The PLO disunity over the question of negotiations was matched by the U.S. and Israeli unity: there was no room at the peace table for Arafat's PLO. Golda Meir, whose Committee X had been systematically hunting down PLO figures in the months leading up to the October War, rejected the very notion of a Palestinian national identity. Kissinger, who assumed near total authority to conduct U.S. foreign policy while Nixon sank deeper into the mire of the Watergate scandal, was more concerned with dividing Egypt from the Arab world than with finding a just and durable peace. The Arab League, meeting in Algiers in November, tried to force the issue by declaring the PLO the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” Arafat, who had long coveted this recognition of his legitimacy, took it as a mandate to move the PLO in the direction of calculated moderation. A discreet dialogue with the United States became his best option.
At the beginning of November 1973, Henry Kissinger dispatched Vernon Walters to make contact with the PLO. Walters, a career army officer, had become a lieutenant general in March 1972 after a distinguished career as a soldier, military liaison, and covert operator. That same month, Nixon appointed him deputy director of the CIA, and the Senate confirmed him in May. When the intelligence community's involvement in the Watergate affair forced Richard Helms to resign as director of the CIA in July 1973, Walters served as acting director until September, a month before the eruption of the Yom Kippur War. In November, immediately after the war, Kissinger sent Walters to deliver a stern warning to the PLO. Walters arrived in Rabat, Morocco, in the first week of November. King Hassan arranged for his clandestine meeting with PLO moderates, Khaled Hassan, who chaired the Palestinian National Council's foreign relations committee, and Maje Abu Sharer, who directed Fatah's information department.31
Walters delivered a forceful message, but in his memoir he was secretive about the mission: “On one occasion the U.S. government sent me to talk to a most hostile group of terrorists…. We were able to communicate and there were no further acts of blood between us.”32 Somehow U.S. diplomats learned Walter's verbatim remarks: “The violence against us has got to stop, or much blood will flow, and you may be sure that not all of it will be ours.”33 But for the Palestinians, who were suffering the blows of Israel's Wrath of God operation, the threat of American retaliation was less important than the prospect of a diplomatic dialogue. Kissinger had foreclosed that possibility: “at this stage, involving the PLO [in negotiations] was incompatible with the interests of any of the parties to the Middle East conflict.”34 But the PLO representatives, who viewed the PLO as a legitimate party to the conflict, came away with the impression that dialogue was possible. As they tell it, Walters had some probing questions for the Palestinians about Soviet support for the Palestinian struggle, about the PLO moderates' ideas about a future democratic Palestinian state, and about the PLO's relations with Jordan.35 The Palestinians left the secret meeting with expectations for future encounters endorsed by Nixon. But Kissinger had dispatched Walters to deliver a stern message, not to initiate a dialogue. The meeting did not produce a secret back channel between PLO moderates and the Department of State or the White House. Kissinger may have disdained contacts with the PLO, but the CIA saw the wisdom of an accommodation. In fact, the CIA had already renewed its overtures to PLO moderates the previous year. In September 1972, immediately after Black September's horrific failure in Munich, Robert Ames, the CIA's operative in the Middle East, sent a cryptic message to Ali Hassan Salameh, the Red Prince: “My company [CIA] is still interested in getting together with Ali's company [the PLO]. The Southern company [Israel]…knew about our contacts.”36 The CIA would have its opportunity to reestablish communications with Salameh in less than a year, when Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly in New York.
At the end of the month Walters met with PLO moderates in Rabat, Palestinian dissidents took the first of two actions to poison the atmosphere for the coming negotiations in Geneva. On 25 November, three Palestinians hijacked a Dutch KLM Boeing 747 bound for New Delhi from Beirut with 288 passengers and crew. Although it made political sense for Israel and the United States simply to blame the PLO for all terror, the PLO denounced the hijacking. The new reality of renegade terror further complicated already complicated matters. The men who hijacked the KLM flight claimed to belong to the Nationalist Arab Youth for the Liberation of Palestine, a new organization whose command structure Western intelligence was just beginning to piece together. But the hijackers revealed their connection to earlier terror operations when they issued their sole demand: release of the terrorists captured during the failed operation to attack the residence of the Israeli ambassador and hijack an Israeli passenger jet in Cyprus in April. To make the demand more forcefully, the hijackers ordered the crew to fly to Nicosia after a stopover in Damascus to take on fuel. But the Cypriot president refused to be intimidated, and the terrorists ordered the plane to Abu Dhabi and released the hostages without winning the release of their comrades. In a familiar pattern, the terrorists opted for surrender in an Arab state they knew would not dare punish them for air piracy, much less terrorism.
The KLM hijacking was an act of solidarity between fedayeen. Captured terrorists knew their comrades would never forsake them—freedom was a hijacking away, experience taught them. Few governments obstinately refused to surrender to terrorist blackmail, and most saw humanitarian and political reasons for exchanging the guilty for the innocent. The September operation in Paris was different. Abu Nidal's men demanded the release of Abu Daoud from a Jordanian prison, but the deeper motive for the operation was to embarrass Arafat. After the October War, sabotaging PLO diplomacy became even more urgent. Nixon and Kissinger understood the October War as creating conditions for negotiations that would ultimately lure Egypt away from the Palestinian cause. With the Geneva talks set to begin at the end of December, Arafat prudently decided adapt to the radically changed geopolitical circumstances. The official PLO began convoluted internal debates about the necessity of endorsing the Geneva talks, if for no other reason than to prevent the devolution of the occupied West Bank to Jordan on the basis of Security Council Resolution 242. The renegades viewed things differently and vowed to keep the fires of Palestinian revolution burning. In December Abd al-Ghafur, the dissident who had organized a series of Libyan-backed operations beginning in the spring, put his own torch to the plans for the Geneva peace conference. He struck in Rome.
The Pan Am Massacre
Italian authorities knew the Eternal City was the crossroads for Palestinian terrorists. The JRA terrorists who attacked the Ben Gurion International Airport in Lod in May 1972 acquired their weapons in Rome. Abu Iyad and Abu Daoud rendezvoused in the city six weeks before the Munich Olympics operation. In April, Italian authorities arrested two Palestinians planning an attack in the Leonardo Da Vinci airport. In September, they arrested five terrorists who planned to shoot down an Israeli passenger jet there; their trial was actually set to begin in mid-December, around the time the United States and the Soviet Union originally planned to convene the Geneva peace conference. In mid-December Rome was on alert for a terror attack. It was then and there that Abd al-Ghafur sent his men into action.
On 17 December, five terrorists arrived at the Leonardo Da Vinci Airport aboard a flight from Madrid. The men acquired weapons outside the terminal from accomplices and then approached a security check point where passengers were filing through newly installed metal detectors on the way to connecting flights. The attack began there just before 1 P.M. Drawing their weapons, the terrorists broke into two assault squads, one to kill at random, the second to secure an avenue for escape. Two Palestinians opened fire through the thin fuselage of a Pan Am Boeing 707 standing at the gate, then charged the plane, hurling phosphorus grenades into the cabin. Passengers scrambled for emergency exists as the jet exploded into