Sabri al-Banna, better known by his nom de guerre Abu Nidal (Father of Struggle), was found dead of multiple gunshot wounds in his apartment in Baghdad last weekend. The official verdict was suicide, which raised eyebrows even in the Middle East, because people who shoot themselves rarely do so more than once.
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| | | Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (jkelly@post-gazette.com). | |
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Abu Nidal is thought to be responsible for terror attacks in 20 countries that killed or injured nearly 900 people over a span of two decades. His chief targets were U.S. and Israeli airlines. Members of his organization set fire to a Pan Am jet at the Rome airport in 1973, and blew up a TWA airliner over the Aegean Sea in 1974. In 1986, members of the Abu Nidal organization hijacked a Pan Am 747 in Karachi, Pakistan, and blew up a TWA 747 over Athens. In between, there were bloody attacks on El Al ticket counters in Rome and Vienna, and the hijacking of an Egyptian airliner.
A Palestinian who was once an aide to Yasser Arafat, Nidal publicly broke with the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1974 over Arafat's policy of negotiating with Israel. Nidal is thought to be responsible for the assassination of two PLO officials in Tunis in 1991.
Ion Pacepa, Romanian intelligence chief during the rule of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, claims the rift between Arafat and Nidal was phony. The apparent split served two purposes, Pacepa said. It permitted Arafat to appear as a "moderate," and it gave Arafat a band of assassins who could eliminate PLO leaders who incurred Arafat's disapproval. Pacepa said this information came from Arafat himself during a meeting with Ceausescu that Pacepa sat in on.
Abu Nidal's organization was largely dismantled by a clever campaign waged by then CIA counter-terrorism director Duane "Dewey" Clarridge in the late 1980s. Having determined that Abu Nidal was extremely paranoid, CIA operatives made repeated approaches to Nidal's agents, offering to pay them to work for the United States.
"Abu Nidal never quite believed that anyone in his group had turned us down. Their loyalty was suspect thereafter, and the punishment for disloyalty was torture and death," Clarridge said in his memoir, "A Spy for All Seasons."
Clarridge estimated that Nidal ordered the execution of more than 300 of his own operatives. "On a single night in Lebanon in November 1987, approximately 170 were tied up and blindfolded, machine-gunned, and pushed into a trench prepared for the occasion," he said.
Weakened by the purge of his own organization and by declining health, Abu Nidal had by the mid-1990s become a secondary -- but still well-connected -- figure in the world of terror. In late 1998, he settled in Iraq -- which, along with Syria and Libya -- had financed his activities.
Iraqi officials say Nidal committed suicide after being confronted by Iraqi police for plotting against Saddam Hussein's regime. Nidal, according to these officials, allegedly had been in contact with anti-Saddam guerrillas in Syria and Iran.
Palestinian sources say Nidal, 65, committed suicide because he was suffering from cancer and addicted to painkillers.
But even if ailing, a veteran terrorist like Abu Nidal ought not to have needed to empty his magazine in order to end his life. If Iraqi security services helped him out, the question is why?
The official explanation could well be true. Saddam, like Nidal himself, does not require much evidence to take action against a suspected traitor.
But there is another plausible explanation. Nidal's specialty was airplane hijacking and sabotage. At least two Iraqi defectors have said Saddam maintained at Salman Pak, a military base 21 miles from Baghdad, a Boeing 707 on which "Islamicists" practiced hijackings.
Ziad Jarrah was at the controls when United Flight 93 crashed in Somerset County. He had come to Germany as a student in 1996, where his apartment was paid for by his great-uncle, Assam Omar Jarrah. Assam Jarrah has been identified by German intelligence as an operative for both the old East German secret police and the Abu Nidal organization. Assam disappeared two months before Sept. 11.
Could Saddam have been eliminating a piece in the chain of evidence linking him to the 9/11 attacks? Stay tuned.
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