“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”.