Rogers felt sorry for him. But not sorry enough to do anything about it.
“Perhaps we should be heading back,” he suggested.
“Yes,” said the priest with relief. “Let us go back at once.”
They walked down the rocky slope in silence. Rogers turned the strange conversation over in his mind. If the Israelis had sent Father Maroun on this fishing expedition, it was an unusually sloppy operation. Perhaps it was simply their way of putting the agency on notice, firing a warning shot at the Beirut station. Or perhaps, thought Rogers, it was not an Israeli gambit at all. Perhaps Father Maroun was completely genuine. He was a religious man, who cared deeply about his country. Perhaps he truly wanted to establish a quiet channel of contact between the Maronite Church and the fedayeen. If so, Jamal Ramlawi was an obvious candidate. Sophisticated, close to the Old Man. Perhaps Father Maroun’s nervousness was simply the discomfort that any outsider would feel wandering into the secret world without knowing the rules. Perhaps his naivete was the clearest sign that his intentions were pure.
Either way, Rogers concluded, it was probably best to assume that the Israelis would hear about the conversation. He would let Hoffman, who was edgy about anything involving liaison with Mossad, file the cable back to Langley about the unlikely overture from the Maronite cleric.
When Rogers returned to the office that day, he had another odd communication. There was a note waiting for him from Solange Jezzine. It was written on cream-colored stationery, so firm and heavy that it seemed to have been starched, and it smelled faintly of perfume. A red ribbon was tied in a bow at the top of the notepaper, like a red garter atop a pair of silk stockings.
The note itself was as provocative as the package. Solange invited Rogers to come pay a visit, alone.
Rogers sighed and shook his head. What an extraordinary woman! He penned a brief note saying no, thank you. I’m awfully busy just now. The worst thing about work, Rogers wrote, was that it left too little time for play. Perhaps another time. When he walked out of his office that afternoon, Rogers thought he saw his secretary, who had brought the Jezzine letter up from the front desk, smiling at him as if they shared a secret.
The Fatah campaign of terror began in Cairo on November 28, 1971, when a team of four Palestinians murdered the Jordanian prime minister. They shot him in broad daylight, in front of a crowd of other dignitaries, as he was entering the lobby of the Cairo Sheraton. Witnesses said that one of the gunmen kneeled over the body of the dying Jordanian official and licked his blood. The assassins were immediately captured by Egyptian police. They said they were members of a previously unknown organization called Black September, which took its name from the expulsion of the PLO from
Jordan in September 1970.
The next target was the Jordanian Ambassador to London. As the Jordanian official neared his office one day in December, a gunman standing on a traffic island shot at his Daimler limousine with a submachine gun. The ambassador survived. The gunman, an Algerian, escaped. The Jordanians attributed the operation to the same network that had murdered their prime minister. Fatah spokesmen denied responsibility and blamed Black September. Investigators rushed to gather evidence about this new terrorist faction, but they came up with nothing but rumors. The group was frighteningly discreet. It was like an animal that left no tracks.
A few months later, the bombs began to explode in Beirut. They weren’t large devices; often they were little more than sticks of dynamite, meant to confuse and demoralize the Lebanese. Beirutis blamed their favorite villain-Palestinian, Syrian, or Israeli-depending on their political perspective. The painful truth was that nobody really knew who was responsible. It was the year of the bombs.
Black September soon struck again in Europe. This time they attacked targets linked to Israel. Israeli-owned oil facilities in Rotterdam and Hamburg. An electronics plant in West Germany that did extensive business with Israel. They also executed five suspected members of the Jordanian Moukhabarat. The terrorists were becoming heroes in the Arab world, spawning a series of copycat operations. There was jealousy within Fatah, as various lieutenants tried to develop their own terrorist networks.
The Israelis soon escalated their attacks against Fatah. After a fedayeen raid inside Israel, the Israeli Army invaded South Lebanon. The Israelis stayed for four days. Officials in Jerusalem claimed they had struck a decisive blow at the guerrillas. The Israeli operation exacerbated the Lebanese political crisis, as poor refugees from South Lebanon-mostly Shiite Moslems-streamed into the slums outside Beirut. The Lebanese pleaded for decisive action, which their corrupt and paralyzed government couldn’t provide.
Black September continued its campaign of revenge. The group attacked a Jordanian airlines office in Rome, a Jordanian airplane in Cairo, the Jordanian Embassy in Berne, the Jordanian Embassy in Cairo. The group also staged a spectacular but ultimately disastrous operation against Israel. Members of Black September hijacked a Sabena Airlines flight to Tel Aviv and held the passengers hostage at Lod Airport. Israeli commandos, disguised as mechanics, stormed the plane and killed two of the four hijackers.
The Israelis attacked Lebanon again, this time with air strikes against Hasbayah, Marjayoun, and other towns and villages in South Lebanon that had become guerrilla bases. The Israeli raids produced heavy casualties among Lebanese civilians. The Lebanese government briefly considered buying antiaircraft missiles from France to protect its territory. The deal collapsed when Lebanese fixers began demanding huge payoffs for certain interested Lebanese government officials.
The new wave of Palestinian terror became the favorite spectator sport of the Western world. The Fatah leaders, who had nearly disappeared from public view, suddenly found journalists arriving by the score from Europe and America, clamoring for interviews. The Palestinians had become, once again, figures of horror and fascination. The Old Man appeared on magazine covers in his dark glasses and stubbly beard. While his acolytes in the West urged him to shave and dress respectably, the Old Man stuck to his guerrilla garb. He understood that the whole point of the exercise was to look like an outlaw, a blackguard, a despicable and terrifying symbol of violence. Jamal understood it, too. As he made his rounds in Europe and read the extravagant accounts of Black September’s terrorist exploits that were appearing in the newspapers, he could only laugh. Abu Nasir had been right. The ability to create fear is a powerful weapon.
33
Rome; April 1972
Omar Mumtazz was arrested on April 7 at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport. A plainclothes customs official noticed him nervously chain-smoking while waiting for his baggage on a flight arriving from Beirut.
When the nervous-looking Arab grabbed his luggage and headed toward the green “Nothing to Declare” exit, the customs officer stopped him and pointed him toward one of the uniformed officers in the red line. Omar Mumtazz still might have made it if he had kept cool. But when the Italian customs official asked to see his passport, Mumtazz slipped a hundred-dollar bill inside the document. This is a Mediterranean country, he told himself. This is how we do business in the Mediterranean.
The customs official opened the passport and watched the green bill float gently to the floor. He gave a thin smile and called to his captain. A few moments later Mumtazz was taken by three armed men to a cramped office, where he watched with mounting apprehension as a customs official cut through the false bottom of his suitcase. Out of the opening tumbled four fat packets of heroin.
Mumtazz made a terrible row. Though he had only an ordinary Libyan passport, he claimed that he was an intelligence officer who had done work for the Italians. He had powerful friends! He demanded to see someone-immediately!-from the Servizio Informazione Difesa.