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Abu Nidal (Arabic: أبو نضال) (May 1937 –August 16, 2002) — born Sabri Khalil al-Banna (Arabic: صبري خليل البنا), also known as Amin al-Sirr and Sabri Khalil Abd Al Qadir — was a Palestinian political leader and the founder of Fatah — the Revolutionary Council (Fatah al-Majles al-Thawry), more commonly known as the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO). At the height of his power in the 1970s and 1980s, Abu Nidal, or "father of the struggle," was regarded as the world's most ruthless terrorist leader. In a rare interview with Der Spiegel in 1985, he said: "I am the evil spirit of the secret services. I am the evil spirit which moves around only at night causing them nightmares."
Part of the secular, left-wing Palestinian rejectionist front, so called because they reject proposals for a peaceful settlement with Israel, the ANO was formed after a split in 1974 between Abu Nidal and Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Setting himself up as a freelance contractor, Abu Nidal was based over the years in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Egypt, and is believed to have been responsible for ordering attacks in 20 countries, killing or injuring over 900 people.
The ANO's most notorious attacks were on the El Al ticket counters at Rome and Vienna airports on December 27, 1985, when Arab gunmen doped on amphetamines opened fire on passengers in simultaneous shootings, killing 18 and wounding 120. Patrick Seale, Abu Nidal's biographer, wrote of the attacks that their "random cruelty marked them as typical Abu Nidal operations." The group is not known to have been active since 1991, when an ANO gunman assassinated Abu Iyad, the deputy chief of the PLO.
Abu Nidal died of between one and four gunshot wounds in Baghdad in August 2002, believed by Palestinian sources to have been killed on the orders of Saddam Hussein, but said by the Iraqi government to have committed suicide. The Guardian wrote on the news of his death: "He was the patriot turned psychopath. He served only ... the warped personal drives that pushed him into hideous crime. He was the ultimate mercenary."
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Early life
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Abu Nidal was born in May 1937 in the port of Jaffa, now part of Tel Aviv, on the Mediterranean coast of what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. His father, Hajj Khalil al-Banna, was a wealthy merchant who made his money from the 6,000 acres (24 km²) of orange groves he owned, which extended from the south of Jaffa to Majdal, today Ashkelon in Israel. He raised his large family in luxury in a three-storey stone house with a large porch overlooking the beach, now used as an Israeli military court. [Melman, Yossi. The Master Terrorist: The True Story Behind Abu Nidal, Mama Books, 1986, p. 46.]
According to Abu Nidal's brother, Muhammad Khalil al-Banna, their father was the richest man in Palestine. He told journalist Yossi Melman:
My father marketed about ten percent of all the citrus crops sent from Palestine to Europe — especially to England and Germany. He owned a summer house in Marseilles, France, and another house in Iskenderun, then in Syria and afterwards Turkey, and a number of houses in Palestine itself. Most of the time we lived in Jaffa. Our house had about twenty rooms, and we children would go down to swim in the sea. We also had stables with Arabian horses, and one of our homes in Ashkelon even had a large swimming pool. I think we must have been the only family in Palestine with a private swimming pool. [Melman, Yossi. The Master Terrorist: The True Story Behind Abu Nidal, Mama Books, 1986, p. 47.]
Al-Banna told Melman that the family also owned orchards in Majdal, Yavneh, Abu Kabir, and near the village of Tirah. The Ramat Hakovesh kibbutz contains a tract of land to this day called "the al-Banna orchard," he said. "Of course this used to belong to us. My brothers and I still preserve the documents showing our ownership of the property, even though we know full well that we and our children have no chance of getting it back.
Khalil's money meant he could afford to take several wives, and according to Melman, he had 13 wives, who gave birth to 16 sons and eight daughters. Abu Nidal's mother was the second wife, according to Abu Nidal's British biographer Patrick Seale, and the eighth, according to Melman. [ She had been one of the family's maids, a young Alawite girl just 16 years old when Khalil married her against the wishes of his family. She gave birth to Sabri, Khalil's 12th child. Because the family disapproved of the marriage, Abu Nidal was allegedly scorned from an early age by his older half-brothers and half-sisters.]
Khalil sent him to Collège des Frères, a French Roman Catholic mission school in the Old Jaffa quarter, the records of which show he completed the first grade, according to the school keeper, although the school administration refuses to allow journalists to view them. [ However, when Khalil died in 1945, when Abu Nidal was seven years old, the family turned his mother out of the house. The older brothers, more devout Muslims than the father had been, took Abu Nidal out of the mission school and enrolled him in a Muslim school in Jerusalem, now known as al-Umaria, at the time one of the most prestigious private schools in the country. He attended the school for about two years. ][Melman, Yossi. The Master Terrorist: The True Story Behind Abu Nidal, Mama Books, 1986, p. 48.]
Seale suggests that Abu Nidal's unhappy childhood, and the early loss of both his father and mother, explains his difficult personality, described by journalists as psychopathic and paranoid, and as "chaotic" by Abu Iyad, the late deputy chief of Fatah. Issam Sartawi, the late Palestinian heart surgeon, called him a psychopath [Melman, Yossi 1986, p.3.] whose mental world was one of plots and counterplots, [Melman, Yossi. The Master Terrorist: The True Story Behind Abu Nidal, Mama Books, 1986, p. 52.] which was later reflected in his tyrannical leadership of the ANO, trusting no one, and at one point suspecting even his own wife of working for the CIA. [Colvin, Marie & Murad, Sonya. "Executed", The Sunday Times, August 25, 2002.]
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War
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When the Arabs rejected the November 29, 1947 United Nations partition plan — which aimed to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish, one Arab — war broke out between the Palestinian-Arab and Jewish militias, and Jaffa found itself under siege. Life became unbearable, according to Melman, and the disruption of the citrus fruit business hit the family's income. Booby-trapped cars were exploding in the center of Jaffa and there were food shortages. The al-Banna family had had good relations with the Jewish community. Abu Nidal's brother told Melman: "My father was a close friend of Avraham Shapira, one of the founders of Hashomer, the Jewish self-defense organization. He would visit Shapira in his home in Petah Tikva, or Shapira riding his horse would visit our home in Jaffa. I also remember how we visited Dr. Weizmann who became the first president of Israel in his home in Rehovot." [ It was war, however, and the relationships didn't help them. ]
The family fled Jaffa and moved into their house near Majdal, intending to be away from Jaffa for only a few days, but the Jewish militias arrived in Majdal too, and they had to flee again. This time they ended up in the al-Burj refugee camp in Gaza, then under the control of Egypt. There the family spent nine months living in tents, dependent on UNRWA for their weekly allowance of oil, rice, and potatoes. The experience had a powerful effect on Abu Nidal, who was used to wealth and servants, but who now found himself living in abject poverty. [Melman, Yossi. The Master Terrorist: The True Story Behind Abu Nidal, Mama Books, 1986, p. 49.]
The family's skill in commerce, and the small amount of money they had managed to take with them, meant they were able to set themselves up in business again as merchants, although the orange groves had gone, now part of the new State of Israel, which had declared its independence on May 14, 1948. They decided to move to Nablus in the West Bank, then ruled by Jordan, where Abu Nidal spent his teenage years. He completed elementary school and graduated from high school in 1955. Melman writes that he loved reading, particularly adventure stories, and was regarded as studious, although not particularly bright. [Melman, Yossi. The Master Terrorist: The True Story Behind Abu Nidal, Mama Books, 1986, p. 50.] Seale writes that his education was elementary and his childish handwriting a source of great embarrassment to him throughout his life. He applied to study engineering at Cairo University, but returned to Nablus after two years without a degree, although he would later describe himself as having one, part of his constant embellishment of his past, according to Melman.
He joined the Arab nationalist Ba'ath party when he was 18, but King Hussein of Jordan closed the party down in 1957. Abu Nidal made his way to Saudi Arabia, where in 1960 he set himself up as a painter and electrician in Riyadh, according to Seale, or Jedda, according to Melman, and later went on to work as a casual laborer for Aramco. [Hudson, Rex A. "The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?", Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, September 1999.]
Abu Nidal remained very close to his mother and returned to Nablus from Saudi Arabia every year to visit her. During one of those visits in 1962, he met his future wife, Hiyam al-Bitar, whose family had also fled from Jaffa. They had a son, Nidal, and two daughters, Bisan and Na'ifa. Decades later, in the 1980s, he boasted that his daughter Bisan had no idea he was Abu Nidal.
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Political life
In Saudi Arabia, he helped found a small group of young Palestinians who called themselves the Palestine Secret Organization. His political activism and vocal decunciation of Israel drew the attention of his employer, Aramco, which fired him, and then the Saudi government, which imprisoned, tortured, and expelled him as an unwelcome radical. [ He returned to Nablus with his wife and young family, and it was around this time that he joined Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction of the PLO, although the exact timing and circumstances are unknown. ][Melman, Yossi. The Master Terrorist: The True Story Behind Abu Nidal, Mama Books, 1986, p. 51.] He worked an an odd-job man until June 1967, committed to Palestinian politics but not particularly active, until Israel won the 1967 Six Day War, capturing the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. The sight of Israeli tanks rolling into Nablus, after he had already been forced to flee from Jaffa because of the war, and from Saudi Arabia because of his activism, was a traumatic and pivotal experience for him, according to Melman, and his passive involvement in Palestinian politics was transformed into a deadly hatred of Israel.
He moved to Amman, Jordan, setting up a trading company called Impex, and joining the Fatah underground, where he was asked to choose a nom de guerre. He chose Abu Nidal, in part after his son, Nidal, a custom in the Arab world, but also because the name means "father of the struggle." [Melman, Yossi. The Master Terrorist: The True Story Behind Abu Nidal, Mama Books, 1986, p. 53.] He was described by those who knew him at the time as a tidy, well-organized leader, not a guerrilla; during skirmishes in Jordan between the fedayeen and King Hussein's troops, he stayed indoors, according to Seale, never leaving his office.
Impex soon became a front for Fatah activities, serving as a meeting place for members and as a conduit for funds with which to pay them. This was to become a hallmark of Abu Nidal's business career. Companies controlled by the ANO served to make him a rich man by engaging in legitimate business deals, while at the same time acting as a cover for his political violence and his multi-million-dollar arms deals, mercenary activities, and protection rackets.
Seeing his talent for organization, Abu Iyad appointed him in 1968 as the Fatah representative in Khartoum, Sudan, then to the same position in Baghdad in July 1970, just two months before Black September, when King Hussein's army drove the fedayeen out of Jordan, with the loss of between 5,000 and 10,000 Palestinian lives in just ten days. Abu Nidal's absence from Jordan during this period, where it was clear that Hussein might be about to act against the Palestinians, raised the suspicion within the movement that his requests for posts to Sudan and Iraq had been intended only to save his own skin.
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The split from the PLO
Just before the PLO expulsion from Jordan, and during the three years that followed it, several radical Palestinian and other Arab factions split from the PLO and began to launch their own military or terrorist attacks against Israeli military and civilian targets, as well as civilian targets overseas. These included George Habash's PFLP, DFLP, Arab Liberation Front, as-Sa'iqa, Palestine Liberation Front, at that time headed by Ahmed Jibril who went on to set up the radical PFLP-GC, and Black September, a group of radical fedayeen associated with Arafat's Fatah, who carried out operations using Black September as a cover.
Shortly after King Hussein expelled the fedayeen, Abu Nidal began broadcasting criticism of the PLO over Voice of Palestine, the PLO's own radio station in Iraq, accusing them of cowardice for having agreed to a ceasefire with Hussein, and during Fatah's Third Congress in Damascus in 1971, Abu Nidal emerged as the leader of a leftist alliance against Arafat. Together with Abu Daoud (one of Fatah's most ruthless commanders, who was later involved in the 1972 Black September kidnapping and killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympic Village in Munich) and Palestinian intellectual Naji Allush, Abu Nidal called for Arafat to be overthrown as an enemy of the Palestinian people, and demanded more democracy within Fatah, as well as violent revenge against King Hussein. Seale writes that it was the last Fatah congress Abu Nidal would attend, but he had made his mark.
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First operation
Abu Nidal's first operation took place on September 5, 1973, when five gunmen, using the name Al-Iqab (The Punishment), seized the Saudi embassy in Paris, taking 11 hostages and threatening to blow up the building if Abu Dawud was not released from jail in Jordan, where he had been arrested in February 1973 for an attempt on the King's life. According to Seale, the Iraqi government made it clear that the idea for the operation had been theirs. Abu Iyad told Seale than an Iraqi official at the meeting said: "Why are you attacking Abu Nidal? The operation was ours! We asked him to mount it for us."
Two months later, just after the October 1973 Yom Kippur War, during discussions about convening a peace conference in Geneva, the ANO hijacked a KLM airliner, using the name the Arab Nationalist Youth Organization. The operation was intended to send a signal to Fatah not to send representatives to any peace conference. In response, Arafat expelled Abu Nidal from Fatah in March 1974, and the rift between the two groups, and the two men, was complete.
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The ANO
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By all accounts, the ANO reflected Abu Nidal's paranoid and possibly psychopathic personality, more of a mercenary group than one guided by political principle, and ready and willing to act on behalf of diverse interests.
Each new recruit was given several days to write out his entire life story by hand, including names and addresses of family members, friends, and lovers, then was required to sign a paper saying he agreed to be executed if anything was found to be untrue. Every so often, the recruit would be asked to rewrite the whole thing; any discrepancies were taken as evidence that he was a spy, probably for Israel or Arafat, and he would be asked to write it out again, often after days of being beaten and nights spent forced to sleep standing up.
By 1987, Abu Nidal had turned the full force of his terror tactics inwards on the ANO itself. Members were tortured until they confessed to betrayal and disloyalty. According to recruits who were able to escape, victims were buried alive, fed through a tube forced into their mouths, then finally killed by a bullet fired down the tube. Some had their genitals placed in skillets of boiling-hot oil.
There were several mass purges. During one night in November 1987, 170 members were tied up, blindfolded, machine-gunned, and buried in a mass grave. Another 160 met the same fate in Libya shortly afterwards.
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Banking with BCCI
In the late 80s, Britain's domestic and overseas intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, discovered that the ANO held several accounts with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which was raided in July 1991 in seven countries on the instruction of regulators, including the Bank of England, mostly because of massive fraud, but also because of its willingness to open accounts for dubious customers. *
Before the closure, the Bank of England had asked financial consultants Price Waterhouse to conduct an investigation, and on June 24, 1991, the company submitted what it called the Sandstorm report showing that the bank had engaged in "widespread fraud and manipulation," and that it had allowed organizations regarded as terrorist groups, including the ANO, to set up accounts in London. Parts of the Sandstorm report were leaked to The Sunday Times, and showed that MI5 had signed up a source inside the Sloane Street branch of the bank, where the Abu Nidal accounts were held.
The source was Ghassan Qassem, the Syrian-born manager of the branch, who later told reporters that Abu Nidal himself had visited London several times, using the name Shakir Farhan (though this has been noted by the U.S. State Dept as the name of another senior ANO operative). Qassem was expected to drive Farhan around London's most expensive stores, including Selfridges, some exclusive tailors, and a cigar store on Jermyn Street. When the bank closed and Qassem talked to the media, his story led to one of the London Evening Standard's most memorable, and now iconic, front-page headlines: "I took Abu Nidal shopping." [Adams, James, & Frantz, Douglas. A Full Service Bank. Simon and Schuster, 1992.]
When Lord Bingham completed his 1992 public inquiry into the closure of BCCI, he wrote a secret Appendix 8 based on intelligence reports that showed MI5 had recruited Quassem in July 1987 to act as an agent for them (The Observer, January 18, 2004). Though Qassem did not know at the time that he was dealing with Abu Nidal, MI5 learned through documents he passed to them that, since 1980, Abu Nidal had been using a company called SAS Trade and Investment in Warsaw as a cover for FRC business deals, with the company director, Samir Najmeddin, based in Baghdad. All SAS's deals went through BCCI in Sloane Street, and consisted largely of selling guns, night-vision goggles, and armored Mercedes Benz cars with concealed grenade launchers, each deal often worth tens of millions of dollars, the finance consisting of misleading letters of credit arranged by the Sloane Street branch of BCCI.
The documents revealed ANO arms transactions with many Middle Eastern countries as well as with East Germany. There was no shortage of European and American clients willing to sell equipment, including British companies, one of which unwittingly sold the ANO riot guns it believed were intended for an African state, though documents show half the shipment went to East Germany and half was kept by Abu Nidal.
From 1987 until the bank was closed in 1991, British intelligence and the CIA monitored these transactions, rather than freezing them and arresting the signatories and the suppliers. Qassem later told reporters, and swore in an affidavit for investigators, that Najmeddin was often accompanied by an American, whom Qassem much later identified in news reports as the financier Marc Rich, a close friend of President Bill Clinton, who was later indicted in the U.S. for racketeering in an unrelated case, before being controversially pardoned by Clinton on January 20, 2001.
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Libya and revenge attacks
After moving from Damascus in 1985 and settling in Tripoli, Abu Nidal and Colonel Gaddafi of Libya allegedly became great friends, Gaddafi sharing what The Sunday Times called "Abu Nidal's dangerous combination of an inferiority complex mixed with the belief that he was a man of great destiny."
It was a relationship that Gaddafi is alleged to have made good use of. On the night of April 15–16, 1986, U.S. warplanes had launched a series of bombing raids from British bases * ["US launches air strikes on Libya", BBC News, April 15, 1986.] — the first U.S. military strikes from Britain since World War II — against Tripoli and Benghazi, killing dozens, including Hanna Gaddafi, a baby girl Gaddafi and his wife had adopted, in retaliation for the bombing 10 days earlier of a Berlin nightclub used by U.S. soldiers. [Malinarich, Natalie. "The Berlin Disco Bombing", BBC News, November 13, 2001.]
According to Atef Abu Bakr, a former senior member of the ANO, Gaddafi asked Abu Nidal to coordinate, together with the head of Libyan intelligence, Abdullah al-Senussi, a series of revenge attacks against the United States and Britain. Abu Nidal first arranged for two Britons and an American to be kidnapped in Lebanon: the hostages were later killed. He then allegedly suggested to Senussi that an aircraft be hijacked or blown up. On September 5, 1986, an ANO team hijacked Pan Am Flight 73 in Karachi, killing 22 passengers and wounding dozens of others. In August 1987, Abu Nidal tried again, this time using an unwitting bomb mule to carry a bomb on board a flight from Belgrade, airline unknown, but the bomb failed to explode.
Allegedly angered by this failure, according to Atef Abu Bakr, Senussi told Abu Nidal to supply a bomb and Libyan intelligence would arrange for it to be placed on a flight. The flight that was chosen, according to Abu Bakr, was Pan Am Flight 103, the scheduled Pan Am service between Frankfurt and New York ''via'' London. On December 21, 1988, it exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, when a bomb was detonated in its forward cargo hold, killing all 259 passengers and crew, and 11 people in Lockerbie. On January 31, 2001, a Scottish court convicted Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, the former head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines, for his role in the attack. The allegations of an Abu Nidal link to the bombing had not been made by the time of the trial and remain unconfirmed. (See Alternative theories into the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103).
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Death
Abu Nidal is known to have entered Iraq in 1999 after being expelled from Libya by Gaddafi, who was distancing himself from terrorism in an effort to re-establish diplomatic relations with the U.S. and UK after Lockerbie. The Iraqi government later said Abu Nidal had entered the country using a fake Yemeni passport and was not there with their knowledge, but by 2001, at the latest, he was living there openly, in defiance of the Jordanian government, whose state-security court had sentenced him to death by hanging in absentia in 2001 for his role in the 1994 assassination of a Jordanian diplomat in Beirut.
On August 19, 2002, al-Ayyam, the official newspaper of the Palestinian Authority, reported that Abu Nidal had died three days earlier of multiple gunshot wounds in his home in the wealthy al-Masbah neighborhood of al-Jadriyah, Baghdad, where the villa he lived in was owned by the ''Mukhabarat'', or Iraqi secret service.
Iraq's chief of intelligence, Taher Jalil Habbush, held a press conference on August 21, 2002, at which he handed out photographs of Abu Nidal's bloodied body, along with a medical report purportedly showing he had died after a single bullet had entered his mouth and exited his skull. Habbush said that Iraq's internal security force had arrived at Abu Nidal's house to arrest him on suspicion of conspiring with the Kuwaiti and Saudi governments to bring down Saddam Hussein. Saying he needed a change of clothes, Abu Nidal went into his bedroom and shot himself in the mouth, Habbush said. He died eight hours later in intensive care. [details terror leader's death", CNN, August 21, 2002.] He is known to have been suffering from leukemia.
Other sources disagree about the cause of death. Palestinian sources told journalists that Abu Nidal had in fact died of multiple gunshot wounds. Marie Colvin and Sonya Murad, writing in The Sunday Times, say that he was assassinated by a hit squad of 30 men from Office 8, the Iraqi Mukhabarat assassination unit. [ ''Jane's'' reported that Iraqi intelligence had been following him for several months and had found classified documents in his home about a U.S. attack on Iraq. When they arrived to raid his house on August 14 (not August 16, according to Jane's), fighting broke out between Abu Nidal's men and Iraqi intelligence. In the midst of this, Abu Nidal rushed into his bedroom and was killed, though Jane's writes it remains unclear whether he killed himself or was killed by someone else. Jane's sources insist that his body bore several gunshot wounds. Jane's further suggests that Saddam Hussein may have ordered him arrested and killed because he regarded Abu Nidal as a mercenary who would have acted against him in the event of an American invasion, if the money had been right. ][Najib, Mohammed. "Abu Nidal murder trail leads directly to Iraqi regime", Jane's Information Group, August 23, 2002.]
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Notes
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Further reading
Miller, Aaron David. "Sabri Khalil al-Banna" in Reich, Bernard. (ed.) Political Leaders of the Contemporary Middle East and North Africa: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990.
Steinberg, Matti. "The Radical Worldview of the Abu Nidal Faction." Jerusalem Quarterly 48 (Fall 1988): 88–104.
Yallop, David. To the Ends of the Earth. Random House, UK, 1993.
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