Why the CIA Came Late to the Palestinian Revolution

A veteran British foreign correspondent captures the years when Palestinian terrorists captured the world's attention, only to burn out and cede ground to Iran's proxies

A month after the bloody debacle of the 1972 Munich Olympics, the CIA was still struggling to comprehend what had unfolded. Palestinian gunmen had slipped into the Olympic Village at dawn, taken 11 Israeli athletes’ hostage, and, after a botched and amateurish rescue attempt by German police, murdered them. In Langley, analysts responded as bureaucracies do: they compiled a background report on the Palestinian organizations suspected of involvement. It was orderly, methodical—and curiously hollow.

“What the CIA either failed or chose not to mention,” writes Jason Burke in his superb and meticulously researched book The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s, “was that, despite its name, the Black September Organization was not actually very organized.” It was less a coherent entity than a label—a convenient fiction designed to put distance between the gunmen and the leadership of Fatah, the PLO faction under Yasser Arafat. Black September was plausible deniability dressed up as organization, a shadow cast to obscure responsibility.

Burke, a seasoned journalist for The Guardian, argues that the CIA’s presence in the Middle East at the time was thin and undistinguished. Much of what it believed it knew about the Palestinian movement came secondhand—from allied intelligence services.

Western European agencies occasionally supplied valuable material. Relations with Israel’s Mossad were wary and prickly; those with Jordanian intelligence, by contrast, were warm and productive. Indeed, it was from Amman, more often than from Tel Aviv, that the CIA drew its sharper insights. Both the Israelis and the Jordanians ran agents inside Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and other extremist factions, and both benefited from information passed along by third parties.

This uncertain performance stood in stark contrast to the CIA’s earlier audacity. In the two decades after the Second World War, the agency had moved across the chessboard of the Middle East with confidence and imagination. It helped engineer a coup in Syria in 1949; it cultivated the Free Officers who toppled King Farouk in Egypt in 1952; it joined Britain’s MI6 in restoring the shah to power in Iran in 1953 to safeguard Western oil interests. It turned the young King Hussein of Jordan into a paid agent, and landed Marines in Lebanon in 1958 to shore up a fragile order. The CIA’s Miles Copland coined it as “the game of nations.”

Yet when Palestinian terrorism surged after the Six-Day War of 1967—when Israel defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan—the CIA receded into the shadows. The reason was simple: the United States was not the Palestinians’ primary target. Its various militant groups concentrated on Israeli and Jewish targets in Western Europe, not American outposts in the region, much less the U.S. homeland. The KGB and its satellite services—which the CIA was certainly interested in—offered weapons, documentation, and sanctuary.

In the charged atmosphere following the leftist student uprisings of 1968, particularly in the U.S. and France, the Palestinian factions—especially the PFLP—cultivated the aura of a revolutionary vanguard. They drew into their orbit disaffected youth from across the West: members of Germany’s Red Army Faction, Italy’s Red Brigades, Japan’s Red Army. These recruits provided manpower and mystique, reinforcing the image of a transnational insurgency. The romance of rebellion traveled faster than the facts of violence.

PLO terrorists, 1972 Munich Olympics (CNN)

There were exceptions. In September 1970, the PFLP hijacked four airliners, two of them American, and blew them up on a Jordanian airstrip before the world’s cameras. In 1973 came a failed plot to detonate car bombs during a visit of the Israeli prime minister to New York. More ominous still were two episodes that year tied to Salah Khalaf—aka “Abu Iyad”—Arafat’s deputy: a thwarted attack on the U.S. Embassy in Amman and the seizure of the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum during a cocktail reception.

President Richard Nixon, speaking off the cuff, declared that the United States would not “pay blackmail” to the terrorists. Hours later, three American diplomats were led to a basement and shot. Witnesses recalled that the gunmen, upon returning upstairs, “did not look like men who had killed before.”

Yet these attacks, just a few compared to the bloodshed in Europe, did not prompt the CIA to exact revenge. Instead, it sought accommodation. A 1971 National Intelligence Estimate concluded that no durable Middle Eastern peace was possible without addressing Palestinian aspirations. Quietly, the agency opened secret channels to ensure that American targets would be spared.

Robert Ames, the CIA’s Middle East chief of operations, became the back channel interlocutor. Across the table in safe houses in Beirut sat Ali Hassan Salameh, Arafat’s protégé – codenamed the “Red Prince” by Mossad. In March 1973 Salameh assured Ames that Khartoum had “made its point,” and that so long as dialogue continued, Americans would not be targeted.

Salameh was killed in 1979 by a car bomb in Beirut, by Mossad agents, which held him responsible for Munich. Ames himself died four years later in the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, carried out by a new force rising from Lebanon’s fractured landscape: Hezbollah, backed by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The old secular militancy was giving way to something more overtly theological, more enduring.

Deft Portraits

Burke’s achievement lies not only in the breadth of his research, nearly a decade in the making, but in his tone: dry, detached, faintly ironic. His “revolutionaries” are seldom grand architects of utopia. They appear instead as eccentrics, drifters, thrill-seekers. Kōzō Okamoto, a Japanese communist who arrived at Lod Airport in 1972 and opened fire on pilgrims from Puerto Rico, is rendered as an oddity obsessed with cherry blossoms and DDT. German female militants preach dialectical materialism by day and sunbathe topless in Amman by afternoon to the discomfort of their hosts.

The revolutionary brotherhood was often less enlightened than it claimed. Many of its men were unabashed chauvinists, uninterested in equality and more in sex. One Berlin commune member likened women to horses: break them in, he said, and they are available to all. Ideals dissolved easily into appetite.

And then there was Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan Marxist who abandoned his studies in Moscow to join the Palestinian struggle.

“I’ve been in the Middle East, learning how to kill Jews,” he once said with chilling candor. After years sheltered in the capitals of communist Eastern Europe, he was eventually captured in Khartoum by French agents (with the help of the CIA), transported to Paris and sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering two French police officers.

The romance of these movements did, for a time, captivate young imaginations across continents. But the spell weakened as the Western world, even its radicals, grasped the reality: This was not idealism armed with practice, but violence sanctified by rhetoric. Secular nationalist terror, Burke suggests, thrived in the vacuum left by the collapse of the revolutionary left. And into that vacuum flowed a new current—Islamist militancy, from al-Qaeda to ISIS and beyond—reshaping the landscape of global terror in ways the dreamers of 1968 could scarcely have foreseen. At last, after 9/11, the CIA declared a war on terror.

The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s Knopf. 768 pp, $24.38