When Abu Nidal turned up dead in Baghdad in 2002, Christopher Hitchens admitted feeling to a twinge of nostalgia as he had been one of the few Western journalists to have interviewed the legendary Palestinian hitman and all-round bad guy, albeit back in 1975 (when the picture at left was taken), before either of them achieved lasting fame.
When we met, he raved briefly about how he was the true leader of the Palestinians and then inquired if I knew Said Hammami. Mr Hammami was at that time the PLO envoy in London and had written a fine series of articles in the Times, exploring the possibility of mutual recognition with the Israelis. I replied that I did know him, and Abu Nidal told me to warn Hammami against the consequences of treason to the revolution. I passed on the threat, and not long afterwards Abu Nidal had him shot down in his office. This was the beginning of an orgiastic campaign of murder, extending through the airports of Rome and Vienna to Egypt and back to London, where the attempted killing of the Israeli ambassador in 1982 was the trigger for the Begin-Sharon invasion of Lebanon.
The PLO leadership always maintained that Abu Nidal was a double-agent, and he certainly killed a lot of their people (Patrick Seale wrote a very interesting book on this hypothesis). What's interesting for now is that, though he pimped in his time for a number of regimes from Syria to Libya, and was a mercenary as well as a psychopathic killer, it was invariably to Baghdad that he returned. He was spattered with the blood of civilians in innumerable countries, and with the blood of many Palestinian patriots, but Saddam's people were always glad to see him again.
Doubtless, Hitch will be experiencing a further dose of nostalgia this week as it has been reported that Abu Nidal also pimped for, you guessed it, good old Uncle Sam. According to Robert Fisk, writing in the Independent on 25 October:
Iraqi secret police believed that the notorious Palestinian assassin Abu Nidal was working for the Americans as well as Egypt and Kuwait when they interrogated him in Baghdad only months before the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Hitherto secret documents which are now in the hands of The Independent – written by Saddam Hussein's brutal security services for Saddam's eyes only – state that he had been "colluding" with the Americans and, with the help of the Egyptians and Kuwaitis, was trying to find evidence linking Saddam and al-Qa'ida.
President George Bush was to use claims of a relationship with al-Qa'ida as one of the reasons for his 2003 invasion, along with Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. Western reports were to dismiss Iraq's claim that Abu Nidal committed suicide in August 2002, suggesting that Saddam's own security services murdered him when his presence became an embarrassment for them. The secret papers from Iraq suggest that he did indeed kill himself after confessing to the "treacherous crime of spying against this righteous country".
I find it richly ironic although not in the least surprising — and I fully expect that Hitch will share these sentiments — that the raving psychopathic killer and the drink-soaked popinjay were working toward the same ultimate ends in the months leading up to the former's demise and the latter's writing of his obituary, namely, the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime. It may even be that Abu Nidal's reports on relations between the Baathists and Al Qaida formed the basis of Hitch's long-running claim that there was collusion between those two parties.
More ironic yet, in the very book of Searle's quoted by Hitch, there is a mention of another deeply embarrassing piece of pimpery, which Fisk describes thus:
His biographer Patrick Seale, who suggests that for some time Abu Nidal even worked for Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, has written of how, when he feared treachery in his own ranks, a suspected spy would be buried alive, fed through a tube for days and then – if Abu Nidal's "court" deemed death appropriate – a bullet would be fired down the tube.
If readers of this blog learn nothing else, I would at least like them to take away a spluttering of Japanese, as one never knows when a few well-chosen words will come in handy. Today's lesson is easy. When a Japanese person wants to warn others of a clear and present danger, such as a wild boar approaching at high speed down a steep mountain path or a geisha girl who has accidentally set her kimono on fire, the expression they are most likely to use is an urgent "Abunai-da!" And to the unacclimatized Western ear, this will in all likelihood be heard as the name of Hitch's old terrorist acquaintance, who was a "danger man" in more ways than one.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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