sorry.
Jamal found the disastrous meeting in Rome oddly comforting. It clarified matters for him. The Americans seemed, once again, to fit the stereotype. They were arrogant and manipulative, interested in the Arabs only to the extent that they could get something from them. Jamal was also relieved to have broken off the ambiguous relationship he had begun with Rogers. He liked blacks and whites better than grays.
The Old Man was not so pleased when he received a coded account of the meeting from Jamal through the Kuwaiti diplomatic pouch from Bonn. The Old Man regarded the American channel as a project of the highest importance. He sent Jamal a return message advising him to continue building his network in Europe. He should forget about the Americans for now. Fatah would maintain contact with them through other intermediaries in London and Amman.
Though the Americans didn’t know it, Jamal was under their noses. He had remained in Europe, staying mostly in Rome, where the Fatah security service maintained a secret base of operations. The Fatah intelligence service, the Rasd, had safehouses there and secret sources of funds and even a local documentation office that produced forged travel documents. Jamal travelled occasionally through the summer, especially to Germany and France.
He was building an infrastructure. The Rome center operated under the cover of a bar called II Principe Rosso near the Via Veneto. It was financed by wealthy Palestinians in Kuwait and provided the Rasd a discreet way to move large sums of money. The Italian authorities, had they been curious, would have believed it was nothing more than another Roman establishment cooking the books and cheating on its taxes. On his trips to Paris and Munich, Jamal broadened the network. He developed local contacts and used them to rent apartments, open bank accounts, spot local talent, and do the thousands of other mundane things that provide a base for clandestine operations.
Jamal didn’t ask what it was all to be used for. The Old Man had told him that the movement might need such a network someday and dismissed further questions with a wave of his hand. Making his rounds in Europe, Jamal felt sometimes like a squirrel storing up nuts for a long winter whose advent nobody could predict.
The crisis in Jordan had been building for months. But the final confrontation was triggered by an act of terrorism so foolish and inflammatory that even Jamal wondered later whether it had been a deliberate act of provocation.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine launched a terrorist “spectacular” on September 6 by simultaneously hijacking two airplanes. They landed at an airstrip in Jordan that PFLP propagandists dubbed “The Airport of the Revolution.” On September 9, the PFLP hijacked another plane. The group held nearly five hundred hostages, many of them Americans.
The hijackings were like pointing a blowtorch at a pool of gasoline. The flames exploded from several directions at once. The United States, which had been urging the king for months to crack down against the fedayeen, moved the Sixth Fleet toward the Eastern Mediterranean. The king-who had been taunted in recent months by Bedouin officers who put brassieres on their tank antennas to signal their doubts about his resolve-finally ordered the army to crack down hard. There was the usual comic interlude of mediation by the Arab League. But the king finally gave the order to his army on September 17 to open fire with their tanks and heavy artillery.
The military pretensions of the guerrillas were quickly demolished. The Jordanian Army captured the Fatah headquarters on Nasser Square in minutes. The Old Man fled deeper into Jebel Hussein, then to the hilltop of Ashrafiyeh. In the first hours, the Fatah leader spent his time frantically calling his Jordanian political contacts to try to arrange a cease-fire. Fatah had no battle plan, no secure headquarters, no reliable communications other than open radio transmissions.
The one-sided battle lasted barely more than a week. It ended when the Old Man ignominiously slipped out of Amman, disguised in Bedouin robes as a member of a Kuwaiti mediating delegation. The Jordanians continued for more than a year mopping up what was left of the resistance until they eventually slaughtered the last band of die- hard fighters who had remained in the woods near Jerash and Ajlun in northern Jordan.
The Old Man had believed nearly to the end that he would win in Jordan. His folly was documented in stacks of handwritten memos and documents that were captured by the king’s Bedouin troops during the Battle of Amman.
It was a touching collection. A hand-drawn plan of Basman Palace, roughly sketched as if by a child, showing how the fedayeen could attack the Hashemite monarch in his chambers. A crude map showing how to attack a Jordanian military encampment on a road between Amman and Salt. Another rough sketch showing how to penetrate Jordanian barbed wire. Lists that endlessly detailed the responsibilities of various chiefs and subalterns in this most bureaucratic revolution. Handwritten notes from the Old Man himself that showed him scheming, double- dealing, manipulating, and playing politics-assuring the king all the while that the fedayeen hadn’t any designs on his throne.
After it was all over, the king gathered the most incriminating documents into a simple booklet called The Activities of the Fedayeen in Jordan, 1970. The booklet was printed only in Arabic and was never distributed in the West. But the king sent a copy to each of the twenty-one Arab heads of state. It was a catalogue of the Old Man’s perfidy and helped explain why, for years after, the other Arab leaders paid lip service to the Palestinian cause but didn’t fully trust the PLO chairman.
“Black September,” as the dazed Palestinians called the events in Jordan, seemed at first like a finale, but it was really only a prelude. It was a hurricane, which swept through the cracks and crevices of the Arab political world and left the foundations weak and vulnerable. One of the Fatah leaders who supervised the Rasd’s intelligence activities wrote later of a warning that he secretly transmitted to the Jordanian king after the events of Black September:
“If you strike the fedayeen in their last holdouts in Jerash and Ajlun, I’ll follow you to the end of the earth, to my dying breath, to give you the punishment you deserve.”
It must have sounded like a vain and idle threat. But it was the beginning of a nightmare that took the codename “Black September.”
25
Beirut; Fall 1970
Hoffman came into the office the morning after the Lebanese election waving a copy of An Nahar, the leading Beirut newspaper. A banner headline across the top of the page proclaimed: “The Voice of the People Has Spoken.” Beneath it was a front-page editorial, lauding the victory of the new president, who had been elected by parliament the previous day by one vote.
“Can you believe these assholes?” said Hoffman to his four senior officers as they sat down in the conference room for one of their infrequent staff meetings. Hoffman was in a bad mood: red-faced, mean-tempered, a menace to anyone unlucky enough to get in his way. He brandished the newspaper at Rogers.
“The guy wins by one fucking vote and they’re calling it the voice of the people!” said Hoffman. “Imagine what they would be saying if he had won by two votes.”
“Sore loser?” asked Rogers.
“Hell, yes,” said Hoffman. “It cost us plenty to buy the old gang of thugs. Now we’ve got to start all over again.”
“It’s a bit more complicated than that, chief,” said the station’s senior political analyst. He was a beady-eyed man who looked as though he should be wearing a green eyeshade.
“No doubt,” said Hoffman. “Everything seems to be more complicated than I think it is. All I want to know is who won and who lost.”
“That’s just the problem,” said the analyst. “It’s very hard to tell. The old political establishment has been swept out of office, to be sure. But that doesn’t mean there are clear winners and losers. The Sunni Moslems might seem to have won, since the new president has the support of most of the Sunni leadership. But the new president also has the support of some of the Christian militia leaders who were being squeezed by the old regime. So you see, it’s really rather complicated.”
“Bullshit,” said Hoffman.
