Re. Palestinian attacks against Americans, there is one other attack that shouldn't be swept under the rug. The slaying of two American embassy personnel on Arafat's order in 1973.
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Arafat's past comes back to haunt him
George Jonas
National Post
January 16, 2002
On March 3 last year, I picked up a message on my service: "Mr. Jonas, my name is Jim Welsh," the flat American voice said. "I'm curious about something regarding the Munich Olympic massacre that you wrote about many years ago. I worked in the Palestinian section of the National Security Agency, and I am curious whether you were aware of a particular aspect of the incident.
"The NSA is a cryptologic organization, dealing with, among other things, signals intelligence. I'm no specialist in clandestine affairs, but I did write a book about an Israeli counterterrorist team set up to avenge the Munich massacre of 1972. On March 6, after making some inquiries, I phoned back Mr. Welsh.
The event Mr. Welsh wanted to talk about was a notorious terrorist action that occurred in March, 1973. Black September, the same group that had murdered the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics the year before, invaded a diplomatic reception held at the Saudi Arabian embassy in Khartoum, Sudan. Holding a group of diplomats hostage, the commandos demanded the release of Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert Kennedy. When U.S. President Richard Nixon refused to negotiate, the terrorists murdered American Ambassador Cleo A. Noel Jr., his deputy, George Curtis Moore, and Belgian chargé d'affaires, Guy Eid.
Mr. Welsh asked whether during my research I came upon any evidence that this particular action was orchestrated by Yasser Arafat, then leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The answer was no; my book didn't deal with Khartoum at all. Then Mr. Welsh told me what he knew about the matter.
Apparently in early 1973, while seconded to the NSA's Palestinian desk from the Navy, Mr. Welsh was involved in a signals intercept between Mr. Arafat in Beirut and Khalil al-Wazir in the Khartoum office of al-Fatah. According to Mr. Welsh, the two were discussing an operation about to occur in Khartoum. In addition to logistics, the intercepts revealed the code name for the operation. It was Nahr al-Bard or Cold River.
Based on the intercept, a warning was duly issued on Feb. 28, 1973, but owing to some mix-up between the NSA and the State Department, it was downgraded from "Flash" precedence to a communication of lesser urgency. As a result, by the time it reached Khartoum on March 2, the three diplomats were dead.
When Mr. Welsh decided to talk, 27 years after the event, few people were inclined to listen. He had no proof. The mainstream media weren't interested and neither were the congressional committees he approached. If the matter was initially hushed up just to conceal an organizational snafu -- i.e., the failure to warn Ambassador Noel -- or to protect the security of signal intercepts, by the spring of 2001, everyone had too much invested in Mr. Arafat -- Nobel Prize laureate, Israel's ostensible "partner for peace" under the Oslo agreement and frequent guest in the Clinton White House -- to rock the boat over some old murders of U.S. diplomats.
Knowing that tapes had been prepared of the intercepts, Mr. Welsh was trying to find out where they might be stored. He approached NSA, the State Department and the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act, with no success. He asked writers and journalists who might have come across the material while researching other matters. On the Internet, he queried the Intelligence Forum, a bulletin board for retired agents and intelligence buffs, as well as the AFSA Forum, maintained for the American Foreign Service Association.
"Has the AFSA ever called for an examination of the tapes of Yasser Arafat planning and directing the murders of Amb. Noel and DCM Moore in Khartoum in 1973?" read Mr. Welsh's plaintive post on March 30, 2001. "If not, why has the AFSA not done so inasmuch as the evidence of these murders is in the possession of the U.S. government?"
Mr. Welsh's quest generated no echo. The journalist Joseph Farah did raise the subject on WorldNetDaily.com early in 2001, as did Sidney Zion in The Israel Report, but the mainstream continued to be silent. Three events had to pass before a change in the climate. The most important one occurred on Sept. 11. The second came on Dec. 12, when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon finally declared Arafat "irrelevant" to the peace process. The third did not happen until Jan. 3, when the 4,000-tonne freighter Karine-A, carrying 50 tonnes of arms destined for the Palestinian Authority, was boarded by Israeli commandos.
With that, the mirage of Oslo finally vanished. On Jan. 10, The Wall Street Journal ran an article by Ion Mihai Pacepa, essentially confirming Mr. Welsh's story. "James Welsh, a former intelligence analyst for the National Security Agency, has told a number of U.S. journalists that the NSA had secretly intercepted the radio communications between Yasser Arafat and Abu Jihad during the PLO operation against the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, including Arafat's order to kill Ambassador Noel," wrote Mr. Pacepa, who had much more to rely on than just Mr. Welsh's account."
In May 1973, during a private dinner with Ceausescu," Mr. Pacepa recalled, "Arafat excitedly bragged about his Khartoum operation. 'Be careful,' Ion Gheorghe Maurer, a Western-educated lawyer who had just retired as Romanian prime minister, told him. 'No matter how high-up you are, you can still be convicted for killing and stealing.' 'Who, me? I never had anything to do with that operation,' Arafat said, winking mischievously."
Mr. Pacepa had been in an excellent position to observe the real Mr. Arafat. Until his defection in the summer of 1978, he had been the Romanian Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu's chief of secret police. As head of DIE (Departmentual de informatii externe), Lt.-Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa used to be one of Mr. Arafat's mission controllers while the PLO leader orbited the Kremlin.
The difference between a terrorist in vogue and a terrorist who has become irrelevant is striking. Gone are White House dinners, Papal audiences and Nobel Prize receptions. They're replaced by The Wall Street Journal beginning to rattle old skeletons in the once fashionable murderer's closet.
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