Arafat and Company
Wolf, Gary
BOOKS Arafat and Company Inside the PLO: Covert Units, Secret Funds, and the War Against Israel and the United States by Neil C. Livingstone and David Halevy William Morrow, 1990. 336 pp.,...
...Arafat has personal control over much of this illicit income via his Chairman's Secret Fund, estimated by Livingstone and Halevy to contain up to $2 billion in assets...
...Several facts are corroborated by interviews with agents "from several intelligence services...
...This book should give pause to all those who would elevate the PLO to the status of a popular, progressive and, ultimately, just movement...
...336 pp., $21.95 Reviewed by Gary Wolf Though many books and articles have been written on the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), few, if any, have provided such a comprehensive compendium of the activities, plots and machinations of the terror group as Inside the PLO...
...Extensive biographical sketches bring us into the living rooms of Yasser Arafat, Abu Iyad, Ahmed Jibril and all the rest...
...A glossary of names provides a handy reference tool for future use...
...PLO earnings are both overt and covert...
...A key example was the PLO's hiring of Abu Nidal (who ostensibly broke with the PLO in the 1970s) to assassinate Issam Sertawi, a Palestinian accused of moderation...
...But this is not half the story: "[F]or the most part, Arafat and his lieutenants operate as a multinational crime syndicate, relying on extortion, bribery, theft, narcotics trafficking and murder to fulfill their financial needs...
...Twenty-seven gripping pages are devoted to the brilliantly executed Israeli operation— but did we ask for it...
...No anecdote is more instructive here than George Habash's 1976 terrorist summit in Lebanon, in which this key PLO figure summoned officials of terror groups from every corner of the globe to discuss avenues of collaboration and mutual aid...
...smuggling...
...We also gain familiarity with characters in the broader play of world terror...
...Naturally, Inside the PLO chronicles in great detail the most hideous PLO terror strikes, from hijackings to the Munich Olympic massacre to Achille Lauro...
...mercenary activities...
...drugs...
...The dredging of behind-the-scenes intelligence data is clearly the authors' forte...
...As the saga unfolds, one gains firsthand familiarity with the main characters in the PLO play...
...Those expecting a Bernard Lewis-style scholarly work on a Middle Eastern topic will have to look elsewhere...
...These underworld adventures include "flight insurance," a protection racket aimed at airlines fearful of hijacking...
...and extortion of corporations and governments alike...
...On December 7, 1988...Arafat, speaking on behalf of the PLO, accepted the right of Israel to exist...
...Yet Inside the PLO is meticulously documented and footnoted, projecting an air of confident authority...
...A prime example is the superficial treatment of events leading to the opening of the U.S.-PLO dialogue in December 1988...
...Even the United States at one time made protection payments to the PLO to assure the safety of its Middle East installations...
...Another problem is the tension between the book's strong arid expertly crafted dossier segments and its brief forays into policy analysis...
...Arafat uses this money to fund, inter alia, intra-PLO assassinations as well as such lavish personal expenses for the group's leadership as $100,000 weddings...
...After digesting the facts presented here, one is left wondering just what the connection is between the Palestine Liberation Organization and liberation...
...Samed, the PLO's international conglomerate, runs industrial and agricultural projects that yielded $70 million in gross revenues in 1989...
...the New York branch of the Arab Bank ("the PLO bank") manages PLO investments "in excess of $1 billion...
...Livingstone and Halevy describe "Operation Cold River," the PLO's 1973 assassination of U.S...
...Perhaps no other revelation is more startling or more damning than the book's exposure of the PLO's financial empire...
...Ambassador Robert Pelletreau shook hands with Abd al-Latif Abu Hijlah, "who 15 years earlier had emptied the magazine of his Russian-made assault rifle into Ambassador Cleo Noel...
...Six days later he reiterated his pledge in Geneva, before the UN General Assembly...
...ambassador Cleo Noel and other diplomats in the Sudan...
...The latter exercises are weak and laden with common wisdom...
...As it turns out, at the first official U.S.-PLO meeting in Tunisia at the end of 1988, U.S...
...Privy to so much data, the authors could not resist the temptation to include narrative on various actors in this arena, particularly Israeli intelligence...
...bank robbery...
...Gary Wolf is associate director of international concerns at the Jewish Community Relations Council of Philadelphia...
...In addition to the gruesome acts themselves, the authors deftly probe the issue of "deniability," the PLO's attempts at disassociation from its own actions...
...Notwithstanding these drawbacks, Inside the PLO is an impressive and hardhitting expose...
...Total PLO assets are pegged at f 8 to $14 billion...
...We learn of their cooperation and intimate connections with the PLO, forming a network extending deep into the Soviet bloc and the Third World...
...Livingstone and Halevy are well steeped in the mysterious realms of counterterrorism and intelligence-gathering, apparently possessing privileged access to closely guarded information...
...Indeed, the first chapter, "The Death of Abu Jihad" (in a 1988 Israeli commando raid in Tunisia), might as well have been called "Inside the Mossad...
...On the negative side, Inside the PLO suffers from an overextended fascination with the global espionage game...
...This book—which includes obscure photos "from the authors' personal collections"—reads like a spy thriller...
...One is aghast at discovering that "indeed, the PLO is the richest revolutionary movement in the world, with annual revenues currendy exceeding the gross national product of some Third World countries...
...Overt income, which totals more than $600 million per year, is derived from investment income, contributions from Arab governments, donations from wealthy Palestinians and a 5-7 percent wage tax on Palestinians in many Arab countries...
...Using an eminently readable novelistic style, Livingstone and Halevy have produced the definitive dossier, laying bare the PLO's worst excesses and endemic corruption...
...This oft-repeated statement ignores the fact, later discussed by the authors themselves, that Arafat's acceptance of Israel was so vague and convoluted that even the State Department, which was then spoon-feeding the desired language to the PLO leader, demanded one further press conference before finally accepting Arafat's assurances...
...conditions for dialogue (recognition of Israel, renunciation of terrorism and endorsement of UN Security Council resolution 242...
...A serious analysis of the whirlwind prior to the dialogue would have had to examine the panoply of sophisticated tricks used by Arafat and his deputies to avoid an unequivocal endorsement of the U.S...
...Other terror operations point to the problematic nature of U.S.-PLO diplomacy...
Vol. 15 • December 1990 • No. 6
