Yasser Arafat is holed up in two lightless rooms in the PLO compound, and the secretary of state of the United States spent yesterday trying to figure out whether to meet with him before "postponing" the event.
For nearly 30 years a succession of American regimes has sent its emissaries to meet Arafat, stood him next to presidents, fed him at state dinners and behaved as if he were not the man who personally ordered the murder of two of its diplomats on March 2, 1973.
The government of the United States, both the transient ones that come and go with each president and the permanent one that inhabits the warren of offices at the State Department, has pretended for three decades that Yasser Arafat could be transformed from a gang leader to a morning-suited statesman with an unusual hat and colorful past.
I tell the story of James J. Welsh, former intelligence analyst with the National Security Agency, the man who examined the cables in which Yasser Arafat, statesman, dispatched eight members of the Black September Organization into an embassy in Khartoum, Sudan, with orders to kill an American ambassador, his charge d'affaires and a Belgian diplomat who had the bad luck to be nearby.
Now retired and living in Oregon, Welsh told me what he learned about terrorism that day at NSA headquarters.
Welsh first noticed something amiss when his radio man in Cypress cabled him an urgent message.
"He said, 'Hey, Jim, I got something unusual. I've got Beirut talking to Khartoum,'" Welsh said.
Arafat and his top aide, Salah Khalaf, were in Beirut talking by high-frequency radio to Khalil al Wazir, otherwise known as Abu Jihad, at the PLO's Khartoum office.
Welsh said Arafat and Khalaf wanted to know if the operatives had arrived in Khartoum. What was their mind-set? Were they all ready to go?
The presence of Abu Jihad on the radio worried Welsh. The last time NSA had picked him up was 1972. He was broadcasting from Benghazi, advising his bosses in Beirut that "the eight have departed for Munich." Days later, 11 Israeli Olympians were dead.
Welsh's department sent out an alert. A bureaucrat up the line downgraded it. The next night, Cleo A. Noel Jr., the American Ambassador to Sudan and his aide, George Curtis Moore, attended a reception at the Saudi Embassy. As the night wound down a team of eight Black September terrorists rushed the place and took Noel, Moore and Guy Eid, a Belgian diplomat, at gunpoint.
They issued their demand: the release of Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert Kennedy.
Over the next 25 hours, Welsh saw dispatches move across his desk explaining that Arafat and Khalaf were in contact with the Khartoum operatives, telling them to "remember Cold River." Cold River -- Nahr Al Barad in Arabic -- was a terrorist training camp the Israeli Army had blown to pieces months earlier.
The tapes, long hidden from public hearing despite the fact that copies were made by both American and Israeli intelligence agencies, show that Arafat personally got on the radio and demanded to know, "Didn't you understand the order? Have you carried out Cold River?"
They had. Noel, Moore and Eid were lined against a basement wall. Their captors shot them in the legs first, then sprayed the machine guns upward into the rest of their bodies.
Welsh was sick. A warning had been received. A warning had been overlooked and two American diplomats were dead. At least they had the goods on the killers.
That was when a superior showed up and explained that all must be forgotten.
"He said, 'It's over.' "
"What do you mean it's over? Who screwed this up?" Welsh said he replied. "But they just said, 'Well, forget it. It's over.'"
Welsh threatened to go to Congress. His boss threatened his security clearance, which could mean Welsh, who was on loan to the NSA from the Navy, could wind up on an oil tanker somewhere in the middle of an ocean.
He backed off and the tapes tying Arafat to murder disappeared into the sediment of diplomacy.
"I think everybody back then thought, well, this guy is going to end up on the scrap heap of history," Welsh said. But Arafat has proven adept at the climbing of scrap heaps, all the while insisting it is not he who dispatches suicide bombers, not he whose security forces fire at Israeli civilians.
He is a statesman. He has the Nobel Peace Prize to show for it. And an uncomprehending world rallies around him and the government of the United States has the goods on him but seems unwilling to remember Cold River.
Dennis Roddy's e-mail is droddy@post-gazette.com.
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