The Foreign Service Journal, June 2009

36 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 0 9 in the murders: That intercept of the order to kill was almost certainly the work of the National Security Agency, which was closely monitoring the sit- uation; if the Belgians had gotten it from some other source, they would have surely shared it at once with the U.S. Assuming that others up the line who had to know did know, I never thought to ask at the time. Later research backed up that as- sumption. The Arlington National Cemetery Web site (www.arlingtoncemetery.com ) credits Israeli intelligence with intercepting the order to kill and forwarding it at once to Washington. (Elsewhere, in a chilling reminder of former National Security Council counterterrorism ad- viser Richard Clarke’s allegation that serious intelligence warnings of an attack on the U.S. were ignored prior to 9/11, former NSA Middle East analyst James Welsh has for several years been testifying that in late February 1973 he sent a flash message to State, for forwarding to Khar- toum, concerning a credible warning of an imminent PLO operation in Sudan, which inexplicably was never passed on. See www.wnd.com and www.frontpagemag.com for reports on Welsh’s efforts to draw official attention to this matter.) In any case, a 1973 State Department document de- classified and released on May 4, 2006, leaves little doubt about what was known and who knew it (www.state.gov/ documents/organization/67584.pdf): “The Khartoum op- eration was planned and carried out with the full knowl- edge and personal approval of Yasir (sic) Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the head of Fatah. Fatah representatives in Khartoum participated in the attack, using a Fatah vehicle to transport the terrorists to the Saudi Arabian embassy.” (The same document, in- cidentally, also notes that “no effort was spared, within the capabilities of the Sudanese government, to secure the freedom of the hostages.”) A Secret Revealed Arafat’s central role in the assassinations was the se- cret I already knew, thanks only to that friendly briefing I was given in 1974. The devastating secret I did not know showed up in the papers of former CIA Director Richard Helms released in August 2008. These files make clear that in 1973, within days of the Khartoum murders, the CIA had been authorized to pursue negotiations with a trusted Arafat aide. Witness this excerpt from a mem- orandum of July 18, 1973, from CIA official Robert Ames to Helms, the U.S. ambassador to Iran at the time, who, several of the papers make clear, was in constant contact with Henry Kissinger (www.foia.cia.gov ): MEMORANDUM FOR: The Ambassador SUBJECT: Contacts with the Fatah Leadership During my stay in Beirut on 9-10 July [1973] I con- tacted a close associate of Fatah leader Yasir (sic) Arafat on the basis of a letter he sent to me requesting a meeting. As you know, I had a useful meeting with this fellow in the past and his position in Fatah is fully established. ... My contact said that significant changes had taken place in the Pales- tinian Movement since I had last seen him in early March 1973. He reiterated what he said at that time, which was shortly after the Khartoummurders. The fedeyeen have no plans to go after individual Americans or American inter- ests; Khartoum had made its point of causing the USG to take fedeyeen terrorist activity seriously. He again insisted that no blackmail was intended; the men would have been killed in any event. He said that, while he could not guarantee complete immunity from ter- rorist acts, no one can stop a determined individual gun- man. Arafat wanted the USG to know that he had “put the lid on” American operations by the fedeyeen and that the lid would stay on as long as both sides could maintain a dia- logue, even though they might have basic disagreements. This was not a threat — i.e., talk to us or else—but a recog- nition that talking was necessary. The Iron Rule Defenders of bothNixon and the iron rule that demands there be no negotiations, no bargaining, no deals with ter- rorists may want to seize on the assurances of those terror- ists that “the men would have been killed in any event,” although that could just as easily have been an Arafat ges- ture for getting Nixon and Kissinger off the hook. Does it really matter? Senior American officials, who would later fulminate over the release of the terrorists by the Sudanese, tolerated F O C U S We were asking others to deal with terrorists while we maintained an uncompromising position.