Year of the Golden Ape

Colin Forbes
Part one The terrorists
1

In January two major assassinations took place in the Middle East. The new, thirty-year-old King of Saudi Arabia was murdered as he made love to one of his numerous wives, skewered through the back so savagely as he lay prone that the knife blade penetrated the body of the girl beneath him, piercing her heart. An alleged cousin promptly assumed nominal power and issued a statement that he would not rest until Arab troops patrolled the streets of Jerusalem. The statement reassured everyone east of Suez – it showed that the King's heart was in the right place, that he was bent on the extinction of the State of Israel.

But the significant figure in this drama was the man who planned it. Sheikh Gamal Tafak immediately took over the posts of Oil and Finance Minister from his predecessor, who with so many other moderates had fled the country for his life. Tafak, a brilliant fanatic, sincerely believed that to recover Palestine for the Arabs, the oil weapon which chance had placed in their hands must be wielded ruthlessly. It was from this moment that the power of the sheikhs was really exerted against the West.

The oil tap was turned off in January – at the height of a savage European winter – and Tafak himself visited western capitals to inform his nervous hosts that this time, unlike in 1973, there would be no concessions…

'The West must no longer support Israel with so much as a glass of water,' he informed European foreign ministers. 'Until this condition is fulfilled we are cutting the flow of oil to Europe and America by fifty per cent. We are declaring a state of blockade…'

Tafak was in London when the gentle, statesmanlike President of Egypt was assassinated, beaten to death with rifle butts as he slept, by the urgent hammerblows of young soldiers under the direct orders of Colonel Selim Sherif who personally emptied his revolver into the already dying president. Within hours Col Sherif was proclaimed as the new President of Egypt. He reassured the Cairo mob with a speech from a balcony.

The traitor who sat down with our enemies at the same table is dead. In the West they call us apes – we will now show them the real power of the ape…'

Sheriff's reference was to an article by an exasperated Washington correspondent who had dubbed certain autocratic sheikhs as 'golden apes, gold piling up in their treasuries while their people still roam the desert…' Sherif, a clever propagandist, seized on the phrase and broadened it to include the entire Arab nation.

What the West had most feared had happened. The moderate Arab leaders who had struggled valiantly to ease their way forward to cooperation with the rest of the world had been swept aside, buried. As so often happens when vast power is there for the taking, the extremists had climbed into the saddle. In London, shortly after Col Sheriffs balcony speech, Sheikh Gamal Tafak made his own speech at a City of London banquet – much to the consternation of his hosts.

This time there will be no favoured nations as in 1973. The whole of the West must suffer as we are suffering in Palestine -where an alien race oppresses our people, steals their land, turning them into refugees who are stateless persons without a country, without hope…'

The Year of the Golden Ape had begun…