Najjar was behind the May 1972 Sabena hijacking. And although Munich was principally the work of Abu Iyad and Abu Daoud, the Israelis were certain of Najjar's involvement. Kamal Adwan also belonged to Black September. He was a staunch supporter of terror, even after Arafat began to have second thoughts about hijackings and hostage-taking for strategic, though certainly not moral, reasons. In the wake of the PFLP-JRA massacre at Lod, Adwan had quipped “this was an ordinary attack similar to any other attack conducted by a combat unit on a settlement or military camp.”8 Committee X did not specifically mark Kamal Nasser for a Wrath of God assassination. But as a principal apologist for the PLO, the Israelis reviled him—as they reviled the PFLP's Ghassan Kanafani, whom they killed on a Beirut street the previous year—for his words as much as his deeds. The Israelis killed Najjar, Adwan, and Nasser on an April night in an operation with a disconcertingly idyllic code word, Youth of Spring.
Operation Youth of Spring was a coordinated Mossad-Sayaret Matkal operation. On the night of 10 April, Lieutenant Colonel Ehud Barak's commandos came ashore on a Beirut beach in Zodiac boats and rendezvoused with Mossad agents, who rushed them to Rue Verdun in rented cars.9 Some of the commandos were disguised as women to deceive Lebanese police and Palestinian militants patrolling the Fahkani district; Barak, the future prime minister, disguised as a brunette woman, began the killing, shooting a guard posted outside the apartment building. A silencer muffled the shots. Then Barak's men rushed up flights of stairs to the apartments where the men slept and blew open the doors to Kamal Adwan's apartment. Barak is not reticent about telling the details in his imperfect English: “It was only the split-second hesitation of the terrorist when he sees it's (sic) civilian people, that ended up our officer shot the terrorist and not the other way around.” Adwan was racked with as many as 55 bullets. His daughter witnessed the attack “glass was being shattered on our heads and he just fell.”10 It was the same in Najjar's apartment, except that there the Israelis killed Najjar's wife, who threw herself in the line of fire to save her husband. Her son, who heard the burst of fire from the adjoining room, remembers his father cursing the Israelis—”You killed her you dogs”—an instant before they killed him. Within minutes a battle erupted in the Fahkani. As Barak's men were killing Najjar, Adwan, and Nasser, another Sayaret Matkal team was attacking the nearby headquarters of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Abu Iyad, who improbably claims he was in a nearby apartment debriefing the survivors of the Munich operation the West Germans released the previous October, heard gunfire and deafening explosions.11 Out on the street the Israeli commandos came under fire from Lebanese and Palestinians.
Operation Youth of Spring inflicted heavy damage on Black September. The Israelis killed three of the senior cadre; and almost a fourth. Abu Iyad had dined with the slain men earlier in the evening, attended a PLO central committee meeting with them, and was briefly at Nasser's apartment that night.12 Yasser Arafat and the DFLP's Naif Hawatmeh lived within blocks of the epicenter of the Israeli assault. But the damage went beyond the body count. The deepest wounds were psychological. Iyad was convinced that the “commandos would never have been able to operate with such impunity for three hours in the heart of Beirut if they hadn't benefited from important local complicity.” In fact, the raid lasted thirty minutes, not three hours, but the nighttime assault not only shook what the PLO's sense of invulnerability, it deepened their suspicions of the Lebanese, especially the minority Maronite Christians.13 This was not coincidental because the Israelis came to inflame tensions between Lebanese and Palestinians as much as they came to kill Palestinians terrorists. Over the next three weeks, Palestinian fedayeen and Lebanese security forces clashed, and in May President Frenjieh ordered the Lebanese air force to bomb and strafe the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The possibility of a wider conflict was averted only through the mediation of Arab states. It was a prelude of bad times to come. In less than two years Lebanese and Palestinians would be killing each other with the same ferocity that the Jordanians and Palestinians had killed each other in September 1970.
Israel was not winning the war on terrorism, but it was inflicting great harm on its terrorist enemies. Two days after Operation Youth of Spring, a Mossad Wrath of God assassination squad struck again in Athens, killing Zaid Muchassi with a bomb in his room in the Hotel Aristides. Muchassi was filling in for Abad al-Chir, the PLO liaison with the Soviet KGB, whom the Israelis had killed in Rome in October. Making their escape, the Israelis ran into Muchassi's KGB contact in a car outside the hotel and shot and killed him.14 In the months since the Munich massacre, the Mossad had struck five times: against Black September with the Wrath of God assassinations in Rome, Paris, and Cyprus between October and January; against the PFLP with the devastating attack on the PFLP camps in Tripoli, Lebanon, in February, and again against Black September with the audacious April assault in Beirut. The Palestinians were finding it harder and harder to mount operations in the spring of 1973.
On 15 March, French and Italian authorities arrested two Palestinians who planned to attack the Israeli and Jordanian embassies in Paris. On 4 April, Italian police arrested two more Palestinians, forestalling an attack on El Al passengers at the Leonardo Da Vinci Airport in Rome. Five days later, authorities in Cyprus arrested four Palestinians before they could mount simultaneous attacks on an Israeli Arika passenger jet and the Israeli ambassador's residence in Nicosia. The Mossad and Sayaret Matkal executed Operation Youth of Spring in the heart of Beirut the next night. Seventeen days later the Palestinians tried to retaliate. On 27 April, security officials at Beirut's international airport apprehended three more Palestinians who tried to board a plane for France with explosives. That same day a Palestinian opened fire at the El Al office in Rome, this time managing to kill an Italian clerk who had crossed the path of Palestinian terror. It was a succession of Palestinian failures punctuated by Israeli successes. In June, the Mossad struck in Paris again. This time it was a preemptive strike rather than a reprisal killing.
A Dirty War
The PFLP had not conducted a major international terror operation since May 1972, when Wadi Haddad sent the Japanese Red Army mercenaries on a suicide mission to slaughter disembarking passengers at the Ben Gurion International Airport in Lod. By 1973, tensions between George Habash, the PFLP's nominal secretary general, and Haddad, the master of PFLP terror, had begun to divide the PFLP into factions. The devastating attack on the PFLP training camps in Tripoli in February disrupted Haddad's operations. But the master had not laid down the gun. In mid-1973, Haddad was carefully expanding the PFLP terror network in Europe from safe houses in Paris and London. The man at the center of the network was Mohammed Boudia. As chief of PFLP operations in Europe, Boudia had a range of responsibilities that included the recruitment of foreign nationals to the Palestinian cause in the name of world revolution. Among his recruits was Illich Ramírez Sánchez, a megalomaniac young Venezuelan known as Carlos the Jackal, who throughout much of 1974 and 1975 would be one of the world's most hunted terrorists. The Israelis discovered Boudia's activities in Paris. Late in the morning of 28 June, Mossad planted a bomb beneath the seat of Boudia's car; the pressure of his weight detonated it, killing him.15 The assassination of Mohammed Boudia was the ninth assassination sanctioned by Committee X and the last successful killing in a series of Wrath of God killings. But it was not the last attempt on the life of a Palestinian terrorist. A month later, the Mossad struck again, this time with disastrous consequences. But first Wadi Haddad's faction of the PFLP suddenly went back into action.
On 20 July, five terrorists hijacked a Japanese Airways flight out of Amsterdam en route to Tokyo with 145 passengers and crew. The hijacking was a combined PFLP and JRA operation. JRA terrorists proved useful to Wadi Haddad at Lod in 1972, but this time the master ordered PFLP members to accompany the Japanese. The operation was a fiasco. One of the hijackers, a Palestinian woman, inadvertently exploded a grenade, killing herself and severely wounding a member of the crew.16 Miraculously, the Boeing 747 remained airworthy and the terrorists ordered the plane to fly to the Persian Gulf in search of a country that would permit the plane to land. Iraqi authorities denied permission to land at Basra, and Bahraini authorities refused to allow the plane to touch down in Manama before the United Arab Emirates decided to try to resolve the crisis in Dubai. The UAE defense minister took personal charge of the negotiations and boarded the plane after the wounded crew member and the body of the dead terrorist came off it. But the incident did not end in Dubai. The terrorists ordered the plane on to Benghazi, Libya, without issuing a single