Nidal, Abu

born the illegitimate son of a wealthy Palestinian orange grower as Sabri Khalil al-Banna (Arabic: صبري خليل البنا; May 1937 – 16 August 2002), known by his nom de guerre Abu Nidal (“father of struggle”), was employed by Mossad and the founder of Fatah: The Revolutionary Council (Arabic: فتح المجلس الثوري), a militant Palestinian splinter group more commonly known as the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO).^[1] At the height of its militancy in the 1970s and 1980s, the ANO was widely regarded as the most ruthless of the Palestinian groups with recruits who committed assassinations, massacres, and airliner hijackings. He did not operate out of Palestine, but out of host Arab nations, each of whom eventually expelled him.

In 1992, Patrick Seale, former correspondent for the London Observer, and one of Britain’s top Middle East specialists, wrote a biography, Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire. Seale’s book made a stunning revelation: although portrayed in mainstream media as a “Palestinian terrorist” and “enemy of Israel,” Nidal was in fact employed by Mossad—Israel’s equivalent of the CIA.

● Abu Iyad, chief of intelligence for the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), asked to meet with Seale in Tunis in 1990. Quoting Seale:

“Every Palestinian who works in intelligence,” he told me, “is convinced that Israel has a big hand in Abu Nidal’s affairs.” His suspicions had now hardened into a conviction: Abu Nidal was not just an extreme rejectionist who sold his services to Arab regimes. Israel had gained control of him. That was the key to his persistent sabotage of Palestinian interests. . . . . Abu Nidal had killed the PLO’s most accomplished diplomats: Hammami, in London; Qalaq, in Paris; Yassin, in Kuwait; he had slaughtered hundreds of Palestinian fighters; he had debased the Palestinian national struggle with his senseless and savage terrorism and succeeded in alienating the Palestinians’ best friends. He had made the word Palestinian synonymous with terrorist. . . . Abu Nidal, he told me, was the greatest enemy of the Palestinian people.⁵

Eventually Abu Iyad himself was murdered on orders from Abu Nidal.

● Isam Sartawi, a prominent figure in the Palestinian movement, said in the January 22, 1982 Le Monde: “Abu Nidal is not a maximalist serving the cause of the rejection front, but a renegade in the service of Israel.”⁶

●  A senior Jordanian intelligence officer told Seale: “Scratch around inside Abu Nidal’s organization and you will find Mossad.”⁷

● A French government expert on terrorism informed him: “If Abu Nidal himself is not an Israeli agent, then two or three of his senior people certainly are. Nothing else can explain some of his operations.”⁸

● A CIA officer who had been station head in several Arab countries told Seale: “It’s quite likely that Mossad picked up Abu Nidal in the late 1960s, when it was putting a lot of effort into penetrating the newly formed Palestinian guerrilla groups.”⁹

In 1977, the Likud, Israel’s far-right party, came to power for the first time. Menachem Begin, who had once been leader of the Irgun terrorist gang, now became Prime Minister. Begin wanted to expand Israeli territories in Palestine, and destroy the PLO, even though the PLO had turned from violence to seeking peaceful negotiations. A few months after Begin came to power, Abu Nidal began killing Palestinian moderates.¹⁰

It was the Israeli mindset that, in order to keep the lands which they had stolen during the 1967 Six-Day War, it was necessary to equate Palestinians with “terrorists” as a pretext to justify refusal to conduct negotiations.

Hollywood began helping out by making movies that would support this new narrative. In Black Sunday (1977), Palestinian terrorists attempt to wipe out the fans at the Super Bowl with a shrapnel bomb, but the plot is foiled by a Mossad agent, saving 80,000 American lives.

In The Delta Force (1986), Palestinians hijack an American airliner and hold the passengers hostage in Lebanon, but Chuck Norris and the Delta Force rescue the victims and bring them to safety in Israel. And, of course, who could forget the wild-eyed terrorists in Back to the Future (1985). In this case the terrorists were from Libya, a country that, as we have mentioned, Ronald Reagan bombed the following year as a result of a Mossad deception.

Abu Nidal, who himself almost seemed like a scripted movie villain, carried out a series of terrorist attacks that invariably aided Israel and harmed Palestine.

● In 1982, Israel brutally invaded neighboring Lebanon, where the PLO had set up their headquarters. The Israelis committed 76,000 men, 1,250 tanks, and 1,500 armored personnel carriers, supported by air and naval bombardment. 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians were killed. (According to Seale, Israel had brokered its famous peace treaty with Egypt to ensure it could undertake such aggressions without having to worry about Egypt’s military intervening.)¹¹

However, before the attack on Lebanon, U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig advised the Israeli government that it would need a “major, internationally recognized provocation” to justify the invasion.¹² After all, the PLO had not fired a single shot at Israel from Lebanon.

Abu Nidal gave Israel the incident it needed by having his gunmen seriously wound Shlomo Argov, Israel’s ambassador to Britain. This became Israel’s official pretext for the invasion, even though neither Lebanon nor the PLO—Nidal’s enemy—had anything to do with it. Raful Eitan, Israel’s chief of staff, barked: “Abu Nidal, Abu Shmidal. We have to strike at the PLO!”¹³

● Seale writes that in 1985, “Austria and Italy were the two European countries with which the PLO had the closest relations, and with their encouragement, a European-Palestinian dialogue had been developing satisfactorily.”¹⁴

So what did Abu Nidal do? He had his fanatical young followers, doped on amphetamines, launch simultaneous attacks on the Vienna and Rome airports on December 27, 1985, killing 18 people and wounding 110 with rifle fire and hand grenades. Nidal lied to the gunmen, telling them that people at the El Al ticket counters would be Israeli pilots in civilian clothes who had bombed their families.¹⁵

Israel falsely accused the PLO of carrying out the attacks, even though the PLO denounced them and Abu Nidal took the credit. In the public mind, however, It was just “Palestinians.”

● Again quoting Seale:

Cyprus . . . had long been sympathetic to the Palestinians, having supported them during Israel’s siege of Beirut in 1982 and given them a haven when Arab states expelled them. Cyprus sometimes seemed more committed to the Palestinian cause than many Arab countries—much to Israel’s annoyance. On May, 11, 1988, Abu Nidal’s organization detonated a car bomb in Nicosia, killing and wounding fifteen people . . . . In the wake of this, Cypriot opinion turned against the Palestinians.¹⁶

● On May, 15, 1988, Abu Nidal assaulted Sudan, which Seale describes as “even more consistently pro-Palestinian than Cyprus.”¹⁷ Nidal’s men attacked a hotel and restaurant with machine guns and grenades. Seven people were killed and 21 wounded. The victims’ nationalities included Sudanese, British, French, American, Swiss, and Polish—no Israelis. Sudanese support for Palestine then dwindled.

● Seale notes: “Greece was the European country most sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, and its prime minister, Andreas Papandreou, was the European leader who had most effectively defended the Arabs against Israel’s charge of terrorism.”¹⁸

So what did Abu Nidal do? On July 11, 1988, he had his men, armed with machine guns and grenades, attack a Greek cruise ship carrying hundreds of tourists, killing nine and wounding 80. Does anyone think Nidal really believed this would somehow help Palestine?  Greeks were furious that Palestinians had badly damaged their tourist trade, and the incident helped bring about the downfall of the Papandreou government.¹⁹

● It’s noteworthy that the last three terrorist attacks I have cited occurred shortly after the start of the First Intifada—Palestinian uprising against Israel. The Intifada had begun in December 1987. And this brings us to Nidal’s deadliest terror: the slaughter of his own men. Between 1987 and 1988, Seale notes:

In a little over a year, it is estimated that Abu Nidal murdered some six hundred of his own people, between a third and a half of his total membership, mostly young men in their early twenties—almost as many Palestinians as Israel killed in the first three years of the Intifada. . . .

Over three hundred men were killed in South Lebanon, 171 of them in a single night in November 1987—on the fabricated charge of being Jordanian agents.  According to a defector, a bulldozer was brought in to dig a deep trench. Blindfolded, roped together, and with their hands tied behind their backs, the men were then lined up, sprayed with machine-gun fire, and immediately pushed in for burial, some of them struggling and still alive.²⁰

Needless to say, none of these young men were able to join their fellow Palestinians in the Intifada.

Was Abu Nidal working for Mossad? Of course, we have no signed confession, by him or the Israelis. But every action he took harmed Palestine and helped Israel. As Jesus said, “by their fruits you shall know them.”

It is noteworthy that Nidal never directly attacked Israel, and Israel never attacked him.  A German expert on counterterrorism told Seale in 1990: “Those that the Israelis want to destroy, they destroy, even if it means sending in assassins. But what have they ever done to Abu Nidal in fifteen years? He seems more like a protected species that the Mossad wants to keep alive!”²¹

Nidal fulfilled the stereotype of “Palestinians are terrorists” that Hollywood was simultaneously painting. He not only threatened to kill Oliver North, but Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Yet ironically, despite his innumerable murders and threats, no one brought him brought to justice. Even after 9/11, a decade after Seale published his book, Nidal was still at large.

But the slaughter of his own followers had marked the beginning of Abu Nidal’s  decline. Many men fled his organization, and new recruits became hard to find.

Part of the terrorism PSYOP seemingly requires a “poster boy” to symbolize it in the public mind. With Abu Nidal withering, the “poster boy” baton may possibly have been passed to Ramzi Yousef, implicated in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (an event with more Mossad fingerprints on it).²² But Yousef’s terrorist career ended after he was arrested in Pakistan in 1995.

In 1996, a new Poster Boy emerged in Osama Bin Laden, who issued a call for jihad against the United States that year. His main pretext for the announcement—that U.S. troops were desecrating Arabia by their presence there—seemed rather belated and flimsy, as it was his own Saudi government who had invited in U.S. troops, to battle Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, back in 1990-91.  It should also be noted that Bin Laden had joined the Mujahideen in their fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Since the U.S. heavily funded the Mujahideen, and Wikipedia notes that “Bin Laden’s first trainer was US Special Forces commando Ali Mohamed,”²³ it seems odd that Bin Laden turned so swiftly on his benefactors.  In yet another irony, Bin Laden’s older brother, Salem Bin Laden, had been a partner in George W. Bush’s Arbusto Energy Company.²⁴

Abu Nidal and Osama Bin Laden: Parallels

Several common denominators existed between Abu Nidal and Osama Bin Laden.

● Both men were extremely wealthy. Intelligence sources estimated Nidal was worth $400 million.²⁵ He made money from weapons sales and “protection” money (blackmailing countries such as Kuwait and France into paying him off in exchange for not attacking them), but one must wonder if such sources alone could account for that much affluence for the son of a Palestinian orange grower. Some officials estimated Bin Laden’s worth at $250 million in 1991, although others put it lower.²⁶

● Both Nidal and Bin Laden held accounts at the now-defunct BCCI Bank.

● Both men operated from desert compounds where they trained and radicalized young men into murderous fanatics.

● Despite his vast wealth, and despite supposedly being an advocate of Palestine, Abu Nidal never gave even one dollar to help the Palestinian people.²⁷ And although Bin Laden also proclaimed solidarity with the Palestinians, I have never seen evidence that he donated anything to them either.

● Nidal never directly attacked Israel and Israel never attacked him. Likewise, for all his criticisms of Israel, Bin Laden never attacked it, nor did Israel attack him. It might be argued that Bin Laden couldn’t have penetrated Israel very easily to strike at it, but certainly he could have hit Israeli “soft” targets such as its overseas embassies (just as he did with U.S. embassies). Israel’s embassies he left untouched. Confining himself to U.S. targets served the interests of the Israelis, who wanted the U.S. to make war on their enemies.

● As we have seen, the combined intelligence and military resources of the Western Bloc nations were never able to locate and eliminate Nidal, despite his many crimes and threats. It was Sadaam Hussein’s intelligence service that finally took him out in 2002 in Iraq. (Some sources claim that, when confronted in Iraq, he committed suicide.) Ironically, the U.S. would invade Iraq the following year. Likewise, Bin Laden remained at large for 10 years after 9/11, until his alleged execution by Navy Seals in 2011, an incident that remains highly controversial, since his body was almost immediately dumped in the ocean, preventing confirmation of his identity.

Although the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was supposedly to “get Bin Laden,” he rapidly faded in importance and became a secondary objective. Gary Bernsten, the U.S. field commander in the hunt for Bin Laden in Afghanistan, later wrote:

Day and night, I kept thinking, We needed US soldiers on the ground! We need them to do the fighting! We need them to block a possible al-Qaeda escape into Pakistan! I’d sent my request for 800 US Army Rangers and was still waiting for a response. I repeated to anyone at headquarter who would listen: “We need Rangers now! The opportunity to get bin Laden is slipping away!!”²⁸ . . .

I’d made it clear in my reports that our Afghan allies were hardly anxious to get at al-Qaeda in Tora Bora. So why was the US military looking for excuses not to act decisively? Why would they want to leave something that was so important to an unreliable Afghan army that’d been cobbled together at the last minute? This was the opportunity we’d hoped for when we launched this mission. Our advantage was quickly slipping away. . . .²⁹

When Bernsten was ready for his final push against Bin Laden, he was relieved of his duties and transferred to South America. He wrote: “Now that we finally had bin Laden and his al-Qaeda cadres trapped in the White Mountains, why was headquarters pulling us out? And why was Washington hesitant about committing troops to get bin Laden? These were the questions that kept me up at night.”³⁰

It appears that, just as no one wanted to capture Abu Nidal—in order to sustain Israel’s refusal to engage in negotiations—no one wanted to capture Bin Laden either, because to do so would have ended the pretext for America’s endless Middle East proxy wars on behalf of Israel, as enumerated by General Wesley Clark.

There were differences, as well, between Nidal and Bin Laden. Nidal was highly secular and drank a bottle of whiskey every day. Bin Laden, on the other hand, was, according to those who were with him, a religious Muslim who fasted and rose before dawn to pray.³¹ And while Bin Laden personally engaged in combat, Nidal scrupulously avoided it.

Source: https://jamesperloff.net/from-the-arab-platoon-to-hamas-israels-abu-nidal-strategy/