Agents of Innocence

24

Beirut; September 1970

Rogers was shattered when he heard about the Rome meeting. He felt mute and helpless, like a father hearing the news that one of his children has died while in the custody of someone else. In the first several weeks he tried to reestablish contact with Jamal. He came up with various strategems, but nothing worked. It was difficult to locate somebody if you couldn’t acknowledge that you knew him.

The Palestinian remained silent and invisible. The Lebanese had no record of his returning to Beirut. Indeed, nobody had any record of his going anywhere. He had vanished. It was then that Rogers began to suspect that he had underestimated Jamal.

Rogers’s immediate problem was Fuad. The Lebanese was disgusted by what had happened, and for a time he disappeared, too. He eventually sent a message to Rogers from Greece-a postcard from Skiathos-but Rogers let him be. Fuad’s anger toward the United States would help reinforce his cover, Rogers assured Hoffman. Eventually, Fuad returned to Beirut and threw himself into the whirl of Lebanese leftist politics. He went to meetings of the Progressive Socialist Party, the National Syrian Socialist Party, the Independent Nasserite movement. He watched, he gathered information, he reported at regular intervals to Rogers. And he wondered, in his idle moments, why it was that the Americans were so accident-prone.

The PECOCK file went dead. There were meetings and discussions. The DDP’s office conducted a review of Marsh’s handling of the Rome meeting and concluded that he had badly bungled the case.

Much as Rogers disliked Marsh, he felt sorry for him now. His career was in limbo. He asked for a transfer to the newly formed staff that was handling congressional relations. It was said to be a growth area for the agency. There was some debate about the wisdom of that move, but Stone vouched for Marsh’s integrity. Rogers was pleased that his own arguments about how best to run the case had been vindicated, but that did him little good now. The agent had bolted.

In August, Stone made a swing through Beirut. Without ever admitting that his own recommendations had been wrong, he commended Rogers for his patience and good judgment. He also advised him that he would receive a promotion and advance to a higher pay grade as of September 1. It was Stone’s way of saying that he was sorry.

Jamal found the disastrous meeting in Rome oddly comforting. It clarified matters for him. The Americans seemed, once again, to fit the stereotype. They were arrogant and manipulative, interested in the Arabs only to the extent that they could get something from them. Jamal was also relieved to have broken off the ambiguous relationship he had begun with Rogers. He liked blacks and whites better than grays.

The Old Man was not so pleased when he received a coded account of the meeting from Jamal through the Kuwaiti diplomatic pouch from Bonn. The Old Man regarded the American channel as a project of the highest importance. He sent Jamal a return message advising him to continue building his network in Europe. He should forget about the Americans for now. Fatah would maintain contact with them through other intermediaries in London and Amman.

Though the Americans didn’t know it, Jamal was under their noses. He had remained in Europe, staying mostly in Rome, where the Fatah security service maintained a secret base of operations. The Fatah intelligence service, the Rasd, had safehouses there and secret sources of funds and even a local documentation office that produced forged travel documents. Jamal travelled occasionally through the summer, especially to Germany and France.

He was building an infrastructure. The Rome center operated under the cover of a bar called II Principe Rosso near the Via Veneto. It was financed by wealthy Palestinians in Kuwait and provided the Rasd a discreet way to move large sums of money. The Italian authorities, had they been curious, would have believed it was nothing more than another Roman establishment cooking the books and cheating on its taxes. On his trips to Paris and Munich, Jamal broadened the network. He developed local contacts and used them to rent apartments, open bank accounts, spot local talent, and do the thousands of other mundane things that provide a base for clandestine operations.

Jamal didn’t ask what it was all to be used for. The Old Man had told him that the movement might need such a network someday and dismissed further questions with a wave of his hand. Making his rounds in Europe, Jamal felt sometimes like a squirrel storing up nuts for a long winter whose advent nobody could predict.

The crisis in Jordan had been building for months. But the final confrontation was triggered by an act of terrorism so foolish and inflammatory that even Jamal wondered later whether it had been a deliberate act of provocation.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine launched a terrorist “spectacular” on September 6 by simultaneously hijacking two airplanes. They landed at an airstrip in Jordan that PFLP propagandists dubbed “The Airport of the Revolution.” On September 9, the PFLP hijacked another plane. The group held nearly five hundred hostages, many of them Americans.

The hijackings were like pointing a blowtorch at a pool of gasoline. The flames exploded from several directions at once. The United States, which had been urging the king for months to crack down against the fedayeen, moved the Sixth Fleet toward the Eastern Mediterranean. The king-who had been taunted in recent months by Bedouin officers who put brassieres on their tank antennas to signal their doubts about his resolve-finally ordered the army to crack down hard. There was the usual comic interlude of mediation by the Arab League. But the king finally gave the order to his army on September 17 to open fire with their tanks and heavy artillery.

The military pretensions of the guerrillas were quickly demolished. The Jordanian Army captured the Fatah headquarters on Nasser Square in minutes. The Old Man fled deeper into Jebel Hussein, then to the hilltop of Ashrafiyeh. In the first hours, the Fatah leader spent his time frantically calling his Jordanian political contacts to try to arrange a cease-fire. Fatah had no battle plan, no secure headquarters, no reliable communications other than open radio transmissions.

The one-sided battle lasted barely more than a week. It ended when the Old Man ignominiously slipped out of Amman, disguised in Bedouin robes as a member of a Kuwaiti mediating delegation. The Jordanians continued for more than a year mopping up what was left of the resistance until they eventually slaughtered the last band of die-hard fighters who had remained in the woods near Jerash and Ajlun in northern Jordan.

The Old Man had believed nearly to the end that he would win in Jordan. His folly was documented in stacks of handwritten memos and documents that were captured by the king’s Bedouin troops during the Battle of Amman.

It was a touching collection. A hand-drawn plan of Basman Palace, roughly sketched as if by a child, showing how the fedayeen could attack the Hashemite monarch in his chambers. A crude map showing how to attack a Jordanian military encampment on a road between Amman and Salt. Another rough sketch showing how to penetrate Jordanian barbed wire. Lists that endlessly detailed the responsibilities of various chiefs and subalterns in this most bureaucratic revolution. Handwritten notes from the Old Man himself that showed him scheming, double-dealing, manipulating, and playing politics-assuring the king all the while that the fedayeen hadn’t any designs on his throne.

After it was all over, the king gathered the most incriminating documents into a simple booklet called The Activities of the Fedayeen in Jordan, 1970. The booklet was printed only in Arabic and was never distributed in the West. But the king sent a copy to each of the twenty-one Arab heads of state. It was a catalogue of the Old Man’s perfidy and helped explain why, for years after, the other Arab leaders paid lip service to the Palestinian cause but didn’t fully trust the PLO chairman.

“Black September,” as the dazed Palestinians called the events in Jordan, seemed at first like a finale, but it was really only a prelude. It was a hurricane, which swept through the cracks and crevices of the Arab political world and left the foundations weak and vulnerable. One of the Fatah leaders who supervised the Rasd’s intelligence activities wrote later of a warning that he secretly transmitted to the Jordanian king after the events of Black September:

“If you strike the fedayeen in their last holdouts in Jerash and Ajlun, I’ll follow you to the end of the earth, to my dying breath, to give you the punishment you deserve.”

It must have sounded like a vain and idle threat. But it was the beginning of a nightmare that took the codename “Black September.”