Where Are Arafat's Secret Accounts?
Ronen Bergman
Senior Investigative Reporter, Yediot Aharonot
In the early morning hours of Friday,April 20, a group of armed masked men knocked on the door of the home of Jawad el-Russein in Abu Dhabi. El-Russein, the PLO treasurer, opened the door and was met with drawn weapons and an offer he couldn't refuse -- to accompany them. According to reports that reached London, he was flown, while bound, in Arafat's plane to the Palestinian Authority. Only a few PA officials were privy to the secret operation. Even today, only a few people know where the man who was the senior money man in the PLO is being held.
Members of el-Russein's family, who live in London, were given very sketchy information about his whereabouts. They say that he was acquainted intimately with the PLO's financial set up overseas. They say that there are some PA officials who are trying to prevent the treasurer from sharing this information with others. "El-Russein is a walking time bomb for senior PA officials, including Arafat himself," confirm Israeli sources.
El-Russein and Arafat are old acquaintances and their relationship is complex and charged. For years el-Russein was the PLO's chief bookkeeper. He is familiar with the smallest details of the organization's assets, how they are held, where, and who exactly has the right to sign. He is the man who knows the private bank accounts of the chairman and how PLO money has been spent from the early 1980s to this very day.
Arafat, according to reports, began to fear recently that el-Russein was about to open his mouth. And the distance from that to his abduction in Abu Dhabi was short.
The el-Russein family is not without means. The daughter, Mona Boanas, acquired infamy in British tabloids for her close relations with Culture and Sport Minister David Mellor. The family pulled strings and moved heaven and earth in an attempt to release el-Russein. Scotland Yard became involved (el-Russein is a British subject) as did the secret service, MI5, to a certain extent. The Palestinian Authority adamantly denied it was holding him. Until recently.
"PA intelligence agents are holding el-Russein in a secret hideaway," confirmed here, for the first time, the speaker of the Palestinian parliament and the chairman of "Samad," the PLO's economic arm, Ahmed Qurei, a.k.a. Abu Ala. According to Abu Ala, el-Russein was not abducted. "What do you mean abducted?! He was legally arrested in Abu Dhabi at an extradition request made by the PA and brought here. He took a loan of a few million dollars from us, and did not return it. We are demanding of him that he return the money."
Abu Ala's version is puzzling in light of the fact that there is no extradition treaty between Abu Dhabi and the Palestinian Authority. The Justice Ministry there did not publish any announcement on the matter, nor did the PA. Moreover, why should the PA, or the PLO, lend millions of dollars to its treasurer?
According to articles published in England, el-Russein was abducted indeed. The reason for his abduction may constitute further proof to allegations raised in the course of the years about corruption in the PLO's monetary set-up. "It's hard to believe that the PA's intelligence agents, who are busy with urgent matters, would get involved in such a complex operation, one that perhaps violates Abu Dhabi's sovereignty, if this was purely a loan," officials in Israel say. "Only a very important reason for the chairman could prompt him to take such an irregular measure."
For Israel, the importance of the information stored in the abducted treasurer's head is of even more urgency nowadays. The signing of the Oslo agreements in 1993 changed overnight the way the Israeli intelligence community viewed the PLO and the Palestinian's economic activity, rendering it irrelevant -- or at least that's what they thought. The economic department of the IDF Intelligence research branch and the parallel unit in the GSS nearly fell into degeneration. The PLO became a legitimate organization and its money management were no longer of any interest to Israel. "Money that goes in or out of the PA does not interest us," many in the security establishment were wont to say, "If the Palestinians choose to be corrupt, that's their business."
The el-Aksa Intifada changed this premise. The questions that had been central before the Oslo agreement, and which were neglected since, are now of interest Israel again. How is the Palestinian Authority funded? Does it make use of money given for welfare to purchase weapons or to augment its security organizations? Is it active inside the Green Line (particularly in Jerusalem and among Israeli Arabs) disguised or covered by other organizations? To what extent do organizations that do not bear the title PLO fund the Intifada? And how much money does the rais have in his pocket, in the territories and in banks overseas?
The answers to these questions could determine Arafat's standing in the territories, his ability to persevere and his ability to influence the next moves in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In his book, The Armed Struggle and the Search for a State, the most comprehensive and impressive research ever done on the PLO, Dr. Yazid Saigh describes the rare access el-Russein had to Arafat's most carefully kept secrets. The latter in 1984 appointed el-Russein, one of his oldest and most loyal friends, to the senior position in order to strengthen his control over the monetary and organizational set-up in Fatah, in particular. and the PLO in general. El-Russein made sure to transfer from the Palestinian National Fund to Arafat's personal account, every month, between 7.5 and 8 million dollars, for what was termed operational needs of the "Palestinian liberation army," a branch of the PLO.
A secret and internal Fatah investigation in 1993 found that to this account alone, el-Russein transferred USD 540 million. This account has never been under any sort of supervision and today as well, apparently, there are only three people who know exactly what happened to the money: Arafat, el-Russein, and the powerful secret consultant, Mohammed Rashid, the person in whom Arafat places full trust.
"When Arafat was the PLO chairman in exile, the organization's economy was run by a system of notes signed by the chairman," says Brig. Gen. Gadi Zohar, formerly a senior officer in IDF Intelligence Branch and the coordinator of government activities in the territories. He says "the person who truly knows the details and who handled the large projects is, of course, Abu Ala."
El-Russein and Abu Ala know each other well. Abu Ala's central position before the Oslo agreements, a position he holds to this day, was head of the "Samad" organization, or by its full name, "the Palestinian Sons of Shahids Project." In practice, this is the Palestinian counterpart to the Histadrut with an economic branch called "Samad el-Iktisadi," which over the years became a huge economic organization controlling assets of tremendous value.
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