Middle Eastern Terrorism: From Black September to September 11

2. Revolutionary Violence Is a Political Act, Terrorism Is Not

Chapter 2 Revolutionary Violence Is a Political Act, Terrorism Is Not The year 1972 was an election year in the United States. Richard Nixon, who had come into office in 1969 amid mounting protests against the interminable war in Vietnam, already the longest in U.S. history, was seeking a second term. Nixon’s foreign policy agenda was ambitious. Henry Kissinger, who would become both national security advisor and secretary of state in the second Nixon administration, was simultaneously pursuing détente with the Soviet Union, making overtures to the People’s Republic of China, and negotiating the extrication from Vietnam . But by the time Nixon and Kissinger negotiated ‘‘peace with honor’’ in the Paris peace talks with the Vietnamese delegation in 1972, which led to a complete U.S. withdrawal the following year, the crisis in the Middle East had worsened. Egypt and Syria acted to reverse the humiliation of 1967. This was also the year of Black September. Black September struck out with a vengeance to compel the world to understand the Palestinian conflict would not be confined to the Middle East. Terror seeped into Europe, and Americans fell victim to terror. The organization that congealed in the bloodshed in Jordan nearly assassinated King Hussein’s envoy in London only a week after it murdered his prime minister in Cairo. In February it sabotaged a West German electrical installation and a Dutch natural gas plant. In March it attempted its first hijacking, and at the end of May it attacked a petroleum refinery in Trieste. Black September would attack four more times at different points of the compass before its final operation in March 1973: Europe in September, Asia in December, the Middle East in February, and North Africa in March. Black September The principal figures in Black September—Abu Iyad, Mohammed Najjar, Abu Daoud, and Ali Hassan Salameh—were all were powerful actors in Fatah.1 Abu Iyad, a founder of Fatah, was chief of Fatah’s intelli- 30 Chapter 2 gence, Jihaz al-Razd. Mohammed Najjar was Abu Iyad’s chief of operations until the Israelis killed him in April 1973. Abu Daoud commanded Fatah guerrilla forces in Jordan before the Jordanians expelled them. Ali Hassan Salameh was Abu Iyad’s deputy and would eventually become chief of Arafat’s security detail, Force 17, until the Israelis killed him in January 1979. Abu Iyad never acknowledged his connection to Black September, and his public statements about the terror organization are almost undecipherable. ‘‘Black September was never a terrorist organization ,’’ he wrote in his memoir, ‘‘it acted as an auxiliary to the Resistance , when the resistance was no longer in a position to fully assume its military and political tasks. . . . Its members always insisted that they had no organic tie with Fatah or the PLO. But I knew a number of them, and I can assure you that most of them belonged to various fedayeen organizations.’’ The fact is that Abu Iyad not only knew many of the members of Black September, he recruited them—Abu Iyad was the organic link to Fatah. That Black September did not commit acts of terrorism was a question of semantics because, said Iyad, ‘‘I do not confuse revolutionary violence, which is a political act, with terrorism, which is not.’’2 Abu Daoud’s public statements about Black September were made in February 1972 while he was under a sentence of death for conspiracy to seize the U.S. embassy in Amman. ‘‘There is no such organization called Black September,’’ Daoud confessed in a televised spectacle, ‘‘Black September is only the intelligence apparatus [of Fatah] Jihaz el-Razd.’’3 Daoud named Iyad, Najjar, and Salameh in his public confession, but uttered not a word about Yasser Arafat. Because these men formed the circle around Arafat, Arafat himself was at the epicenter of Black September , even if he was not specifically aware of the details of Black September ’s operations. This was Arafat’s cynicism at its worst. Black September was the concession Arafat made to Fatah’s radicals to the dismay of the movement’s moderates. One of those moderates, Khalad Hassan, swears he was secretly negotiating a rapprochement between the PLO and Jordan with Wasfi Tel in Egypt when Black September murdered the Jordanian prime minister.4 One of the more intriguing figures in Black September was Ali Hassan Salameh. Palestinian militancy was in his lineage. He was only seven when his father, Sheikh Hassan...