At that time the monarchy of Jordan's legendary King Hussein was largely ruled by the regulars and irregulars of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Indeed, as I drove into Amman by cab from the airport that first night, open jeeps of PLO men in full uniform careened around the streets of that lovely city with its villas of gold-colored stone. It was all too obvious that they were taking it over from the king; an air of imminent civil war hung about the entire place.
In the evenings on the outdoor terrace of the Hotel Intercontinental, the guerrillas of Fatah, As Saiqa, or the Popular Front, or a score of other movements, would walk around with macabre "politeness" asking for donations. The silent machine guns they carried lent the requests a certain urgency and clarity. When you donated to any one group, that group would put a yellow or a red or a green slip of paper on your table -- you would not be bothered by them again.
One of the most exciting efforts I have undertaken has been to penetrate these organizations. They are madly suspicious, and being an American certainly did not help. They can turn on you at any moment and their important functions are, for the most part, underground.
Only in the beginning, in dealing with this strange shadow world, does it seem odd that these "underground" movements have "information offices." Then your mind adapts and you become just as crazy as everyone else and it seems perfectly natural to go along with the often sinister drama.
So the first thing I did was to go to the Fatah Information Office, where I first met Zudhi Terrazzi, the fiftyish scion of an old crusader family from Jerusalem. They spelled his name "Terzi" on his visa application, so he turned out as "Terzi" at the UN . Then sleeping on a cot in the office, Zudhi was later to become the PLO 's first ambassador to the UN . A cultured, calculating man who was utterly dedicated to the cause, Zudhi started me on the little journeys necessary for a journalist's work.
The first thing for a journalist to do in such a situation is to create trust, which takes time. One way to do this is to "make the rounds." Dutifully, day after day, I trooped out of the Jordan Intercontinental, sometimes with a group and sometimes alone, to see the training camps, to see the little Palestinian boys training, to see the wounded in the hospitals, in effect to go through the whole ritual.
In order more fully to understand, I spent a night in the Marka refugee camp with a refugee family. We drove out that day to the Marka camp just outside of Amman, and I settled in with the Abdel Khader family, originally from a village named Jemsu in what was now Israel. The first little "crisis" came when, despite the fact that I had (I thought) worn a very conservative black dress, as I sat on a low stool my knees showed slightly.
There was a flurry of whispers. But everything was solved when the manager of the camp himself appeared with a towel, which he demurely draped over my knees. It was my first encounter with the fact that elbows and knees drove Arab men quite mad.
Later that evening I had put on a heavy long nightgown of the wife's (apparently just fine to wear in front of the men) and when it was time to sleep they all piled their thin mattresses up one on another and I found myself sleeping several feet above the rest of the family!
But it was in the Marka camp I began to see, firsthand, the real problem of the three million Palestinians and, even more so, the dangerous unreality of our ideas about them. I could see with this family, who talked endlessly about the day when they would return to their old village of Jemsu (as though it were still as it was when they left), how the poor Palestinians had made out. One million of them remained in camps, mostly without citizenship and without work, having been driven from or having left voluntarily what had been Palestine and what was now Israel. But there were also other Palestinians -- neither hungry nor in refugee camps.
Soon I was in Beirut with these others -- the vast body of business men and intellectuals and educated people that also made up the Palestinians. One day there, Walid Khalidi, a brilliant man who refuses to indulge in "vulgarizations about his Jewish cousins," was explaining to me why it was that of all the refugees in the modern world it was only these Palestinian refugees who kept on with this insane insistence upon a return.
"It was the wholeness," he explained, "the wholeness of everybody being put across a frontier ... and not on a time scale to allow the Great Healer time to do his work. You woke up and you said, 'Am I not in Jaffa? Of course, I must be.' Then, compounding injustice, plus insult, there was the closeness of standing in Jerusalem and seeing a Jewish family washing clothes on your balcony. And at the same time, there was the din of applause for your persecutors ringing constantly in your ears."
I was beginning to put the Palestinian "problem" into some perspective, and I realized that there was a new theme just lying there and waiting to be sung -- the truth that the Palestinians were only secondarily the Abdel Khaders in the camps. With 100,000 college graduates or more, they are the most developed people in the Arab world and the major catalyst for change. In November 1970 I wrote in The New Republic:
The Palestinian Arabs -- those ultimately fanaticized people who just masterfully sabotaged the Middle East peace plan -- are not what they seem to be. They are not, as they have widely been pictured, poor. They are not, by and large, uneducated. They are not a people without hope and their cause is not a cause born primarily of depredation and poverty ....
It is nearly impossible, among the 30,000 to 50,000 commandos or "fedayeen" (the Arabic word for "those who sacrifice") to find a leader or sub-leader who is not a doctor, lawyer or literary person. And in this apparent contradiction, almost unnoticed in the plethora of news coverage of this obstreperous revolutionary movement, lies the fascination of this curious people. They are a revolutionary force in the world today not because they are poor and without hope but rather because they are the most advanced people in the Arab world.
***
I was trying to get to the "base of the lighthouse," which was indeed always dark even as the lighthouse shone its light across a darkened sea. It was very much the same job as a psychiatrist's: to listen and to understand, to get at the trauma and let it speak. Terrorism was the symptom of breakdown, and I knew I was dealing first-hand with one of the epi-themes of our era.
***
After going through the "rounds" of getting to know the PLO and its strange and often dark ways, and thus building confidence, my next step was to try to get to know the leadership -- not, then, an easy move.
Despite my feeling that interviewing leaders is actually one of the more tiresome of life's concerns, from the first time I went to Beirut in 1969, I started working on interviewing Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and, to many, the number one terrorist in the world. For an amazing number of years, eight actually, nothing happened. I applied through the information offices (never the way to get to the top men) and I reapplied in all sorts of ways.
I saw others, but I didn't see him. I met Abu Jihad, the head of the PLO military wing, in Damascus, and he and his wife inexplicably gave a Thanksgiving dinner for me. Since he was even harder to see than Arafat, that was extremely nice -- but he wasn't Arafat. I interviewed Abu Iyad, who really is head of the terrorist wing, and
I was held in an Arab embassy where we talked for an hour until he returned to wherever it is shadowy figures such as he return to -- or I would have been held responsible for anything that happened to him. But he wasn't Arafat either.
Finally, in the spring of 1977, an interview was arranged through a mutual friend, a Palestinian doctor, and I arrived in the broken city of Beirut on a Saturday evening that was my birthday. It was heart rending, seeing those piles of blackened bricks where once the beautiful white city on the sea had been, and the next night I crossed over to the Fakhani section to meet Arafat. The meeting took place in the impeccable, bourgeois apartment of his secretary, a plump and buxom woman who bustled about bringing piles of food to everyone.
Actually Arafat surprised me, as I was often to be surprised in these interviews I now see
med destined to do.
For one thing he was far less harsh in person than in his pictures. He smiled and laughed easily, his face expressive and his odd, poppish eyes cushioned by the pouches that lay underneath them. There was, of course, the heavyset body, the headscarf or kaffiyeh, and the self-conscious khakis. He looked like a cross between GI Joe and the Buddha.
I was expecting the worst. I knew that interviews with him (with any "revolutionary" leader) were often filled with nonproductive rhetoric. So my relief grew when I soon saw it becoming something quite different.
"We are embarking upon a new program," he said with intensity, "a program of international legitimacy." Here is where you have to be able to read the hieroglyphics -- the Rosetta stones of the liberation fronts -- in order to figure out what is really being said. And what he was saying, this April of 1977, was that whereas before the PLO program had recognized no course of action except "armed struggle," now it would work through the UN and other respectable bodies.
"Do you understand the importance of what I am saying?" he asked me at one point, his eyes narrowed. "This is a very important signal."
The "international bandits" of the world were embarking upon an all-out program of diplomacy, to gain respectability in preparation for the formation of a "Palestinian state."
And now he talked about that state, something he had always denied before. He said there could indeed be federation or confederation with Jordan, but only after an independent state had come into being. He vehemently denied that what he was saying was only "tactical."
When I pressed him on recognition and guarantees for Israel, he said that "the formation of a Palestinian state will solve (our problems with Israel) for the next twenty years."
"Why twenty years?" I pressed him, suspicious.
"From your questions," he answered, smiling a patient-impatient, oddly avuncular smile, "I can understand that you are asking for guarantees for Israel. I only say twenty years because by that time I will be dead. Others will have to work out the future." He then went on to renounce terrorism and to approve enthusiastically the new contacts between PLO representatives and "any Israelis or Jews who recognize the Palestinian people."
We started at 10:00 p.m. and we ended at 2:00 a.m. In between we finished off platefuls of typical Arab food. Just before 2:00 a.m. he said that of course he could not fully recognize Israel at this time, throwing up his hands and saying, "You are asking from the victim everything."
Yet I knew that he had in fact given to me in this curious interview an implicit recognition. On the side, his people told me they were thinking about de facto recognition of Israel in the first stage of settlement, with de jure recognition coming in the final stage.
And as I left him that strange early morning in that grotesquely wounded city that I had loved so much, this man that many saw as the new Attila the Hun smiled broadly and said, "I am optimistic, yes, I am optimistic."
As I got to know these Palestinians better -- but never, believe me, as an outsider, really to know them -- I kept searching for the secret to Arafat's leadership. What was his "genius," this chubby man with the stubble of beard? As I talked with his people, I began to see him as a kind of moderate, a juggler of passions who let a thousand flowers bloom in order to hold his then-disparate movement together. His were the welcoming arms that closed around every Palestinian, no matter what that man had done, or what horror he had committed, and tried to lead him back to the fold.
Indeed it was only half a year later that I saw him again -- but now in a totally different manner. Now it was December of 1977, immediately after Anwar Sadat's stunning trip to Jerusalem. Now all of the hopes of Arafat, expressed to me only that last spring, were dead. This time, after the glory and drama of the Cairo Conference where Israelis and Egyptians met for the first time, he agreed to see me but only on the basis that it would be all off the record. Unhappy about it, I nevertheless agreed. And I found quite a different man.
It was as though he were drained of all energy. He spoke from the heart. His words, which I can here only paraphrase, were really cries of anguish. He had been in Cairo with Sadat. They had been talking about the new initiatives in the UN . He, Arafat, had left by plane to go to Libya to try to patch things up with Qaddafi for Sadat. In midair the plane was called back by Sadat: something urgent. Then Arafat was taken to the front rows of the meeting of the Arab Socialist Union, where Sadat had called an extraordinary session; he was even placed in a front-row seat. Sadat then proceeded to inform the population that he was going to try to make a breakthrough by going to Jerusalem. Arafat sat there, stunned, incredulous, unbelieving, and, above all, deeply and deliberately humiliated.
"Georgie Anne," he told me, "we were both sitting on a high platform, Sadat and me. Then he pushed me off. He -- he is still up there. But I -- I am down. I am finished." It was a strange, dread cry for help that I cannot easily forget.
I saw Arafat twice after that. Once in 1978, he had been sick -- the flu it was -- and I waited several days (what non-journalists never really understand is that it is the ability to wait and outwait, not perception, or aggressiveness, or intelligence, or penetrating questions, that mark the good journalist!) and so I waited. Finally, on a Saturday, I recall, they said he was better. I trotted up to the apartment again and there saw Yasser Arafat -- the scourge of the world, to many -- sitting in bed in his blue starched pajamas with blue flowered sheets and a white chenille bedspread. He and Mahmoud Labadi, his excellent press man, and I sat there eating candied apricots ... and talking.
The last time I saw him, in March of 1980, he was, again, a different man. Now he had just come back from Teheran and was foolishly ecstatic. He had thrown the PLO 's lot with Khomeini (even at the time, I thought this quite mad) and was trying to help negotiate the hostages' freedom ....
***
During these years the correspondent's role was changing. Diplomats could not get to these revolutionaries, for the revolutionaries blamed them for their problems. We had become the new diplomats -- the new intermediaries in the world -- the surrogates for nations. And the diplomats -- the good ones -- were jealous. One American, seasoned and experienced, remarked to me with unmistakable yearning, after I had been smuggled into Syria on a PLO "visa," "If only I could once do that!" But they couldn't. That was left to us -- the intermediaries, the in-between people, the people who didn't have to be there.
Interestingly enough, I have found that guerrillas ... terrorists ... freedom fighters ... whatever you choose to call them, understood us and our role perfectly -- in many ways they understood it better than many Americans. Only once, for instance, was I ever accused by any of them, anywhere, at any time, of being a CIA agent, and that was for a reason.
One of the leading PLO diplomats one night at dinner kept accusing me of being CIA , until I quite lost my cool and snarled at him something about how they really didn't deserve anything because they were so hopeless and never could analyze anything correctly, etc., etc.
After a hurt silence he finally looked at me and said, "I'm sorry. You see, we needed a contact with the CIA and we were just hoping you could be it."
***
Dealing with the Palestinians also had its most awful days and nights of terror for us as well.
Bob Allison, CBS correspondent, and I were sitting in the Sheraton dining room one night in Cairo, gazing from our privileges out over the massed humans and dusty dreams and sobering squalor that was Cairo. Suddenly Bob got a phone call from his office, and when he came back to the table, he was shaking his head.
"You won't believe this," he said as he sat down, wearing now that special, exhausted look of the correspondent who has been called away on one too many 2:00 a.m. flights to nowhere. "Some Palestinian terrorists in Khartoum have taken a group of diplomats and are holding them." He paused. "The American ambassador is among them."
By 2:00 a.m., arrangements all behind us, we were sitting on the single Sudanese Airways night flight to Khartoum, s
outh from Egypt, down into the endless northern deserts of Africa.
As dawn was breaking over the vast desert city of Khartoum, where Chinese Gordon had fought off the Mahdi's dervishes in the 1890s, only to have his head end on one of the Mahdi's spikes and the British Empire in this part of Africa fall apart, we landed. After checking into a small downtown hotel at 6:00 a.m., we were off immediately by taxi and by foot to the sprawling residential area where the Palestinians were holding the diplomats in the Saudi embassy. It was a grim story ....
A typical diplomatic party had been held the night before at the Saudi embassy, a big, four-storied modern stucco villa that was as utilitarian as it was tasteless. Into the midst of the proper and dutiful crowd, representing all the establishments and structures of the world, suddenly had swept a band of Palestinians, faces ghoulishly masked with black ski masks and hands holding the ever-present Kalashnikovs. They took five guests: American Ambassador Cleo Noel, the American charge Curt Moore, a Jordanian, and two other Arabs.
When I heard this, my sorrow increased. Curt Moore I had met on a previous trip through Khartoum. A tall, bespectacled man, he was one of the finest officers I knew. Ironically, Curt was a splendid Arabist; he understood the Arab complaints. It shows, again, how little it mattered what we personally thought -- or did -- in terms of the world's "causes."
On foot, I reconnoitered the area. The streets around the embassy were now closed to the public by the police. But journalists could get right in front of the Saudi embassy and see the terrorists pacing the balconies in their grotesque black masks.
I was walking back and forth, wondering exactly what to do, when, catty-cornered from the Saudi embassy, I saw some people on a balcony soberly surveying the situation. They looked like Americans.
Buying the Night Flight Page 23