Middle Eastern Terrorism. Mark Ensalaco

the PFLP spokesperson, whom the Israelis would assassinate in July 1972, did all the speaking, but he repeatedly deferred to the man seated beside him. That man was Wadi Haddad, head of the PFLP Special Apparatus.¹² Known as the Master, Haddad was among the founders of the ANM and later the PFLP. Like Habash, the PFLP secretary-general, Haddad was the son of Greek Orthodox parents and graduated from the American University with a degree in medicine. These two men were close. In 1956 both went to the Jordan Valley to lend their medical services to the United Nations Relief and Works Administration, an agency set up to attend to the flood of Palestinian refugees. There Jordanian officials became aware of Haddad and arrested him. It was a premonition: Haddad would make it his mission to overthrow the Jordanian monarchy as a prerequisite to the destruction of Israel. By the early 1960s Haddad was conspiring in Damascus. But while Habash was busying himself with political matters, Haddad worked to create a military strike force. He was among the first to advocate military operations against Israel. The ANM guerrilla operations were Haddad's. When those proved ineffective, and when Fatah gained ascendancy after the battle of Karameh, Haddad turned to air piracy—and to terror.

      It is not known whether Habash knew of the El Al operation in advance, since he had been in custody in Damascus since March. Haddad's special apparatus organized his escape to Jordan two months after the last hostages left Algeria. What is certain is that as Haddad intensified the campaign against civilian aviation culminating in a spectacular operation in the fall of 1970, Habash endorsed Haddad's operations. The idea, said Habash, was “to turn passengers into hostages, blow them out of the sky, attack them in the terminals.” Habash would not reverse his position until 1974, well after the Soviet Union, which had adopted the Palestinian cause, publicly condemned hijacking.¹³ But Haddad never abandoned the strategy and continued to organize hijacking operations until failed operations in Entebbe in 1976 and Mogadishu in 1977 forced Habash to expel him from the PFLP. Haddad died the following year, but the disciples of the Master would sustain his campaign of aviation terror well into the 1980s, when Islamic fundamentalism was already replacing Palestinian nationalism as the ideological inspiration for violence.

      The El Al operation was, in fact, the beginning of a lethal campaign to take hostages, blow passengers out of the sky, and attack them in the terminals. Two days after Christmas 1968, PFLP terrorists killed one passenger and wounded several others in attack on an El Al jet on the tarmac at the airport in Athens. Two days later, Israelis retaliated with a devastating air strike on Beirut International Airport, destroying thirteen passenger aircraft on the ground. On 18 February 1969 the PFLP attacked again, strafing an El Al aircraft in Zurich, killing a passenger and wounding four others. Six months passed without another major incident; then, at the end of August, PFLP terrorists led by Leila Khaled, a twenty-four-year-old woman who would soon become famous, hijacked a TWA flight after takeoff from Rome, diverted the plane to Damascus, and destroyed the jet on the ground after forcing the passengers off. The PFLP—with the connivance of the Syrian government—held two Israelis hostage for six weeks until Israel, in another humanitarian gesture, released two captured Syrian pilots.¹⁴ The PFLP followed this with a September grenade attack on an El Al office in Munich that left two dead and an identical attack in Athens in November that killed a four-year-old boy. In December, airport security in Athens thwarted a PFLP attempt to seize another flight in Athens, but in February 1970 the PFLP raked the transit lounge at the Munich airport with gunfire, killing one El Al passenger and wounding many others.

      The operations demonstrated a great deal about the PFLP's operational capabilities and commercial aviation's security vulnerabilities. Haddad proved that his special operations apparatus could strike in major European cities: Athens (where aviation officials routinely decried as unconscionably lax security), Zurich, Munich, and Rome. No airline was safe from attack. Although the Israelis would prevent Palestinians from hijacking El Al flights after the 1968 Algiers incident, they could not protect passengers and planes from ground attack in foreign cities, and soon the PFLP would demonstrate its capability to strike passengers in an Israeli airport. The August 1969 TWA hijacking proved the PFLP would not refrain from assaulting American commercial airlines. It was attacking on the external front, and it was beginning to attack Israel's U.S. and European allies. The PFLP operational capability was obvious, but the purpose behind the strategy was perplexing, even to some of its own fedayeen. If attacking El Al was tantamount to attacking Israel, then the operations were a continuation of the guerrilla war against Israel by other means. The attacks proved that the fedayeen were not impotent despite Israel's supremacy in conventional arms and dramatized the Palestinian problem even if they inevitably damaged the Palestinian cause. And inflicting casualties on Israeli passengers produced the psychological effect of exacting revenge for slain fedayeen and Palestinian civilians. But Haddad's strategy was more ambitious. The assault on civilian aviation was intended to isolate Israel, to strangle its economy by terrorizing pilgrims to the Holy Land, and to coerce commercial airlines to abandon their lucrative routes between the United States and Europe—and Israel.

      The Destruction of Swiss Air 330

      Haddad's assaults on aircraft raised the profile of the PFLP, but they also deepened the ideological rifts within it. Naif Hawatmeh, a young and charismatic member of the PFLP, broke ranks with Habash and Haddad over the strategy of air piracy. Hawatmeh's Marxism ran deeper than Habash's, and his orthodoxy led him to repudiate the hijacking operations as the desperate acts of elite commandos insulated from the masses. In February 1969, the same month of the attack in Zurich, Hawatmeh formed the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and set up operations in Jordan. Hawatmeh was a revolutionary who never wavered in his conviction that the destruction of Israel demanded the overthrow of reactionary Arab regimes. Hawatmeh's strident calls for the overthrow of King Hussein's monarchy in Jordan would have terrible consequences by the end of 1970.

      The defection of Ahmed Jabril was more consequential for international terror. Jabril, who had merged his Palestine Liberation Front with the PFLP, drew the opposite conclusion about terrorism. In 1969, Jabril also broke away from the PFLP to form the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command in order to be free to act independently. On 22 February 1970, Jabril's PFLP-General Command went into action. On that day, bombs exploded aboard an Austrian Airlines jet en route to Israel from Frankfurt and a Swiss Air flight to Israel from Zurich. Although the Austrian Airlines jet was damaged, the pilot managed to land it. The pilot of Swiss Air 330 was less fortunate.

      Fifteen minutes after takeoff from Zurich en route to Israel, the copilot of Swiss Air 330 calmly radioed the control tower with a report of an in-flight emergency: “I suspect there's been an explosion in the aft compartment.”¹⁵ The pilot struggled to put the Coronado jet back on the ground safely and swung out over Lake Lucerne. By then the cockpit was filling with dense, acrid smoke. The pilot nearly delivered his passengers to safety. Ground controllers watched the jet approach the airport, but then turn north instead of east. The crew was flying blind. It was the copilot's voice on flight 330's final transmission: “We are crashing. Good-bye everybody, good-bye everybody.”¹⁶ Swiss Air flight 330 crashed in a Zurich suburb, killing all 47 passengers and crew aboard. Eight Americans died in the worst act of terror up to that time. It did not take investigators long to determine that a bomb had brought down Swiss Air 330. The forensic science of proving airplane sabotage—and fixing responsibility—was still new in 1970; it would be well advanced by 1988 when a bomb destroyed Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The evidence suggested the bomb, which exploded at 14,000 feet, was detonated by a barometric pressure devise, and that the bomb—disguised as a small radio manufactured in East Germany—was placed on board the jet along with mail bound for Israel. Compounding the tragedy was the fact that the crime was so simple—terrorists simply mailed in a bomb.

      The PFLP-General Command claimed responsibility for the destruction of Swiss Air 330, but almost immediately disavowed it. The atrocity was such an unconscionable escalation of the war against civilian aviation that even other Palestinian organizations repudiated it. The PLO officially gave solemn assurances that it “strongly condemns such barbaric actions” and “no commando contingent would have carried out such an action.” Arafat's Fatah went so far as to send its condolences to the families of the victims.¹⁷ The condemnation may have been disingenuous or it may have evinced serious disagreements within and between the fedayeen organizations about terror. But the reality