Terror, Inc.

About 5:30 on the afternoon of September 15, 1974, a young man leaned over the toprail balcony of the multilayered Le Drugstore, a combined boutique, newsstand and snack bar on Boulevard Saint Germain in Paris. From the pocket of a gray jacket, he pulled a U.S.-made hand grenade. With an abrupt gesture, he dropped it among the shoppers and diners below. The toll: two dead, 34 wounded.

On June 27, 1976, Air France's Tel Aviv-Paris flight took off from Athens, bound for France. Four terrorists--a German man and woman, and two Palestinians--suddenly took command. They set the plane on a course that led to the Libyan city of Bengasi and then to Entebbe, Uganda. For the next six days, the most tense hijacking in history took place. It was ended only by the dramatic Israeli rescue. The dead: one Israeli officer, seven terrorists, at least 20 Ugandan troopers and three hostages caught in the cross fire.

Six weeks later, at Istanbul's Yesilkoy Airport, a group of El Al passengers was leaving the transit lounge to board a Tel Aviv flight. Suddenly, three young men carrying Kuwaiti passports whipped out pistols and grenades, launching a murderous attack. Turkish guards returned the fire. The toll: one terrorist and three passengers killed--including a staff member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations--and 30 passengers wounded.

And so it goes--one terrorist act after another. Of course, not every act of violence in the world is caused by terrorism. But there are many more of them than almost anybody realizes. The Western world is seized by an unseen, largely unknown network of terrorism. It has one main aim: to make you so paralyzed by fear that ultimately you will be unable to assert the independence and good sense that make Western democracies work. Finally, you will cower in fear and others will decide your fate. Or so think the masterminds of terrorism.

The terrorist is today's criminal par excellence. But the aim of terrorism is not money, though that is a part of it. The aim is power.

So far, the United States has largely been spared the horrors of terrorism. Yet no American air traveler can pass through all the security paraphernalia at any major airport and step aboard a jet without wondering: Is there someone on this plane who is going to whip out a pistol and hijack us? And who can walk past the baggage conveyors in New York City's La Guardia Airport without thinking about all the canvas-shrouded victims of the terrorist bomb, probably disguised in an ordinary suitcase, that someone--also probably quite ordinary-looking--placed in a locker on December 29, 1975? Whoever it was took precautions not to leave fingerprints behind. Or can anyone stride past the lockers in Grand Central Station without remembering that one of them harbored the bomb planted there by the Croatian terrorists?

The creeping encroachment of terrorism: The baggage lockers have now been removed from Newark and some other major airports.

But in many countries, terrorism already has seized the jugular and is squeezing hard. Think of Northern Ireland and Lebanon: strangled spiritually, politically and economically. Or consider Argentina and Brazil. There, terrorists have set off a ruinous right-wing reaction that has led to the creation of murder squads on both sides, each hunting down the other--and catching scores of innocent people in the cross fire.

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We are living in an era of violence and the terrorists understand how to use that violence for their own calculated purposes. Take, for example, the seemingly senseless tossing of the grenade in Le Drugstore. The young man who dropped the grenade, a U.S. Army M-26 with a 50-foot casualty zone, was Carlos--the Jackal, as the European press has dubbed him. As we shall see, Carlos is a specially manufactured product of the Soviet K.G.B. In this instance he was seeking to apply pressure to the French government: Two days before the Drugstore episode, a handful of Japanese Red Army members, the killer elite in the terrorist network, had stormed the French embassy in The Hague and taken hostage the ambassador and some ten other embassy personnel. The goal was to secure the release from a French prison of a fellow Japanese, a terrorist courier known as Yutaka Furuya, who had been apprehended while passing through customs at Paris' Orly Airport carrying secret messages about future operations.

When dealing with terrorists, the Dutch government usually seeks to stall for time, hoping to wear them down. The French have less patience; hence, Carlos was hoping to emphasize the urgency of a quick deal. The Drugstore bombing had the desired effect: It spread panic throughout Paris and further unnerved the jittery French government. Then an anonymous caller, probably Carlos himself, heightened the tension by ringing up news-service offices in Paris. "We'll attack a cinema next," the voice warned. The official reaction: Àa ne va plus!--This can't go on! The French government immediately began to lean very hard on the Dutch, who finally caved in. The Japanese Red Army gunmen flew to the Middle East with a ransom of $300,000 and their comrade, whom the French already had taken to the Netherlands.

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The threat of terrorism is intense and growing steadily worse. The terrorists are becoming more brazen, more confident and better equipped. From the original weapons of grenades and submachine guns, they are graduating to infrared-guided rockets. What will come next? Just about every antiterrorist operative has his own special nightmare about the day in the not-too-distant future when terrorists may finally get their hands on small nuclear devices that could devastate whole cities or the bacterio-logical-warfare germs that could spread plagues quickly throughout entire countries--or perhaps even the world.

In the face of the terrorist threat, Western governments so far have proved to be extremely ineffectual, or worse. And the terrorist is quick to capitalize on the cowardice of his opponents. Says L. Douglas Heck, director of the State Department's Office for Combating Terrorism: "A terrorist has an 80 percent chance of escaping death or capture, a 50 percent chance of having all or some of his immediate demands met and a 100 percent chance of getting the publicity he sought." The Arab terrorists, who constitute the main external peril to Western societies, have the backing of many of the oil-producing Arab states. Hence, western Europe's dependence on Arab oil confers an immunity on the terrorist, who knows that even if he is apprehended, his stay in a west European prison will probably be short.

Just how short was demonstrated by the French. The case concerned a former terrorist called Abu Daoud (real name: Uchmed Daoud Mechamed Auda). He is a middle-ranking Palestinian Liberation Organization official who once was an important member of Black September. But Daoud was not, as was widely reported, the mastermind of the 1972 massacre of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich. That infamous distinction belongs to Ali Hassan Salameh, the Black September planning chief still high on the Israeli hit list. Daoud was the logistics officer; he arranged for the delivery of weapons in Munich and helped procure fake passports for some members of the eight-man Black September assault team. He left Munich before the attack. A few months later, he was captured while on a surveillance mission in Jordan. There he broke down and his confessions were televised. Later, Black September stormed the Saudi Arabian embassy in Khartoum, killing two visiting American diplomats, in an unsuccessful attempt to force the release of Daoud (and several hundred others) from prison.

In late 1973, Daoud was released through amnesty to the P.L.O., but he never again was entrusted with sensitive intelligence missions. Instead, he became a P.L.O. bureaucrat, specializing in propaganda and leading delegations on visits abroad. Israeli intelligence did not even have him on its hit list; the Israelis reckoned that after his confession in Jordan, he either was washed up in the P.L.O. or had become a Jordanian agent. But he was still wanted by Germany and Israel for his role in the Munich killings.

Traveling under the fake name of Youseff Raji Hanna on an Iraqi passport, Daoud flew to Paris last January as a member of a three-man P.L.O. delegation to attend the funeral of a colleague, Mahmoud Saleh, who had run (continued on page 158)Terror, Inc.(continued from page 154) the organization's library and bookstore in Paris. Saleh had been gunned down in the French capital, probably by assassins from a rival Arab-terrorist group. Terrorism, like revolution, consumes its children.

Why would a wanted terrorist take the risk of going to Europe? First of all, Daoud undoubtedly thought his cover was secure; second, terrorism demands huge amounts of machismo. Even an operative on the outskirts of terrorism must be prepared to take great risks and to show that he has the guts to outfox and defy the enemy. For example, Salameh, mastermind of the Munich massacre and then one of the world's most wanted terrorists, accompanied P.L.O. chief Yasir Arafat on his official visit to the United Nations in November 1974.

French intelligence was aware that Daoud was coming to Paris. He and his two P.L.O. companions had obtained visas at the French consulate in Beirut; Daoud's Iraqi alias was undoubtedly spotted by resident French agents. Furthermore, the photo in Daoud's passport was easily recognizable as that of the same P.L.O. official who was often pictured in the Arab press. No outsider knows for certain why French intelligence did not object to his being granted a visa. One explanation is that it wanted to embarrass the pro-Arab government by allowing a wanted terrorist to travel to Paris and then arrest him there.

In Paris, Daoud and his two colleagues checked into a fairly expensive hotel on the boutique-ridden Rue St.-Honoré. They were invited to the Quai d'Orsay, where a French Foreign Ministry official gave sympathetic assurances that the French government would do everything in its power to bring to justice the murderer of their associate. When Daoud returned to his hotel, French intelligence agents were waiting. They only wanted to check out his identity, they told him. He went quietly.

Through Interpol channels, Israel and West Germany sent requests for Daoud's detention until they could supply the full particulars that would justify his extradition (both countries have extradition treaties with France that provide for a suspect to be held at least 60 days). But they were out of luck. Four days after his arrest, Daoud was whisked from his cell in the Santé prison in southeast Paris for closed-door hearings before a Paris court. Daoud's lawyers (seven attorneys were lined up on short notice on his behalf) and the government's representative argued that the German and Israeli requests were invalid on technicalities (the Germans had failed to identify Daoud with his present Iraqi cover name, for example, and had not followed up their Interpol request with a diplomatic démarche). The Israelis and the Germans were given no opportunity to present their case; they did not even know the hearing was in process.

The next sequence of events reeked of French duplicity and cynical self-interest: The court ruled that Daoud should be expelled from France. The entire proceeding lasted only 20 minutes. French police rushed him to Orly, where an Algerian Airlines jet delayed its departure for 30 minutes to take him aboard. The French government paid for his first-class ticket. In Algiers, a P.L.O. delegation welcomed him as a returning hero.

"France does not give lessons," declared interior minister Michel Poniatowski, "and France does not expect to receive any."

In French eyes, oil and money came first; resisting terrorism was not even a poor third. It is a nonstarter. While Daoud was being held, France's defense minister was in Cairo discussing French participation in a huge Arab armaments project. On the very day Daoud caught the plane for Algiers, France closed a deal with Egypt for the sale of 200 advanced fighter-bombers, worth two billion dollars or so.

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Terrorism is probably the most difficult subject a journalist can attempt to cover; huge efforts must be expended before he feels even close to putting together a story. The terrorists themselves, for obvious reasons, are uncooperative. They have no press officers, no brochures, no guided tours of training facilities. Worse yet, they are scared. If you think that we are paranoiac about them, well, they are even more paranoiac about us. Any journalist showing an interest in them must, they suspect, be an enemy intelligence agent setting them up for a kill. Khodr Kannou, a Syrian journalist, was murdered in Paris by Black September because it suspected he was an Israeli double agent.

Fortunately, a few contacts--mainly diplomats and businessmen on the fringe of the network--are less skittish and, under very carefully prescribed circumstances, are willing to talk a little, off the record. But one can't know how reliable their information is, since there are few means of verifying it.

Information from Western intelligence agencies is, sad to say, almost as hard to double-check as that of the terrorists' friends. Furthermore, how cooperative are those agencies, really? The data they pass off as secret often could have been read days earlier in The New York Times or Le Monde.

By far the best-informed intelligence agency is the Israeli Mossad. Next best is the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, though other Allied services claim that it is fading fast. The CIA's repressive bureaucracy and its exposure in Congressional hearings have caused many foreign informants to draw back. As one of them put it: "I don't want to read my name next week on the front page of The Washington Post." Next in order of good information are the West German, British and French agencies, but their knowledge is limited mainly to their own territory. These national agencies do, after all, suffer the serious handicap of operating only within one country, while the terrorists are far more effectively organized on an international basis. Ironically, though their orientation is generally Marxist, the terrorists are set up like the great multinational corporations; just as the multinationals can switch funds and personnel from country to country, seeking the maximum economic advantage, so, too, can the terrorists move teams, explosives and weapons around to strike at the most vulnerable targets with the greatest potential for publicity and political impact.

Interpol, the international police information-sharing agency based in Paris, is largely ineffectual against terrorism. Its charter prohibits it from dealing with political crimes and it is bound by such archaic operational procedures that it cannot catch a fast-moving terrorist. All in all, in the war between terrorism and Western counter-measures, you can assume two things: (A) the terrorists are ahead and (B) the intelligence agencies are not yet closing the gap.

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One afternoon in early 1976, a small group of terrorists slipped quietly through the bushes just outside a landing strip at Nairobi International Airport. As they were preparing a small, highly sophisticated rocket launcher, with which they planned to shoot down an El Al airliner, they were surprised by Kenyan police. The Kenyans do not like terrorists' operating on their turf. Into prison went the terrorists.

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Every six months, the chiefs of Western and Israeli intelligence meet in secret to discuss their challenges and problems. (continued on page 166)Terror, Inc.(continued from page 158) The most recent meeting took place somewhere in Switzerland. The climactic dialog ran about like this:

West European intelligence chief: "So we have devised methods to penetrate and destroy terrorist units...."

Israeli representative: "And when will they go into effect?"

Answer: "I can't say."

Question: "Why not?"

Answer: "Our government has tied our hands. Because of détente, we are not supposed to offend the Russians. Because of our oil needs, we are not supposed to offend the Arabs."

The fact that the Western side is clearly on the defensive makes the job of reporting on terrorism all the more difficult. Victors may sometimes brag, but men under siege are reticent. So in researching this article, I fell back on contacts that I had developed for The Wrath of God (Playboy, August 1976), which told the story of the Israeli campaign of retaliation against the leaders of Arab terrorism and was expanded into the book Hit Team. And I turned to my old friend and colleague David Halevy, an Israeli journalist and army-reserve lieutenant colonel who has been intimately concerned with terrorist activities ever since his childhood in Jerusalem.

David and I started digging; when we hit nothing, we started again. Piece by piece, we put the story together. Whenever possible, we tested information from one agency against that from another, trying to factor in the additional information we gained by various means from sources close both to the terrorists and to Soviet intelligence. From our research emerged six stark, scarifying facts about international terrorism, as seen by the people waging it as well as by those fighting against it.

One: Terrorism represents nothing less than an undeclared World War Three, a continuing interacting conflict that, in essence, pits the terrorists against Western societies. The big war, for which the U.S. and the Soviet Union have spent uncountable billions preparing their armies, may never be fought. Our world may end, as T. S. Eliot mused, "not with a bang but a whimper." A selective series of terrorist attacks--what the British call "low-intensity operations"--is tearing at the fabric of Western society and, in time, could cause a polarization of political forces, left vs. right. During the Nazi era, German Communists used to say, "Nach Hitler, uns"--"After Hitler, us." The terrorists hope to create a similar situation of strife and heightened hostilities in which, this time, their extremists triumph.

Two: A confederation of at least 30 terrorist groups interlaces the entire free world. Some of these outfits, mainly those in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, cooperate extremely closely. They provide personnel for joint operations, exchange information, share training facilities, weapons and explosives. Other groups, especially those in South America and the Philippines, participate less directly in this Terrorist International but can be counted upon for help and cooperation.

Three: International terrorism is, to a large degree, directed by remote and well-protected "brains," who do the over-all planning and selection of targets. One of the main brains is Palestinian; the other is Russian. Sometimes their aims mesh. The Russians, for their part, are not pushy. They seldom seek to sponsor an operation that would directly serve their goals: That would be too blatant and might lead to exposure of their involvement. Instead, the K.G.B. works mainly to create chaos and fear in the West, echoing the old pre-Revolutionary code of the Russian anarchists: "To throw a bomb is a creative act."

Four: Terrorism is extremely profitable. The sums of money rewarded for successful operations are enormous. Sometimes the money is pocketed by the individual terrorists, who spend it on wine, women and safe hiding places. According to the rules, however, the money should be plowed back into the organization. Two of terrorism's principal financial benefactors besides the K.G.B. are Libya's Muammar el-Qaddafi and Algeria's Houari Boumedienne. In 1972, Qaddafi, swimming in new-found oil riches, awarded Black September, then the most dreaded Arab-terrorist outfit, $5,000,000 for the massacre of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich. Reason: He admired their direct and violent approach. In December 1975, either Qaddafi or Boumedienne reportedly paid a $5,000,000 reward for the kidnaping of the Arab oil ministers from the Vienna meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

Five: A secret network of Arab and Communist governments and their embassies gives essential support to the terrorists--communications, fake identities, passports, weapons, hiding places and training. Communist East Germany, for example, is a haven for terrorists on the run from western Europe; in and around East Berlin are numerous so-called safe houses where they can rest and regroup. East Germany also provides training facilities where terrorists learn to use the latest Soviet weaponry. It was there that Arabs were taught to use the Soviet Sam-7, a shoulder-held surface-to-air missile that is capable of destroying an airliner flying at a low altitude. The fear of Sam-7 caused the British to station tanks and troops around Heathrow Airport in 1974. Within 60 miles of Moscow are three institutes whose sole aim is to train both foreigners and Soviet citizens as terrorists. Libya, Algeria and the Democratic Republic of Yemen provide passports as well as hiding places and staging areas for terrorists. Libyan embassies act as weapons storehouses in Europe and Libya is fast becoming an increasingly important training area. Cuba, too, is a major training site; an estimated 200 to 400 aspiring terrorists pass through courses there each year, and the Cuban intelligence agency (known as the D.G.I.) frequently acts as a front for the K.G.B. Carlos' contact in Paris, for example, was a Cuban.

Six: The Terrorist International makes effective use of psychological warfare. Exhibit A is the myth building involving Carlos. Playing upon the gullibility of Western public opinion, a clandestine K.G.B. propaganda campaign has managed to project his image as that of a Superman and a Scarlet Pimpernel combined, far too clever for Western police ever to catch. Carlos, in reality, is only a very fallible Venezuelan named Ilich Ramírez Sánchez. Sure, he can shoot straight, but he is also an overweight, vain Casanova who was never nearly so successful with women as he hoped to be. But the Russians have "run" him well, as they say in the spy trades, tailoring his exploits to grab headlines and enhance his image. And it worked. Last autumn, when Carlos left his hideaway in Algiers for a trip to Belgrade, which has become an important transit point for terrorists, the European press recoiled in dread. "Carlos is heading for Britain," wailed one London daily.

It seems the K.G.B. hit upon the Carlos idea in 1967 or 1968, when western Europe and the U.S. were exploding with student revolts. They needed a revolutionary who was not bound to the relatively conservative and nonviolent Communist parties of western Europe. They wanted a hero, a loner who could foment terrorism, somebody with a simple, readily recognizable name--and they came up with the concept of Carlos, a Robin Hood of terror. The present Venezuelan version is not the only Carlos. Western intelligence agencies have identified at least three others: an Algerian, a Palestinian and a second Latin American. All use the same four or five passports and fake names. Thus, the Soviets have created an undying Carlos; if one falls, another will always be there to carry on the mission of murder and kidnaping. The good guys will never know if they have really gotten Carlos. In this manner, the Soviets have made the movement, as well as the man, seem indestructible.

In the tidier wars of the past, generals had large maps on the wall. Everyone could see the results of a battle. Red lines delineated the ebb and flow of opposing armies. The "generals" in the defensive war against terrorism have no such tidy diagrams. But pinned on many of their walls is another sort of map. It resembles the chart of an air-routes system showing the frequency of flights and air freight. In reality, it reveals the flow of terrorists and supplies between the supporting countries and their targets. The center now is Tripoli, capital of Libya. Black lines show the flow of volunteers, recruited among the restless Arab youths by various Libyan embassies, arriving for training in the Libyan camps of Sirte, Tocra, Tarhuna and Misurata. Other lines indicate more volunteers from Kuwait, the Sudan, western Europe. Still others show supplies, medicines and intelligence information arriving from the Soviet Union. And more black lines point to Yemen and Somalia, where some of the volunteers are also trained. At this writing, 30 young Dutch people are undergoing weapons and attack training in Yemen.

On the map are also red lines, showing the routes of attack. They point to western Europe and the U.S. and etch the ingress of trained terrorists into the heart of the target countries. From Tripoli and Belgrade, the two chief jumping-off points, the red lines extend to Paris, Bonn, Vienna, London--to virtually every center of Western commerce and culture.

These maps are not the product of imagination; if anything, they are far too limited. They do not show, for instance, the flow of money and terrorists from Latin America into Europe. For reasons the government of Giscard d'Estaing has failed to explain, Paris' Latin Quarter is once again safe turf for the terrorists. French counterintelligence officers imply that they know what is going on. But can they control it? I wouldn't bet on it.

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Somewhere in a well-guarded flat in Baghdad, Aden or Mogadiscio, the capital of Somalia, sits a burly, distinguished-looking Arab. Inside he is burning with rage at the failure of the Nairobi operation. Slowly, his complex mind figuring every angle, he begins to formulate his revenge. He puts his finger on the map: Athens.

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Organized terrorism dates back to the late Sixties. At that time, the Palestinians, having been defeated in their efforts to start a guerrilla war within Israel, shifted the scene of battle to Europe, where they began killing Jews, burning Jewish old-age homes and hijacking or dynamiting airliners. As they moved into this new theater of operations, the Palestinians needed all the essentials for clandestine operations--places to hide, secure communications, detailed data about the capabilities of the police and intelligence service in the countries in which they were operating.

Hence, they sought out the radical dissent groups that were forming in various parts of western Europe during the rebellious Sixties. In the process, the Palestinians became the catalyst that brought the different groups into contact with one another. They also provided the organizational drive; unlike many of their fellow Arabs, the Palestinians have a talent for patient, methodical organization.

In the spring of 1972, the Palestinians secretly convened what might be called the First International Conference of Terrorism. The host organization was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or P.F.L.P. Called Flop by its detractors, the P.F.L.P. was in reality a highly successful outfit that specialized in skyjackings. Its leader was George Habash, 40ish, a droopy-mustachioed Palestinian Christian educated as a physician at the American University of Beirut. Habash had run an eye clinic in Amman, but increasingly he grew desperate over the plight of his patients, who were often Palestinian refugees living in the miserable, fly-infested refugee camps. He switched from medicine to murder.

By secret and circuitous routes, the representatives of at least a dozen terrorist groups made their way to a refugee camp near Tripoli, Lebanon. Today, by and large, they still compose the core of the Terrorist International. In attendance were delegates of the German Baader-Meinhof urban-guerrilla group, the Japanese Red Army, the Eritrean Liberation Front, the I.R.A., the Basque separatists and the French far-left underground. There were also delegates from a number of illegal liberation fronts, including those in Turkey, Iran and the Sudan. At the meeting, the conferees agreed to try to work out ways and means by which they could cooperate to inflict maximum pain and terror on their enemies.

The first example of international terrorism at work came only a few weeks after the conference: the Lod massacre. Black September, the supersecret terrorist wing of Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Organization, wanted to avenge a failure at Lod, where earlier that year they had hijacked a Sabena jet in hopes of freeing their comrades from Israeli prisons. Instead, they were outsmarted by Israeli commandos, who boarded the plane disguised as mechanics, killed the two male terrorists and captured their two female accomplices.

So, after meeting with Black September representatives at the conference, the P.F.L.P. hired three Japanese Red Army gunmen to act on behalf of Black September. Posing as ordinary tourists, they deplaned in spring 1972 from an Air France flight at Lod. When their luggage reached them on the baggage belt, they pulled out submachine guns and sprayed the airport arrivals hall. You know the rest: 28 persons killed and 72 wounded.

The Lebanon meeting was kept remarkably secret--but not from the Soviets. For several years, the Russians had been observing the growth of terrorism, especially in the Middle East. Already they were providing weapons for various Palestinian terrorist groups. Now, as the terrorists began to organize on an international basis, the K.G.B. undoubtedly sensed an opportunity to wield power behind the scenes. In the K.G.B.'s gray-stone headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square in Moscow, a special section for terrorism was established and a K.G.B. colonel, Yuri Kotov, was summoned home to direct it.

Now about 45, Colonel Kotov is a huge, hard-driving bear of a man who had been masquerading since the mid-Sixties as a Soviet diplomat in Israel and Lebanon. His aim in Israel was to recruit agents. After Moscow broke diplomatic relations with Israel because of the 1967 Six Day War, Kotov moved to Lebanon, where he became involved with Palestinian terrorists. By the time he was summoned home to take charge of the new section for terrorism, the Soviet Union had created its own training program for terrorists.

"What we face," says a ranking counterterrorist specialist in a major intelligence agency, "is an organized wave of terror. I would call it the international trade union of terror." No outsider knows for certain exactly how many members belong to this union or how many remain active. The terrorists have never suffered from a shortage of volunteers. Within the past six years, an estimated 10,000 foreigners have taken terrorist training in Soviet, Cuban and Palestinian schools. Some 200 of them are thought to be in Mexico, 400 in Britain, 600 to 700 in West Germany, 500 in France, 400 in the Netherlands, 200 in Sweden, 200 in Austria, 200 in Italy.

Who are the terrorists? They are generally young, in their late teens and 20s. Many come from middle-class backgrounds, attended high school, sometimes even college. But somewhere in their development, they became losers: failed at studies, were unlucky in finding jobs. Within them an anger flared and they directed it against the society that they felt had wronged them. Often their convictions assume psychopathic proportions; a large percentage of captured terrorists have proved to be mentally unbalanced, attracted by violence. Many of them delight in venting their rage by seeing bombs explode and bullets fired; you wouldn't want to invite one over for a drink and a chat.

And guess what? Two hundred to 300 Americans have also passed through terrorist training schools and have returned to the U.S. A large contingent was trained in Libya last year. So far, they have not engaged in any terrorist activity, but many of them are traveling around the United States a great deal, apparently to establish new contacts and perhaps to study various cities and airports for future operations.

Who are these Americans? They stem mainly from Arab ancestry. Many of them are the sons and daughters of Lebanese parents who immigrated to the U.S. shortly after World War Two and acquired citizenship. Others are Palestinians who came to the U.S. as students and then decided to stay; they got jobs, often married Americans and became citizens.

And what are Federal agencies doing about this threat? At present, not much. Once these terror-trained Americans return to the U.S., they come under the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But the FBI is under certain constraints when it comes to surveillance of American citizens; unless it can convince a Federal judge that it has solid information of a conspiracy, the bureau is theoretically restrained from placing wire taps and other electronic bugs that might enable it to flush a terrorist plot. There will probably have to be a major terrorist outrage in the U.S. before the FBI is able to crack down on incipient terrorism.

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Four or five men begin to lounge around the Athens airport. They try to appear as unobtrusive as possible, but whenever a jetliner is landing from or taking off for Tel Aviv, they edge close to the passport check point. From there they can observe the transit lounge and note the passports of the passengers boarding the flight in Athens. The watchers are being watched. Israeli Mossad undercover agents, checking their activity, notice they are beginning to take a special interest in Air France flights.

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There are conflicting accounts about how the Soviets came across Ilich Ramirez Sánchez as a candidate for the Carlos role. According to one version, he was spotted by a veteran Communist spy-master while attending a terrorist training course in Cuba. Another theory has him recruited by the Soviets in Venezuela in 1967 as an undercover agent to keep tabs on the leftist revolutionary movements in South America.

His background would have been appealing. Born in Caracas in 1949, he was the eldest son of a wealthy Venezuelan lawyer who celebrated his allegiance to Marxism by naming each of his three sons after Lenin. Ilich is, of course, Lenin's patronym. The second son was called Lenin; the third son was called Vladimir, Lenin's given name.

When Ilich was a teenager, his parents separated and he traveled extensively throughout the Caribbean before he finally settled with his mother and brothers in London in the late Sixties. By that time, the K.G.B. undoubtedly was keeping him under surveillance to see how well he could handle himself in a Western country. They must have been pleased. Using his family's connections, he quickly gained access to London's diplomatic set and was soon attending cocktail parties and dinners, often accompanied by beautiful Latin-American girls.

Ilich's appearance also must have fitted in with the K.G.B. plan. He had a saturnine, ill-defined face that would enable him to pass as a European, a South American or even a citified Arab. Later, when Carlos became a hit man, his Mr. Everybody appearance confused witnesses, who invariably gave conflicting descriptions.

Since little is known of Carlos' true personality, it's difficult to deduce exactly which traits in his character endeared him to the K.G.B. We can, however, speculate. "There are basically two types of people who get involved in terrorism," says a senior psychologist with a Western intelligence agency, "the frustrated and the destructive. The frustrated type is an introvert who eats himself up and hates the world because of his failures. The destructive type has a need to destroy; he is like the small child who breaks his toys because he wants to gain attention. Carlos, I think, is a combination of both, and therefore especially dangerous."

By late 1969, Ilich evidently satisfied his K.G.B. control officers that he was, indeed, promising material. A scholarship was arranged and he went to Russia, where he entered Patrice Lumumba University. Situated on the outskirts of Moscow, the university is a major place of learning for foreign students. It also is a center for recruiting and training K.G.B. agents. There began the transformation of Ilich into Carlos.

During the next two years, Carlos had a blotted record at the university; he frequently missed classes and made poor grades. No wonder. All that time, he was being drilled by the K.G.B. in the arts of espionage and political assassination. Judging from his later exploits, he was superbly schooled in three disciplines: (1) the care and use of weapons, (2) surveillance techniques--how to elude tails and how to follow without being spotted yourself--and (3) the organization and conduct of terrorist missions, including the use of fake identities and codes and the establishment of escape routes.

By late 1971, the K.G.B. began to script Carlos' transformation from student to terrorist. His behavior during his brief appearances at Patrice Lumumba became more loutish. He engaged in a protest demonstration outside an African embassy, an unheard-of occurrence in the Soviet Union, and was placed under brief arrest. He even began openly to criticize the Soviet Union and to condemn communism, Soviet style, as too bureaucratic and ossified. As a consequence, the young Venezuelan was summoned before a disciplinary board and expelled from the university. He was thereupon ordered to leave the country. Carlos' departure as a protesting anti-Communist was just a bit too perfect; but then, the K.G.B. often overdoes things.

For the next year, Carlos dropped almost entirely from sight. After his "expulsion," he returned to Britain to visit his mother and brothers. Then he took a trip to the Middle East; a few fairly reliable eyewitness reports place him in Palestinian camps and in Beirut in mid-1972. During that period, he met the leaders of Arab terrorism and apparently impressed them as a capable, trustworthy young man. Later, he returned by clandestine means to the Soviet Union for further training--and possibly psychological conditioning. Having viewed films of Carlos in action during the kidnaping of the OPEC oil ministers in Vienna, some Western intelligence analysts were convinced that he under-went extensive psychological preparation in the Soviet Union. His deliberate, almost slow way of moving, his studied manner of speech and his uncannily cool behavior under pressure suggest that he was well programed through hours of suggestive treatment; in such conditioning sessions, the subject is placed in a semihypnotic state and told repeatedly how to react under various conditions of stress. In effect, Carlos was turned into a sort of Manchurian Candidate, prepared to respond to commands with total allegiance.

By late 1972 or early 1973, his K.G.B. instructors must have decided Carlos was ready. He made his debut in Paris, which was then the center of a shadowy war of kill and counterkill that pitted terrorist gunmen against an Israeli hit team. Carlos became the assistant to a debonair Palestinian named Mohammed Boudia. Boudia, an inveterate womanizer, was director of an experimental theater in Paris; he was also the K.G.B.'s first coordinator for international terrorism. The Israeli hit team, which was killing off one Arab terrorist after another, targeted Boudia as its 12th victim. While trailing him, the Israelis also came across Carlos' tracks but ignored them, judging him to be an unimportant underling. "Oh, what a mistake!" cries an Israeli ex-hit-team member. "At least we should have made him run."

On the morning of June 28, 1973, Israeli demolition experts placed a powerful bomb in Boudia's white Renault in Paris. After spending the night with a girlfriend, Boudia climbed into his auto and was killed by the explosion. Carlos then assumed the terrorist duties of his slain superior, in whose memory he named his terrorist ring the Boudia Commando.

Boudia had been a clever amateur. Carlos quickly showed that he was a pro. He undertook assignments aimed primarily at intimidating Israeli supporters and spreading fear in Europe. As a part of the K.G.B. script, Carlos had to become an instant hero. Hence, he would hit relatively "soft," or unprotected, targets where his chance for success would be very high. As a lone wolf, he undertook a number of operations. In London, he bulled his way into the home of Joseph Edward Sieff, the Jewish heir to part of the Marks & Spencer chain-store fortune, and shot him point-blank. Sieff's tough jaw slowed the bullet, saving his life. In Paris, Carlos probably murdered the Syrian journalist suspected of being an Israeli double agent.

•

A confidential warning about the surveillance of flights from Athens is sent to Air France headquarters in Paris. Back comes the reply: We are not worried. Our government has good relations with Arab organizations.

•

All the while, Carlos strove to coordinate the activities of the main European terrorist groups. He was beginning to make things fit. His Boudia Commandos were excellent planners, as well as efficient killers. The West German urban terrorists, known as the Baader-Meinhof group after the names of their two leaders, gave the other groups weapons and grenades. The Italian Red Brigades provided underground routes for entry from and escape to the Middle East. The Palestinian groups invited the European terrorists to come to their camps for weapons and tactical training. It was all starting to come together, just as the K.G.B. had hoped it would.

Even as he was building this terrorist trade union, Carlos was leading a disarmingly normal life, though somewhat frenetic on the female front. He was shuttling frequently between Paris and London, sometimes using his real Venezuelan passport and sometimes traveling on a false one. In all, it appears he was using at least four identities, including one of a Chilean engineer named Adolfo José Muller. He had two girlfriends in London and two in Paris; in addition to sleeping with them, he used their flats as safe houses in which to store small arsenals of weapons and explosives.

By mid-1975, Carlos had led at least half a dozen major operations, including two attacks on aircraft at Paris' Orly Airport. Even so, Western intelligence agencies were still completely in the dark about the real identity of this international killer. Then came a break. One member of the Boudia Commando was a Lebanese courier named Michel Moukarbel. He sometimes accompanied Carlos on scouting missions throughout Europe, while Carlos compiled long assassination lists of leading European politicians, artists and journalists. (Among those on the list: John Osborne, the British playwright, and Anthony Wedge-wood Benn, the Laborite leftist politician.) Moukarbel also made frequent trips to Beirut, where he received new instructions and picked up funds. (Carlos' operation was funded partly by the K.G.B., which routed the money through a front operation in Cyprus to Beirut.)

The Mossad was seeking to locate the unknown killer in Paris by trailing his couriers, a standard Israeli procedure. In June 1975, as Moukarbel made a return trip to Paris from Beirut, Mossad agents were on his trail. They alerted France's counterespionage agency, the D.S.T.--Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire. On a tip from the Israelis, D.S.T. men picked up Moukarbel. After three days of interrogation, they turned him loose in hopes he would lead them to Carlos. Moukarbel did manage to arrange a meeting with him during which a D.S.T. operative even succeeded in taking a clandestine picture showing Carlos biting his lower lip in a gesture of nervous irritation--apparently suspecting that Moukarbel was leading him into a trap. The D.S.T. did not spring it yet. They seized Moukarbel again, but they let Carlos get away. Perhaps they did not believe Moukarbel's claim that Carlos was the Big Man they were hunting but rather suspected that they were being decoyed away from the real catch. Or maybe Moukarbel had held back the most telling information about Carlos during the interrogation sessions.

No outsider knows for sure; the D.S.T. is extremely secretive and sensitive about its encounters with Carlos. But, according to a European double agent involved in the hunt for Carlos, the D.S.T. men within the next two days became increasingly curious about this character whom Moukarbel had met. Late one afternoon, they decided to have a chat with him. Moukarbel was taken from his cell. Supposedly, he was told: "You can go free if you lead us to the Big Man."

Piling into an unmarked police car, the D.S.T. men followed Moukarbel's instructions, which led them to a shabby apartment house in Rue Tollier near the Sorbonne. It was a balmy Friday night and music and rowdy laughter were pouring from open windows of a third-floor apartment.

While Moukarbel was left behind in the car, guarded by one of the D.S.T. men, the two others climbed the stairs. When they knocked on the door, the music stopped. A girl let them in. Seated on the couch, Carlos, drunk and disheveled, was cradling a guitar. He was giving a going-away party for one of his Latin-American girlfriends. To the D.S.T. men, he must have appeared to be a highly unlikely leader of an international terrorist network.

They asked if they could sit down for a chat and Carlos readily agreed. The conversation is unrecorded, but obviously they must have questioned him about his movements, source of income and the like. After about 40 minutes of what were probably very unrewarding responses for the D.S.T. men, they decided to bring Moukarbel up to the apartment for a confrontation.

By that time, Carlos had sobered up. When he saw Moukarbel, he must have thought his game was up. The next moments are lost in confusion. One report says Carlos asked to be excused to go to the toilet; he had, after all, been drinking heavily. Another account holds that he walked into another room. The results, however, are fully documented. Grabbing a Czech-made automatic that he had secreted in a flight bag, Carlos fired with an accuracy that would have delighted his Soviet instructors. He shot Moukarbel between the eyes and two of the D.S.T. men in the heart. The third D.S.T. man took a bullet in the throat but survived.

Carlos bounded down the apartment-house steps three at a time and raced into the night. Since he was, in the final analysis, a Soviet agent, he undoubtedly had a prearranged escape route set up by the K.G.B. In such instances, the fleeing agent usually dials a telephone number that he has committed to memory. An anonymous voice gives him instructions. With K.G.B. help, Carlos made a getaway to Beirut.

Before he left, he posted a letter to one of his girlfriends in London. "I am going on a trip for an undetermined time," he wrote. "But I won't be too long in returning." He added, "As for the Chiquito ["Little One," Carlos' nickname for Moukarbel], I have sent him to a better life for his treachery. Kisses, Carlos."

•

To be sure that their suspicions are well founded, the Israeli agents carefully trace the Arab plane watchers in Athens back to the man in Baghdad. Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv is chilled by the connection.

•

Only six months later, Carlos made a spectacular return. Half a year on the run and in P.F.L.P. training camps in the Middle East had made him leaner, meaner and even more self-assured. He had also changed his looks; his hair, normally black, was tinted red. He had grown a chin beard, also red. His fat round face was now thinner and oblong; according to intelligence sources, he had traveled to Prague--the center of East bloc plastic surgery--for removal of his heavy jowls. The head of a six-person group of international terrorists that included two Germans and two Palestinians, Carlos electrified the world with the most successful terrorist kidnaping so far: He shot his way into OPEC headquarters in Vienna and seized the oil ministers as hostages. It was all the more sensational in that most of the captives of the Palestinian operation were Arabs.

During the operation, which stretched out over nearly two days, Carlos behaved more like an accomplished actor than like a wanted terrorist. He strutted and preened, daily capturing world headlines. At an early point in the negotiations for an Austrian Airlines DC-9 to fly the hostages to Algiers, he snapped to an intermediary: "Tell them I am the famous Carlos!" Although his gang killed three persons in the assault, Carlos charmed the hostages with his gracious manners. He gave autographs to his captives and even handed out spent cartridge shells as souvenirs. Despite the tensions that built up during nerve-racking negotiations, Carlos retained a surprising poise. Only at the very last did he show annoyance. As the DC-9 circled over Tripoli, awaiting permission to land, he railed against the inefficiency of the Libyans. "How can one work for such people?" he asked the Austrian flight crew. Oddly, Carlos seems to nurture a racial prejudice against Arabs, who are too disorganized for his liking.

For his part, Carlos pulled off the kidnaping with flawless precision. He and his P.F.L.P. sponsors collected a ransom of at least $50,000,000 from Iran and Saudi Arabia for the safe return of their oil ministers. There are conflicting reports as to which country sponsored the operation, but, in any event, it appears likely that Carlos and Company were paid $5,000,000 by either Algeria's President Houari Boumedienne or Libya's Muammar el-Qaddafi. Both Libya and Algeria are political radicals in the Arab world. The lesson of the OPEC kidnaping was that the conservative oil states, particularly Iran and Saudi Arabia, should watch their step, be aware of political accommodations with Israel or closer cooperation with the U.S. Saudi Arabia and Iran might have more oil, but the radicals had more guts.

The OPEC raid further enhanced Carlos' image as the international terrorist par excellence. It also earned him a new title: He became the world's most-wanted man. On every list but the Israelis'. The number-one man on their hit list was not Carlos but the man who was at that moment plotting the Athens sky-jacking to Entebbe.

The man is named Wadi Haddad and, at this writing, he is still alive, well and active, even though the Israelis have put two teams of six or more persons each on his trail. For many years, Haddad was a close friend of George Habash. Like Habash, he is a Christian and a physician who also was trained at the American University of Beirut. For several years. Haddad and Habash worked together in the eye clinic in Amman.

Haddad, in his 40s, is sturdy (about 5'7"), fair-skinned by Arab standards and, by all accounts, remarkably virile. He is clever and cautious; his residences are always heavily protected and he travels with a sizable number of body-guards. Since the late Sixties, he has done the detailed planning that has led to the most sensational hijackings. He orchestrated the simultaneous four-plane skyjacking that terrified the world in September 1970. He likes to use beautiful women as the leaders of his operations; like Carlos, he freely mixes sex with business. In 1970, when the Israelis first tried to kill him in his Beirut apartment, he was entertaining the beautiful Leila Khaled, who had won fame in the late Sixties by hijacking a TWA jet to Damascus and blowing it up. Later, in July 1973, Haddad used a mistress who traveled under the name Katie George Thomas to direct the capture of a Japan Air Lines 747 jumbo out of Amsterdam. She was killed on board when she accidentally dislodged the pin in a grenade that she was carrying in her purse.

Haddad pursues his new-found revolutionary calling with a ruthless sense of mission and cruel cynicism toward his terrorist underlings. Consider the mission of West German terrorist Bernard Hausman, who received a message in mid-May 1976 to report to a certain home in Amsterdam. Through P.L.O. and diplomatic channels, Haddad had already alerted a cell leader to procure a genuine Dutch passport. When Hausman arrived in Amsterdam, he was presented with the new passport and his new identity--Hugo Muller. Hausman's photograph was properly pasted into the otherwise unaltered Dutch passport.

Muller, as we will now call him, was then ordered to Vienna, where he was to dial a certain number upon arrival. When he did so, he was put in contact with another member of the network, who relayed additional instructions from Haddad: "You are to fly from Vienna to Bangkok and return to Vienna. En route to Bangkok, you will stop over in Tel Aviv and Teheran. You are on an important mission. You are to deliver a suitcase to someone you will contact in Israel."

Muller was given enough Austrian shillings to pay for the air ticket in cash (almost invariably, terrorists pay cash for air tickets, which is one of their giveaways). He was told to jot down a telephone number to ring in Tel Aviv and was handed a specially modified plastic suitcase. His orders were to deliver the suitcase to his contact in Israel. The case was heavy--and no wonder. Skillfully molded inside its top and bottom were 26 pounds of highly potent plastique explosive. Muller was undoubtedly unaware of the suitcase's contents; he was told to put clothes in the case so it would look normal if he were ordered to open it for a security inspection at the Vienna airport. He tossed in about six pounds of soiled and ragged clothing.

At the Austrian Airlines ticket counter in Vienna's Schwechat International Airport, Muller paid in cash for his ticket, plus an overweight baggage charge that brought the total bill to about $800. At the security check, he was asked to open the suitcase. Only clothes were found inside. The inspector failed to note the discrepancy between the few clothes and the weight of the case.

As he arrived later that day at Lod Airport (now Ben-Gurion International) in Tel Aviv, Muller had obviously been poorly briefed on Israeli screening procedures. His jeans and hippie-style eyeglasses made him a prime suspect for special attention.

"Please collect your baggage and come with me." a young woman security officer told him.

Muller picked up his belongings from the same conveyor belt where a few years earlier the three Japanese Red Army terrorists had pulled submachine guns from their luggage. He followed the officer, Marguerite Ben Yishy, to a private inspection room.

"Open your bags, please."

Muller complied. As he snapped open the plastic case, a huge explosion rocked the room. Marguerite Ben Yishy and Hugo Muller were instantly killed. A second woman officer who had been witnessing the inspection was wounded.

Muller had been carrying a bomb in a very cleverly constructed case that contained a two-stage detonator: The firing mechanism had been wired to fire the bomb the second time the case was opened. Evidently, Haddad had reckoned that Muller would be required to open the case the first time in Vienna; that primed the detonator. The next time he opened the case, the bomb would be fired. Haddad may have thought that Muller might be asked to open the case in the arrivals area at Lod, where other passengers would be waiting for their luggage. In that event, the bomb's kill radius would have been 100 feet or more. But in case the Lod opening was not the second one, Haddad had prepared a fall-back position. On Muller's body was found a piece of paper on which he had noted the instruction to check in at the Tel Aviv Hilton. If he had opened the case in a room there, especially if the windows were closed, the explosion could have caused huge damage, perhaps even bringing about the collapse of a tier of rooms. The telephone number that Muller was told to call in Israel did not exist.

Without his knowing it, Muller had been set up for a suicide mission.

•

The word came to the man in Baghdad from his agents. Air France flight 139, usually a wide-bodied, French-made Airbus, carried many Jews. It would be the target, he decided, and he began to make his plans. He sent a message through P.L.O. and Arab diplomatic channels to Carlos, then in Algiers, to send him some operatives. Other messages brought west European and Palestinian terrorists to Baghdad for briefings. Among the visitors was a man from Carlos' ring, left-wing German lawyer and publisher Ernst Wilfried Böse. Another was a German woman: either Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, a member of the Baader-Meinhof gang, or Eleanore Honel-Hausman, the bereaved widow of the unwitting "Hugo Muller" who had died at Haddad's hands only weeks before. Naturally, she would not have been told the true circumstances of her husband's death, only that an accident had occurred during a vital mission. If, indeed, Honel-Hausman was the German woman involved in this new operation, Haddad no doubt played upon her emotions to fire her up for the mission. The individual operative is as much a pawn in the war of terrorism as is the hostage.

And so the operation began to unfold. Haddad moved his base to Mogadiscio, the capital of Somalia, to be closer to the hijacking destination: Entebbe, Uganda. He named the operation after the aborted rocket-launch incident at Nairobi airport: "Remember the Kenyan Treachery."

Four of the operatives--the German man and woman, plus two Arabs--flew to Athens. Someone slipped them their weapons, four pistols and seven hand grenades that had been stored at the Libyan embassy in Greece. Meanwhile, at Haddad's request, Yasir Arafat, who needed a success to boost the waning spirits of the besieged Palestinians in Lebanon, had established contact with the mercurial and maniacal ruler of Uganda, "Big Daddy" Idi Amin.

It was an ironic turnabout. For years, Amin had been a great admirer of the Israelis, who had wooed him with technical assistance and military advisors and had even made him the present of an executive jet. But he had broken with the Israelis in 1972, because they refused to give him a squadron of American-made Phantom fighter-bombers, which he wanted for an attack on Kenya.

Angered, Amin turned for hardware help to the Arabs. The Arab governments, however, were frightened by his unpredictable behavior. Only the Palestinians responded to his overtures. They moved into the political-military vacuum left by the departed Israelis and were soon piloting Amin's Mig fighters; battle-dressed Palestinian gunmen--an odd sight in the heart of black Africa--began serving as his personal bodyguard. The P.L.O. established a propaganda center in the Ugandan capital of Kampala. In a radio-telephone conversation, Arafat won Amin's approval to use Entebbe as the destination of the soon-to-be-hijacked Airbus. Five members of the terrorist team gathered with Haddad in the Somalian capital. Among them was the Palestinian Fouad Jabri, an experienced assassin who had been on the Israeli wanted list since 1968; he would serve as Haddad's on-the-scene commander in Entebbe.

Everything went according to plan. As soon as the four terrorists, including the German woman, had seized the Airbus, they ordered the captain to set a course for the Libyan city of Bengasi. Even as the big plane was still flying over the Mediterranean, one of the terrorists handed the captain a detailed aeronautical map for the final leg of the flight toward Entebbe.

As the plane made its approach to the Ugandan airport, the German woman peered from the window. "We're safe now!" she exclaimed happily. "We have reached our base." The plane was directed to its parking place near the old terminal building. As the four hijackers bounced triumphantly down the air steps, they were warmly embraced by the five other terrorists, who had traveled by air from Mogadiscio to welcome them.

•

Many of the events at Entebbe are well known. What is not known is the inner workings of the secret Israeli operations and the decisions that ultimately led to the dramatic airborne rescue. As soon as he learned that the Airbus had landed in Uganda, the chief of the Mossad activated his first-string hit team, which had not been in operation for three years. This was a small corps of experienced surveillance experts and assassins, who for ten months in 1972 and 1973 had hunted and killed Black September leaders in Europe. Then, following a horrendous mistake by the reserve team in which an innocent Arab waiter was gunned down in Norway (see The Wrath of God), the hit-team operation was suspended. Now the Mossad chief put the A team under the direction of the head of Mossad's clandestine operations, whom we shall call Mike. He had committed a major blunder of leadership in Norway; now he had the opportunity to reclaim his reputation.

While the hostages were being held in the old terminal at Entebbe, about six Israeli hit-team members slipped by various means into Uganda, posing as tourists or business travelers.

Meanwhile, the Mossad chief went to Nairobi, where he negotiated for landing and refueling rights.

By Thursday, July first, the outside world had been led to believe that the area around the hostages was mined with explosives and that the terrorists were serious in their offer to exchange their Jewish prisoners for 53 Arabs and assorted terrorists, 40 of whom were held in Israeli prisons. Mike's team learned differently. By means that remain secret, he and other Israeli agents managed to infiltrate the Entebbe airport and to gain access to the old terminal where the hostages were being held. They found no evidence of explosives; they also observed that the terrorists, overconfident, were sloppy about standing guard. As a rule, only six of the nine terrorists were present. The three others, including Fouad Jabri, were continuously shuttling back and forth between the terminal and the P.L.O. office in Kampala, 24 miles away, which they were using as a communications center for conferring with Haddad.

Somehow, the Israeli agents in Uganda managed to listen in on the conversations between Jabri and Haddad and what they heard had a crucial, perhaps decisive, effect on the tense deliberations of the Israeli cabinet back in Tel Aviv. Some ministers were in favor of breaking with the nation's traditional no-swap policy and agreeing to an exchange of prisoners, to be conducted by the Red Cross at Entebbe. But when Mike and his team eavesdropped as Haddad gave Jabri final instructions for the exchange, they overheard a death sentence for the Jewish hostages. According to the Israelis, Haddad said, "Do not allow one Jew to escape alive. As soon as our people are safe, fire on the Jewish hostages, even if it means hitting Red Cross workers."

Haddad's conversation was flashed via Nairobi to Israel, where the cabinet now realized that the offer of a prisoner exchange was only a trap. Shimon Peres, the tough-minded defense minister, made a short speech that conjured up memories of Auschwitz, where the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele stood between the lines of arriving Jews and by a flick of his hand sent some to immediate death in the gas chambers and others to work in the camp. "The state of Israel was not created to allow another Dr. Mengele to decide over life and death for Jews," declared Peres. "The state of Israel was created to save Jewish lives." Peres' emotional appeal, combined with the chilling information from Uganda, forced the cabinet to decide in favor of a military solution. For all practical purposes, Operation Thunderbolt was now under way.

The military was ready. Earlier in the week, Israeli commandos and pilots had already begun practicing for a possible military solution to the Entebbe impasse. A replica of the old Entebbe terminal was easily constructed at a military base some-where in Israel. The combat team of 100 or so elite troopers under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Yehonatan Netanyahu began practicing assaults. Meanwhile, Israeli air-force pilots aided by technicians began experimenting with night-sight devices that would enable the pilots to see enough to land safely the huge four-engine C-130 transports at night on an unlit airstrip.

On July third, at an air base in the Sinai, the Israelis assembled a small airborne armada: the three C-130s, a Boeing 707 that would serve as an airborne communications command post and a number of Phantom fighter-bombers that would fly protective cover. To avoid Arab radar, the C-130s skimmed only 50 feet above the Red Sea, then turned inland over the southern Sudan. Flying virtually at treetop level, the big planes--"hippos" in Israeli air-force slang--slipped in under the Ugandan radar. Just before the planes landed, the pilots opened the rear cargo ramps; as soon as the planes' wheels touched down, the vehicles inside began to roar out. There were several U.S.-made armored personnel carriers bearing dozens of commandos.

Also on board were a black Mercedes and a couple of Land Rovers. The Israelis had prepared a clever ruse. The black Mercedes was similar to the one used by Amin, who paid frequent visits to the hostages. The Land Rovers were similar to the ones used by his Palestinian bodyguards, who accompanied him everywhere (he no longer trusted his own troops). Contrary to some reports, there was no Israeli made up in blackface to pose as Amin. Instead, there was only a burly Israeli commando dressed in a Ugandan camouflage uniform in the back seat of the Mercedes.

As the small caravan approached, the Ugandan sentries guarding the terminal snapped to attention and saluted. It won the Israelis three seconds--a vital margin. The "bodyguards" leaped from the Land Rovers and stormed into the terminal where the hostages were being held. They were followed by more troopers from the armored personnel carriers. As they fired their submachine guns, the commandos yelled in Hebrew, "Get down, get down; we're Israelis and we've come to take you home."

Other commandos fanned out across the airfield to blow up Amin's big Mig fighters so they could not be used in pursuit. A bitter fire fight raged between the Israelis and the Ugandan troops. Even so, the only Israeli casualty was the mission's commander, Lieutenant Colonel Netanyahu. He took a bullet in the back of the head that was fired from the control tower.

In a hail of submachine-gun fire, the storming Israeli commandos killed seven terrorists. Among them were Jabri, Wilfried Böse, who was Carlos' friend, and the German woman whose curt and merciless attitude toward the Jewish hostages had brought back memories of the Nazi matrons in the concentration camps. To this day, no outsider is absolutely certain of her identity.

•

For a terrorist leader, the first law of remaining in command is simple: A failure must be avenged with an even more spectacular outrage. After Entebbe, Haddad's first operation was the attack last August on the El Al passengers in the Istanbul transit lounge. It was only marginally successful. Evidently, the full plan called for the terrorists to seize the surviving passengers, hijack the El Al 707 and fly to Tel Aviv. There they were to demand the release of imprisoned terrorists in return for the lives of the El Al hostages. That, of course, did not work.

Next, Haddad began planning a strike within Israel itself. Perhaps he was contemplating a bombing in a public place or an assassination that would again make use of an unwitting person á la Hugo Muller as the explosives carrier. As an advance party for the new operation, Haddad made his choice from a group of 15 or so young Dutch radicals who were undergoing terrorist training in Aden, the tiny former British colony at the confluence of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. He selected a Dutch youngster and a fresh-faced young woman whose curvaceous figure had caught his eye. On September 25, 1976, she arrived in Israel, traveling on her own passport. Her orders were to wait--she was to perform surveillance duties. The Dutchman flew on the same Air France flight to Israel.

Upon deplaning at Lod, the Dutch woman somehow aroused the suspicion of the security screeners. Once she was escorted to an interrogation room, she broke down immediately. "So you know all about me!" she sobbed. During the questioning, one reason for her nervousness soon became clear. She was afraid she was pregnant and wanted a test. At first she claimed that Haddad had raped her in Aden. Then she changed her story to say the father presumptive had been her companion on the Air France flight.

"Who?" asked the Israeli interrogator.

"My friend," she replied, adding, "He went into the transit lounge."

Springing to their feet, the Israelis tried to catch the other terrorist. But it was too late. The plane had already taken off. At its next stop--New Delhi--the Dutchman was put under arrest.

•

For the moment, the Israelis have checkmated Haddad's moves. But they cannot drop their guard for one moment, because he will never stop trying. Entebbe represents such a monumental failure to the terrorists that Haddad must be planning a new operation to exceed all his former spectaculars--if the Israelis do not pump him full of bullets first.

"Even an operative on the outskirts of terrorism must be prepared to show that he has the guts to defy the enemy."

"Qaddafi awarded Black September $5,000,000 for the massacre in Munich: He admired their direct approach."