LAST SUNDAY on “Meet the Press,” as Vice President Dick Cheney answered Tim Russert’s questions about Iraq, Halliburton, and his political future, one thing was mentioned that deserves further exploration:
“We know that Saddam Hussein has, over the years, been one of the top state sponsors of terrorism for nearly 20 years,” Cheney said. “We’ve had this recent weird incident where the head of the Abu Nidal organization, one of the world’s most noted terrorists, was killed in Baghdad. The announcement was made by the head of Iraqi intelligence. The initial announcement said he’d shot himself. When they dug into that, though, he’d shot himself four times in the head. And speculation has been, that, in fact, somehow, the Iraqi government or Saddam Hussein had him eliminated to avoid potential embarrassment by virtue of the fact that he was in Baghdad and operated in Baghdad. So it’s a very complex picture to try to sort out.”
The picture is complex, but it’s more than just a “weird incident,” and a recent, exhaustive report from “Jane’s World Insurgency and Terrorism” sheds some light on this Middle Eastern murder mystery. We learn that Abu Nidal (whose name means “Father of the Struggle”) was indeed murdered by Saddam Hussein’s henchmen. The reason was not “to avoid potential embarrassment by virtue of the fact that he was in Baghdad,” but rather, that Abu Nidal was an enemy of the state and was plotting to help overthrow Saddam’s regime. According to the highly respected “Jane’s,” with the aid of official and nonofficial sources in Ramallah, Amman, Baghdad, London, Washington, and Beirut, “the Iraqi dictator is now feeling the pressure from the ongoing U.S. deliberations over a potential invasion to topple his regime. In any such adventure, the anti-Saddam elements within Iraq would most likely okay an important role in turning the tide against Saddam. He has therefore moved to eradicate those dangerous elements, both as a preemptive measure to protect his position and as an example to other prospective internal enemies still at large.”
So how does Abu Nidal, whose faction was once termed by the State Department as “the most dangerous terrorist organization in existence,” lose favor with Saddam Hussein, perhaps the most hated dictator in the world? Although Abu Nidal had done “jobs” for Hussein in the 1970s and ’80s, he lost favor when he sided with Kuwait and the Saudis during the Gulf War. Even more damning, according to the “Jane’s” investigation, Iraqi agents claimed to have found “classified documents and plans concerning a U.S. attack” in his Baghdad apartment.
Still, it’s one thing for Saddam to suspect Abu Nidal of being an enemy of the state; it’s entirely another thing to assume he would help America with its goal of “regime change.” After all, from 1973 to 1994 Abu Nidal had masterminded some of the worst acts of terror in the Middle East and Europe. His victims have included both Jews and Palestinians, Europeans and Americans.
ABU NIDAL was originally named Sabri Khalil al-Bana. Like Osama bin Laden, he came from a wealthy family. Born in 1937 in the port town of Jaffa, al-Bana later became a Gaza refugee in 1948 and ended up in Nablus in the West Bank. He worked as both a teacher and an electrician. Most of all, he was a fervent believer in a Palestinian state–and not one that coexisted side-by-side with Israel. He served willingly under Yasser Arafat, having joined forces with him in 1960, and soon became a high-ranking diplomat in Khartoum and Baghdad. But the difference in visions between Arafat and Nidal would lead to a split in 1974 (Nidal was supported on this move by then-Iraqi vice president Saddam Hussein). He then set up his Fatah Revolutionary Council and embarked on a struggle to bring death to Israel and those Palestinians who might have been willing to compromise.
One of his early acts of terror remains his deadliest–the 1974 bombing of a TWA commercial airliner going from Israel to Greece. All 88 people on board perished. In 1978, the FRC murdered Said Hammami and Izzadin Kalak, the PLO representatives to, respectively, London and Paris. In 1983, they assassinated Issam Sartawi, a PLO diplomat stationed in Lisbon. In 1985, FRC terrorists attacked El Al airport counters in Rome and Vienna–simultaneously–killing 19 and wounding 120. The following year, an Istanbul synagogue was hit, leaving 22 more dead. In 1991, an FRC hitman murdered Salah Khalaf, Arafat’s second-in-command. (Arafat issued a death sentence to Abu Nidal, and, from time to time, attempted to patch things up with him–to no avail.)
There are a string of other terrorist acts in which Abu Nidal is implicated–from the 1986 bombing of the La Belle disco in Berlin to Pan Am Flight 103, which crashed over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. (All told, he may be responsible for more than a thousand deaths.) But perhaps his biggest act was an assassination plot that failed: the 1982 attempt on the life of Israel’s ambassador to London, Shlomo Argov. It became a pretext for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon–and what Nidal undoubtedly hoped would be the final showdown between the Jews and the Palestinians. In 1988, with his situation deteriorating, Abu Nidal conducted his own Night of the Long Knives, purging 156 of his own FRC members after getting wind of a plot to oust him.
Throughout all of these years, Nidal also found himself moving from place to place, like an ordinary mercenary on the run. He went from the West Bank to Saudi Arabia, then to Jordan, Sudan, and Baghdad. In 1983, Iraq expelled him and he landed in Syria. Then Libya. Then Egypt. And finally back to Baghdad around 1999.
It was reported that Abu Nidal went to Iraq for cancer treatment (which speaks volumes about his predicament since, to put it delicately, Iraq ain’t Switzerland). Apparently it was thought that, for all the work he had done for the regime in the past, the Iraqis “owed” him. And so he set up an office with a guard and an apartment–which is where Iraqi intelligence supposedly arrested him this summer on August 14. But here there are two extremely divergent sides to the story.
First the account as provided to reporters by Tahhir Jalil Haboush, chief of Iraqi intelligence: Officials appeared at the doorstep of Nidal’s apartment with orders to bring him to court. As “Jane’s World Insurgency and Terrorism” relays, “when the security officers arrive at his home, Abu Nidal said he needed to go to his bedroom to change his clothes. Haboush said a shot was fired, and the officers found that Abu Nidal had shot himself in the mouth. He was then rushed to the hospital where he died eight hours later.”
But Palestinian sources in Ramallah told “Jane’s” quite a different story, saying that Abu Nidal “had set up plans to target a senior Iraqi official and that his group received $4 million from an Arab country for the operation. It was this . . . that prompted Iraqi intelligence to order the assassination of Abu Nidal and the arrest of his assistants.” Palestinian sources also reported that Nidal’s body “bore several gunshot wounds,” thus casting doubts on the idea of a suicide.
If the Palestinian sources are to be believed, two questions linger: Which Arab state was helping Nidal? Who was the targeted official?
Victorino Matus is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
