Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present

by Max Boot

  For all the fame of the Entebbe operation, its aftermath was shrouded in considerable secrecy. Two years later, in 1978, Wadi Haddad died in an East German hospital from a mysterious ailment that attacked his immune system. Not until nearly three decades later would it be revealed that he had been poisoned by the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, which, knowing of his sweet tooth, had used a Palestinian agent to slip him doctored Belgian chocolates.160

  THE ENTEBBE HIJACKING was only one of many storied terrorist acts carried out in the 1970s by Palestinians and their sympathizers and collaborators among Western terrorist groups. There had been terrorist groups before, and even transnational terrorism was not new—it had been pioneered by the anarchists nearly a century earlier. But in the 1970s, the second great age of international terrorism, this trend reached new heights with terrorists attending each other’s training camps in countries ranging from East Germany to Libya and even collaborating on attacks.

  The Palestinians’ motivations were obvious: they felt they had been robbed of their birthright and wanted back the land occupied by the state of Israel. What of their Western counterparts?

  The Western terrorist organizations of the 1970s—Action Directe (France), the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Red Brigades (Italy), the Communist Combatant Cells (Belgium), the Japanese Red Army, the Provisional IRA, the Basque ETA, the Greek Revolutionary Organization 17 November, the Quebec Liberation Front, the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and others—were, like many of their Latin American contemporaries and their Russian Nihilist predecessors, composed mostly of current or former college students. The most radical members of the sixties generation were not satisfied with peaceful demonstrations, building occupations, and draft-card burnings. Their rage against the “system”—and, truth be told, their love of adventure and rebellion for its own sake—led them to assaults on riot police, window breaking, and eventually, in a few cases, to bank robbery, murder, and hostage taking. They were aptly summed up by the East German spy chief Markus Wolf, whose service supported many of the European terrorist groups, as “spoiled, hysterical children of mainly upper-middle-class backgrounds.”161

  Influenced and encouraged by radical philosophers such as Herbert Marcuse, Régis Debray, and Frantz Fanon, who provided them with justifications for their acts, sixties radicals thought that they could emulate the Vietcong, M-26-7, or the Chinese Red Army without pondering the considerable differences between their own societies and Diem’s South Vietnam, Batista’s Cuba, or Chiang Kai-shek’s China. Or, rather, they fell under the illusion that there was no real difference between such authoritarian regimes and the liberal democracies where they lived. They decided, in the face of all evidence to the contrary (the sixties was also the decade of the civil rights movement), that the only way to bring about change in corroding societies such as “Amerikkka” was through violent revolution.162

  The Weathermen, an outgrowth of the Students for a Democratic Society, were the most restrained. In spite of their bloodcurdling promises to “tear up pig city” and “bring the war home,” they largely desisted from murderous attacks after three Weatherman died in 1970 in the accidental explosion of a Greenwich Village town house where they were manufacturing pipe bombs. They would continue to set off bombs but typically would issue warnings to prevent injury. The worst blot on their record, and the coda to a rapidly fading era, was a 1981 armored car robbery that led to the death of two police officers and one security guard.163

  The Symbionese Liberation Army was even shorter-lived but more violent. Its ideology was Maoist; its slogan, “Death to the Fascist Insect That Preys upon the Life of the People.” Its membership consisted of ten white, middle-class Berkeley radicals led by an escaped African-American convict named Donald DeFreeze, who styled himself “general field marshal.” The SLA became infamous for the 1974 kidnapping of the heiress Patty Hearst. After a few weeks of threats and indoctrination, she became their collaborator in bank robbery under the name “Tania,” the nom de guerre of one of Che Guevara’s followers. The group, which committed its first attack in 1973 (the murder of the black Oakland school superintendent), went out of business in 1975 following the arrest of Hearst and three of her captors-cum-comrades. In between, in 1974, DeFreeze and five other members had been slain in a two-hour shoot-out with police, shown on live television, in a house in South Central Los Angeles where they had stockpiled seventeen guns and 6,000 rounds of ammunition. Like John Brown, these radicals thought that they could spur a massive African-American rebellion with a spectacular act of violence and, like him, they were fatally disappointed.164

  The West German Red Army Faction and its offshoots were larger, longer-lasting, and more destructive but no more successful. Their members killed more than thirty people and wounded more than ninety, including police officers, judges, prosecutors, businessmen, and American soldiers. In 1977 a dozen of its operatives even penetrated a U.S. military base in Germany in an unsuccessful attempt to steal nuclear munitions. Nor was the Entebbe operation their only foray into airline hijacking. In 1977 German radicals again cooperated with the PFLP to seize a Lufthansa Boeing 737, which they diverted to Mogadishu. Here a newly formed German counterterrorist unit, GSG-9, bettered Sayeret Matkal by storming the aircraft without any loss of life among the captives. (Three hijackers were killed and one wounded.) Back home the West German police mounted a massive manhunt that led to the incarceration of most of the Red Army Faction, which apparently never numbered more than thirty full-time operatives and a few hundred active sympathizers. Its early leaders, Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader, killed themselves in prison in 1976–77. Thereafter the group showed an impressive ability to regenerate itself into second and third generations of militants with the aid of the East German secret police and various Palestinian groups and Arab states that provided access to training camps, financing, and weapons.

  The sheer ability of this small band of militants to stay on the loose in a society as orderly and stable as West Germany—waging a “war of six against sixty million,” in the only slightly exaggerated phrase of the Nobel laureate novelist Heinrich Böll—shows the difficulty of eradicating any determined insurgency, no matter how small. The Red Army Faction’s failure to achieve any results, on the other hand, shows the difficulty of shaking a democratic government by force. The Baader-Meinhof Gang did not formally suspend operations until 1992, but long before then it had become an anachronism—another musty holdover from an era of tie-dyes and “be-ins.”165

  The same fate was suffered by the Italian Red Brigades (notorious for the kidnapping and murder of the former premier Aldo Moro in 1978), the Japanese Red Army, and similar groups. They all faded out around the time that the Berlin Wall fell, in no small part because of a decline in support from communist regimes. Their popular appeal was almost nil—less even than that of the anarchists, who could at least tap into the labor movement. Through their wanton cruelty the New Left terrorists, much like the anarchists, forfeited whatever public sympathy they might have generated.

  Terrorist groups with a nationalist appeal, such as the ETA, IRA, and PKK, proved more enduring. They managed to achieve some political reforms even if they failed in their ultimate goal of secession. The most famous group of all was the Palestine Liberation Organization, which combined terrorism with shrewd diplomacy and savvy press operations. Under its longtime chairman, Yasser Arafat, the PLO proved to be a study in resiliency if not statesmanship.

  56.

  ARAFAT’S ODYSSEY

  What Terrorism Did and Did Not Achieve for the Palestinians

  ARAFAT, LIKE CASTRO and countless other modern revolutionaries dating back to the Russian Nihilists, got his start in college politics. His full name was Muhammad Abdel-Rauf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini; “Yasser” was a nickname that meant, ironically, “easygoing” or “carefree”—words that would never be used by anyone to describe this volatile, vain, and demanding character, who never expressed an interes
t in anything other than the Palestinian struggle. So devoted was he to the revolutionary cause that, he explained, he had no time to shave—he could not afford to lose 15 minutes a day, 450 minutes a month, “in the midst of guerrilla warfare.” One of his few relaxations was watching cartoons—he claimed to like “Tom and Jerry” best because “the mouse outsmarts the cat.” His monomania did not make him an easy person to like, but it did not set him apart from Che, Mao, or other successful revolutionaries—nor, for that matter, from many others who are successful in occupations ranging from business to sports.

  Embarrassingly for a Palestinian patriot, Arafat’s birthplace was probably Cairo, where his father, a merchant, had emigrated in 1927, two years before his birth, to pursue business interests. After his mother’s death and his father’s remarriage to a stepmother he hated, young Arafat was sent to live in Jerusalem with family members for a few years in the 1930s, but he soon returned to Cairo. In spite of his later claims of heroic battlefield exploits (“I fought in Jerusalem, in the south of Jerusalem and in Gaza,” he told an interviewer in 1988), there is no evidence that he played any part in Israel’s War of Independence in 1947–48, which led to the exodus of 700,000 Palestinian refugees. The following year he entered King Fuad University, later Cairo University, to study civil engineering. But as one of his friends recalled, in virtually the same words that were used about Castro (who entered the University of Havana in 1945), “His only activity was politics. Very seldom would he come to the School of Engineering.”

  His major achievement was to become president of the Palestine Students’ Union—a feat he accomplished with the support of the Muslim Brotherhood. Arafat would never become an Islamist like the founders of Hamas but, unlike George Habash, Wadi Haddad, and many other Palestinian activists of the 1960s–1970s, he was not a radical leftist either. He was from the start a traditional Muslim with no ideological program beyond Palestinian statehood.

  After graduation in 1956, Arafat moved to Kuwait—lured, like many other Palestinian professionals, by the oil-fueled economic boom. While working as a lowly road engineer for the Ministry of Public Works, he got together in a “discreet house” in 1959 with fewer than twenty other Palestinian exiles to create an anti-Israel group called Fatah (Conquest). Early support came from Syria and Algeria, which in 1964 allowed the nascent organization to establish its first training camps for a few hundred fighters.

  Terrorism against Israeli settlers was hardly a new phenomenon; it had been a fact of life since the Arab Revolt of 1936–39. Following Israel’s formation in 1948, which of course was partly the result of a terrorist campaign by Zionist groups against the British authorities, the Jewish state had faced a nonstop stream of infiltrations by Arab fedayeen (self-sacrificers). Between 1948 and 1956, these attackers killed more than two hundred Israeli civilians and many soldiers and helped precipitate the war against Egypt in 1956 and numerous smaller retaliatory raids. But these terrorist operations were undertaken by neighboring states such as Egypt and Syria, not by independent Palestinian groups. The Palestinians were too divided by clan loyalties and economic interests and insufficiently nationalistic to be a powerful force in their own right. Arab leaders were anxious to keep it that way: they wanted to use the Palestinian issue but not to give the Palestinians their own voice. Authoritarians to a man, the Arab heads of state did not want any Palestinian leader challenging their authority. Thus the Palestine Liberation Organization was created in 1964 under the auspices of Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose domains included the Gaza Strip. (The West Bank was ruled by Jordan.) Its first leader was a nonentity totally dependent on Nasser’s support. Arafat decided to launch his own campaign of terrorism in 1964, at a time when many thought Fatah was not yet ready, largely to steal a march on the PLO and its Egyptian patrons.

  By this time he had already adopted his trademarks—a black and white kaffiyeh (head scarf), a face full of stubble, dark glasses, which he wore day and night, and, in spite of his lack of actual military service, an olive-green military uniform complete with a holstered Smith & Wesson revolver. These symbols became as important for him, and served much the same purpose, as Montgomery’s beret or MacArthur’s corncob pipe. They also helped distract from his unprepossessing appearance: “Only five feet four inches tall, with protruding eyes, a permanent three-day old stubble, and potbelly, Arafat was not,” the journalist Thomas Friedman aptly noted, “what one would call a dashing figure.”

  Arafat’s political astuteness more than made up for what he lacked in physical stature. From the start he made a habit of establishing shell organizations that would claim responsibility for attacks while providing him with plausible deniability. The first of these was called al-Asifa (the Storm). Under its banner, in the first days of 1965, Fatah operatives based in Syria launched their first attack on Israel—a failed attempt to sabotage the waterworks. Although most of the early operations were equally unsuccessful, each was heralded with a bombastic press release that claimed historic achievements. In the early days Arafat would tool around Beirut in his Volkswagen Beetle personally distributing his “boastful communiqués.” Later he would develop a world-class propaganda machine to get his message out; in common with many other modern revolutionaries, he had internalized T. E. Lawrence’s dictum that “the printing press is the greatest weapon in the armory of the modern commander.” Arafat was abstemious when it came to cigarettes and alcohol, but he was addicted to publicity.

  His early, amateurish attempts to organize a Mao-style insurgency in the West Bank and Gaza Strip came to little. Shin Bet, the internal Israeli security service, was “relentless, fast, and ruthless.” It was particularly adept at finding Palestinian informers through a combination of inducements (money, work or travel permits) and threats (prison, deportation). In late 1967 Arafat was fortunate to escape from a Ramallah safe house just ahead of a raid; the security men found his mattress still warm.

  An Israeli officer was dismissive of Fatah: “We cannot dignify them with the name guerrilla or commando. . . . They are nowhere near Viet Cong standards.” True, but irrelevant. No matter how much Arafat might deny it (he insisted the terrorist label was a “big lie” from the “Israeli military junta”), Fatah was a terrorist, not a guerrilla, organization, and its operations were designed to generate publicity and political support, not to militarily defeat, or even seriously harm, Israel. By that standard Arafat was succeeding. With the start of his attacks, wealthy Gulf Arabs began making substantial donations. The PLO was well on its way to becoming, in the words of one scholar, “by far the richest irredentist movement the world had ever seen.”

  Arafat was the only person who would know where the PLO’s funds, eventually amounting to billions of dollars, were stashed. This became a powerful instrument of personal power that helped to explain his long-term survival. But while many of his associates were widely suspected of corruption, Arafat was not. Like Che Guevara, he seemed indifferent to material comforts—for most of his life he led a nomadic existence with few personal possessions other than his Rolex watch and his Smith & Wesson revolver. “There is,” a journalist was to note in 1989, “no bric-a-brac in Arafat’s life.”

  Arafat’s early reputation was made by the battle of Karameh. This was a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan that Fatah used as a base of operations. Israeli ground forces attacked it on March 21, 1968, in retaliation for a mine that had been planted on an Israeli road, blowing up a school bus. The Israelis encountered much heavier resistance than anticipated, losing 33 men. The defenders suffered more—the PLO lost 156 dead and 141 captured. It was hardly a victory in the conventional sense, and most of the fighting had been done by the Jordanian army, not the PLO. But Arafat showed a genius for spinning military dross into public-relations gold. He trumpeted Karameh as the first battle the Israelis had lost—and Arabs, eager for good news after the 1967 Six-Day War, believed him. Thousands of volunteers flocked to Fatah, and the Arab states substantially increased their suppor
t.

  In 1968 Arafat appeared on his first cover of Time, which proclaimed that “everyone in the Arab world knows who he is.” In 1969 he was elected chairman of the PLO, a position he would hold for the rest of his life. With his newfound wealth and power, he was able to expand his network of bases in Jordan into a state within a state. Palestinian gunmen swaggered around extorting “donations” at gunpoint and openly talked of overthrowing the “fascist regime in Jordan.”

  Nemesis was not long in coming.

  The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which after Fatah was the PLO’s second-biggest party and over which Arafat exercised little control, precipitated a crisis in September 1970 with its hijackings of Western aircraft, which were blown up in Jordan. Arafat expressed his disapproval of the PFLP’s aerial piracy, but he made no attempt to stop it. This was too much for King Hussein, who had little respect for the double-dealing Arafat and feared that he was losing control of his own country. He ordered his army to expel the PLO. The Jordanian army, a professional force backed by armor, artillery, and aircraft, made short work of the cocky but “totally unprepared” and hopelessly outnumbered PLO fighters. At least two thousand of them were killed. Some of Arafat’s men were so terrified of the ruthless Jordanians that they sought refuge in Israel. Arafat, for his part, relocated his operations to Lebanon. Openly challenging King Hussein was his first major miscalculation but far from the last.166

  TO STAGE A comeback, in 1971 he organized a new front group called Black September. Its first victim was Jordan’s prime minister, Wasfi Tal—“one of the butchers of the Palestinian people,” according to PLO propaganda. He was gunned down in Cairo in 1971. In a grisly touch, one of his killers drank the dying man’s blood from the floor. In 1973 Black September operatives invaded a party at the Saudi embassy in Khartoum and killed a Belgian diplomat along with the U.S. ambassador and his deputy—one of the few times that the PLO directly attacked the United States. Over the years Arafat made many enemies, but, in spite of his close links with the Soviet bloc, he was cautious enough to avoid a direct assault on a superpower. Black September’s most notable operation was the seizure of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, the most famous terrorist act prior to September 11, 2001. The photograph of a gunman standing on the Israeli team’s balcony with a stocking mask over his head, looking like a pitiless visitor from another planet, became a defining image of the age.