Anonymity meant cut-outs. Layers of people, witting and unwitting, interposed between the word and the deed. It meant establishing dead drops in the major cities of Europe for discreet communications. A boite postale in Paris. A fictitious company in Zurich. A string of flats in London. It meant working with a few trusted Arab intelligence officers, all Soviet-trained, to establish a communications network using embassy codes and the diplomatic pouch.
Building a network meant expanding the frail infrastructure Jamal had been building for many months. It meant recruiting sleeper agents from among the thousands of Palestinian students in Europe. The recruits were kids, most of them, full of hatred for the Israelis and the false courage of youth. Jamal’s spotters would identify the best prospects. A recruiter would meet them, swear them to secrecy, offer them a small stipend, and tell them that in return the Revolution would someday ask for a favor. Then Jamal would test the novitiates. He would send someone to try to worm and wheedle out of them what they had talked about with the recruiter. Those who divulged the secret, or even hinted at it, were dropped immediately from the list. Those who said nothing remained. There were very few who passed the test, and even those few often proved maddeningly indiscreet.
Jamal struggled to create a competent intelligence organization out of this uncertain band of recruits. It was an agonizing and occasionally infuriating process. Jamal would fix a time for a covert meeting in a European capital and hear his agent respond, “Insha’Allah”-If God wills. He would repeat over and over the need for security only to hear one of his men boast to a fellow Arab in a crowded cafe that he was doing “secret work” for the Revolution that he could not discuss. He would ask one of his agents to bring him a detailed diagram of, say, an Israeli-owned oil facility in Rotterdam and receive a messy pencil sketch that might as well have been a map of the Pyramids in Egypt!
Jamal grew sick of Arabs who were tardy, undisciplined, imprecise, easily corrupted, and self-deceiving. That, however, was his raw material, and he was determined to create from it an organization that worked. So he hammered and pushed and prodded. If the Jews could create the powerful state of Israel from the detritus of 1945, he told himself, then it shouldn’t be impossible to transform several dozen Arabs into a reasonably efficient underground network.
Jamal recruited his lieutenants in Europe from among the Palestinian intelligentsia. In Paris, he selected a balding history professor. In London, a prominent businessman. In Madrid, a distinguished professor of physics. In Rome, a long-haired musician. Like Jamal, they were all aristocrats of a sort-at once proud and ashamed of their elite status.
Long before Jamal, Lenin had understood that such people make ideal recruits for a secret organization. They think in abstractions and turn the mundane stuff of politics-land, statehood, the exercise of power-into idealized images. Soon these images become so pure and fine, so embued with romance, that the death of mere mortals seems like nothing if it advances the sacred cause. The Palestinian intellectuals were perfect recruits: hungry for secrets, motivated by the noblest ideals, capable of the most extreme acts of violence.
At safehouses across Europe, Jamal began to assemble his operational files. The schedule of an Arab League meeting planned for Cairo in November; the floor plan of a German factory that built electric motors for the Israeli defense industry; photos of the Jordanian embassies in Paris and Berne; a map showing the route travelled by the Jordanian Ambassador to London on his way to work; airplane schedules and train timetables for a dozen cities in the Middle East and Europe; stacks of false passports and piles of untraceable cash.
As far as the world could see, Fatah was in disarray, still in a period of drift and disorientation after the Jordan debacle. Fatah leaders issued conflicting statements: one day calling for the overthrow of the king, the next day urging reconciliation. There was a search for scapegoats, with the Syrians blaming the Old Man and the Old Man, in turn, blaming a grand conspiracy that included the Jordanians, Americans, and Israelis. Rather than conduct a rigorous critique of his mistakes in Jordan, the Old Man proclaimed that “unity” would solve the PLO’s problems.
It was the silly season. Egypt’s new president announced that 1971 would be “the year of decision”-war or peace-and then did nothing at all. In that same spirit of confusion, the PLO debated in private whether to face reality and accept the existence of Israel and then voted at a PLO congress in Cairo in February 1971 to reject any solution short of the destruction of the “Zionist Entity.”
The Old Man’s outward actions were so clownish and counter-productive that a sensitive analyst might have been suspicious. Was it possible that these public antics were really a sideshow? Was something happening in the shadows? There were tiny fragments of evidence. A hint of a new Fatah underground emerged in May 1971, when the Jordanian government disclosed what it said was a secret PLO plan to assassinate Jordanian officials. But nobody paid much attention. It was too easy to believe that the Old Man was as incompetent as he looked.
The first person on the CIA payroll to notice anything peculiar was Fuad. He had maintained sporadic contact with Jamal ever since the disastrous meeting with Marsh the previous summer in Rome. At one of these infrequent meetings with Jamal in mid-1971-arranged simply as a reminder that the Americans were still in the game-Fuad sensed that something had changed in Jamal. The freewheeling playboy had turned serious. The question was why.
The meeting took place in a coffeehouse in Fakhani late on a Thursday afternoon, the start of the Moslem weekend and the traditional boys’ night out in the Arab world. In the old days, Fuad and Jamal had often met on Thursday evenings for coffee, then whisky, then food, then women.
Fuad arrived late, looking sleek in a pair of wraparound sunglasses. He greeted people in the coffeehouse. They smiled and called his name. Fuad was, by now, a regular in the Fatah-controlled neighborhood of Fakhani. Everyone knew him. He was a rich Lebanese leftist, a friend of the Revolution.
Jamal was already there waiting, smoking a cigarette with one hand and drumming his fingers on the table with the other. He looked tired and overworked, with deep circles under his eyes. The young Palestinian scolded Fuad for being several minutes late. He glanced frequently at his wristwatch.
“You’re behaving more like an American than an Arab,” said Fuad jokingly after a few minutes of desultory conversation.
“And what is wrong with that?” answered Jamal. “There is much that we could learn from the Americans.”
“There is?” asked Fuad, unable to mask his surprise.
“We need help! Sometimes when I watch my Arab brothers, I think maybe we should contract the Revolution out to the Americans. Or the Germans. Or even the Swiss!”
Fuad laughed. But he wondered: What is Jamal telling me? Why is he so tense?
“Do you know what the Arab national slogan should be?” asked Jamal.
“What?”
“ ‘Fut aleina bukra’,” said Jamal. Stop by tomorrow! It was a favorite expression of the time-wasting Egyptians, an Arabic equivalent of manana.
“What is keeping you so busy these days?” asked Fuad.
“Administrative work.”
“What kind?”
“Paperwork,” answered Jamal wearily. “The Old Man asked me to help with the finances. The Martyrs’ Funds. Investments. Money from the Saudis and the Kuwaitis.”