The World Was Going Our Way

by Christopher Andrew

  The KGB was complicit in a number of other abductions by Yunis. In August 1970 his security service kidnapped a US academic, Professor Hani Korda, whom it, and apparently the KGB, believed - quite possibly wrongly - to be a deep-cover CIA officer operating in Lebanon against Palestinian targets. In his Beirut apartment they found a notebook with the names and addresses of his contacts in Arab countries. Korda was smuggled across the Lebanese border to a PFLP base in Jordan, but, though brutally interrogated, refused to confess and succeeded in committing suicide.10 In October the PFLP kidnapped Aredis Derounian, an Armenian-born American journalist in Beirut suspected of having links with the CIA. Though Derounian was best known for his attacks on US fascist sympathizers written under the pseudonym John Roy Carlson, the PFLP considered his work pro-Zionist and anti-Arab. In his apartment the PFLP found two passports and a mass of documents which it passed on to the KGB. Derounian was more fortunate than Korda. After being held prisoner for several days in a refugee camp in Tripoli, he managed to escape and take refuge in the US embassy.11

  KGB collaboration with Haddad was even closer than with Yunis. To conceal his contacts with the Beirut residency from his colleagues, Haddad would send his secretary by car to rendezvous with a KGB operations officer who followed him, also by car, to a location chosen by Haddad, which was never the same from one meeting to the next.12 The main purpose of these meetings for the KGB was to encourage Haddad to undertake ‘special actions’ proposed or approved by the KGB and to prevent PFLP operations which ran counter to Soviet interests.13 Thanks to Haddad, the KGB almost certainly had advance notice of all the main PFLP terrorist attacks.

  The most dramatic operation organized by Haddad in 1970 was a plan for the almost simultaneous hijack of four airliners bound for New York on 6 September and their diversion to a remote former RAF airbase in Jordan known as Dawson’s Field. The most difficult assignment was given to Laila Khalid, still photogenic despite plastic surgery to change her appearance since her previous hijack, and the Nicaraguan-American Patrick Arguello. The pair posed as a newly married couple. Their aircraft, an El Al Boeing 707 departing from Tel Aviv, was the only one of the four which, as a result of previous PFLP hijacks, carried an armed air marshal. Though Khalid and Arguello succeeded in smuggling both handguns and grenades aboard, the hijack failed. Arguello was shot by the air marshal and Khalid, who was prevented by other passengers from removing the grenades hidden in her bra, was arrested after the plane made an emergency landing at Heathrow. The hijackers aboard a TWA Boeing 707 and a Swissair DC8, however, successfully diverted them to Dawson’s Field, which they promptly renamed Revolution Airstrip. A hijacked Pan Am Boeing 747, which was discovered to be too large to land at the airstrip, landed instead at Cairo where passengers and crew were hastily evacuated and the aircraft blown up. A fifth plane, a BOAC VC10, was hijacked three days later and flown to Revolution Airstrip to provide British hostages to barter for Khalid. There the passengers were eventually exchanged for Khalid and Palestinian terrorists imprisoned in West Germany and Switzerland, and the aircraft were destroyed by the hijackers.14

  Mitrokhin’s material gives no indication of what advice FCD ‘special actions’ experts gave Haddad about the PLFP hijacks. Proof that they did advise him on terrorist attacks, however, is provided by the file on operation NASOS: an attack on the Israeli tanker Coral Sea while it was carrying Iranian crude oil under a Liberian flag of convenience to Eilat. The KGB advised Haddad on both the method and location of the attack in the straits of Bab al-Mandab close to the island of Mandaran. On 13 June 1971 two PFLP terrorists, codenamed CHUK and GEK by the KGB, boarded a speed-boat on the coast of South Yemen and launched an attack on the tanker using three of the RPG-7 hand-held anti-tank grenade launchers supplied by the KGB in the previous year. According to the KGB post-operation report, between seven and nine rockets were fired, of which five hit their target. Though the Coral Sea was set on fire, however, it did not sink. CHUK and GEK made their escape to the coast of North Yemen. The head of the FCD, Fyodor Mortin, was sufficiently encouraged by the partial success of operation NASOS to recommend to Andropov afterwards that the KGB ‘make more active use of NATSIONALIST and his gunmen to carry out aggressive operations aimed directly against Israel’.15 Relations with Haddad were complicated by turmoil within the PFLP. In 1972, Habash, as leader of the PFLP, publicly renounced international terrorism, provoking a bitter row with Haddad, who set up a new headquarters in Baghdad where he founded a PFLP splinter group, the Special Operations Group.16 KGB support for Haddad, however, continued.

  Moscow showed rather less interest in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO, codenamed KARUSEL ),17 the umbrella organization for all Palestinian movements which was based in Jordan until 1970, than in Haddad’s faction of the PFLP. Disguised as an Egyptian technician, the PLO chairman, Yasir Arafat (initially codenamed AREF),18 had accompanied Nasser on a visit to the Soviet Union in 1968 and, probably as a result of Nasser’s backing, received a promise of weapons.19 For the next few years, Arafat was cultivated without conspicuous success by an FCD officer, Vasili Fyodorovich Samoylenko.20 Arafat, however, was unaware that since 1968 the KGB had had an agent, codenamed GIDAR, in the office of his personal intelligence chief and most trusted adviser, Hani al-Hasan.21

  In September 1970 King Hussein of Jordan, infuriated by the recent PFLP hijacking of aircraft to a Jordanian airfield and by the emergence of the PLO as a virtually independent state within his kingdom, used his army to drive it out. Thousands of Palestinians were killed in what became known as Black September. A shadowy terrorist organization of that name was set up within Arafat’s Fatah movement at the heart of the PLO when it regrouped in Lebanon. Among the atrocities committed by Black September, for which Arafat disingenuously disclaimed responsibility, was an attack on Israeli athletes competing in the August 1972 Munich Olympics, in which eleven were killed.

  In 1972 Arafat paid his first official visit to Moscow at the head of a PLO delegation but failed to impress the Centre, which distrusted the ‘slanted’ nature of the information he provided and found him anxious to maintain contact with ‘reactionary Arab regimes’ as well as with the Soviet bloc.22 Though Mitrokhin’s notes do not mention it, the Centre was also doubtless well aware that Arafat’s claims to have been born in Jerusalem were fraudulent; in reality, though his parents were Palestinian and he was deeply committed to the Palestinian cause, he had been born in Cairo and had spent his first twenty-eight years in Egypt. The Centre also knew that during the Suez War of 1956, when Arafat claimed to have been an officer in the Egyptian army fighting to defend Port Said, he had actually been attending a Communist-sponsored student conference in Czechoslovakia.23 The fact that Arafat had friendly relations with the deviant Communist dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceauşescu, strengthened Moscow’s suspicion of him. Arafat was franker with Ceauşescu than with the Kremlin. According to the Romanian foreign intelligence chief, Ion Pacepa, during a visit to Bucharest in October 1972 Arafat claimed that Hani al-Hasan, who accompanied him, had been behind the Black September attack at the Munich Olympics.24

  Arafat’s visit to Bucharest led to the establishment of a close liaison between the PLO and the Romanian foreign intelligence service. Probably in response to the Centre’s desire not to be upstaged by the Romanians, a Politburo resolution of 7 September 1973 instructed the KGB to maintain secret liaison with Arafat’s intelligence service through the Beirut residency.25 Arafat’s international prestige, and hence Moscow’s interest in him, increased in the following year after he became the first head of a non-governmental organization to be invited to address a plenary session of the United Nations. ‘I have come bearing an olive branch in one hand and a freedom fighter’s gun in the other,’ Arafat declared. ‘Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.’ During a visit by Arafat to Moscow in 1974 an official communiqué recognized the PLO as ‘the sole legitimate representative of the Arab people of Palestine’. In the course of the visit, Samoylenko,
the KGB officer who had been cultivating Arafat since the later 1960s, was photographed with him at a wreath-laying ceremony.26 Moscow officially announced that it was authorizing the PLO to establish a Moscow office - though it was another two years before it allowed the office to open. The only other national liberation movement given similar status in the Soviet Union was the National Liberation Front of Vietnam.27

  The Centre, however, retained much greater confidence in Haddad than in Arafat. Soviet policy remained to distance itself from terrorism in public while continuing in private to promote Palestinian terrorist attacks. When seeking Politburo approval for Haddad’s terrorist operations, Andropov misleadingly referred to them instead as ‘special’ or ‘sabotage’ operations. ‘W. Haddad’, he reported, ‘is clearly aware of our negative attitude in principle towards terrorism and he does not raise with us matters connected with this particular line of PFLP activity.’ There was, however, no coherent dividing line between the terrorist attacks which ‘in principle’ the Soviet leadership opposed and the ‘sabotage operations’ which it was willing in practice to support. On 23 April 1974 Andropov informed Brezhnev that Haddad had requested further ‘special technical devices’ for his future operations:

  At the present time [Haddad’s section of] the PFLP is engaged in preparing a number of special operations, including strikes against major petroleum reservoirs in various parts of the world (Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf, Hong Kong and elsewhere); the destruction of tankers and supertankers; operations against American and Israeli representatives in Iran, Greece, Ethiopia and Kenya; a raid on the building of the Tel Aviv diamond centre, among other [targets].

  Andropov repeated his earlier assurances that, through Haddad, the KGB retained the ability ‘to control to some extent the activities of the PFLP foreign operations department, [and] to influence it in ways favourable to the Soviet Union’. Three days later Brezhnev authorized the supply of ‘special technical devices’ to Haddad.28 In June 1974 Andropov approved detailed arrangements for the secret supply of weaponry to Haddad and the training of PFLP Special Operations Group instructors in the use of mines and sabotage equipment. In September, Haddad visited Russia, staying with his wife, son and daughter in a KGB dacha (codenamed BARVIKHA-1). During discussions on his future operations he agreed to allocate two or three of his men to the hunting down of Soviet defectors. The weapons supplied to Haddad included foreign-manufactured pistols and automatics fitted with silencers together with radio-controlled mines constructed from foreign materials, at a cost of $50,000, in order to conceal their Soviet manufacture.29 Further KGB arms shipments to Haddad, approved by the Politburo, included one in May 1975 of fifty-three foreign-produced automatics, fifty pistols (ten with silencers) and 34,000 rounds of ammunition. Brezhnev was informed that Haddad was the only non-Russian who knew the source of the arms, which, as in the first weapons delivery to the PFLP five years earlier, were handed over at sea near Aden under cover of darkness.30 Among other assistance given by the KGB to Haddad during 1975 was $30,000.31

  Through the Beirut residency the KGB also established contact with two other terrorist groups which gained publicity after attacks on Israeli civilians in the spring of 1974: the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), led by Nayif Hawatmeh (codenamed INZHENER),32 a Greek Orthodox Christian; and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), a breakaway from the PFLP headed by a former Syrian army officer, Ahmad Jibril (codenamed MAYOROV).33 The Beirut residency arranged meetings with Hawatmeh two or three times a month (for how long is unclear) and planted Service A disinformation in the DFLP journal Hurriya at a cost of 700 Lebanese pounds per page.34 Mitrokhin’s notes contain no details of KGB contacts with Jibril.35

  The most spectacular terrorist operation of the mid-1970s, of which the KGB was almost certainly given advance notice by Haddad, was a PFLP Special Operations Group raid on a meeting of OPEC oil ministers at its Vienna headquarters in December 1975 by a group of Palestinian and German gunmen led by Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as ‘Carlos the Jackal’.36 Carlos was the spoiled son of a millionaire Venezuelan Communist who had named his three sons Vladimir, Ilich and Lenin in honour of the leader of the October Revolution. The KGB had first encountered Carlos when he was given a place in 1968, with his brother Lenin, at the Lumumba University in Moscow for students from the Third World. According to a Venezuelan Communist leader, Carlos paid little attention to his studies: ‘There was no control over him. He received a lot of money, he played the guitar, and he ran after young women.’37 The KGB, it is safe to conclude, did not regard him as a suitable recruit.38 In 1970 he and his brother were expelled from Lumumba University for ‘anti-Soviet provocation and indiscipline’. After his expulsion Carlos flew to Jordan and joined the PFLP, later becoming one of its leading hitmen in London and Paris. Though he claimed to be a Marxist revolutionary, his passion for terrorism derived chiefly from his own vanity and bravado as ‘the great Carlos’. ‘Revolution’, he declared in a characteristic transport of self-indulgent rhetoric, ‘is my supreme euphoria.’39

  The early stages of Carlos’s attack on the poorly defended Vienna OPEC headquarters in December 1975 went remarkably smoothly. All the oil ministers were taken hostage and the Austrian government gave in to Carlos’s demands for a plane to fly them out of the country. Haddad had instructed Carlos to fly around the world with the hostages, liberating most of the oil ministers one by one in their respective capitals in return for declarations of support for the Palestinian cause, but gave orders that the Saudi Arabian and Iranian ministers were to be executed as ‘criminals’. Carlos, however, failed to kill either and freed both in exchange for a large ransom. An outraged Haddad told Carlos that he had disobeyed orders, and dismissed him from his ‘operational teams’.

  Over the next two years, Haddad suffered two humiliating defeats. In July 1976 PFLP Special Operations Group terrorists hijacked an Air France Airbus with over a hundred Israelis on board to the Ugandan airport of Entebbe. The hostages, however, were rescued and the terrorists killed in a daring Israeli commando raid. In October 1977 a Lufthansa Boeing 737 was hijacked to Mogadishu and its eighty-six passengers taken hostage. Though the captain was killed by the mentally unstable leader of the hijackers during a stop-over in South Yemen, the plane was stormed at Mogadishu by West German commandos and the remaining hostages freed.40

  Despite these débâcles, Haddad remained in close contact with the KGB. In 1976 ten of his terrorists were sent on a three-month course at the FCD Red Banner Institute (later known as the Andropov Institute), which included training in intelligence, counter-intelligence, interrogation, surveillance and sabotage. Further courses were run in 1977-78.41 In March 1977 Haddad visited Moscow for operational discussions with the head of the FCD ‘special tasks’ department, Vladimir Grigoryevich Krasovsky, and his deputy, A. F. Khlystov. The assistance given to Haddad included $10,000 and ten Walther pistols fitted with silencers. At the KGB’s request, Haddad agreed to act as intermediary in making contact with the Provisional IRA representative in Algiers, codenamed IGROK (‘Gambler’), who was believed to have useful information on British intelligence operations.42 From 1974 the KGB had a second agent within the PFLP leadership, Ahmad Mahmud Samman (codenamed VASIT), an Arab born in Jerusalem in 1935. Mitrokhin’s brief notes on Samman’s file record that he supplied the KGB with information on PFLP operations, but give no details.43

  In 1978 the Centre lost both its main agents within the PFLP. Haddad died of a brain haemorrhage while staying in East Germany. His KGB file records that, despite their earlier quarrel, the PFLP leader George Habash declared in an emotional oration at Haddad’s funeral in Baghdad, ‘Let our enemies know that he did not die, but is alive; he is in our hearts, and his name is in our hands; he is organically bound to our people and to our revolution.’44 Samman, according to Mitrokhin’s note on his file, was ‘liquidated by the PFLP as the result of internal dissension [probably following Hadda
d’s death] and the activities of the Syrian special services’.45 The Beirut residency also lost probably its most important confidential contact in the PFLP, Ahmad Yunis, head of the PFLP security service in Lebanon. In 1978 Yunis was found guilty by a PFLP tribunal of the murder of one of his colleagues and the attempted murder of another, and executed.46

  The final entry in Haddad’s file noted by Mitrokhin was a decision by the Centre to make contact with his successor. 47 Mitrokhin found no evidence, however, that the KGB ever again established links with any major Palestinian terrorist as close as those which it had maintained with Haddad. Carlos, who had been expelled by Haddad from the PFLP Special Operations Group, used Haddad’s death as an opportunity to found his own terrorist group, the Organization of Arab Armed Struggle, composed of Syrian, Lebanese, West German and Swiss militants, and to pursue his quest for international stardom as the world’s leading revolutionary practitioner of terror. He obtained a diplomatic passport from the Marxist-Leninist regime of the People’s Democratic Republic of [South] Yemen in the name of Ahmad Ali Fawaz, which showed his place of birth as Aden, and increased his credit with the Yemeni authorities by falsely claiming that he was a fully trained KGB officer operating on missions approved by the Centre. In February 1979, according to his KGB file, Carlos also began regular contact with the security agency of the PLO. During the remainder of the year he went on an extraordinary tour of the Soviet bloc, beginning in the spring in East Berlin, in order to make contact with the local intelligence agencies. Though Carlos was allowed to set up bases in East Berlin and Budapest, however, he was held at arm’s length by the KGB. When Erich Mielke, the East German Minister of State Security, passed on to Moscow Carlos’s claims, as reported to him by his South Yemeni counterpart, that he was working for the KGB, he received an official denial from Mikhail Andreyevich Usatov, the deputy head of the FCD, and Yakov Prokofyevich Medyanik, then head of the African Department.48 Carlos eventually became an embarrassment to his Soviet-bloc hosts. According to Markus ‘Mischa’ Wolf, the head of the HVA, the Stasi’s foreign intelligence arm, ‘Carlos was a big mouth, an uncontrollable adventurer. He spent his nights in bars, with a gun hanging at his belt, surrounded by girls and drinking like a fish.’ He was eventually expelled from his East Berlin and Budapest bases in 1985 and moved to Damascus in Syria, the most steadfast of his Arab allies.49