeeping, Abu Nidal had deposited in Salahat's name in a foreign bank. A second damaging defection, in March 1990, was that of Arif Salem, one of the chosen few, the four or five people able to paint a complete picture of the organization. For three years he had occupied the sensitive post of secretary to the first secretary -- the man who opened the mail, examined its contents, and decided which items he could deal with himself and which he should pass on to his chief. Before that, he had filled an almost equally sensitive post in the Membership Committee, which, as its name suggests, keeps all the members' files. Arif Salem defected to Jordan, and it is suspected that he may have been working for Jordanian intelligence all along. I reflected that since neither of these people is thought to have revealed to Algeria or Jordan an Israeli connection, they either did not know about it or there was none. THE INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORATE From the moment of Abu Nidal's breach with Fatah in 1974, his "special operations" were in the hands of a secret core organization known as the Military Committee, staffed by men who had undergone special training, had worked clandestinely, and were committed to violence. Obsessive where security was concerned, Abu Nidal was at pains to protect the identity of the committee's members, laying down strict rules to restrict their contacts, even with each other. They were not allowed to meet at each other's homes, and the committee as a whole was utterly closed to all members not actually working in it. Throughout the Baghdad years, the Military Committee was the heart of the organization. It was headed from 1979 to 1982 by an explosives expert, Naji Abu al-Fawaris, who had lost a hand and an eye in an accident in 1973. His specialty was car bombs. It was he who had handled the operation to kill Heinz Nittal, Chancellor Bruno Kreisky's friend, in Vienna in May 1981 -- which, as we have seen, is difficult but not impossible to square with the notion that Israel had penetrated the organization. When the organization moved from Iraq to Syria in 1982-83, the Military Committee changed its name and became known as the Committee for Special Missions, directed in the mid-1980s, as has been mentioned, by Dr. Ghassan al-Ali, who oversaw most of the murderous operations of those years. Despite the change of name, the basic cadres -- those with training and field experience -- remained in place. A bigger change occurred in 1985, when the Intelligence Directorate was formed, with four subdivisions. These were:
From the start, this directorate was by far the most important in the whole organization. Like the old Military Committee, it was concerned with planting undercover agents abroad, establishing secret arms caches, gathering intelligence about potential targets, carrying out assassinations, and monitoring and penetrating hostile services. Inside the host countries it was responsible for instructors, weapons, and stores at the organization's various training establishments. Any information of a security nature gleaned by other directorates or committees was immediately passed to it. It was the control center to which everything of importance was referred. The Intelligence Directorate maintained thirty or forty "residents" in foreign countries, who were responsible for dozens of arms caches, the largest of which was probably in Turkey -- from where arms could be conveyed overland to Europe and to the Arab world. In the organization's history, there have been two main phases of arms distribution: the Iraqi phase, in which arms dumps were primarily established in Greece, Turkey, and France; and then the Syrian phase, when Cyprus, Italy, and West Germany were added to the list. To an outside observer, there seemed to be periods when the directorate was intensely active and others when it was dormant. But an inside source told me that even when no operations were being mounted or planned, the directorate was always vigilant. Security arrangements at airports and seaports had to be constantly reviewed, alterations to visa and immigration stamps monitored, and a host of other subjects kept up to date; the training of staff was a daily preoccupation. "It was work all the time," the source said. "There were no periods of rest at all. The directorate could not afford to pause for a single moment." This directorate was the object of Abu Nidal's special attention, and whoever else he might appoint as its titular head at any one time, he was its real chief. At the beginning, when the directorate was first founded, in 1985, Abd al-Rahman Isa was a natural choice for the job. The longest-serving member of the organization, he had for years been Abu Nidal's shadow (which was the reason I had been so anxious to interview him when he defected, though I had to make do with his taped debriefing). He had been close to Abu Nidal ever since they had first met in Jordan in the 1960s. Abu Nidal had taken Isa to the Sudan and then to Iraq as his assistant and private secretary, entrusting him with all sorts of personal and family matters. When the organization planned to move to Syria in the early 1980s, Isa was sent ahead to run things until the arrival of Abu Nizar and other Central Committee members. Although physically ugly, unshaven, and shabbily dressed, Isa had charm and was quick and shrewd. On one occasion he was stopped by a customs officer at the Geneva airport and asked if he had anything to declare. As it happened, he was carrying $5 million in notes, which Abu Nidal had asked him to deposit in one of the organization's numbered accounts. Without hesitation, he declared the full amount. Respectfully, the customs officer detailed one of his colleagues to escort Isa to the bank of his choice. But Isa was restless. He had the instincts and reactions of an intelligence agent and saw the whole world in terms of plots and covert operations. Hailing from the village of Amin, near Jenin in the West Bank, he was consumed, like many Palestinians of similar background, with the bitterness of the refugee. He was an old-fashioned believer in armed struggle, in the conviction that violence alone would make Israel yield and return him to his home in Palestine. If anyone deserved Abu Nidal's confidence, it was Abd al-Rahman Isa: They had been partners in crime for close on two decades. But in the mid-1980s, Isa made the fatal mistake of associating himself closely with such leading men as Mustafa Murad (Abu Nizar), then Abu Nidal's deputy, and Atif Abu Bakr, the reformist ideologue who was seduced by events in Lebanon and came to believe that the organization could emerge aboveground and take its place in the mainstream of the resistance movement. Abd al-Rahman Isa was to pay for his mistake. Hardly had Abu Nidal settled in Libya in the summer of 1987 than he demoted Isa, excluded him from the center of affairs, and publicly humiliated him. Isa tried to resign, but Abu Nidal insisted that he stay on in the directorate in a junior capacity, to be ordered about by men whose boss he had been and whom he had himself protected in their time. Abu Nidal even gave instructions that Isa should be treated with particular contempt -- thus encouraging the small fry to believe that their own promotion depended on deriding their former chief. Although Isa had been one of the founders of the organization, by 1988 he found himself alone in a small office, forbidden to contact anyone in the directorate, and having to report daily to Abu Nidal on any telephone calls or visitors he might have received. In Isa's place at the head of the Intelligence Directorate Abu Nidal appointed two men: Mustafa Awad (code name Alaa), who took charge of the Lebanon Committee and was based in that country; and his deputy, Ali al-Farra (code name Dr. Kamal), who was based in Libya and took charge of the directorate's three other committees: Special Missions, Foreign Intelligence, and Counterespionage. In theory, Alaa was the senior of the two, with the title head of the Intelligence Directorate, but as Dr. Kamal worked with Abu Nidal in Libya on a daily basis, he was the true intelligence supremo. From then until the present, Alaa and Dr. Kamal have been Abu Nidal's most malleable instruments. Alaa was a sensual, violent, good-looking man in his forties (in 1991). Like Dr. Ghassan and Abu Nidal, he drank and probably used drugs. He was a West Banker from the village of Tal and had studied in Pakistan before joining Abu Nidal in the 1970s. But as with so many of his colleagues, Abu Nidal had acquired a special hold over him. In 1978, Alaa had been one of a group of Baghdad-based fighters whom Abu Nidal had sent to Sidon to help Abu Dawud harass the Israelis during their invasion of Lebanon that year. Arafat had interpreted the arrival of these fighters as a mass penetration of his ranks by Abu Nidal and had rounded them up and interned them. Rather than face detention, Alaa had joined Fatah and had talked, revealing everything he knew -- in effect betraying Abu Nidal, who promptly condemned him to death in absentia. When Israel invaded Lebanon a second time, in 1982, and the PLO was expelled, Alaa switched allegiance yet again and rejoined Abu Nidal. Some members wanted to execute him for his earlier defection but others believed he should be given a second chance. Abu Nidal exploited the situation by making Alaa understand that if he made the slightest mistake, his past would be dredged up and he would be killed. Thereafter, Alaa tried to satisfy Abu Nidal's every whim, displaying exemplary obedience and loyalty. He became one of the fiercest members of the organization, and was soon up to his ears in blood. His special talents were moving weapons about, hiding them, and planning and carrying out operations. For whatever reason, Abu Nidal promoted Alaa rapidly, brought him into the Political Bureau in 1986 and, in personal matters, allowed him exceptional leeway. Abu Nidal was forever lecturing his members about the need for strict sexual morality -- adultery was a crime in the organization, punishable by death -- but Alaa was known to sleep with women prisoners, with many women outside the organization, and even with several of his comrades' wives. Abu Nidal ignored this. There was, for example, the pathetic case of Bassam al-A'raj, an old cadre who had lost most fingers of both hands in an attack on the PLO office in Karachi in the 1970s. In due course he married a Lebanese girl from Sidon, Abir Qubrusli, only to discover that Alaa was involved with her. When he objected to this, he found himself accused of a security crime, imprisoned in the Balawi refugee camp, and then killed in North Lebanon in 1987, leaving Alaa free to continue his relationship with his wife. There were several aspects of Alaa's career that struck me as odd. He had defected but been let back in; he was sexually promiscuous but got away with it. When I found out he had prevented a Mossad cell that had been uncovered in Lebanon from being "played back" (an incident we shall hear more of later), it dawned on me that he might be in on the Mossad deal, if there was one, with Dr. Ghassan. I put him on my short list of suspected penetration agents. As the Lebanon-based intelligence chief of the organization, he was admirably placed to manipulate events to Israel's advantage. The Libya-based intelligence chief, Ali al-Farra (or Dr. Kamal, as he was more usually called), was also guilty of sexual peccadilloes, which Abu Nidal either indulgently excused or used as evidence against him. He had gotten hold of photographs of Dr. Kamal in diverse sexual positions, allegedly taken by the French police in a Paris brothel, and held them over his head, threatening to send them to his family and his village. Dr. Kamal was a tall, bald, bespectacled man of about forty (in 1991) who came from Khan Yunis, in the Gaza Strip, and had dropped out of Alexandria University, in Egypt, after two years in its engineering department. He had joined Abu Nidal's Military Committee in Iraq, where he climbed the intelligence ladder. Once the organization moved to Tripoli, Dr. Kamal's special responsibility was the daily relationship with Libyan intelligence. But Abu Nidal also used him as a troubleshooter and special envoy to foreign countries or terrorist organizations with which the organization had intelligence dealings. He was the contact man with ASALA, the Armenian secret army, and with the New People's Army of the Philippines. He also handled Abu Nidal's delicate undercover relationship with French intelligence. Dr. Kamal was married to Alia Hammuda, sister of Atif Hammuda, Abu Nidal's main colleague in the Finance Directorate. At one time he and his wife lived in rooms above Abu Nidal's office, and had to suffer his constant harassment. For example, Abu Nidal would summon Dr. Kamal's wife downstairs and scold her about her cooking -- it smelled -- or for being too fat or for allegedly stealing some trivial object that had arrived at the office or even for gossiping with other wives about him. He accused her of giving his telephone number to the CIA. Bullying was Abu Nidal's way of controlling everyone around him. At meetings, Abu Nidal would spend the first half hour haranguing those present with sarcastic, slighting remarks, browbeating them so that when it came to discussing serious matters, they were at a psychological disadvantage. "You marry slim women," was one of his favorite themes, "but within a month they turn into elephants. It must be all that chocolate you feed them! If I'm given a piece of chocolate on a plane, I take it home to my son. But you take chocolate out of the mouths of your children and eat it yourselves!" His members listened meekly to such inanities. THE ORGANIZATION DIRECTORATE This directorate dealt with the recruitment of new members, their education in the rules and philosophy of the organization, and their preparation for a job within it. In theory, it should have served as a sort of mother directorate, except that it was always in a state of upheaval because Abu Nidal was convinced its leaders were spies in the employ of hostile powers. It had three main branches: the Committee for Foreign Countries; the Committee for Arab Countries; and the Palestine/Jordan Committee. The first of these committees was the important one, because it dealt with Palestinian students at foreign colleges and universities, who from the very beginning were the bedrock of Abu Nidal's whole structure. In the first phase, in the mid-1970s, groups of students were enlisted and sent to Yugoslavia, Spain, Britain, Turkey, and Pakistan, the main centers at the time for his concentrated instruction. The students were instructed to spread the word, to recruit others, to gather useful data, to investigate potential targets and to set up secret arms caches. But they would not usually be involved in military or paramilitary operations. When an operation was planned, a specially trained hit team would be sent in to do the job. Some students joined Abu Nidal because they needed money; others were fanatics, attracted by his political views. The organization preferred to recruit very young men, whose minds had not yet been formed. Most were country boys from one of the six hundred or so villages of pre-1948 Palestine. Such students were usually recruited before they were sent abroad to study. The organization's technique, much like that of other Palestinian factions, was to approach young people who had just left school and did not know what to do next. "Here is a scholarship to Poland or East Germany!" The student would be hooked as long as the organization could afford to pay him. Abu Nidal spent millions on students -- he was the best payer among all the Palestinian factions. In Eastern Europe, Fatah used to give its students $50 a month; Abu Nidal gave his $500. No one could compete on this level. Of course, he gave his scholarships to young men he considered politically loyal. Many of them were good revolutionary material, good patriotic fighters. But instead of putting their idealism to work for Palestine, he implicated them in criminal acts. They came to see the world through the prism of his bitter philosophy and, in their isolation, he owned them. In Western Europe, Abu Nidal was even more successful, because he could afford to meet all the expenses of his students -- rent, board, fares, pocket money -- which allowed them to settle down into big-city European life and to be ready for action when he needed them. In Spain, he built up a strong organization by taking over most of Fatah's students: He was able to pay them well; Fatah was not. In the 1980s, there was a radical change of climate in several of the countries where Abu Nidal operated. His presence in Spain was virtually wiped out after his assassination of a defector had alerted the Spanish police to his activities; in Britain, after the crackdown that followed the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador, he found it difficult to maintain even a foothold; in Turkey, too, the organization was hit hard after it assassinated a Jordanian diplomat in Ankara in July 1985; and in Pakistan it suffered from harsh repression after the hijacking of the Pan Am jumbo jet at Karachi in 1986. Its presence in Yugoslavia, once a major center of its operations, was also much reduced, and in the late 1980s several of Abu Nidal's students were moved from there to Hungary. As operations in Europe became more difficult to mount and counterterrorism became more effective, the organization shifted its emphasis to Southeast Asia, especially to Thailand and the Philippines; also to India; and in a sketchy way, to Latin America and a number of African countries. As Jorde's career illustrated, such faraway operations had nothing whatsoever to do with the Palestinian cause. By this time Abu Nidal was running a protection racket-raising funds by blackmail and extortion. As its name suggests, the Organization Directorate's Committee for Arab Countries looked after members in those Arab countries where the organization had a presence, which was by no means all of them. After its departure from Iraq and Syria, the organization maintained a small underground presence in these two countries. In Algeria it was well represented, and in Libya it was, of course, present in strength. But in most other places it was a matter of a few individuals living a shadowy existence. The Jordan/Palestine Committee was the weakest of all. The organization had been strong in Jordan in the 1970s, but when in the 1980s it started hitting Jordanian targets on Syria's behalf, it faced tough repression: Its leaders and prominent cadres were arrested and, in many cases, spent years in jail. As for Palestine, the real scandal was that in spite of its strident propaganda and exaggerated claims, Abu Nidal's organization was virtually absent from the occupied territories: For much of its existence, 1974 to 1990, its military activity there was nil. It did not throw a single stone during the intifada, let alone anything more lethal. This, more than anything else, I reflected, gave a clue to Abu Nidal's real priorities. Until 1986, the head of the Organization Directorate had been Fu'ad al-Suffarini (code name Umar Hamdi), who had joined Abu Nidal when he was a young clerk in Abu Dhabi and had given himself over completely to the organization. He had served as the head of Abu Nidal's private office and knew all his secrets; he had overseen the attempt to murder Syria's foreign minister, Khaddam, in the United Arab Emirates; and he had interrogated and executed a number of people in the organization's prisons. As a result, Suffarini had been promoted to head of the Organization Directorate, a position very close to the center of power. But in 1986, Suffarini could no longer cope psychologically with the terrible things he had witnessed. He fell into a depression and voluntarily asked to be passed over. Knowing Abu Nidal's methods, Suffarini must have feared he would be killed. He locked himself in his house, and whenever anyone from the organization knocked on his door, his wife would not open. There came a point when he would deal only with those members he felt would not betray him. Because his loyalty was not in doubt and he seemed genuinely in need of a rest, Abu Nidal sent him as his representative to Greece -- and it was from there that Suffarini fled to Jordan in 1987. Had Abu Nidal suspected that he was planning to defect, he would have ordered Suffarini's execution there and then and denounced him as a spy for the "traitor king," his standard phrase for King Hussein. But clearly things had gone badly wrong in the organization if a man of Suffarini's seniority felt that his only way out was to escape to Jordan -- a country that was his enemy, against which he had mounted lethal operations, but from which he now felt he could expect more mercy than from Abu Nidal. Suffarini was replaced at the head of the Organization Directorate by Mustafa Murad (Abu Nizar), Abu Nidal's deputy, who had now fallen from grace. In his case, the move to the directorate was a substantial demotion, for Abu Nizar had occupied the number-two position in the whole organization for many years. Abu Nizar's career had been typical of the contemporary Palestinian resistance experience. He was born on March 15, 1946, in the Palestinian village of Umm al-Fahm, which was overrun by the Israelis in 1948. His family first fled to Jenin, then to Tulkarm, in the West Bank, where he grew up and went to school in a refugee camp. He attended a teachers' training college at Irbid, in Jordan, worked briefly as a teacher, and then joined Fatah at the age of twenty, in 1966. He was a brave, strong youth and soon distinguished himself in clashes with the Jordanian army. Captured during the battles of September 1970, he was badly beaten and suffered severe leg wounds, which later required an operation in Czechoslovakia. By this time he had moved with many other fighters to Iraq, where he joined Abu Nidal after the 1974 split and was put in charge of the newly formed Military Committee. Abu Nizar was involved, it will be recalled, in Abu Nidal's botched attempt to kill Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazin), of Fatah, in Damascus in 1974. This was the operation that earned Abu Nidal a death sentence, passed by the PLO in absentia, and that put Abu Nizar into a Fatah jail in Syria for eighteen months. On his release in 1976, he returned to Baghdad and again took charge of the Military Committee. In 1979, at the time of the Naji Allush crisis, he played a decisive role in bringing the whole organization back under Abu Nidal's control and was suitably rewarded. When the organization moved to Syria, he was elected Abu Nidal's deputy. Abu Nizar was a large, energetic man, popular with the rank and file, many of whom he had trained, but politically something of a simpleton. He was ill prepared for the in-fighting that was to start in 1985-86, when, on his return to the Middle East from Poland, Abu Nidal started scheming to consolidate his control over the organization -- and to destroy his deputy. The battle over the deputy leadership started in Damascus in 1985, when Abu Nidal was still abroad, traveling between Poland and Libya. He sensed -- and rightly so -- that Abu Nizar, who had run the show in his long absence, had become a powerful figure in his own right, with a personal following swollen by the influx of new recruits in Lebanon. So Abu Nidal, as was his custom, started to attack Abu Nizar in sharply worded letters to the Central Committee and conspired to replace him with a young man in his mid-thirties, Isam Maraqa (code name Salim Ahmad). Maraqa was generally considered mediocre, but he had two features that endeared him to Abu Nidal: He was the husband of his wife's niece, and therefore part of the family; and he was slavishly loyal to Abu Nidal. Born in the early 1950s, he was a blond, blue-eyed man from Khalil, in the West Bank, who had gone to Iraq in the early 1970s to study at the Basra Agricultural College, but he had dropped out to join Fatah before finishing his course. In 1974 he sided with Abu Nidal and went to work in the Military Committee. Abu Nidal took to him and pushed him up the ladder, securing his election to the Central Committee in 1986 and then, in the teeth of opposition from the rest of the leadership, to the Political Bureau itself. It was the first time a member had risen so high without a majority vote in his favor in the leadership. Enraged at the opposition to his plans for Maraqa, Abu Nidal denounced Abu Nizar, who, puzzled and hurt, withdrew to his house for several months and refused to attend meetings. He was persuaded to resume his duties only by the need to mobilize for the War of the Camps -- which, in Abu Nidal's mind, it turned out, was yet another reason to kill him. By the time the organization left Syria in 1987, Abu Nidal had secured the appointment of Isam Maraqa as his deputy -- based in Lebanon, with Dr. Ghassan, head of the Secretariat -- while Abu Nizar, stripped of his powers, was shunted aside to the Organization Directorate and transferred to Libya, under Abu Nidal's direct control. THE MEMBERSHIP COMMITTEE This ultrasecret committee controls the files of every member of the organization, whoever and wherever he may be. Originally paper files, they are now being computerized. No one knows for certain how many members Abu Nidal has and who they are. PLO sources put the total at several hundred. In 1986, Israeli intelligence estimated the strength at five hundred to eight hundred active members and several hundred sympathizers. Western sources suggest the membership could be as large as two thousand men, since the organization has the allegiance of many Palestinian students at universities in different parts of the world. Since 1987, the committee has been based in Sidon, Lebanon, and has been headed by Aziz Abd al-Khaliq (code name Awwad), a West Bank Palestinian, born in 1947, who joined the organization in Baghdad as a young man. Abu Nidal made every effort to keep this committee hermetically sealed off from the rest of the organization. No one was allowed access to its offices, and no direct contacts -- not by the leadership, still less by ordinary cadres -- were allowed with its staff. The committee functions both as an information bank and as a security sieve, for it has the power to accept or reject recommendations for membership submitted by other committees and directorates. Its personnel files contain whatever is known about each member of the organization: birth, family background, education, relatives, marriage, children, career history, political allegiances -- and, of course, details of any intelligence or security agencies with which he might have been involved. Also included is the member's photograph, photographs of his wife, children, and relatives, and photocopies of his passport. A key entry is the long autobiographical statement that each member, and each candidate for membership, is obliged to write, spelling out the details of his life to date. Supplementary information may be called for if the committee sees fit. It might, for example, ask a member or would-be member if he knows the names of anyone in Jordanian intelligence or in the CIA or merely anyone rich. It might ask a member if he suspects his fiancee of having had relations with other men before him and, if so, with whom. Answers must be given in full, and the committee's decision is final. Once accepted into the organization, a member may still have to face further questioning months or years later, and he might, as happened to Jorde, be asked to write out his autobiographical statement again, or face further probing if fresh material surfaces about him. The committee will also pronounce on where in the organization the new member is to be placed, but clearly, members of the leadership also have a say in such matters. If a cadre is seen to have military qualities, for example, someone in the leadership can recommend his transfer to a suitable position. If he is thought to have political potential, he is assigned to political work. Abu Nidal intervenes when someone is spotted with a talent for intelligence or security work. Most members join the organization on the recommendation of an existing member, but once in his job, a new member is forbidden to have any contact whatsoever with the cadre who first recommended him for membership. If a person recommends himself for membership, he will immediately be suspected of being a plant and will have to undergo a long, difficult examination. The investigation may be prolonged. If suspicions are thought to be well founded, the usual procedure is to accept the candidate for membership, transfer him to a "training camp," arrest and interrogate him, and, more often than not, kill him. To prepare for such eventualities, the organization takes the precaution of making would-be members sign a form, as Jorde did, saying that they agree to be put to death if treachery can be proved against them. When the organization was in Syria, any such suspect candidates for membership were usually transferred to Lebanon and dealt with there. A good deal of poaching takes place from other Palestinian organizations -- a task to which the Intelligence Directorate applies itself. In fact, each directorate and committee is involved in poaching and recruitment -- from the street, from refugee camps, from villages, from other organizations. And constant efforts are made to infiltrate and plant members on other organizations. THE POLITICAL DIRECTORATE This directorate is in many ways the most overt part of the organization. It administers two committees, the Publications Committee and the Political Relations Committee; and like some of its sister institutions, its activities are divided between Lebanon and Libya, with the Libyan end known as the Bureau of the Political Directorate Abroad. The main function of the Publications Committee is to publish Filastin al-Thawra (Palestine the Revolution), the organization's weekly journal and principal mouthpiece. (Its name is the same as the PLO's magazine, another example of Abu Nidal's wish to present himself as a rival and alternative to Yasser Arafat's movement.) The magazine was first edited in Baghdad; it then moved to Damascus, from the early 1980s to June 1987; and then, after the organization's departure from Syria, it established its headquarters in Lebanon, in the southern Shuf, in territory controlled by the Druze leader Walid Jumblat. About twelve thousand copies a week are printed and distributed. Because the organization is isolated and clandestine, and at war with a host of Palestinian and other enemies, the magazine is its voice and platform. It is Abu Nidal's main medium of information, of propaganda, of political expression, but also the means by which he communicates his current political line to his scattered members. Occasionally, it has been used to transmit coded instructions. When the organization was in Syria, an attempt was made to publish an English-language edition of the magazine, but only two issues appeared. The Publications Committee also produces posters, postcards, and other publicity material, as well as a series of booklets, of which ten have so far appeared under the imprint Manshurat Filastin al-Thawra (Palestine the Revolution Publications). In the late 1980s, Abu Nidal was believed to be spending about $165,000 a month on the activities of the Publications Committee. When based in Syria, the Publications Committee owned and operated a printing press and a news service under the cover of Dar Sabra (the Sabra Publishing House). Its editorial department was housed in two Damascus apartments, while the computers, electronic typesetting, and German press (which had been purchased in 1984 for 22 million Syrian lira) were housed in a works outside the city. Dar Sabra was headed by a Palestinian journalist, Dr. Ahmad Abu Matar, an able man with a doctorate in Arabic literature, whose allegiance to the organization was not generally known. He had had a career in radical Palestinian politics, having been involved with Dr. Wadi Haddad's PFLP in the 1970s, before secretly joining Abu Nidal in 1983. He used to claim that the apartments and the printing press were jointly owned by himself and his wife's family, but they in fact belonged to the organization, and Dr. Matar was paid a salary of $1,300 a month, together with a house, car, and travel expenses. With his wide range of contacts in journalism, politics, and the world of intelligence, he made great play of being independent, even writing critical articles about Abu Nidal in the Beirut press. However, he also reported regularly to Abu Nidal on intelligence and security matters. When the organization left Syria, much of Dar Sabra was closed down, except for the news service, which Dr. Matar continued to run as a private business (although it has been suspected of links with Syrian intelligence). Dr. Matar has left the organization but has not wholly escaped Abu Nidal's attentions: Since 1989, a number of attempts have been made to abduct him to Lebanon, presumably to kill him there. In Lebanon, the organization controlled a news service called Manara Press, which bought material from free-lance writers and sold it to news agencies and newspapers. On the surface it was a straightforward journalistic outfit, but it too provided the organization with political intelligence, gleaned from its contacts. In Beirut, Manara Press was for several years managed by a Lebanese woman, called Ibtissam Abbud, on a contract basis. She knew that Abu Nidal controlled the company, but she was not a member of his organization. In 1987, rebelling against his dictatorial methods, she decided to resign and claim statutory compensation. The organization's answer was to try to kill her. On orders from Alaa (the Lebanon-based head of the Intelligence Directorate), a car in which she and her fiance were driving came under fire. He was killed and she was seriously wounded. Reporting the incident, the Lebanese press spoke of "unknown assailants." At one time, Manara Press also had a Damascus branch, run by one of Abu Nidal's nieces, Salwa al-Banna, a relatively independent-minded journalist who had specialized in Palestinian affairs and had built up a good range of contacts. But her family connection did not spare her Abu Nidal's harsh discipline. When she refused to marry within the organization and attempted to have a social life of her own -- an aspiration he found wholly reprehensible -- he had her imprisoned for a year in Iraq. Suitably chastened, she eventually agreed to marry Ibrahim al-Tamimi (code name Tariq Mahmud), a member of the Publications Committee, and in 1987 she returned to full-time work with the organization, joining the editorial board of Filastin al-Thawra. But the editorial side of the magazine, like the rest of the organization, was subject to draconian controls. Abu Nidal laid down a whole dictionary of terms and expressions that had to be rigidly adhered to. The PLO was invariably referred to as "the so-called PLO"; Israel, as the "Zionist entity"; Jordan, as the "East Jordan regime"; Saudi Arabia, as "the regime of the Saudi family" or as the "Zionized family." Abusive sneerings constituted the entire political content of the articles. Members of the committee trembled as they wrote, because any departure from the formula laid them open to security accusations. You could be a journalist one day and on trial the next. Failure to grasp the organization's political line, as laid down by the supreme "brain" and "architect," was a serious crime. Having to write to Abu Nidal's dictation, the editors were more like hostages than journalists. Copy arriving from Libya -- it was reverently called "central material" -- had to be used intact and without alteration. Even grammatical errors had to go uncorrected. For a brief period, 1985 to 1987, the journal broke out of these shackles and became a genuinely Palestinian magazine able to compete with those of other groups. It was edited at that time by Atif Abu Bakr, the reformist ideologue, who tried to address Palestinian concerns: the War of the Camps; disunity in Palestinian ranks; the dangers facing the Palestinian people; and so forth. When Abu Nidal sent him an article that alleged that Arafat was suffering from AIDS, Abu Bakr refused to run it. Was it political AIDS, he inquired mockingly, or the real thing? If it was the illness, then it was simply untrue and slander was not the way to challenge policies with which one disagreed. But by 1987 Abu Nidal had regained control, and the magazine reverted to its old ways. Arafat was once more the "enemy within," the traitor who was steering the Palestinian ship onto the rocks. There were, of course, other changes of tone in the magazine, depending on where it was based. When it was in Iraq in the 1970s, Syria was depicted as "the treacherous, Alawi, sectarian regime," while Iraq was the "nationalist regime," the "backbone of the Arab revolution." When the organization moved to Damascus, it was Syria's turn to be praised as the "champion of strategic balance." On Abu Nidal's orders, a photograph of President Assad appeared in every issue to illustrate flattering articles about Syria. Meanwhile, Iraq was abused as a "fascist dictatorship," Iran's victories in that Gulf war were extolled, and Iraq's foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, became the special butt of Abu Nidal's venom: His Christian origins and "Crusader mentality" were constantly attacked. He was the tool of "a Vatican conspiracy against the Arabs," it was claimed. Then, when the move to Libya took place, Assad's picture was dropped, together with all flattery of Syria, and Qaddafi and Libya were praised. The Political Directorate's second committee was the Political Relations Committee, in charge of handling all the organization's political relationships -- with Arab and foreign states, with political parties, with other Palestinian factions -- except for those of an intelligence or security nature. Abu Nidal could not resist poaching from the committee those relationships that interested him -- such as the relationship with France, for example -- on the argument that they were really an intelligence matter. But he was clever enough to realize that some relationships were better handled by reasonably open-minded people on the committee, able to conduct sensible political discussions, rather than by the thugs of his Intelligence Directorate. Atif Abu Bakr was head of the Political Directorate from 1985 to 1987. He was replaced by Mansur Hamdan, a mild, cultured man who, in return for a quiet life, was evidently prepared to do Abu Nidal's bidding. As for the Political Relations Committee, it was divided into two when the organization left Syria, one part going to Lebanon to supervise relations with Palestinian and Lebanese factions, and the other to Libya, where it reported directly to Abu Nidal. Since 1987, the head of this committee has been Rizk Sa'id Abd al-Majid (code name Walid Khalid), who came to the attention of the foreign press at the time of the Silco affair, for which he acted as the organization's spokesman. As we shall see later, Silco was a converted French fishing boat captured by the Libyans in 1986 somewhere between Malta and Libya. A year later, in November 1987, Abu Nidal claimed this was his operation, in order to get Qaddafi off the hook. THE FINANCE DIRECTORATE The headquarters of this directorate were situated wherever Abu Nidal happened to be -- in Iraq, Poland, Syria, or Libya -- and the men who ran it were never anything more than employees, with full allegiance to him. All money matters were kept firmly in his own hands. It was Abu Nidal himself who monitored the foreign bank accounts, who determined the size of the organization's budget, who approved the monthly transfers of funds and made all the investment decisions. The more I investigated Abu Nidal's organization, the clearer it became to me that what he cared most about was the millions tucked away in foreign banks -- together with his personal security, which in turn dictated his political relations with his host countries. His preoccupation with money and with the broad political and diplomatic picture meant that he left the planning and conduct of operations largely to others, giving men like Dr. Ghassan al-Ali and Alaa great leeway. The Finance Directorate was divided into two branches, one dealing with expenditure, the other with investments. The first dealt with the organization's spending on a day-to-day basis; the second managed funds, kept an eye on companies owned or partly owned by the organization, traded in arms and other commodities, collected commissions due on middleman activities. Although the directorate is at present based in Libya, where Abu Nidal can control it, a senior member of the leadership lives in Lebanon and supervises expenditure in that country. The real head of this directorate is Abu Nidal. His deputy, Atif Hammuda (code-named Abu Siham), is an uninspired but useful technocrat who has been with the organization since its foundation. Although he has been a member of the Central Committee for years, he has never been known to utter a word at any of its meetings. As the custodian of the organization's financial secrets, he is not allowed to have social contacts with anyone and lives in great isolation. His sister is married to Ali al-Farra (Dr. Kamal), the Libyan-based intelligence supremo and Abu Nidal's right-hand man. (Hammuda's predecessor as deputy head of the Finance Directorate was a certain Khalid al-Madi who, being less of a doormat, dared voice certain reservations about his work. To chastise him for not displaying the right slavish mentality, Abu Nidal removed him from his post and from the Central Committee and demoted him to being an ordinary cadre. In a further twist, characteristic of Abu Nidal, a pension paid to his old mother, who was then living with him, was stopped and the air conditioner from his house removed -- a grueling enough punishment in Libya in mid-summer.) In the 1980s, two men were largely responsible for the foreign investments of the group. One was Dirar Abd al-Fattah al- Silwani, a member of the command of the Finance Directorate, who, from offices in East Berlin, ran one of the organization's companies, called Zibado. But Dirar defected first to West Germany and then to the United States, spilling the beans to the CIA about Abu Nidal's investment and trading network. A second important overseas manager was Samir Najm al-Din (code name Abu Nabil), who, from a base in Warsaw, ran the SAS Foreign Trade and Investment Company, a large corporation with several branches and interests, ranging from property development to arms trading. (SAS stood for the first letters of the names of three members of the Finance Directorate: Samir Najm al-Din himself; Adnan al-Kaylani; and Shakir Farhan -- the last name an alias for Atif Hammuda.) Samir Najmal-Din was a Palestinian from Iraq with a head for business who in the 1980s was already in his sixties. He made SAS a commercial success, which may have been the reason for his downfall. In 1987, Abu Nidal summoned him to Libya and demoted him. He forbade anyone to have dealings with Najm al-Din, and to break him further, he had his son-in-law, whose name was Dr. Sadiq, arrested, held captive for a year, and then murdered in September 1989. Abu Nidal then claimed that Sadiq had been killed by the Mossad. When Abu Nidal first thought of branching out on his own in the early 1970s, he had very few assets. His first real acquisitions were Fatah's assets in Iraq, valued at some $4 million, which the Iraqis handed over to him. (This estimate excludes the $15 million worth of arms that they also gave him.) Then the Iraqis gave him another $5 million when Fatah condemned him to death. He was clever with money and managed, with these relatively small sums, to make sound high-return investments. No one in the organization knew the details of the banks or the brokers through whom he dealt. Such matters he kept very much to himself. He made a lot of money from blackmail and extortion, adding substantially to his assets. Sources inside the organization told me that he had been shaking down the Saudis since the 1970s, using contacts he had made when he worked in Saudi Arabia. The go-between was a Saudi living in London. From blackmailing the Saudis and lesser Gulf rulers, he is estimated to have collected some $50 million in the twelve years from 1976 to 1988. More money came from arms trading. Iraqi intelligence sources told me that Abu Nidal fronted for Iraq in buying weapons on the international market and shipping them to political factions and liberation movements that Iraq wished to support. By using Abu Nidal as an intermediary, the Iraqis were able to deny all knowledge of the traffic. "He made millions through his arms deals on our behalf," the Iraqis told me. Those mid-1970s deals put Abu Nidal in touch with Polish and Bulgarian suppliers and with Syrian, Lebanese, and Iraqi dealers. In the late 1970s he made still more money selling Polish small arms and light machine guns to tribesmen on the borders of Saudi Arabia and the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, a betrayal, incidentally, of the Saudis, who had been buying him off for years. He would buy a Kalashnikov in Poland for $120 and sell it in South Arabia for ten times that sum. He also bought cut-price copies of Western weapons from Bulgarian state corporations. He made money from these deals, but more importantly, he used these East-bloc countries as safe havens for his various operations. Before the Iraq-Iran War, Abu Nidal had about $120 million, but by the end of the war in 1988, this sum, Western intelligence sources told me, had grown to $400 million. Like many other dealers, he made a fortune selling arms to both Iraq and Iran. The big money came in the 1980s, most of it from selling East-bloc weapons. Most of his funds are salted away in nominee companies or deposited in banks in Switzerland, Austria, and Spain. Funds he deposited with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) in London were lost when it was found out in 1991 that the bank was run by bigger crooks than himself. Ghassan Ahmad Qasim, a former manager of BCCI's branch on Sloane Street, West London, said on the BBC's "Panorama" program on July 29,1991, that an account containing about $50 million was opened at a BCCI branch in London in 1981 by Samir Najm al-Din, Abu Nidal's commercial adviser, and was used to finance arms deals with British companies. Qasim said he had escorted Abu Nidal on shopping trips during three visits he made to London in the 1980s. He also said that he had been recruited by MI5, Britain's security service, in 1987 to pass on information about Abu Nidal's financial dealings with BCCI. Much of Abu Nidal's money was deposited in foreign banks in the names of his wife; his son, Nidal; his daughter, Badia; her husband; and other members of his family. He was said to have placed $20 million in an account in the name of his wife's sister's son -- when the boy was still underage. Large sums were also deposited in the names of leading members such as Abu Nizar, Samir Najm al-Din, Dr. Ghassan, and others, usually with two signatories per account. But in 1985, Abu Nidal regained control of these funds. According to Atif Abu Bakr, Abu Nidal said to Abu Nizar, "Your joint account with such-and-such a bank in Geneva has been identified. We now think it best that it be transferred to the name of so-and-so." So Abu Nizar would go to the bank and relinquish his signatory rights to the person whom Abu Nidal had named. This was usually Atif Hammuda, deputy head of the Finance Directorate, who in turn gave Abu Nidal power of attorney over all the funds held in his name. He was one of the more mobile members of the directorate, investigating the organization's companies abroad, withdrawing or depositing funds in Swiss banks, and monitoring the various accounts. He behaved, according to one inside source, like Abu Nidal's lap dog, and Abu Nidal often referred to him as "you damn dog!" THE COMMITTEE FOR REVOLUTIONARY JUSTICE This infamous committee runs the organization's prisons, interrogation centers, and places of execution. Its main base is in the village of Bqasta, in the southern Shuf Mountains of Lebanon, a location leased by Abu Nidal from the Druze leader Walid Jumblat. Two neighboring Druze villages, Karkha and Alma, are used by Abu Nidal as an arms depot and a military base. In exchange for the use of Druze territory, Abu Nidal supplies Jumblat with arms, expertise, funds, and security. It is a mutually convenient arrangement. The committee is officially headed by Abdallah Hasan (code name Abu Nabil), a former schoolteacher now approaching sixty, who is not directly involved in interrogations or torture. But since he signs execution orders, he is nevertheless implicated in the committee's crimes. Hasan was a senior and long-standing member of Fatah who left to join Colonel Abu Musa at the time of the 1983 Fatah mutiny. When that mutiny collapsed, he rallied to Abu Nidal in 1985. But he was not wholly trusted and, in fact, faced interrogation in 1987, which resulted in a heart attack. With his hands still manacled, he was rushed to the Ghassan Hammud hospital in Sidon, where he recovered. He was reinstated in his job on the committee but lives in the shadow of a sort of permanent blackmail. The real boss of the committee is Mustafa Ibrahim Sanduqa (code name Khaldun), who is married to one of Abu Nidal's nieces. He is a member of the Central Committee and used to take the minutes at its meetings. He therefore knows many of Abu Nidal's secrets. In the following chapter, I shall describe the events of November 1989, when a Mossad agent was discovered. This episode led me to suspect that if there was an Israeli connection, Sanduqa, like Dr. Ghassan and Alaa, was probably part of it. THE TECHNICAL COMMITTEE This small unit, responsible for forging passports, visas, immigration stamps, and diverse documents, used to be an independent body but, since the move to Libya, has been attached to the Intelligence Directorate and, like the principal committees of that directorate, is based in Libya, close to Abu Nidal. The need for passports is an enduring preoccupation and one to which Abu Nidal gives his personal attention. All members' passports are in his personal custody. When in Syria and Lebanon, the organization made use of Armenian expertise in the printing business, through its contacts with ASALA, the Armenian secret army. Forged passports printed in Italy and Japan were also acquired, while the Sudan proved a useful source of genuine passports, largely because the political upheavals of recent years opened its bureaucracy to corruption and bribery. One member of the Technical Committee is Isma'il Abd al-Latif Yusuf (code name Hamdi Abu Yusuf), a Palestinian from Gaza, who has concerned himself with forgeries over many years. Recently, he has been in charge of computer programming at the organization's Sidon offices. He also worked at one time as Abu Nidal's private secretary, is one of his proteges, and knows many of his secrets. The only shadow over his career is a spell in a Turkish jail in the 1970s when, under interrogation, he is believed to have told the Turks what he knew. THE SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE This is another small committee, specializing in developing and manufacturing weapons and explosive devices -- car bombs, suitcase bombs, guns concealed in briefcases (which fire when the handle is squeezed), lethal cigars, chemical poisons, methods of sedation, and the like. Its team of specialists attempts to follow developments in these fields and apply them to the organization's needs. The present head of the committee is Mustafa Abu al-Fawaris (code name Naji), who headed the old Military Committee when the organization was in Baghdad and who lost a hand and an eye in one of his own experiments in 1973. Fawaris has had no scientific training as such, but through long service with the organization he has acquired a good deal of practical experience. He was a military instructor at a Fatah camp in Iraq in 1968 and stayed on when Abu Nidal "inherited" Fatah's assets in that country. The committee occupies several buildings in the Lebanese village of Wardaniyya, in the southern Shuf. THE PEOPLE'S ARMY (SOMETIMES KNOWN AS THE MILITARY DIRECTORATE) Wholly separate from the organization's other directorates and committees, the People's Army is a regular militia closely resembling those of other Palestinian factions. It is found only in Lebanon and concerns itself with Palestinian guerrilla fighters, their bases, training, weapons, and equipment. It has no connection whatsoever with the secret agents and arms caches of the Intelligence Directorate or with special missions, foreign operations, assassinations, kidnappings, and so forth. Nor should it be confused with the former Military Committee that later grew into the Intelligence Directorate. The People's Army was set up in 1985, when the organization came aboveground in Lebanon and started recruiting members en masse. As has been mentioned, it benefited from the 1983 mutiny in Fatah, when large numbers of fighters came over to Abu Nidal from Abu Salih. The role played by the People's Army in the War of the Camps increased its visibility and contributed to the organization's transformation from a purely secret network. The head of the People's Army is Wasfi Hannun, a member of the Political Bureau and the only link with the organization as a whole. He used to be a sensitive, well-educated man. Originally from Anabta, in the West Bank, Hannun completed his studies at Mosul, in Iraq. He started with Fatah but joined Abu Nidal from the very start in 1974. However, his association with Abu Nidal has driven him to commit crimes that have broken and perverted him. Of these, the most terrible was the killing of his own mother-in-law and sister-in-law in 1986, on Abu Nidal's false charge that they were agents of Jordanian intelligence. The story is worth recounting as an illustration of what happens to men caught up in Abu Nidal's organization. It involves not only Wasfi Hannun but also his brother-in-law, a cadre named Mahmud Tamim (code name Ali Abdallah), who now heads the Bureau of the Political Directorate Abroad -- that is to say, the Libyan end of the Political Directorate. Tamim has also had a painful and checkered history, and the story begins with him. Before being posted to Libya, Tamim was employed by the organization in Lebanon, where he was accused of working for Jordan. With his wife and children, he was jailed for over three months, and as a form of coercion, they were all forced to bark like dogs. On being let out, the children continued to bark when spoken to, because they had become used to it. Tamim's wife was one of a family of four sisters, one of whom was married to Wasfi Hannun. When Tamim and his wife were arrested, his wife's mother, accompanied by her youngest daughter, came to Damascus from Jordan to see what had happened. On arrival, they were seized, taken to Lebanon, and executed on the grounds that they, too, were Jordanian agents. Abu Nidal even alleged that the young woman had been sent to seduce Hannun and recruit him for the Jordanians. In a sick flight of fantasy, he described the pink nightgown she was supposed to have worn and her stock of poisons. Abu Nidal condemned them to death but specified that Hannun himself was to execute them. The experience of killing his mother-in-law and sister-in-law to save his own life evidently unhinged him. Inside sources say that Wasfi Hannun is now resigned to perishing before long. He knows that his role at the head of the People's Army is largely a decorative one. From my investigations, I concluded that real power in Lebanon was in the hands of Sulaiman Samrin (Dr. Ghassan al-Ali), first secretary of the Central Committee and head of the Secretariat; Mustafa Awad (Alaa), head of the Intelligence Directorate; and Mustafa Ibrahim Sanduqa (Khaldun), boss of the Justice Committee.
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