The Levanter

Chapter 1

Lewis Prescott

May 14

This is Michael Howell’s story and he tells most of it himself. I think that he should have told all of it.

He may not be the most persuasive of advocates in his own cause, and as the central figure in what has come to be known as the Green Circle Incident, he is very much the defendant; but he alone can answer the charges and give the necessary explanations. It is upon his own words that he will be judged. In his sort of predicament declarations of sympathy and understanding from outsiders are apt to sound like pleas in mitigation. Instead of strengthening his case, my contributions could very well weaken it. I told him so.

He, however, did not agree.

“Supporting evidence, Mr. Prescott,” he said earnestly; “that’s what I need from you. Tell them what you know about Ghaled. Give it to them thick and strong. I can tell them what happened to me, but they have to understand what I was up against. They’ll believe you.”

“My opinion of a man like Ghaled, formed in the course of a single interview, isn’t evidence.”

“It will have the weight of evidence. I don’t expect you openly to side with me, Mr. Prescott — that would be asking too much — but don’t, I beg you, play into the hands of my enemies.”

Fruity and false; this was the Levanter speaking. I gave him a bleak look.

“I am not playing into anybody’s hands, Mr. Howell, least of all your enemies. I would have thought I had made that sufficiently clear.”

“To me, yes.” He held up a finger. “But what about the public and the news media? How can I vindicate myself, and the Agence Howell, when important independent witnesses, those who know the truth, choose to remain silent?”

“I wrote a three-thousand-word feature on the subject, Mr. Howell,” I reminded him. “I don’t call that remaining silent.”

“With respect, Mr. Prescott, your Green Circle article gave only a smattering of the truth.” He began wagging the raised finger at me. “If I am to be believed, I must tell it all. In that telling I need your help. I ask you to stand up with me and be counted.”

I paused before replying: “You may find yourself wishing that I had remained seated.”

“I am prepared to take that risk. What we have to do between us, Mr. Prescott, is to tell the whole truth. That is all, the whole truth.”

He made the telling of the whole truth sound very simple. He may even have believed that, in his case, it was.

For the record: at the time of which I am now writing I had neither met Mr. Howell nor even heard of his existence.

As a senior foreign correspondent working for the Post-Tribune syndicated news service, I am based in Paris. Two months prior to the Incident I had been assigned temporarily to the Middle East to cover the visit of a U.S. Secretary of State making yet another attempt to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. The tour had ended in Beirut and it had been there that I had encountered Melanie Hammad.

My wife and I had met her originally in Paris at the apartment of mutual friends. Knowing her to be a free-lance contributor to French and American fashion magazines, I had been surprised to find her sitting next to me at a Lebanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs press conference.

“A little off your usual beat, aren’t you?” I asked after we had exchanged greetings.

She raised her eyebrows. “This is my home. Didn’t you know that I was an Arab?”

“I knew that you were from Lebanon.”

In Paris she had been an attractive young woman with sultry eyes who dressed well, spoke several languages, and knew the high-fashion people. She had been helpful to my wife in the matter of getting special discounts on perfume, I remembered.

“Here,” she said firmly, “I am Arab first and a Lebanese second.”

“Muslim or Christian?”

“My parents are Maronite Christian, so I suppose I am, too.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “At present I am observing for the Palestinian Action Force.”

“I see.” I assumed that she was joking and added with a smile: “Unofficially, I take it.”

“I could scarcely do so officially.” She did not return the smile. “We could talk about it later if you wish.” Her fine eyes became intense. “I think you might be interested, Mr. Prescott.”

I hesitated. She seemed to be serious, but the only Palestinian Action Force I knew of was a splinter guerrilla group led by a man named Salah Ghaled with a gangster reputation. It was difficult to think of the elegant Miss Hammad as in any way connected with him. Still, I was intrigued.

“All right,” I said. “I’m at the St. Georges. If you’re free we might have lunch.”

The syndicate’s Middle East bureau has an office in Beirut. The man in charge is an Englishman named Frank Edwards who also acts as a stringer for one or two British newspapers. Before meeting Miss Hammad for lunch I made some inquiries.

Edwards laughed. “So, our Melanie’s picked on you, has she? I thought she was after the New York Times man.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She’s press agent for the Palestinian Action Force.”

“But my wife and I know her. She’s one of the Paris fashion girls.”

“In Paris she may be a fashion girl, but in this part of the world she’s a Palestinian activist. Ghaled recruited her when she was a student at the Sorbonne and he was still with Al Fatah. Her old man’s rich, of course, or the police would be leaning on her. He owns that new office building you can see from the St. Georges and a few more like it as well She doesn’t have to work for a living, and, anyway, where Ghaled is concerned it’s love. We’ve got loads of stuff on them both. Do you want me to get it out?”

“I think I’ll see what sort of a pitch she makes first.”

“I can tell you that now. Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice. Moderation is another name for weakness. I’m told that she can be very persuasive. You get handed an expurgated version of the PAF manifesto and, to warm the cockles of your heart, a mimeographed copy of the 'Thoughts of Salah Ghaled.'”

“She could have given me that in Paris.”

“There you weren’t writing about the Middle East.”

However, in one thing Edwards had been mistaken. Melanie Hammad had more to offer than pamphlets.

“You have,” she informed me, “a reputation for being truly objective and independent, of not accepting uncritically a consensus of opinion, even when it would be prudent to do so.”

That’s very flattering, Miss Hammad, but I hope you’re not suggesting that I am in any way unique.”

“I am not so stupid. There are other Americans like you, of course. But they are not often here, and when they are they have no time to listen. I know what is said about the Palestinian Action Force. It is said that they are criminals using the Palestinian cause for their own ends, that Salah Ghaled deserted Al Fatah when they were under attack, that he is no fighter for freedom but a mere gangster. You may be inclined to believe these things. You will at least have taken note of them. But you may also question and wonder if this received view, this consensus, may be wrong. Given the chance, I think that you would prefer to form your own opinion.”

“But since nobody has asked me to form an opinion about Mr. Ghaled and his Palestinian Action Force …” I left the rest of the sentence in the air.

“I am asking you.”

“Unfortunately you are not my New York editor.”

“You have wide discretion. Your wife told me so. I am speaking of an important personal interview by you, Lewis Prescott. It would be exclusive, of course.”

I thought for a moment.

“Where would this exclusive interview take place?”

“Here in Lebanon. In secret naturally. Great discretion would have to be observed.”

“When would it take place?”

“If you agree today, I think I can arrange it within twenty-four hours.”

“Does Mr. Ghaled speak English or French?”

“Not well. I would be the interpreter. You have only to say the word, Mr. Prescott.”

“I see. Well, I’ll let you know later today.”

Edwards whistled when I told him of the proposal “So Ghaled wants to come out of the woodwork!”

“Has he been interviewed much before? Hammad mentioned that she had done pieces on him.”

“That was when he was an Al Fatah man. Since he started the PAF caper he’s been underground most of the time. The Jordanians put a price on his head and the PLO people in Cairo tried to persuade the Syrians to crack down on him. The Syrians wouldn’t quite go along with them on that, but he’s had to keep his nose clean there and be careful. Though he’s based in Syria he never sends his goon squads into action on Syrian territory. He’s poison here, of course. He could use an improved image, a little respectability.”

“Frank, you’re not suggesting, I hope, that, to please pretty Miss Melanie Hammad, I’d do a clean-up job on him.”

Edwards held his hands up defensively. “No, Lew, but I am reminding you that a personal interview of the kind you do tends to become a profile of the institution with which the person interviewed is generally identified. If you were to do a job like that in this case you’d be giving Ghaled a lift, the sort of international identity that he doesn’t at present have.”

“If I were out to do a piece on the Palestinian guerrilla movement, which I am not, would I choose Ghaled as representative of it?”

“Representative?” He looked blank for a moment, then shrugged. There are ten separate Palestinian guerrilla movements, more if you include groups like the PAF. You might do worse than choose Ghaled. He’s been in one or other of the movements since he was a boy.”

“Isn’t he a maverick, though, a far-out fanatic?”

“They’re all far-out fanatics. By hatred out of illusion, the lot of them. They have to be. They couldn’t have survived otherwise.”

“No moderates at all? What about Yasir Arafat?”

“He isn’t a guerrilla, he’s a politician. He’s against Palestinians killing Palestinians instead of Israelis. If he ever so much as hinted that a peaceful settlement with Israel might someday be possible, he’d have his throat cut within the hour. And it would be someone like Ghaled who’d order the cutting. Ghaled might even do the job himself.”

“Well, I can see that you think he’s interesting.”

“Yes, Lew, I do.” He screwed up his eyes. “You see, since the Second Betrayal…”

“Come again?”

“That’s what Ghaled calls the '71 Jordanian government crackdown. The first crackdown, in ‘70, when Hussein’s army turfed the guerrillas out of Amman, was the Great Betrayal. The Second Betrayal was the mopping-up operation that followed a year later. A lot of the steam has gone out of the guerrilla movement since then, at least as far as the Al Fatah and the PFLP are concerned. You could say that events have proved Ghaled’s original point for him. That alone makes him interesting. Personally I happen to think that he’s got something more.”

“A hunch, or reasons?”

“A hunch. But if Melanie had asked me, I’d have jumped at the chance of an interview.”

“Okay them. I’ll jump. We’d better wire New York. Can we put Ghaled’s name in a cable from here?”

“Not unless you want to be tailed by the police.”

“Is it that bad?”

“They’d probably tip off the local Al Fatah bureau, too. I told you. He’s poison.”

It took me some two hours with the bureau files to find out why.

Salah Ghaled had been born in Haifa, the eldest son of a respected Arab physician, in 1930, when Palestine was under the British Mandate. His mother had been from Nazareth. He had attended private schools and was said to have been an exceptionally gifted pupil. In 1948 he had been accepted as a student by the Al-Azhar University in Cairo. He was to have studied medicine there, as his father had. That program, however, had been interrupted by the first Arab-Israeli war.

The attacking forces were those of the Jordanian Arab Legion and an irregular Arab Liberation Army. On the defensive at first, but later counterattacking, was the Haganah, the Jewish army fighting to preserve the newly proclaimed State of Israel. Charges of atrocities committed against noncombatants were made freely by both sides. An Arab exodus began.

Over eight hundred thousand Arabs went; some in panic, some because they thought that they were leaving the field clear for an advancing Army of Liberation. All expected soon to return to their land and their homes. Few ever succeeded in doing so. The Palestinian refugee problem had been born. Among those early refugees had been the Ghaled family from Haifa.

They suffered less than many of their fellow refugees; Ghaled senior was a doctor and had money. After a few weeks in a temporary camp the family moved to Jericho. At that point Salah could have gone to Cairo and the university as planned. Instead, and apparently with his father’s blessing, he joined the Arab Liberation irregulars. This was the army which had boasted that it would “drive the Jews into the sea”.

When, a year later, the war ended, with the Israelis more firmly established on dry land than ever and the Arab forces in hopeless disarray, Salah Ghaled had just turned eighteen. He had fought in an army which had been not only defeated but humiliated as well. Both defeat and humiliation had to be avenged. In Cairo, where he at last went to pursue his medical studies, he was soon drawn into student politics. According to a statement he made some years later, he there became a Marxist. He never qualified as a doctor. In 1952 he went to work as a “medical aide” in an UNWRA Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan.

The guerrilla movement was in its infancy then, but he seems to have been a natural leader and was soon heading his own band of “infiltrators”, as they were called by the Israelis, in raids across the Jordanian border into Israel. As he was still on the UNWRA payroll as a medical aide, it was necessary for him to use a cover name. The one he chose was El-Matwa — Jackknife — and before long it had achieved some notoriety. One of Jackknife’s exploits, the shooting-up of an Israeli bus, was believed to have provoked a shattering Israeli reprisal raid. Among the Palestinian militants, success was measured by the violence of the enemy’s reaction. Jackknife’s reputation as a local leader was now established. When Egyptian intelligence officers came looking for Palestinians who knew the border country and would be willing to serve with the fedayeen, Ghaled was among the select few who were approached.

The Egyptian fedayeen were heavily armed commando forces. Operating from Egyptian and Jordanian bases, they penetrated deep into Israeli territory, murdering civilians, mining roads, and blowing up installations. The Sinai campaign of 1958 put an end to their activities, but among the Palestinians the fedayeen idea persisted. The guerrilla groups which now began to be formed were trained and organized by men like Ghaled who had soldiered with the Egyptian fedayeen. One of the larger groups became known as Al Fatah, and Ghaled was one of its early leaders.

In 1963 he was wounded in the left leg during an Israeli reprisal raid. The wound was serious and the early treatment of it inadequate. Toward the end of the year his father advised him to go to Cairo for corrective surgery.

His presence in Cairo at that time had decisive effects on his future. The Palestine Liberation Organization was in the process of being formed there, and Ghaled, convalescing after the operation on his leg, was drawn into the discussions. As an Al Fatah leader of note he was consulted about the PLO’s new official field force, the Palestine Liberation Army, which was to be armed with Soviet weapons. Though he refused the battalion command which was offered to him, he was appointed a member of the PLO’s new “Awakening Committee”.

Under the PLO charter this committee was to devote itself to “the upbringing of the new generations both ideologically and spiritually so that they may serve their country and work for the liberation of their homeland”. During his convalescence Ghaled was given the job of lecturing to groups of Arab students attending, or about to attend, Western universities, and of leading discussions. It was at one of these student meetings that he met Melanie Hammad.

There were two articles by her in the Ghaled file. The first had been published by a French left-wing quarterly and was a dull restatement of the Palestinian case enlivened by direct quotes from Ghaled. One of them, a comment on the Balfour Declaration, gave me a foretaste of the sort of thing I might have to listen to.

“The British are unbelievable,” Ghaled had said. “They promised to provide the Zionists with a national home in Palestine and in the same breath promised that they would do so without infringing on the rights of the existing inhabitants. How could they? Did they think that, because they were dealing with the Holy Land, they could count on another of those Christian miracles of loaves and fishes?”

The other Hammad piece, also in French, had been written in 1933 for a big-circulation newspaper noted for its sensationalism. In this Melanie Hammad had let herself go. Ghaled, then commanding an Al Fatah training camp in the Gaza Strip, was eulogized as the white knight sans peur et sans reproche of the Palestinian cause, a resolute yet honourable fighter for freedom, a Nasser-like politico-military leader of the kind needed if there were ever to be true unity of purpose in Palestine.

Edwards had written a note in red ink across the clippings: PLO Cairo spokesman went out of his way to dismiss this estimate of G. as “grossly distorted” and said that it “impugned his loyalty to the Palestinian cause”. Hammad dubbed “irresponsibly inaccurate and naive”. Picture declared phony.

The picture referred to, which appeared with the article, showed a tall man in desert uniform studying a map spread out on the tailgate of a truck. He was wearing a head cloth which shaded most of his features. All you could see was a prominent, somewhat aquiline nose and a thin moustache. Since there was no authenticated photograph of Ghaled in the file with which to compare it, I had no way of judging its possible phoniness. What interested me more was the suggestion, implicit in the spokesman’s strictures, that in 1966 Ghaled’s loyalty to the PLO was already suspect; I looked for evidence of disciplinary action of some sort.

All I found was an announcement put out by the PLO radio some weeks later (November ‘66) that Ghaled had been relieved of his duties as a member of the Awakening Committee in order to “concentrate upon his operational duties with Al Fatah in the field”. In other words he had been told to stay clear of politics, stop playing personality games, and get back to killing Israelis.

Presumably they believed that this public admonishment had brought Ghaled to heel; and, presumably, his general demeanour encouraged them in that belief. Subsequent references to him in PLO communiqués were laudatory in tone. His sudden turnaround, when the crunch came in Jordan, had obviously taken them by surprise.

Following the Six-Day War with Israel and the fresh influx of West Bank refugees which it produced, tension in Jordan between the government of the Hashemite King Hussein and the Palestinians had grown steadily. Half the population of that small country were now Palestinian refugees. The Al Fatah and other refugee guerrilla organizations began to present the king and his government with a serious challenge to their authority. In 1970 the Palestinians were warned by Ghaled that the Jordanian government was planning to make a unilateral peace settlement with Israel. It was time, he declared, to take over the government in Amman and make it their own. Quite suddenly he became the most militant and vociferous of the anti-Hashemite Palestinians. In a speech to his fedayeen, reported by the Damascus guerrilla radio, he had thrown down the gauntlet. “By Allah,” he had shouted, “we will wade through a sea of blood if need be. I tell you, comrades, we must risk everything now for our honour.”

From the self-styled Marxist, Salah Ghaled, this sort of hysteria was new. Frank Edwards thought that the fact that Ghaled’s parents had once again become refugees when the West Bank was occupied, and that Ghaled senior had subsequently died in an UNWRA camp, had precipitated the change. I wasn’t so sure. It seemed to me more likely that Ghaled had decided that the moment had come for him to make his bid for power, and that the hysteria had been calculated.

Anyway, he got the sea of blood he had called for. When he and the other Al Fatah guerrilla leaders attempted to take control of the capital, Amman, King Hussein ordered the Jordanian army to stop them, and the army obeyed.

At this point, the series of events which Ghaled was later to denounce collectively as “the Great Betrayal” took place. Alarmed by the spectacle of what was, in effect, an Arab civil war, the PLO Central Committee hastened to intervene. Negotiating with the king and his government, they secured a cease-fire, then an extension of it, and finally signed an agreement under which all Palestinian guerrilla forces would be withdrawn; to begin with from Amman, and later from all other urban areas in Jordan. This tragic conflict, it was said, had been the result of Israeli provocations designed to incite brother to fight brother instead of the common Zionist enemy.

Ghaled was not the only guerrilla leader to defy the Central Committee by refusing to honour either the cease-fire or the withdrawal agreement, and sporadic fighting continued in and around Amman for many weeks; but, with the acceptance of the agreement by most of the Al Fatah forces, the Jordanian army was free to concentrate on and to isolate those that remained. One by one, as they saw their positions becoming untenable, Ghaled and the rest had slipped away, taking their men, their arms, and their equipment with them.

Ghaled and his fedayeen went north, first to a base at Ramtha near the Syrian border, and then, when the Jordanian army moved to clear that area too, into Syria itself. Most of the dissident leaders, having taken to the Jordanian hills to await developments, now set about composing their differences with the Central Committee. Not Ghaled, however; he remained loudly defiant.

From a subsidiary camp in Lebanon he proclaimed his independence of the PLO “running dogs” in the Al Fatah and his support for the Maoist-Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. At the same time he announced the formation of the super-militant Palestinian Action Force.

I found a copy of the original PAF manifesto in the file. It was subtitled, Who Are Our Enemies? Stripped of all the dialectical circumlocutions, his answer to that question could be summed up as, “Those who now falsely profess to be our friends”.

How were we to distinguish between false professions of faith and true ones? Simple. All would be regarded as suspect until tested in secret. How tested? The PAF had its own security service and its own sources of information. It would conduct its own secret courts-martial. Lists of convicted traitors would be published; PAF purification squads would carry out the court’s sentences. Only thus could the Palestinian movement be purged of the poison of the Great Betrayal and become purified.

What Ghaled meant by “purification” and “purified” had soon become clear. Only five or six well publicized “courts-martial” death sentences and “purification” squad executions had been necessary. After those demonstrations there were few men of sense and substance in the Fertile Crescent who did not see that it was better to contribute to the PAF’s fighting fund than to run the risk of being named on one of Ghaled’s purification lists.

The PLO denounced him as a criminal extortionist. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine dissociated itself from the PAF and its “revisionist” leader Ghaled’s “adventurism”. The Jordanian government outlawed him. In Lebanon he was wanted on various felony charges. As Frank Edwards had said, he was poison.

“As far as I can see,” I said, “this character is completely unrepresentative of the Palestine guerrilla movement. I’m not talking about what he used to be when he was with Al Fatah, Frank. I’m talking about what he has become lately.”

He nodded. “I Suppose it’s the extortion bit that you don’t like. Would you feel that he was more representative if he planted bombs on foreign airliners or in Israeli supermarkets?”

“Yes I would.”

“I can tell you one thing. This extortion thing wasn’t started to line his own pockets. The PLO cut off his supplies and subsidies. He had to turn somewhere. Maybe the Russkis are helping him, maybe the Chinese, but he still has to have some cash to operate.”

“But to operate what? Does he really believed that he is serving the Palestinian cause with this purification racket of his?”

“No, that’s a means to an end.”

“What end?”

“Why not ask him? You talk as it you already know what he’s become lately — a mere extortionist. That’s the PLO line and I don’t buy it I don’t know what he’s become. That’s why I’m interested in him, and curious. I’d like to know what he’s up to.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll try and find out.”

I called Melanie Hammad then and told her to go ahead with the arrangements for the interview.

“At once,” she said. “I am pleased to be of service, Mr. Prescott. There will, of course, be certain conditions.”

I would have been surprised if there had not been. “What conditions, Miss Hammad?”

“The interview must not be published until two days after it has taken place. Security, you understand. And there can be no photographs taken.”

“Okay. Accepted. What else?”

“The interview must be tape-recorded.”

“I don’t use a tape recorder for interviews. I take notes.”

“Salah will wish it. He will not ask you to submit your copy to him before you file your story. Obviously that would be difficult but he will wish for an exact record of what is said.”

“Very well.”

“I will supply the two recorders.”

“Two?”

“You also must have an identical record.”

“I don’t need one.”

“That will be Salah’s wish.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“I will telephone you tomorrow with arrangements for the following day.”

We met in the early afternoon at the museum in Beirut — ”I am known to too many people at the St. Georges Hotel, Mr. Prescott” — and two tape recorders on the front seat of the car were committed to my care.

Miss Hammad drove as if we were being pursued. The mountain road we were soon climbing was narrow and poorly surfaced, the Buick softly sprung. Clutching the armrest as she flung the car through the hairpin bends, I began to wonder if, for the first time in my life, I was going to be carsick. I was about to protest that we had made good time from Beirut and that there was really no need to go so fast when she braked hard. I had to grab the two tape recorders on the seat beside me to stop them slithering to the floor.

We had just come through a very sharp bend onto a short, level stretch. I saw now that there was a roadblock ahead of us. It consisted of a striped barrier which could be raised and lowered, and, to prevent anyone crashing the barrier, a staggered arrangement of concrete posts on either side of it. A concrete guardhouse with weapon slits crouched beside the barrier, and three Lebanese army men with sub-machine guns stood outside. As the car rolled to a halt one of the soldiers lounged forward.

By the time he reached the car Miss Hammad had her window down and was talking fast. The soldier talked back while looking at me. I wasn’t unduly concerned. I didn’t speak or understand Arabic myself, but I had heard enough of it spoken to know that, although Miss Hammad’s conversation with the soldier might sound like an exchange of threats or insults, it could very well be an exchange of pleasantries. This judgment was proved correct when she gaily laughed at something he had said, wound up the window, and was waved on past the barrier.

“What was all that about?” I asked.

“We have entered the military zone,” she said. “Because this is near the Syrian and Israeli borders the army polices the area. You see how it is? Those cowards in Beirut use the army to oppress the fedayeen.”

“Those fellows didn’t seem very oppressive. They didn’t even ask for our papers.”

“Oh, they know me and they know the car. It is my father’s. He has a chalet in the hills here. I said that you were an American friend of his.”

“Is that where we’re going, your father’s chalet?”

“Only until it is time to go to the rendezvous. That is at another place.”

We had passed through an Arab village and were climbing steeply again. Although it was May, up there in the mountains the snow was still unmelted in the gullies. Soon after we left the roadblock behind us she switched on the car heater.

“You didn’t tell me I might be needing a topcoat,” I said.

“Someone at the hotel might have thought it curious if you had left with an overcoat to go to the museum in Beirut. But it is all right. There are coats at the chalet that we can use.”

The chalet proved to be a sizable house with servants to welcome us and a wood fire blazing in a big stone fireplace. Sandwiches had been prepared and there was a well-stocked bar.

“I know it is early for dinner,” she said, “but we shall get nothing to eat where we are going.”

“Which is where?”

“There is a village two kilometres from here, and above it an old fort. That is the rendezvous. What will you drink?”

“Can I say that the interview took place in an old fort near the Syrian frontier?”

“Of course. There are dozens of them in the mountains here.” She smiled. “You could call it a ruined Crusader castle if you like.”

“Why?”

“It would sound more romantic.”

“Is it a ruined Crusader castle?”

“No, it was built by Muslims.”

Then it’s an old fort. Thanks, I’ll have Scotch.”

Over the drinks she tried to pump me about the sort of questions I was going to ask. I replied vaguely and as if I had not given the matter much thought. She became irritated, though she tried not to show it. Conversation flagged. I ate most of the sandwiches.

When the sun began to set she said that it was time to go. She donned a voluminous, poncho like garment, which looked as if it had been made out of an old horse blanket, and black felt ankle boots. I was handed a fur-lined anorak belonging to her father that was uncomfortably tight across the shoulders. The Buick had been put away and we travelled now in a Volkswagen fitted with snow tyres. She had a haversack with her. I carried the tape recorders on my knees. The two kilometre journey over weather-scoured tracks took twenty minutes.

We stopped just short of the village by a ramshackle stone barn that smelled strongly of animals.

“From here we must walk,” she said and produced a flashlight from her haversack.

It was still light enough to see the outline of the fort; a squat, ugly ruin perched on a ledge of rock jutting out from the hillside above. It wasn’t far, but the way up to it was rough and we needed the flashlight. In some places there were stone steps and these were dangerous because most of them were broken or loose. Unimpeded by having to carry tape recorders, Miss Hammed bounded ahead, however, and was obviously impatient when I failed to keep up with her. Finally, as the track straightened out and we approached the scrub-covered glacis of the fort, she told me to wait and went on alone. At the foot of the glacis she made some sort of signal with the flashlight. When it was answered from above she called to me that all was well. I plodded on up. By then I didn’t much care whether all was well or not. My chief concern was to avoid spraining an ankle.

The stone archway which had been the entrance to the fort had long ago collapsed, and stunted bushes grew in the rubble. There was, however, a path of sorts through it, to which she guided me with the light. There was an Arab in a black wool cape waiting. He motioned me forward with the lantern he carried.

Inside there was more rubble and then a clearing. One of the old walls was still intact, and against it had been built, probably by some local goatherd using stone from the ruins, a lean-to. It had a roof made of bits of rusty iron sheeting patched with tar paper, and a door with cracks in it through which light filtered. In the clearing beside the hut were tethered three donkeys.

“I will go first,” said Miss Hammad. “Give me the recorders, please, and wait here.”

She said something in Arabic to the man in the cape, who grunted an assent and moved up beside me as she went to the hut. When the light spilled out from the opening door he peered at me curiously and licked his lips. He had a gray stubble on his jaw and very bad teeth. He smelled bad, too. He asked me in halting, guttural French if I spoke Arabic. I said I didn’t and that was that. Two minutes went by, then Miss Hammad reappeared and beckoned to me.

The light in the hut came from a kerosene pressure lamp standing on a battered oil drum. The only other furniture consisted of a crude bench-like table and two stools; rags had been spread to cover the earth floor for the occasion and a smell of cigar smoke almost masked those of kerosene and goat.

As I entered, the cigar-smoker, who wore a sheepskin coat and a knitted wool cap, rose from one of the stools and inclined his head.

“Mr. Prescott,” Miss Hammad announced with awe. “I am permitted to present to you the commander of the Palestinian Action Force, Comrade-leader Salah Ghaled.”

He was not handsome; he had a beak of a nose that was too big for his head and a thin moustache that emphasized the disproportion, but in his hawk like way he was impressive. The eyes, heavily lidded, were both keen and wary. Although I knew that he had only just turned forty, he seemed to me to be a much older man. A very fit one, however; every movement he made was precise and economical, and those of his hands had a curious grace about them.

He inclined his head fractionally and then straightened up.

“Good evening, Mr. Prescott,” he said in strongly accented, hesitant English. “It is good of you to make this journey. Please sit down.” His cigar hand motioned me to the second stool.

Thank you, Mr. Ghaled,” I replied. “I am glad of this opportunity of meeting you.”

We sat down on the stools.

“I regret,” he said, “that I am unable to offer you coffee here, but perhaps you will accept a glass of arrack and a cigarette.”

He stumbled over the words and they were the last he said in English. Miss Hammad now took over as interpreter.

A bottle of arrack and two glasses stood on the bench beside the tape recorders along with a pack of the cigarettes I usually smoke. Obviously the arrack, the glasses, and the cigarettes had been brought by her in the haversack.

“Mr. Ghaled does not, of course, normally drink alcohol,” she said as she opened the bottle, “but he is not bigoted in these matters and as this is a private occasion he will join you in a glass of arrack made in Syria.”

I happen to loathe arrack, wherever made, but this did not seem the moment to say so.

“I am told that Syrian arrack is the best kind.”

She translated this as she poured.

Ghaled nodded and motioned to the glasses. We each picked one up and took ceremonial sips.

“I will now prepare the tape recorders,” said Miss Hammad. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor now and went on talking alternately in English and Arabic as she set up the microphones and inserted the cassettes.

“Each tape will record for thirty minutes at the slow speed, and I will warn you when I am about to change them. Perhaps it will be as well if I repeat the conditions under which the interview is conducted.”

She did so. Ghaled said something.

“Mr. Ghaled has no objections if Mr. Prescott wishes to take written notes to supplement the tape recording.”

“Thank you.” I put my glass down and took out the scratch pad on which I had already made notes of the preliminary questions I would ask — the easy ones. I could feel Ghaled watching me as I thumbed through the pages; he was trying to weigh me. I took my time looking over the notes and lit a cigarette to extend the silence. If he became impatient, so much the better.

It was Miss Hammad who became impatient.

“If you will say something into the microphones to test them, Mr. Prescott, we can begin.”

“It is an honour to be received by Mr. Ghaled.”

She translated his reply. “It is gracious of Mr. Prescott to say so.”

She played it back on the recorders. They were both working. She pressed the “Record” buttons again and said in English and Arabic: “Interview of the commander and leader of the Palestinian Action Force, Salah Ghaled, by Lewis Prescott, correspondent of the American Post-Tribune news service syndicate, meeting in the Republic of Lebanon on. .” She looked at her watch to check the date before adding it.

It was the fourteenth of May.