Two Major Middle East Terrorist Figures Die in their Safe Havens
By Michael B. Kraft
The deaths within days this weekend of two major figures behind major Middle East terrorist attacks and the possible death of a third last month should serve as a reminder of how long the terrorist threat has been with us -- and the difficulty in taking action against terrorists when they enjoy safe havens.
In Damascus, Mohammed Oudeh, better known as Abu Daoud -- the mastermind of the 1972 massacre of Israel athletes at the Munich Olympics, died Friday of kidney failure at the age of 73.
In Beirut Lebanon on Sunday morning, a liver hemorrhage claimed the life of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the Shiite spiritual leader of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorist organization which conducted the 1983 bombings of the barracks of the U.S. and French peacekeeping forces and the U.S. embassy. The group was also involved in the kidnappings of dozens of American and other Western hostages in Lebanon in the 1980’s. He was 75.
Both deaths were announced separately by the families or associates.
In an unconfirmed report last month, the German press agency DPA reported that a drone missile strike in Pakistan on June 19 killed Mohammad Ali Hamadeh, a Lebanese Hezbollah member who was accused of killing of an American Navy diver, Robert Stethem during the hijacking of TWA 847 flight to Beirut 25 years ago in June, 1985. However State Department officials said they could not confirm the report when it came out and DOD did not respond to a query.
Both the Munich Olympics attacks and the Beirut bombings had wide ranging consequences although not necessarily those intended by the perpetrators.
In the Munich massacre, 11 Israeli Olympic team members were killed, either outright by the Palestinian Black September terrorists, or during a botched rescue operation by German security officials. In the bombings a decade later in Beirut, 241 U.S. marines were killed and 58 French paratroopers were killed by nearly simultaneous suicide truck bomb attacks in October, 1983. In the earlier suicide bombing American embassy attack in April, 60 persons were killed, including 17 Americans.
Discussing the Munich attack in an 2006 AP interview, Oudeh was quoted as saying:
”Before Munich we were simply terrorists. After Munich, at least people started asking who are these terrorists? What do they want? Before Munich, nobody had the slightest idea about the Palestinians.”
Oudeh apparently had a short memory a very high opinion of himself, or a desire to rationalize the attack, which he claimed was intended to take hostages to swap for Palestinian prisoners, not kill the Israeli Olympic team members. It was the 1968 hijacking of four airplanes by a rival group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the spectacular blowing up of three planes at Dawson field, an old World War II air base in Jordan, that brought the Palestinians large scale publicity for their terrorist attacks..
It is a dubious proposition that the killing of athletes at the widely televised international Olympics had a positive impact on the Palestinian image or cause. Palestinian leaders nevertheless, paid tribute to Oudeh.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas sent his condolences to Oudeh’s family, the Palestinian news agency, WAFA reported.
"He wrote in his letter to his family, 'He is missed. He was one of the leading figures of Fatah and spent his life in resistance [against the occupation] and sincere work as well as physical sacrifice for his people's just causes,' " the news agency quoted Abbas as saying.
(Abbas provided funds used for the operation, although he allegedly did not know what the money was being spent for, according to Oudeh in his autobiography, From Jerusalem to Munich, published in France in 1999, and later in a written interview with Sports Illustrated, Wikipedia said in citing the book as part of its description of the attack.)
Oudeh also was praised as “a fighter of the highest order,” by Amin Maqboul, Secretary General of the Fatah Revolutionary Council. (Some high order! The terrorists killed the eight Israelis who survived the initial attack by throwing hand grenades at them and raked them with gunfire when they were tied up in helicopters to be taken to an airport as part of an ostensible deal worked out with the Germans.)
Oudeh belong to that faction of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization. In 1996, Israel allowed him to attend a PLO assembly meeting in Ramallah where he voted to remove the PLO’s charter clause calling for an “armed struggle” to destroy the Jewish state. Three years later, he was barred from returning to the West Bank from a trip to Jordan after he published his book acknowledging his role in organizing the Munich attack. He found refuge in Syria, which harbors a number of terrorist organizations.
In one unintended consequence of the Munich attack, then-President Nixon established the first U.S government unit to focus specifically on countering terrorism. He first set up a Cabinet-level committee. That turned out to be too unwieldy to deal with day-to-day activities and the State Department established an office to coordinate counterterrorism activities overseas. It is now the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, and the Coordinator, currently Daniel Benjamin, has ambassadorial rank and is the equivalent of an Assistant Secretary of State.
The Munich attack, and the actions by several countries that provided sanctuary to terrorists, prompted Congress to enact legislation prohibiting foreign assistance to countries that support international terrorism by granting sanctuary to terrorists.
The attack also led to the eventual development of a 1979 Export Administration Act provision that authorizes the Secretary of State to formally designate governments that repeatedly provided support to acts of international terrorism. This law, initiated by the late Rep. Millicent Fenwick
(R- New Jersey), a House Foreign Affairs Committee member for whom I was working at the time as her foreign policy legislative assistant, became known as the terrorist list. Designations trigger a variety of economic sanctions against terrorist-supporting states. In 1979 Syria was among the first countries designated and to this day it remains on the list.
Ayatollah Fadallah was a major figure in the emergence of political activism among Lebanese Shiite Muslims, the poor cousins to the more powerful and affluent Sunni community in that country of many factions. He justified the use of suicide bombings against Americans and Israelis and western intelligence services considered him to be responsible for the nearly simultaneous truck bombings of the American and French peacekeeping units and the American embassy.
As described by the London Daily Telegraph foreign editor, Con Coughlin: ,
“ … he was right up there with other infamous terror masterminds, such as Abu Nidal and Carlos the Jackal.
The U.S Marines were bunched up in a barracks instead of sleeping tents because the unit commanders felt that would provide better protection from the mortar attacks that had been aimed at them by Muslim militia groups who considered the U.S. to be allies of the Lebanese Government Forces in the internal Lebanese strife. Although then-President Reagan had previously vowed to keep the Marines in Lebanon, he withdrew them three months later. This action reinforced a perception among Bin Ladin and many militants that the U.S. was a “paper tiger” and had no staying power.
The attack on the embassy also led to a commission led retired admiral Bobby Inman that led to new construction and physical security requirements for US embassies to make them more resistant to terrorist attacks. The refitting of existing buildings and construction of new ones –many of them in inconvenient locations where more land was available for setbacks from the nearest road—cost billions of dollars. The attacks also led to the creation and expansion of the State Department Diplomatic Security Bureau which is charged with the protection of US government personnel and facilities overseas and implementing counterterrorism training and rewards programs.
The embassy bombing killed the CIA station chief, Bob Aimes, and some of his colleagues. There has been speculation that the terrorists knew they were holding a meeting. This aspect of the attack has been previously and widely reported.
But overlooked was the fact that the large bomb that destroyed the embassy also killed Bill McIntyre and other Agency for International Development(AI.D.) team members who were planning major foreign assistance projects for Lebanon.
In early 1983 I and several other Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffers spent time with the team when we visited Lebanon to look at the possibility of stepping up the U.S. aid program in Lebanon following Israel’s withdrawal. Senators Rudy Boschwitz (R-Minnesota,) and Paul Sarbanes (D-Maryland), the chairman and ranking member of the Middle East Subcommittee, wanted us to look at the proposals in preparation for legislation supporting the assistance.
Bill had been our escort officer. He and his team showed us various proposed aid projects, including infrastructure projects and others planned to provide permanent jobs, such as citrus canning plants. Most of the projects were intended for the Shiite areas in Beirut and Southern Lebanon, which had been neglected by the central Lebanese government. McIntyre was a decent, hard working career foreign assistance officer. Had the plans and the planners not been literally blown up, the Lebanese Shiites would have benefited greatly.
Whenever I hear or read complaints that the U.S, has not done enough for the Muslims, especially the Shiites, or hear about Fadlallah I think of McIntyre and his colleagues. May they rest in peace.
As for Oudeh and Fadlallah, they were lucky to survive apparent assassination attempts and to find sanctuary in Beirut and Damascus where they could hide from everything but fatal illness.