The intervention of the Egyptian ambassador proved critical. Whatever encouragement the terrorists may have taken from the release of the three survivors of the Munich, the deaths of the other five must have weighed heavily on their minds. With no other viable options, the four Palestinians accepted the Egyptian offer of safe passage and surrendered without harming their captives. Everyone took away different lessons from the Bangkok incident. For governments confronted with the threat to their diplomats—this included the Nixon administration—Bangkok taught the efficacy of absolute refusal to strike deals with terrorists. For the terrorists, Bangkok taught the futility of threats and the imperative to kill.
Abu Iyad and Ali Hassan Salameh had shifted tactics from hijacking airliners to seizing embassies. The change was first evident in Munich. Instead of seizing random passengers, Black September would pursue high officials and dignitaries. There was another critical change in strategy. Black September's major operations after Bangkok—an embassy takeover in Amman in February that failed and one in Khartoum in March that succeeded—revealed its perception of its real enemy, the United States.
Chapter 3
Much Blood Will Flow, Not All of It Ours
The year 1972 was a year of terrible violence; 1973 would be worse. The year began triumphantly for Richard Nixon, who took the oath of office for a second time in January. The electoral returns the previous November seemed to vindicate the career of one of the more controversial politicians in recent decades. Within days of his second inauguration, Nixon addressed the nation to announce that Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnamese envoy, had initialed the Paris Peace Accords, which ended the Vietnam War and earned the two men the Nobel Prize for Peace. But 1973 would be a year marked by scandal in Washington and violence in the Middle East. Within weeks of his second inauguration, the president would confront the same wrenching moral dilemma the Israeli prime minister faced the previous September. The Israeli Mossad was engaged in an escalating dirty war of counterterrorism against the PFLP and Black September, and renegade organizations backed by Iraq and Libya launched a wave of terror operations in Europe to destroy any appearance of Palestinian moderation. Not a month passed without terrorist or counterterrorist violence. Moreover, it was almost inevitable that Egypt, Syria, and Jordan would seek to reconquer the territory they lost to Israel in the Six Day War. By the end of the year, while Nixon's presidency crashed down around him as a consequence of the Watergate scandal, the fourth Arab-Israeli war would bring the United States and the Soviet Union into a confrontation and would reshape the political terrain in the Middle East.
Black September's Final Operations
The campaign of Palestinian terrorism and Israeli counterterrorism had by now escalated into low-intensity warfare. The resolution of the hostage incident in Bangkok in December 1973 seemed proof that governments could compel terrorists to back down simply by refusing to capitulate to their demands. The Israelis were actively engaged in a covert counterterrorism of reprisal killings and preemptive assassinations. Operation Wrath of God, the Mossad's covert campaign of assassinations of the PLO middle echelon, had claimed its first two victims in October in Rome and December in Paris. In January, the Mossad struck again, killing Hussein Abad al-Chir in Cyprus. The operation was almost identical to the one that eliminated Mahmoud Hamshari in Paris the previous month; the Mossad's avengers placed a bomb under al-Chir's bed. The next day, Black September struck back in Madrid, assassinating Baruch Cohen, a Mossad agent who recruited Palestinian university students in Spain as Mossad informants.1 Abu Iyad, whose life depended on counterintelligence, discovered Cohen's operations and ordered his assassination.
The violence was only beginning. On 20 February, the Israeli armed forces assaulted two Palestinian refugee camps near Tripoli, Lebanon—Badawi and Nahr al-Bard—where PFLP trained fedayeen. The Israeli commandos killed 40 in the raid. The following day, as the Israeli forces were completing the operation in Lebanon, Israel's acute security concerns caused a catastrophe. The waste of innocent life marked the Arab-Israeli conflict from the beginning. Palestinian terrorists found justification for killing innocent Israelis, Israeli soldiers rationalized the deaths of innocent Palestinians as collateral damage. But what happened in the skies over the Israeli-occupied Sinai Peninsula claimed more lives than any terrorist act up to that time. On 21 February, the pilot of a Libyan airliner en route to Cairo became disoriented in one of North Africa's blinding sandstorms. Before the pilot realized the error in navigation, the plane had strayed into Israel's security zone over the occupied Sinai where Israeli fighter jets intercepted it. Israeli efforts to hail the pilot were to no avail. The Israelis later insisted that the pilot ignored orders to land, but there is another explanation. The French-speaking pilot apparently did not understand the commands coming over the civilian radio channel. The Israelis feared the worst. No terrorist had deliberately crashed a civilian airliner in a population center or military installation—none did until 9/11. But the Israeli authorities acted to preempt the possibility of a suicide attack on Israel's nuclear weapons installation at Dimona. It was a tragic miscalculation. The pilot of the doomed Libyan airliner had already reversed course when the Israelis fighters opened fire; 106 passengers and crew died when the plane crashed in the desert.2
That same month, Black September set in motion its third major operation after Munich and Bangkok. Like Bangkok, the mission was an embassy seizure. As Abu Iyad tells it, it was an “ambitious plan.” Coming only two months after the demoralizing failure in Bangkok, Black September needed a bold strike.3 If the plan was ambitious, it was also dangerous. The embassy was in Amman. Jordan remained hostile territory for the Palestinians, especially for Black September. whose name is an allusion to the fratricide of 1970. Jordanian intelligence was alert to the threat of Black September, whose first operation was the assassination of the Jordanian prime minister in Cairo. Jordanian intelligence was collaborating with the Israeli Mossad and the CIA. The collaboration of the intelligence agencies was important, but the brutality of Jordanian intelligence toward suspected enemies of the kingdom gave it a critical advantage. There was something else about the ambitious operation that Iyad later reported was months in planning. Black September planned to take down the U.S. embassy in the Jordanian capital and hold American diplomats hostage until the Jordanians freed imprisoned fedayeen and the Americans freed Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy's assassin. It was the first time the Palestinians deliberately targeted Americans. The Amman operation marked a critical turning point in Middle Eastern terrorism.
Because of the importance of the mission—and the urgency of success—Iyad selected Abu Daoud to take charge of the mission. Daoud commanded Fatah forces in Jordan during the confrontation with Hussein's troops in September 1970 and planned the Munich Olympics operation with Abu Iyad. Iyad considered him courageous, capable, and a close friend. That Daoud managed to enter Jordan through Iraq and set himself up in a safe house was a remarkable achievement. Actually, fifteen fedayeen operating in two squads infiltrated Amman, one to storm the U.S. embassy, the second to seize the adjacent offices of the Jordanian prime minister if the assault on the Americans failed. In fact, the entire operation failed. Daoud planned the preparation for 14 February. After putting all the elements in place, Daoud left Jordan en route to Syria. He never reached the border. Jordanian intelligence arrested Daoud and a woman posing as his wife as they drove from Amman to Damascus. It was not a chance encounter. At the same time Jordanian intelligence raided the safe houses where the fedayeen were mustering for the operation. Daoud had been betrayed by an agent within the conspiracy. The arrest of a senior figure in Black September—and Fatah—was an intelligence coup. Under interrogation Daoud made damaging statements about Black September, Fatah, and Abu Iyad.4 That the Jordanians tortured him is a reasonable certainty; Black September did not condemn him to death for his moral weakness under interrogation. But a Jordanian court did sentence him to death. King Hussein prudently commuted the sentence to life, fearing for his own life if the monarchy killed a Palestinian of Daoud's stature. But that was not the end of the Daoud affair. Inevitably, Black September would act to liberate him. Less than a month after Daoud's capture, Black September set in motion its fourth major operation. It had struck in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, now it would strike North Africa, demonstrating its reach to all points on the compass.
The planning for what Black