NO HONOR AMONG THIEVES:
ABU NIDALS NEMESIS
DEBKAfile Exclusive Report
Terror As a Thriving Business
20 August 2002
Abu Nidal - once Yasser Arafats best friend; later turned fierce foe - was shot dead early Friday, August 16 by gunmen who burst into his home in Baghdad. DEBKAfiles intelligence and counter-terror experts have no doubt that the ailing 65-year old terrorist was murdered by Iraqi military intelligence.
Sabri al Banna, who went under the nom de guerre of Abu Nidal Father
of the Struggle, self-appointed secretary-general of the Fatah Revolutionary
Council was the leading evil genius of the terrorist world in
the last quarter of the 20th century. From 1974, this exceptionally ruthless
murderer accounted for hundreds of deaths in 20 countries. In recent years,
incapacitated by leukemia and a heart condition, Nidal lived in virtual retirement
on a select estate situated on the banks of the Tigris reserved for senior
terrorists and pensioned-off assassins, whether Egyptian, Syrian, Saudi and
Yemeni, or Iraqi intelligence agents who once handled terrorists in the line
of duty. The gates of the walled estate are guarded by Iraqi military intelligence
agents in plain clothes.
His murder raises some intriguing questions:
1. Why would Iraq want to dispose of a sick, clapped out terrorist who once
performed services for Saddam Hussein?
2. Does his liquidation have any bearing on the approaching American military
attack on Iraq?
3. Is it related to the intricate trade-off relations between Saddam Hussein
and Yasser Arafat? Iraqi military intelligence and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades?
Or the networks currently engaged in preparing a mega attack in Israel?
Some of the answers will be found in Abu Nidals singular modus operandi
as defined here by DEBKAfiles terror experts:
A. Sabri al Banna was above all a mercenary, hiring out for a fee. His clientele
spanned Yasser Arafat in the early seventies before they fell out over
their conflicting orientations; Libyas Muammar Qaddafii in the late
seventies, early eighties, for whom he carried out strikes in West Europe;
Iranian intelligence, which used him as its surrogate overseas liquidator
and, most of all, Saddam Hussein. Abu Nidals fee per operation ranged
from $1 million to $3 million.
B. A sharp businessman, Abu Nidal may have been the only international terrorist
to diversify openly into commerce, selling arms and trafficking in fellow
terrorists secrets from a business base he set up in Soviet East Europe
in the mid-1970s. The chain of companies he established there collaborated
with his hosts intelligence services.
The Fatah Councils Warsaw firm sold and leased weapons and ammunition
to terrorist networks and paramilitary militias, such as the Irish Republican
Army, the Japanese Red Army and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Unbeknown to these purchasers, Abu Nidal retained clerks to note down the
serial numbers of the sold or rented war materials, enabling him to track
their disposition and sell the information to the highest bidder.
C. The dreaded Abu Nidal did not execute all the attacks credited to him.
He may have claimed some to build up his reputation and raise his fee; sometimes,
rival terror groups borrowed his name. But most of all, he found that, on
top of his pursuits as terrorist, gun for hire, gunrunner and super-grass,
he could turn a pretty penny by renting out the name of his organization.
For a fee therefore, the Fatah Revolutionary Council, might claim a terrorist
operation in order to cover up the real perpetrators.
Our terror experts reveal for instance that, contrary to general belief, Abu
Nidal did not carry out the attempted murder of the Israeli ambassador Shlomo
Argov in London in June 1982, which prompted Israels invasion of Lebanon
and led to the destruction of Arafats military infrastructure in south
Lebanon and his own expulsion. This operation was carried out by a seven-agent
Iraqi military intelligence team. Saddam paid Abu Nidal a quarter of a million
dollars to attach his name to the crime.
Nine years later, Iraq paid him handsomely to say his men had murdered two
of Arafats top aides, Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad) and Hayel Abdel-Hamid,
two days before the Gulf War began in 1991. Both men opposed Arafats
alliance with Saddam.
In his capacity as super terrorist, he staged the simultaneous attacks on
El Al ticket desks at Rome and Vienna airports on December 27, 1988, killing
18 and wounding 120. However, the slaying of 22 Jewish Shabbat worshippers
in Istanbuls Neveh Shalom Synagogue in September 1986 was the work of
Imad Mughniyeh, as was the bomb explosion aboard the TWA Boeing as it approached
Athens airport on December 27, 1985.
In both cases, Abu Nidals name was borrowed or bought.
Al Banna moved to Libya in 1986 when the Soviet bloc started crumbling, along
with the intelligence services who employed and protected him - especially
the Russian KGB, the Polish military intelligence and East German Stasi. With
an international warrant out for his arrest, Abu Nidal sheltered for 12 years
under Gaddafis aegis. Not much is known about that period except that
he set up as a consultant on terrorist tactics, conducted a brisk trade in
covert information and had his hands full coping with factions in his group
who fought for control of the organization and its wealth.
After 12 years of obscurity in Libya, Abu Nidal surfaced in late 1997, taking
up residence in Cairo with a small band of trusted partisans. What was Egyptian
president Hosni Mubarak thinking of when he opened the door to this notorious
purveyor of death? Thereby hangs an extraordinary tale, which DEBKAfile reveals
here for the first time.
Faced with virulent threats from extremist Islamic terror groups, Egyptian
political and security leaders persuaded their opposite numbers in Washington
that groups like Osama Bin Ladens al Qaeda and Dr. Ayman al Zuwahris
Egyptian Jihad Islami could only be penetrated and fought by terrorists of
the same ilk. Therefore, they proposed hiring arch terrorist Abu Nidal to
extinguish the two rising fundamentalist menaces. DEBKAfilesWashington
sources recall that the Clinton administration agreed to go along with the
project - albeit passively...
For two years, Egyptian intelligence employed Abu Nidal and his organization
to track down, penetrate and destroy al Qaeda and Jihad Islami cells in Yemen,
Sudan, Albania, Kosovo and Egypt. Washington asserted control from afar.
Our sources report that in 1998, Abu Nidals men were among the American
and Egyptian special forces purging bases in Tirana and other Albanian towns
of al Qaeda units, to prepare the ground for NATO landings in Kosovo. There
were also unconfirmed claims in Middle East circles that his men had turned
up also in Chechnya.
The Americans and Egyptians put a stop to the Abu Nidal project in mid-2000
after picking up signs that he was at his old tricks of peddling information
on his own client to the opposition, grassing to al Qaeda on American and
Egyptian secret tactics in their efforts to combat the Islamic extremists.
Before he could be nabbed, the terrorist had slipped out of Cairo heading
first for Tehran, then Baghdad.
Clinton called off the investigation against him before the CIA had a chance
to establish exactly what secrets Abu Nidal had sold to Osama Bin Laden. This
omission is viewed in retrospect by many counter-terror experts as an error
that left the Bin Laden-Zuwahri duo free to go ahead with their plan to launch
the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
The Iranians wanted [nothing to do] with the runaway, having acquired their
own master terrorist, the Lebanese Imad Mughniyeh.
Saddam Hussein welcomed him with open arms, eager to exploit this source of information to find out exactly how much the Americans and Egyptians knew - or didnt know - about al Qaeda. The Iraqi leader needed this information before deciding how far he could prudently play ball with Bin Ladens network without laying himself open to American retaliation. Abu Nidal must have given Saddam what he wanted, because not long after he reached Baghdad, in July or August 2001, al Qaeda fighters began arriving in the pro-Iraqi fundamentalist Kurdish towns of Biyar and Tawil in the Shoman district of northern Iraq. Iraqi military instructors trained them there in the use of bombs and devices containing chemical and biological agents and possibly also in the handling of nuclear devices. DEBKAfiles intelligence sources say that at the end of their courses, the al Qaeda trainees left Iraq via Syria and Lebanon. Some made for Afghanistan and Pakistan, others for countries in East and Central Europe, or even the United States. Those camps have been taking in fresh intakes ever since.
This week, American ABC and CNN TV stations reported the discovery of a chemical
weapons program run by al Qaeda members in northern Iraq, plus the fact that
Washington had been planning a covert operation against it, which the President
called off late last week.
According to DEBKAfile's intelligence and counter-terror sources, those facilities
have been there since summer 2001and between 150 and 250 al Qaeda trainees
have passed through them. This joint Iraq-al Qaeda WMD training project was
first exposed by DEBKA-Net-Weekly Issue No. 54 on March 22, 2002.
The Bush administration held off acting on the information partly to wait
for its verification beyond doubt, but mostly for fear of letting the cat
out of the bag on Abu Nidals role in the Bin Laden-Baghdad connection
and how Saddam Hussein used that role to dig out Washingtons hapless
involvement.
But this constraint may have been superseded, providing the Iraqi ruler, who
is perfectly aware of the approaching US threat to his regime, with a pressing
need shut Abu Nidals mouth. He saw the US president under mounting pressure
from critics of the coming offensive against Iraq to come up with proof of
a direct link between Saddam and terrorists as justification for the offensive.
Under this pressure, he feared Bush would jump in one of two ways: He could
have sent a covert American force to secret northern Iraqi training bases
to snatch al Qaeda trainees with their Iraqi WMD instructors red-handed. Alternatively,
American special forces might have abducted Abu Nidal and brought him to America
with his damning testimony against Saddam.
Both options boded grave danger to the Iraqi ruler, but neither is any longer
available to Washington.
Tipped off to their potential as President Bushs cassus belli against
Baghdad, the al Qaeda and Iraqi birds have flown Biyar and Tawil, while Abu
Nidals mouth was permanently shut five days ago by four bullets.
By disposing of one terrorist, Saddam Hussein issued a graphic warning to
another Yasser Arafat as to the fate awaiting collaborators
with Washington - whether Abu Iyad in 1991 or Abu Nidal in 2002.