For some time, King Hussein of Jordan had been concerned about the growing power of the Palestinians living in his midst. The western portion of his country had become a virtual state within a state, with a chain of refugee camps ruled by heavily armed Fatah militants who openly flouted the authority of the Hashemite monarch. Hussein, who had lost half his kingdom already, feared he would lose the rest unless he removed the Palestinians from Jordanian soil. In September 1970 he ordered his fierce Bedouin soldiers to do precisely that.
Arafat’s fighters were no match for the Bedouin. Thousands were massacred, and once more the Palestinians were scattered, this time to camps in Lebanon and Syria. Arafat wanted revenge against the Jordanian monarch and against all those who had betrayed the Palestinian people. He wanted to carry out bloody and spectacular acts of terrorism on the world stage-acts that would place the plight of the Palestinians before a global audience and quench the Palestinian thirst for revenge. The attacks would be carried out by a secret unit so the PLO could maintain the charade that it was a respectable revolutionary army fighting for the liberation of an oppressed people. Abu Iyad, Arafat’s number two, was given overall command, but the operational mastermind would be the son of the great Palestinian warlord from Beit Sayeed, Sabri al-Khalifa. The unit would be called Black September to honor the Palestinian dead in Jordan.
Sabri recruited a small elite force from the best units of Fatah. In the tradition of his father, he selected men like himself-Palestinians from notable families who had seen more of the world than the refugee camps. Next he set out for Europe, where he assembled a network of educated Palestinian exiles. He also established links with leftist European terror groups and intelligence services behind the Iron Curtain. By November 1971, Black September was ready to emerge from the shadows. At the top of Sabri’s hit list was King Hussein’s Jordan.
The blood flowed first in the city where Sabri had served his apprenticeship. The Jordanian prime minister, on a visit to Cairo, was gunned down in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel. More attacks followed in quick succession. The car of the Jordanian ambassador was ambushed in London. Jordanian aircraft were hijacked and Jordanian airline offices were firebombed. In Bonn, five Jordanian intelligence officers were butchered in the cellar of a house.
After settling the score with Jordan, Sabri turned his attention to the true enemies of the Palestinian people, the Zionists of Israel. In May 1972, Black September hijacked a Sabena airlines jet and forced it to land at Israel ’s Lod Airport. A few days later, terrorists from the Japanese Red Army, acting on Black September’s behalf, attacked passengers in the arrival hall at Lod with machine-gun fire and hand grenades, killing twenty-seven people. Letter bombs were mailed to Israeli diplomats and prominent Jews across Europe.
But Sabri’s greatest terrorist triumph was still to come. Early on the morning of September 5, 1972, two years after the expulsion from Jordan, six Palestinian terrorists scaled the fence at the Olympic Village in Munich, Germany, and entered the apartment building at Connollystrasse 31, which housed members of the Israeli Olympic team. Two Israelis were killed in the initial assault. Nine others were rounded up and taken hostage. For the next twenty hours, with 900 million people around the world watching on television, the German government negotiated with the terrorists for the release of the Israeli hostages. Deadlines came and went, until finally, at 10:10 P.M., the terrorists and the hostages boarded two helicopters and took off for Fürstenfeldbrück airfield. Shortly after arriving, West German forces launched an ill-conceived and poorly planned rescue operation. All nine of the hostages were massacred by the Black Septembrists.
Jubilation swept the Arab world. Sabri al-Khalifa, who had monitored the operation from a safe flat in East Berlin, was greeted as a conquering hero upon his return to Beirut. “You are my son!” Arafat said as he threw his arms around Sabri. “You are my son.”
In Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Golda Meir ordered her intelligence chiefs to avenge the Munich eleven by hunting down and killing the members of Black September. Code-named Wrath of God, the operation would be led by Ari Shamron, the same man who had been given the task of ending Sheikh Asad’s bloody reign of terror in 1948. For the second time in twenty-five years, Shamron was ordered to kill a man named al-Khalifa.
DINA LEFT THE ROOM in darkness and told the rest of the story as though Gabriel were not seated ten feet away from her, at the opposite end of the table.
“One by one, the members of Black September were methodically hunted down and killed by Shamron’s Wrath of God teams. In all, twelve members were killed by Office assassins, but Sabri al-Khalifa, the one Shamron wanted most, remained beyond his reach. Sabri fought back. He killed an Office agent in Madrid. He attacked the Israeli embassy in Bangkok and murdered the American ambassador to Sudan. His attacks became more erratic, as did his behavior. Arafat was no longer able to maintain the fiction that he had no connection to Black September, and condemnation rained down upon him, even from quarters sympathetic to his cause. Sabri had brought disgrace to the movement, but Arafat still doted on him like a son.”
Dina paused and looked at Gabriel. His face, lit by the glow of Sabri al-Khalifa’s image on the projection screen, showed no emotion. His gaze was downward toward his hands, which were folded neatly on the tabletop.
“Would you care to finish the story?” she asked.
Gabriel spent a moment contemplating his hands before taking up Dina’s invitation to speak.
“Shamron learned through an informant that Sabri kept a girl in Paris, a left-wing journalist named Denise who believed he was a Palestinian poet and freedom fighter. Sabri had neglected to tell Denise that he was a married man with a child. Shamron briefly considered trying to enroll her but gave up on the idea. It seemed the poor girl was truly in love with Sabri. So we sent the teams to Paris and put a watch on her instead. A month later, Sabri came to town to see her.”
He paused and looked up at the screen.
“He arrived at her apartment in the middle of the night. It was too dark to confirm his identity, so Shamron decided to take a chance and wait until we could get a better look at him. They stayed in the apartment making love until the late afternoon, then they went to lunch in a café on the Boulevard St-Germain. That’s when we snapped that photo. After lunch they walked back to her apartment. It was still light, but Shamron gave the order to take him down.”
Gabriel lapsed into silence, and once more his gaze turned down, toward his hands. He closed his eyes briefly.
“I followed them on foot. He had his left arm around the girl’s waist and his hand was shoved into the back pocket of her jeans. His right hand was in his jacket pocket. That’s where he always kept his gun. He turned and looked at me once, but kept walking. He and the girl had drunk two bottles of wine over lunch-I suppose his senses weren’t terribly sharp at the time.”
Another silence; then, after a glance at Sabri’s face, another meditation over his hands. His voice, when he spoke again, had an air of detachment, as if he were describing the exploits of another man.
“They paused at the entrance. Denise was drunk and laughing. She was looking down, into her purse, looking for the key. Sabri was telling her to hurry up. He wanted to get her clothes off again. I could have done it there, but there were too many people on the street, so I slowed down and waited for her to find the damned key. I passed by them as she slid it into the lock. Sabri looked at me again, and I looked back. They stepped into the passageway. I turned and caught the door before it could close. Sabri and the girl were in the middle of the courtyard by now. He heard my footfall and turned around. His hand was coming out of his coat pocket and I could see the butt. Sabri carried a Stechkin. It was a gift from a friend in the KGB. I hadn’t drawn my gun yet. Shamron’s rule, we called it. ‘We do not walk around in the street like gangsters with our guns drawn,’ Shamron always said. ‘One second, Gabriel. That’s all you’ll have. One second. Only a man with truly gifted hands can get his gun off his hip and into firing position in one second.’ ”