How Arafat Got Away with Murder
Johnson, Scott W.
How Arafat Got Away with Murder The State Department covered up his responsibility for the 1973 slaughter of two American diplomats By Scott W Johnson Twenty years before he joined Bill Clinton...
...Sullivan to the contrary notwithstanding, the summary stated that "the Khartoum operation was carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval of Yasser Arafat...
...message warning the U.S...
...You're obviously writing a piece designed to elicit a certain reaction rather than one based on factual accounts or actual comments made by the U.S...
...In late February 1973, the National Security Agency listening post in Cyprus picked up radio traffic including Arafat, Salah Kalaf (a cofounder of Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization faction, Fatah), and others strongly suggesting that a PLO operation was about to be conducted in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan...
...Edward Keefer is the general editor of the Foreign Relation series in which the 1973 document was published...
...Two were quickly released...
...Given Sullivan's statement, the State Department's posting this past June of the 1973 CIA summary of the Khartoum operation came as a surprise...
...The tortured history of the government's treatment of Arafat's responsibility warrants much additional investigation...
...The State Department watch officer unaccountably downgraded the message for routine transmission...
...In early 1986 the possibility of seeking remedies in the criminal justice system was reportedly under consideration by the Justice Department's criminal division...
...embassy in Khartoum that a PLO operation was imminent...
...Indeed, as recently as the summer of 2002, the State Department denied that such evidence existed...
...The contemporaneous State Department cables reflect this intense concern within the State Department regarding the security issues raised by the murders...
...The letter referred to "various State Department cables that may confirm Arafat's role in the murders...
...At 9:00 p.m...
...and Guy Eid, charge d'affaires at the Belgian embassy...
...Discovered by researcher Russ Braley in the Nixon archives, the Rogers cable states: "Question of link between Black September Organization (BSO) and Fatah has been subject of much public discussion since murder of U.S...
...Noting only that Noel and Moore were killed by "Black September Palestinian terrorists," Kissinger makes no mention of Arafat, Fatah, or the PLO in this connection...
...the release of a Black September leader held in Jordan...
...In November 1974, when Yasser Arafat made his famous debut at the United Nations in New York wearing a sidearm, he was accompanied by Ali Hassan Salameh, the chief planner of the Khartoum operation, and several other key participants...
...They first learned of the document's wider interest beyond the context of American-African relations when they read Caroline Glick's January 2, 2007, Jerusalem Post column on the subject...
...Fatah leader Yasser Arafat has now been described in recent intelligence as having given approval to the Khartoum operation prior to its inception...
...Walters's own 1978 memoir, Silent Missions, says nothing about these events...
...The cable then attributes the following statements to an intelligence brief prepared by the department and the CIA: "The Black September Organization (BSO) is a cover term for Fatah's terrorist operations executed by Fatah's intelligence organization...
...and the release of several members of the terrorist Baader-Meinhof gang held in Germany...
...The department received reports from its embassies and missions conveying the results of intelligence inquiries, and the secretary of state, William Rogers, himself promptly disseminated his conclusions regarding responsibility for the operation based on these reports and other intelligence sources...
...That's a legitimate question," he responded...
...diplomats in Khartoum...
...In 1990 Neil C. Livingstone and David Halevy had published Inside the PLO, devoting a chapter to the murders and quoting extensively from State Department cables received in response to the authors' Freedom of Information Act requests...
...Forty-four Senate members signed off on a February 12 letter urging Attorney General Ed Meese to speed up the investigation...
...Deputy Chief of Mission George Curtis Moore...
...ambassador is such a case...
...Explain your just cause to [the] great Sudanese masses and international opinion...
...On March 1, the embassy of Saudi Arabia in Khartoum held a going-away party for U.S...
...ambassador to Sudan Cleo Noel Jr...
...Fatah funds, facilities, and personnel are used in these operations...
...Kissinger's memoirs maintain a discreet silence regarding Arafat's responsibility for the Khartoum operation...
...Yet he reserves his deepest indignation for Nixon, blaming him for "having triggered the murders of the two Americans and the Belgian" by refusing to make concessions to the Black September operatives...
...On March 13, Secretary Rogers issued a comprehensive cable summarizing the department's conclusions and sent it to American embassies around the world...
...But what about Arafat...
...The government's failure to make any public issue of Arafat's responsibility had unfortunate consequences...
...The failure of the government generally or the State Department specifically to make a public issue of Arafat's responsibility facilitated this amnesia...
...Welsh and his NSA colleagues marked the message for transmission with a "flash" (highest) precedence...
...In the fall of 1973 and early 1974, as part of his larger diplomatic efforts in the Middle East, Kissinger authorized the late Vernon Walters, then deputy director of central intelligence, to undertake the first meetings of an American representative with the PLO...
...We have analyzed all the materials available and determined that the evidence currently available is plainly insufficient for pros-ecutive purposes if there were a legal basis for instituting charges against Arafat...
...In a sentence that makes little sense outside the context of Khartoum, Kissinger states in his memoir that after Walters's second meeting with Arafat's representative, "attacks on Americans—at least by Arafat's faction of the PLO—ceased...
...Set against the backdrop of the detailed knowledge possessed by the government (certainly including Kissinger himself), Kissinger's silence provides a valuable clue to understanding the State Department's public silence about Arafat's responsibility for the murders of Noel and Moore and the subsequent U.S...
...Any peace based upon that hand is a delusion...
...I asked Dennis Ross, the Middle East envoy and chief peace negotiator in the administrations of both George H.W...
...He added somewhat cryptically and almost completely inaccurately: "We enlisted the assistance of the State Department and various components of the intelligence community to obtain and verify Arafat's complicity in the planning of the embassy takeover and the murder of our diplomats...
...By June 1974, Thomas Ross was reporting in the Chicago Tribune that crucial State Department cables from the American embassy in Khartoum had been destroyed on the basis of an order that "could have come only from a high level in the State Department or the White House...
...The murders of Noel and Moore convulsed the State Department...
...I asked him what he would say to the average citizen with the perspective that the murderer of American officials shouldn't get a pass...
...Both points are made over and over again in the cables to and from the secretary of state...
...How Arafat Got Away with Murder The State Department covered up his responsibility for the 1973 slaughter of two American diplomats By Scott W Johnson Twenty years before he joined Bill Clinton and Yitzhak Rabin in Washington for that famous handshake—and proceeded to become Clinton's most frequent foreign guest at the White House—Yasser Arafat planned and directed the murder of an American ambassador and his deputy chief of mission...
...As a result, it arrived several days late...
...As the State Department reached conclusions regarding ultimate responsibility for the operation, it dispatched its representatives to meet with sympathetic governments and attempt to persuade them to take appropriate precautionary measures...
...In 1993, Korn published his equally well-documented volume, though Korn buried the documentation of Arafat's culpability in the book's source notes...
...It's fair to say," he said, "at a minimum, that it's hard to fathom...
...What happened...
...One would never know it, however, from reading Henry Kissinger's invaluable memoirs of the period during which he served as national security adviser (early 1969 to January 1975) and secretary of state (concurrently, September 1973 to January 1977...
...Sullivan did not respond to my request for an interview...
...Using coded instructions, Arafat's closest Fatah associate in Beirut, Salah Khalaf, directed the murder of Noel, Moore, and Eid...
...Susser and Keefer explained that the document was deemed of interest in the context of American relations with Sudan...
...policy, found neither an institutional nor a consistent personal advocate at the State Department in Washington, no one whose prime and overriding responsibility it was to ensure that the government of Sudan honored its commitment to bring to justice the eight men who murdered them...
...We are with you on the same road...
...Korn's text seethes with anger over the deaths of his former colleagues, accusing Nixon of seeking to "exculpate" himself...
...On the one hand, it abetted the impulse to appease enemies that runs so strong in the State Department...
...Noel and George Moore, and though Black September was a part of the Fatah movement, the linkage between Arafat and this group has never been established...
...Arafat ordered his operatives to surrender to Sudanese authorities...
...treatment of Yasser Arafat...
...Across seven administrations, the State Department hewed to silence and denial...
...government...
...From the first moment of the deadly operation, which took place in Khartoum on March 1, 1973, the State Department possessed direct evidence of Arafat's responsibility, yet neither the State Department nor any other government agency made public its knowledge...
...I asked him whether, if in fact the department had determined Arafat's involvement, we should not have dealt with him like a criminal rather than an honored guest...
...Bush and Clinton, if he was aware of Arafat's responsibility for the 1973 murders of Noel and Moore...
...By 1975 he had become an aide to Kissinger on the policy planning staff...
...Thus, such information would never be admissible in any trial of Arafat in this country...
...I noted that there is Fatah office in almost every Arab capital operating openly and, in light of Khartoum tragedy, this has clear implications...
...I was aware that State had looked into it, but I didn't know that a conclusion had been reached," he told me...
...The publication of the 1973 CIA summary ends 33 years of public silence on Yasser Arafat's murder of two high-ranking State Department officers...
...It is a notable event...
...And that was that...
...that very night, the Black September operatives marched Noel, Moore, and Eid to the embassy basement and murdered them with forty rounds from Kalashnikov weapons fired from the feet to the head in order to inflict maximum suffering on the victims...
...Korn of course faults the Black September operatives and their Sudanese protectors...
...hen the Bush (I) and Clinton administrations dealt directly with Arafat, did they somehow not know exactly with whom they were dealing...
...The terrorists seized the embassy and held Moore and two others hostage—U.S...
...State Department Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs deputy director of press affairs Gregory Sullivan responded: "I can't say I'm impressed with your research or argumentation...
...Korn also faults Kissinger for this no-concessions policy...
...Until last spring...
...Criminal Division deputy attorney general Mark Richard testified and provided the Justice Department's verdict on the pursuit of Arafat through the criminal justice system: There was no legal ground for a federal prosecution of Arafat based on his role in the murders, Richard testified...
...Hill recalls that the murders were the subject of frequent, intense discussion among desk officers and leaders at Foggy Bottom for roughly three years afterward...
...The cables demonstrate that in the immediate aftermath of the assault, the State Department had concluded that Black September was nothing more than a front for Fatah and that Arafat himself had directed the operation resulting in the assassination of Noel and Moore...
...Arafat was thus "cleared" for his cozy relationship with the Clinton White House...
...In June 2006, the department's Office of the Historian quietly posted an authoritative summary of the events dated June 1973...
...President Nixon replaced Rogers that summer with Kissinger...
...Marc Susser is head of the office...
...Communications intelligence afforded the State Department immediate knowledge of every relevant fact regarding these events...
...The American ambassador to Tunisia, for example, met with Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba on March 10 to convey the department's concerns about Fatah in light of the Black September attack in Khartoum: "I referred to Sudanese government's revelation that head of Fatah office in Khartoum masterminded Khartoum assassinations...
...The source of the summary is not given, but the CIA had previously produced it in redacted form in response to a Freedom of Information Act request...
...What we would have done had we been fully aware of it after the Israelis made their decision to proceed in dealing with Arafat, I can't say...
...They included it for publication in fulfillment of the office's statutory obligation to document American foreign relations, after thirty years, without input from any policymaker at State...
...Two other diplomats were seized and released...
...And given the fact that Arafat's right hand man is the current prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, it is not only of historical interest...
...Your mission has ended," he told them, in an intercepted communication...
...At trial the leader stated that they had acted "under the orders of the Palestine Liberation Organization and should only be questioned by that organization...
...The eminent diplomat Charles Hill, now on the faculty at Yale, served at high levels in the State Department before and after the murders...
...By the early years of the Carter administration, according to Hill, the institutional memory of the event had largely been lost...
...National Security Agency analyst Jim Welsh received word of the operation at his post in Washington and helped draft a Scott W. Johnson is a Minneapolis attorney and contributor to the Power Line blog...
...When I inquired into the posting of the document, I was referred to the State Department's Office of the Historian...
...A gang of eight who identified themselves as members of the Black September Organization stormed the party...
...For all intents and purposes no significant distinction now can be made between the BSO and Fatah...
...Arafat himself separately confirmed the instructions...
...Although Hill and his colleagues knew nothing of the communications intelligence showing Arafat's responsibility, Hill remembers there being no doubt in his circle of professionals on the seventh floor of the department that Arafat bore ultimate responsibility for the operation...
...In the summer of 2002 I contacted the State Department for a comment on a draft column addressing the question of Arafat's responsibility for the Khartoum murders...
...Korn makes little of Arafat's responsibility for the murders, but he acutely observes: "So Curt Moore and Cleo Noel, who were required to sacrifice their lives in Khartoum to sustain a principle of U.S...
...Fatah leader Arafat has disavowed connection with BSO...
...I really don't have the time to do the research for you, but I do find myself compelled to point out . . . Evidence clearly points to the terrorist group Black September as having committed the assassinations of Amb...
...With his "characteristic swaggering efficiency and discretion" (Kissinger's words), Walters seems to have worked out a modus vivendi that precluded any accounting with Arafat for the murders of Noel and Moore...
...In his well-researched 1993 book ^ssassi-nation in Khartoum, former foreign service officer David Korn recalls that Nixon visited Foggy Bottom on March 6 to speak at the laying of a memorial plaque in honor of Noel and Moore...
...Kissinger did not respond to my request for an interview...
...The operation was a matter of life-and-death interest to the department's field officers...
...Shaking the hand of a murderer of a U.S...
...His role in the murders of Noel and Moore was not yet entirely forgotten...
...Did the administration's highest officers know whom they were dealing with...
...Information concerning Arafat's direct involvement in this operation is, at best, hearsay and conjecture...
...In April 1986, Senator Jeremiah Denton convened a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee for a one-day hearing on the possibility of bringing Arafat to justice for crimes including the murders of Noel and Moore...
...The next morning the eight operatives surrendered...
...The six convicted operatives were immediately turned over to their PLO patrons...
...The Black September operatives issued several demands: the release of Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert Kennedy...
...Prepared by the CIA on the basis of intercepted communications, it baldly states: "The Khartoum operation was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval of Yasser Arafat...
...The remaining six were tried and convicted in June...
...If so, regardless of the failure of institutional memory reflected in Ambassador Ross's comments and the institutional misrepresentations reflected in Richard's testimony, excuses were lacking...
...Speaking in a 2003 interview from the perspective of an average citizen who was also a firsthand witness to a most significant piece of this tortured history, former NSA analyst Welsh may appropriately be given the last word, at least for the moment: "There are limits to which foreign policy issues should require a man to lower himself...
...On March 2, President Nixon and representatives of the other two governments announced that they would not negotiate with terrorists for the release of the diplomats...
...Had it been understood at the highest levels, it should have factored into the decision making...
Vol. 12 • January 2007 • No. 19
