Ali Hassan Salameh (1940? - January 22, 1979), the so-called "Red Prince", was the chief of operations for the "Black September" organization, which was responsible for the Munich Massacre and other terrorist attacks. His code name was Abu Hassan. He was also the founder of Force 17.

His wife, Georgina Rizk, was Miss Universe 1971.

The Israeli Mossad assassinated him in Beirut in 1979 using a remote-controlled car bomb. They had earlier missed him in 1974 in the Lillehammer affair, mistakenly killing an innocent Moroccan waiter, Ahmed Boushiki.

According to several sources, Salameh served as a secret contact between the PLO and the CIA from 1970 until his death.

Bold textComing of Age in Fedayeen SocietyBold text

Born to Sheikh Hassan Salameh, a popular leader of local Arab irregulars under militia leader Abd el-Kader Husseini, the younger Salameh was barely eight when his father was killed by a patrol of the Jewish Haganah militia who unknowingly had stumbled upon one of the better organizers of local Arab armed groups. After Israel was founded the Salameh clan moved into Jordanian territory, and Ali Hassan spent most of his youth in Jordan and Beirut. Benefiting from his father's legacy, the younger Salameh lived a life more privileged than most of his Palestinian contemporaries (like many relatives of top PLO officials), and attended university in Europe. It was there that he forged many of the ties with Palestinian and leftist radicals that led to the success of his new terror in the 1970s.

Ali Hassan was seen as an unlikely recruit in the late 1960s when he joined the Fatah armed and intelligence wings because of his reputation as a young playboy, but he was graciously received by Yasser Arafat, who had played the role of surrogate uncle to him. Arafat was also eager to have the prestige of the Salameh clan's support during the consolidation of his Fatah group as the lead force in the PLO following the ousting of civilian Palestinian leader and academic Ahmed Shuqairy in 1969, as a result of his stand at the legendary battle of Karameh, Jordan (1968). But in 1970 followed the disappointing disaster of the September civil war with the Royal Jordanian Armed Forces that followed the highjack of three airliners by his rivals George Habash and Dr. Wadi Haddad of the extreme left Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to deserted airstrip Dawson's Field in Jordan. Young hawks like Salameh received a boost in the Fatah organization relative to the more moderate veterans like Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Iyad). Following his expulsion from Jordan, Arafat was forced to compete with the more hard-handed tactics of the PFLP and Nayif Hawatmeh's Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Bold textArafat's Ambassador to International TerrorismBold text

Salameh and a number of Fatah officials and lower activists were therefore charged with creating a shadow front to act on behalf of Arafat in punishing Jordan's King Hussein, and escalating Palestinian terror operations in Europe following the 1967 Six Day War disaster.

They formed the Black September Organization (BSO) in 1971 during additional skirmishes in Jordan, and launched several bloody operations, including the 1971 murder of Jordanian premier Wasfi el-Tal in Cairo. Black September also cooperated with the PFLP and the West German Baader-Meinhof Red Army Faction on many highjackings. On September 5-7, 1972, 11 Israeli athletes were taken hostage and later died during a rescue attempt at the Munich Olympics, an operation orchestrated by Salameh's (or Abu Hassan as he called himself) group and the PFLP. Salameh was the most important director of these operations, though he was never involved in specifics. BSO was important as a Fatah front for the following reason: Arafat had in the 1960s shied away from airline highjackings and spreading his war to Europe on the grounds that he believed direct assaults on Israeli military and civil targets in Israel were not only more credible, but more effective. A public shift toward PFLP tactics would not only gain more criticism in the West, but be viewed as a victory for his more radical rivals Habash and Hawatmeh.

Bold textThe Enemy's EqualizerBold text

What followed was a clandestine war between Israeli agents and military and the BSO, who would never again enjoy un-reprised operations. Salameh was placed at the top of a secret list of PLO officials and activists to be assassinated. From early 1973, six key Black September operatives acting under or aiding Salameh were assassinated: Recruiter Wael Zwaiter (Rome), Fatah diplomat Mahmoud Hamshari (Paris), PLO liason to the KGB Abad al-Chir (Athens), terror cell organizers Mohammed Boudia and Basil al-Kubaisi (Paris), and al-Chir's replacement Ziad Muchassi (Nicosia, Cyprus). In addition Israeli General Staff Reconnaissance Platoon ("Sayeret Matkal") commandos pulled off a spectacular coup in 1973 by killing three Fatah/BSO chiefs in Beirut: propaganda specialist Kamal Nasser, nominal BSO commander-in-chief Yousuf Najjar (Abu Yousouf), and PLO militia commander Kemal Adwan, plus a major DFLP headquarters building. These targetings depleted the operational freedom of the BSO.

Dr. Wadi Haddad, the key PFLP partner in the terror campaign was forced into hiding and died of an unspecified disease sometime later. Mohammed Oudeh ("Abu Daoud"), perhaps the most important planner of the Munich operation was continually being harrassed and troubled, including a long stint in a Jordanian jail after trying to sneak in from Saudi Arabia, and a mysterious 1974 assassination attempt in a Warsaw hotel lobby that seriously wounded him.

Salameh was the last BSO leader who was successfully tracked down by the Israeli Mossad, and the 1974 Lillehamer fiasco ruined the agency's reputation for years. Though his unique success at survival gave him legendary status in the PLO and refugee circles, the depletion BSO's leadership took from assassinations and the ever-increasing security precautions he and other survivors took severely limited the organisation's operations from 1973 on. The al-Chir assassination was one of many events that linked world terrorism with the KGB, a fact that undermined the credibility of both partners in this arrangement. Also, it soon became impossible to deny Fatah's ties to BSO, and Arafat's undercover support for airline highjackings he had previously avoided in the late '60s for stated strategic reasons. This was partly a result of the fact that BSO never totally had a separate infrastructure from Fatah. By 1975 BSO stopped taking credit for operations, and much of its work was assumed by foreign mercenary terrorists like the Venezuelan Ilich Ramirez Sanchez's ("Carlos the Jackal")cell named after Mohammed Boudia, the PFLP, and the Baader-Meinhof RAF. These operations were subject to less initiative by Salameh, rather bold enterprising by Sanchez, and classic highjackings and bombings by the RAF and PFLP.

Bold textGroundbreaking "Fatahland" in southern LebanonBold text

Salameh by now had become much more of an internal figure in Fatah, leading the organization's establishment in Lebanon along with more conservative terror chiefs Salah Khalaf (Abu Jihad, armed guerrilla commander-in-chief) and Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Iyad, intelligence chief). Fatah built up a formidable arsenal in Beirut and the southern border region while the PFLP, DFLP, Fatah-"Revolutionary Council" (an extremist offshoot spawned by the notorious terrorist Sabri al-Banna, better known as Abu Nidal) wasted resources and time highjacking planes and bombing airports and cafes. The July 4, 1976 Operation Thunderball/Johnathan by Israeli forces that liberated passengers of an Air France flight taken hostage in Entebbe, Uganda by PFLP and Baader-Meinhof RAF highjackers, as well as a similar brilliant operation by the German GSG-9 unit in Mogadishu, Somalia under nearly identical circumstances (the Somalis cooperated with the Germans, the Ugandans with the highjackers)humiliated both the PFLP and Fatah, but otherwise didn't harm Arafat's own standing.

Bold textThe Legacy of Abu HassanBold text

The Beirut assassination of Ali Hassan Salameh was the natural conclusion to the era when his style of spectacular terror operations like Munich, the Tal murder, and the Jackal's OPEC Board hostage-taking caught the press's imagination and helped recruit thousands of European and other western radicals to similar organizations. But the West had caught up, as Italy, Israel, France, and Germany were only a few of the countries who committed to special anti-terror commando and intelligence sections. Though in the following decade Fatah would be embroiled in large-scale warfare with Israeli and Syrian armies, since his 1974 appearance at the UN Arafat had been drifting away from armed insurrection as moderate veterans like al-Wazir remained after the extinction of BSO. These would eventually lead to Arafat accepting negotiation as a solution to his war in 1988, and the Oslo Accords in 1993.

Bold textWho is today's Salameh?Bold text

Until the Al-Aqsa Intifadeh erupted in September 2000, many believed that figures like Salameh, Muhammed Odeh, and their more radical colleagues like Habash, Hadad, and Ahmad Jibril (commander of the hard-line PFLP-General Command) were antiquated warlords that were a figment of the past.

Yet modern Palestinian terrorists have taken a page from the Salameh book. Young, charismatic local terror chiefs like Muhammed Barghouti (Fatah-Tanzim militia), Yehiya Ayyash (the pioneer of the suicide bombing in the radical Islamist Hamas organization, and a cult figure rather than actual leader), Hamas strongman Muhammed Deif, and the founder of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades Zacarias Zubeidi follow the legacy created by Arafat in 1955 in Kuwait and Salameh in 1971 in Beirut. Indeed, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades was formed under similar circumstances as the BSO as a front for terror operations initiated by Fatah to disguise Arafat's participation in terror-related crimes. Therefore, it is likely that Salameh will not be remembered as a corrolary of the satirized "Tunis Group", the Fatah leadership comprising Arafat, Khalaf, and al-Wazir that took shelter in Tunisia after leaving Beirut in the wake of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and siege of the capital. Their surviving members comprise the aging Fatah leadership that continues to dominate the Palestinian Authority to this day and is seen as a corrupt oligarchy.

Salameh is more often depicted as a front-fighter, even though his career was made in making deals with other terrorists, planning operations that put himself at relatively low direct risk, and liaising between the PLO and the American CIA. In these respects his actual similarities are more attuned to those of Palestinian Authority law-and-order moderate Muhammed Dahlan, a stated opponent of hard-line terrorism that rejects negotiation as a solution that Zubeidi and Deif have resurrected.

Bold textSalameh's Importance TodayBold text

From a purely strategic standpoint Abu Hassan's 1979 assassination gained little for the West and Israel in the war on terrorism. In the following decade Abu Nidal, Ahmed Jibril, and other more radical Palestinian guerillas stepped up their operations' ruthlessness. The Hizbullah organization in Lebanon launched a bloody reign of terror that continues to this day. Islamic terror has burned like a fire since the October 6,1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in Cairo, ten years after the Tal murder. Salameh's importance is only put in perspective by the fact that like Osama bin Laden today he was portrayed in the 1970s by Israeli intelligence as a top target in the war on terror, and that despite his death the plague continued. This seems to confirm a theory that rejects the idea that individual demagogues like Arafat and bin Laden are the sole architects of terror rather than larger networks of terrorists acting on their behalf. The brilliant assassinations of the BSO operatives after the Munich Massacre and the Entebbe and Mogadishu operations therefore should be seen as more critical to the defeat of BSO and its style of terror in the 1970s than Abu Hassan's own death. But his mythical life and playboy lifestyle will undoubtedly influence his legend in the Palestinian street than his actual deeds.

Sources:

Bar-Zohar, Michael. Italic textThe Quest for the Red PrinceItalic text. New York: Morrow, 1983.

Jonas, George. Italic textVengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-terrorist TeamItalic text. New York: Simon and Schuster, c1984.

• Washington Post article about alleged CIA link (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A34478-2001Sep14)

nl:Ali Hassan Salameh