On the evening of 1 March, just as the diplomatic reception was breaking up, Abu Ghassan and seven other Palestinians, armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles and grenades, rushed the front gate and shot their way into the Saudi Arabian embassy. They killed a Sudanese policeman and wounded the U.S. ambassador Cleo Noel, Jr. and Belgian chargé d'affaires Guy Eid. In the panic of the first moments of the assault a number of diplomats managed to escape over the garden wall in the rear of the Saudi compound. The Palestinians seized many others. But their mission was not to take as many dignitaries hostage as possible, but to capture and kill Americans. Moore, Noel, and Eid were bound and beaten. Within hours, word reached Washington that terrorists again held Americans hostage.
The crisis in Khartoum compelled President Nixon to confront the same moral dilemma that the Munich attack forced on Golda Meir. It was not the first time a U.S. diplomat had been taken hostage and threatened with death. In September 1969, Brazilian terrorists abducted the U.S. ambassador to the country, Charles Elbrick. Nixon, still in his first year in office, encouraged the Brazilians to comply with the terrorists' demands for the release of imprisoned Brazilian terrorists. The Brazilian military government, known for its hard line, accommodated the White House. The Brazilians were more concerned about the prospect of the death of a U.S. diplomat on Brazilian soil than about freeing political prisoners. The U.S. ambassador went free after a few days of captivity; the terrorists and their freed comrades flew to Algeria aboard a military transport. But in 1973 Nixon was adamant in the refusal to make concessions to terrorists. The president drew the lessons from Bangkok, while ignoring those of Munich.
Golda Meir made the policy of no negotiations an article of faith: if Israelis died in Munich, their death was due to the malevolence of the Palestinians and the incompetence of the West Germans, not the intransigence of the Israelis. In Bangkok, Thai authorities reacted to Black September's seizure of the Israeli embassy with a formidable display of force. Golda Meir's intransigence and Thai armed posturing appeared to break the four terrorists holding the Israeli diplomats. The crisis unfolding in Khartoum resembled the crisis in Bangkok in that respect:the Sudanese also rushed forces to the Saudi embassy. In Bangkok unlike Munich, however, the Egyptian government saw an interest in mediating the crisis. But that apparently made less impression on the White House situation room than did Golda Meir's resolute adherence to the doctrine of no negotiation or the psychological effects of military threats.
Nixon apparently did not consider all the psychological dynamics of the hostage situation. The Sudanese made a show of force but also intervened to resolve the crisis. Sudanese vice president Mohammed al-Baghir Ahmad personally took charge of negotiations. A general, al-Baghir understood the language of force, but with the Palestinians he preferred the language of mediation. Even after he was certain Nixon would offer him nothing he could offer to Black September, al-Baghir understood the need to convince the Palestinians to keep lines of communication open. In reality he understood the need to wear the Palestinians down and erode their resolve. Then, in an unguarded remark, Nixon destroyed that possibility. Asked by a reporter to comment on the crisis as it was entering its second day, Nixon said: “As far as the United States as a government giving into blackmail demands, we cannot do so and we will not do so…. We will do everything we can to get them released, but we will not pay blackmail.”6 Three hours later, the eight Palestinians murdered Moore, Noel, and Eid with bursts of Kalashnikov fire in the basement of the Saudi embassy. The order to kill the diplomats came via a coded radio message instructing the Black September commando to “remember the martyrs of Nahr al-Bard,” a reference to the Palestinians killed in the Israeli operation in Tripoli in February. The Israelis who intercepted the transmission have always alleged, but never proven, that the voice was Arafat's. But the order to kill came from the highest echelon of Black September, meaning the militant core of Arafat's Fatah, and almost certainly from Abu Iyad.7
After executing George Curtis Moore, Cleo Noel, Jr., and Guy Eid, the eight fedayeen surrendered to Sudanese authorities. U.S. officials put considerable pressure on Sudan's president, Gaafur Nimeiry, to prosecute the killers. The affair says a great deal about the politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and about justice. Nimeiry was deeply embarrassed by the operation and correctly suspected that Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan dictator, was behind the murder of the diplomats. Qaddafi, who was already emerging as a principal figure in the intricate web of state sponsorship of Palestinian terror, would become even more involved as a sponsor of the Rejection Front, which emerged after the official PLO opted to participate in the nascent peace process in 1974. Nimeiry had reason to expose Qaddafi. Moreover, Nimeiry felt betrayed by Fatah. He had become personally involved in the September 1970 crisis in Jordan, flying to Amman to help mediate between the Jordanians and the Palestinians. From his perspective, Arafat owed his life to the Sudanese president's intervention.
This same ideological commitment to the Palestinian cause prevented Nimeiry from punishing the Black September terrorists who embarrassed him in his own capital. The same perverse logic applied to the Egyptians who released Wasfi Tel's assassins on narrow legal grounds. Nimeiry would have preferred not to alienate the United States. The two countries had only recently renewed diplomatic relations which were suspended after the Six Day War. The most important task of the two slain U.S. diplomats had been to achieve a full rapprochement. But passion prevailed over reason. Nimeiry, after considerable delay, forced a Sudanese court to try the diplomats' killers, although the Palestinians transformed the trial into a forum to voice Black September's grievances. On 24 June 1973, a Sudanese court found six of the eight guilty of murder. But twenty-four hours later Nimeiry released the men into PLO custody with the understanding that Arafat's security would imprison them in Beirut for the duration of their sentences. This was not the end of the incident: in one of those small ironies of the history of Palestinian terrorism, in November 1974 dissident Palestinians would hijack a British airliner to demand that the PLO free brother Palestinians.
The Khartoum incident alerted the Nixon administration to the dangers the escalating terror campaign posed for U.S. emissaries. These were dangers Americans traveling to Israel confronted once the PFLP turned to air piracy. But apart from applying diplomatic pressures on the Sudan, the Nixon administration had few options. Its myopic efforts to frame a negotiated solution were focused on ending hostilities between Egypt and Israel. The idea of a comprehensive peace that accommodated the Palestinians fell outside the administration's strategic vision. Not until months later, after the October War, did Nixon and Kissinger even contemplate discreet communications with the PLO, though the CIA had once established contact with Arafat via Ali Hassan Salameh, the Red Prince. When Kissinger finally dispatched an envoy to speak with PLO representatives in November, he gave instructions to warn of dire consequences for future acts of violence rather than to explore prospects for meaningful dialogue.
Operation Youth of Spring
Even before Munich the Mossad was gathering intelligence on the senior PLO cadre and terrorists. By April Mossad agents identified the residences of three of them in an apartment building on Rue Verdun in Beirut's Fahkani district, which by 1973 the Palestinians had converted into a principality. Mohammed Najjar was the most dangerous of the three. A senior member of Fatah intelligence and an operational