...SHADES OF ARAFAT’S GHOST
by Emanuel A. Winston, a Middle East Analyst & Commentator
Once again an American diplomat and humanitarian aid official, 33 year old John Granville and his driver were murdered in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan at 4 a.m. January 1, while returning home from a New Year’s Eve party at the British Consulate General.
Some will recall the March 1, 1973 kidnapping of Cleo Noél, Jr., America’s Ambassador to Sudan, his aide, U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission, George Curtis Moore and the Belgian Charges d’affaires Guy Eid by 8 of Fatah terrorists from Yassir Arafat’s Black September faction, led by a Force 17 Arafat proxy.
An intercepted phone message between Arafat and the Black September Terrorists was kept hidden. However, the Israelis intercepted it and Ariel Sharon gave U.S. Intelligence the intercept. Nothing was ever done to Arafat, probably because he was on the State Department/CIA payroll as an inside link. Noél was sacrificed and the Congress made some burbling noises but, never investigated the Arafat/State connection.
One is further reminded of Arafat’s Palestinian role in Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in August 2, 1990. It was known but denied that James Baker III via Ambassador April Glaspie gave Saddam Hussein the “green light” to invade Kuwait in order to loot $80 Billion in Kuwaiti cash, gold and precious stones. The one question never asked was: Who gave Arafat the “green light” to work with Saddam to locate all the Kuwaiti military sites, all the banks, the homes of both Kuwait’s military commanders, and the homes of every bank official and other wealthy influentials?
Since Arafat was probably on the U.S. payroll to protect American interests, American Intel at the highest levels must have known all through the prior year that Arafat and Saddam were intending to invade Kuwait. The Iraqis desperately needed funds to continue the long war against Iran. Saddam was already close to $79 Billion in debt and no one would sell him weapons on credit.
Of course, there was the Father Bush-Baker effort to take $5 Billion from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to assist Saddam’s war effort. Later, this was lightly investigated during the Clinton term by Janet Reno. It was a well-kept secret until a brief announcement Reno said: “There was no illegal transfer.” Senior Bush and Clinton have been close friends ever since.
The matter of the execution of Ambassador Noél, Moore and Eid as ordered by Arafat remained a State Department secret, meaning they knew but wanted to keep Arafat alive and well no matter what he has done. The CIA never acknowledged receiving a recorded tape of Arafat’s orders to execute our Ambassador.
The present murder of our American diplomat, James Granville and his driver, 40 year old Abdel Rahman Abbas, will likely also disappear in a short time, particularly if the culpability leads to Muslim Islamists Terrorists.
This is especially pernicious as President George W. Bush travels to Israel January 9th to press Israel into agreeing to evacuate territory to the Palestinian Muslim Arabs who are to be trusted with “Peace” for the homes of Jews.
If ever Congress lifted the rug under which the dirty deals have been swept, a lot of senior politicians, diplomats, Intelligence Directors and more could be tried, convicted and sent to jail.
Presently, President Bush, Secretary Rice, former Secretary Baker are doing a “beauty shop make over” on Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s fellow Terror organizer, companion, financier for 40 years. We also see President Bush moving toward Kashering Bashar Assad, President of Syria, so Israel can be forced to surrender the Golan Heights in the “Peace Wave” or whatever the propagandists consider a convincing slogan. Since the “Road Map” slogan is already taken what might the Syrian misadventure be called.
If one could only get down to the lowest basements of State, the CIA and the White House, I feel certain we would see large cauldrons bubbling with bats, snakes and all the stuff of a witches’ brew with the staff dancing around chanting incantations to bring up the darkest of spirits.
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-THE PAST IS THE FUTURE!-
ARAFAT MURDERED U.S. DIPLOMATS
Posted by Emanuel A. Winston, September 29, 2004.
FOR MANY YEARS I HAVE CONTENDED THAT THE U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT WAS NOT ONLY A PRO-ARAB INSTITUTION BUT ALSO A COLLABORATOR WITH YASSIR ARAFAT – with the tacit acceptance of American Intelligence Agencies. These American institutions have not only collaborated with Arab Muslim Terrorist organizations but have used American tax-payers’ dollars to fund their activities. The cover-up by the pro-Arab U.S. State Department of Arafat’s orders, February 28, 1973, recorded on tape, to execute the U.S. Ambassador, Cleo Noel, his aide and the French chargé d’affaires in Khartoum is merely one of their heretofore hidden activities. Every year the State Department writes a fictitious report to Congress about the PLO’s compliance with Oslo so they can continue to receive several hundreds million of American tax-payers’ dollars. These activities and much more were ignored by the 9/11 Commission – quite deliberately.
The following article by Kenneth Timmerman tells us the story of this ultimate betrayal and what might be treason by State Department personnel who should be tried for these crimes and, if convicted, be serving long prison sentences in a Federal Penitentiary.
Perhaps, IF the State Department had been caught and their institutional biases corrected at that time in the 1970s and ‘80s, the Terrorist organizations of the world would not have found America a free field in which to thrive and, just maybe, they would not have been able to organize 9/11 and all the other anti-American Terrorist attacks of the 1990s, 2000s, including 9/11, Madrid, Bali, Beslan……
. . . highly classified intercepts of Arafat’s verbal orders to the killers and has been suppressed for years by the State Department and by political appointees at the National Security Agency (NSA).
. . . Arafat praised his gunmen for pumping 40 bullets into U.S. diplomats Noel and Moore and a Belgian colleague. . . the Department of Justice must issue a warrant for Arafat’s arrest on charges of murder.
“Arafat Murdered U.S. Diplomats”
by Kenneth R. Timmerman ()
Late in May, 53-year-old Sarah Blaustein, a Long Island, N.Y., native who moved to Israel last year with her husband, was killed by Palestinian terrorists while driving to attend a funeral in Jerusalem. She was the 18th American victim of Palestinian terrorists in Israel since Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat stood on the White House lawn with former president Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on September 13,1993 and signed the Oslo peace accords.
A Palestinian spokesman, Saeb Erekat, implicitly accepted responsibility for the drive-by shooting, telling CNN that cease-fires only can be forged between armies. “We are not an army,” he said pointedly.
Also wounded in the attack were Blaustein’s husband, Norman, 52, and her son Samuel Berg, 28, who was visiting Israel from New York.
Every year since Arafat set up shop in Gaza in 1994, there have been moves in the U.S. Congress to cut off aid to his Palestinian Authority (PA), which runs several hundred millions of dollars each year. But an end to his U.S. subsidy soon could become the least of Arafat’s worries. New evidence establishing that Arafat personally ordered the assassination of two U.S. diplomats in Khartoum, Sudan, in 1973 could lead Attorney General John Ashcroft to issue an arrest warrant for Arafat, effectively barring the Palestinian leader from any future role in Middle East peace negotiations.
The evidence includes highly classified intercepts of Arafat’s verbal orders to the killers and has been suppressed for years by the State Department and by political appointees at the National Security Agency (NSA). It finally is coming to light, thanks to the efforts of a former NSA employee, James J. Welsh, who has been shaking heaven and earth the last six months, trying to get official Washington to pay attention to Arafat’s trail of infamy.
During his six years as a U.S. senator, Ashcroft was one of Arafat’s fiercest critics. In June 1999, he successfully introduced legislation requiring the State Department to compile a report every six months on U.S. citizens killed by Palestinian terrorists. The latest report, released in April, carefully skirts involvement by members of Arafat’s security forces in anti-U.S. terrorist attacks.
But the trap was laid. “The United States government attaches a high priority to ensuring that the perpetrators of these terrorist acts are brought to justice,” the report states.
What if the perpetrator is named Yasser Arafat and the evidence of his crimes includes recordings and transcripts of him giving direct orders to the killers who murdered U.S. diplomats in cold blood? As a pro-Israeli lobbyist tells Insight, “There is no statute of limitations for murder.” Therefore, should the new evidence come to light, by law the Department of Justice must issue a warrant for Arafat’s arrest on charges of murder.
In 1973 Welsh was a 27-year-old NSA employee at Fort Meade, Md., whose job was to analyze military communications of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) for potential threats to the United States and to U.S. allies. On Feb. 28 of that year he received a call from a colleague in Cyprus, Mike Hargreaves, alerting him to a highly unusual radio message intercepted between Beirut and Khartoum. The NSA code-named these intercepts FEDAYEEN.
“Arafat and his top deputy, Salah Khalaf, were giving orders over their shortwave network to a team of PLO operatives who had just arrived in Khartoum,” Welsh recalls. “From the transcript, it was clear that everyone was armed and ready to go. We didn’t know what the target was, but it was clear that a major operation was in the works. This was not just a bunch of hand-grenade throwers. These were the big guys.”
At first, Welsh thought Arafat and his Fatah organization were planning an attack on Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, who was scheduled to arrive in Khartoum later that day for talks with Sudanese President Muhammad Gaafar al-Nimeiry. Welsh pressed his superiors to send an unusual FLASH message – the highest priority – to the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum, warning of imminent danger.
Welsh went home that Wednesday night thinking he had helped avert a disaster. Just six months earlier, he knew, a similar tip-off had been ignored just hours before Palestinian terrorists burst onto the world scene in Munich, where they seized a dormitory at the Olympic Village and murdered 11 Israeli athletes in cold blood. “We felt tremendous satisfaction over the job that we had done,” Welsh recalls. “We went to bed thinking: `At least our embassy personnel will be safe.’ ”
Early the next morning, Welsh received a call at home telling him to turn on the television. A Fatah commando had just stormed the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum during a diplomatic reception and taken U.S. Ambassador Cleo Noel and Chargé d’affaires George Curtis Moore hostage, along with other diplomats.
Welsh rushed back to Fort Meade, where his NSA office was in an uproar. “We were shocked,” Welsh recalls. “How could the ambassador have gone to the Saudi Embassy reception if he had gotten our warning?” As Welsh learned later, the warning had been downgraded by Juanita Moody, a NSA liaison officer, after a State Department desk officer complained that it had come from “a couple of enlisted guys.” (Both Welsh and Hargreaves, who worked the radios in Cyprus, had been detailed to NSA from the U.S. Navy). The downgraded cable didn’t arrive for another 48 hours.
During those next two days, FEDAYEEN intercepts from PLO shortwave radios began pouring in from the Cyprus listening post, this time with clear orders from Arafat and his deputy, Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), who were directing the hostage-taking from their headquarters in Beirut.
Arafat used a Racal Single-Side Band radio tuned to 7150 kHz to communicate directly with his top deputy Khalil Wazir (Abu Jihad), who had been dispatched to Khartoum from Beirut to carry out the kidnapping. Wazir, in turn, relayed the orders by telephone to the terrorist commandos holed up inside the Saudi Embassy. Details of the operation and the communications scheme penetrated by NSA were reported in a previously secret postmortem account that was commissioned by the Rand Corp. in 1975.
The PLO operation was code-named “Cold River,” after a Palestinian refugee and training camp, Nahr al-Barad, that Israeli fighter jets had attacked 11 days earlier. At one point, the Palestinian commando was ordered to demand release of Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian who assassinated Sen. Robert Kennedy. When then-president Richard Nixon refused to negotiate, Arafat’s deputy in Beirut, Abu Iyad, gave the order to execute the hostages: “Remember Nahr al-Barad. The people’s blood in Nahr al-Barad is screaming for revenge. These are our final orders. We and the world are watching you.”
The transcript of Abu Iyad’s call to the PLO office in Khartoum shows that it took place at around 8 p.m. local time on March 2, 1973. But when the international news media still hadn’t reported the execution of the American diplomats one hour later, Arafat himself came on the radio and reiterated the command to execute the American diplomats.
In one of the last FEDAYEEN intercepts that day, Arafat praised his gunmen for pumping 40 bullets into U.S. diplomats Noel and Moore and a Belgian colleague. “Your mission is ended,” he told his men. “Release Saudi and Jordanian diplomats. Submit in courage to Sudanese authorities to explain your just cause to [the] great Sudanese Arab masses and international opinion. We are with you on the same road.”
The Rand report, which relied on the still-classified intercepts, states categorically: “The order to kill three of the hostages came from Beirut. The barrage of messages which they received from Beirut strongly suggests that the operation was being tightly controlled from Beirut, presumably by Khalaf and Arafat.”
Welsh believes that recordings of those intercepts still exist – either the U.S. originals or contemporaneous copies made by Israeli- or British-intelligence listening posts in the region. Wall Street Journal editorial writer Robert Pollock says that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon confirmed to him recently that Israel gave the U.S. government copies of its own intercept of Arafat’s order to murder the Americans.
“Several authorities on signals intelligence have given the opinion that this message, coming at the height of a hostage crisis that had been under way for 25 hours, and broadcast over open radio waves in a voice transmission, could not realistically have escaped interception and recording by the intelligence-gathering facilities of the United States and other countries,” the Rand report states.” One authority said, `It would be impossible not to have intercepted it.’ Another offered the observation that, `If the U.S. didn’t catch it, hundreds of people should have been fired.'”
But, through the years the State Department and the NSA have sought to downplay the incident, especially in the wake of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war, when Arafat and the PLO publicly embraced an end to international terrorism.
In 1986, 47 U.S. senators signed a letter to then-attorney general Edwin Meese demanding that the Justice Department indict Arafat for murder. One of the signatories was Tennessee Democrat Al Gore Jr. As vice president – and during last year’s presidential campaign – Gore championed Arafat as America’s “partner” for Middle East peace. But in the 1986 letter, Gore excoriated the Reagan administration for making excuses for Arafat.
“These allegations, if substantiated, leave little doubt that a warrant for Arafat’s arrest should be issued, and a criminal indictment filed against him,” the Senate letter concluded. “To allow other factors to enter into this decision is to make a mockery of our laws and our stated commitment to eradicate terrorism.”
The Monday after Noel and Moore were murdered on Arafat’s orders, the NSA director, Lt. Gen. Samuel C. Philips, drove over to the State Department carrying a special folder with Welsh’s warning. “When he returned, we were told, `It’s over,'” Welsh recalls. “I was 27 years old and got angry. I threatened to go to Congress to tell them that our warning had been discarded and was now being covered up. I was told in no uncertain terms by my superior that if I didn’t shut up I’d have my clearances pulled and be sent out on a fleet oiler within 48 hours.” A year later, after eight years in the Navy, Welsh left the NSA and resigned.
Twenty-eight years later, Welsh finally is going to Congress asking for an investigation. Former intelligence analysts consulted by Insight believe Welsh is right, and that transcripts of Arafat’s orders to kill the U.S. diplomats were sent to CIA stations in Beirut, Cyprus, Paris and Khartoum and still exist. If so, they could be entered into evidence before a court of law as Exhibit A in U.S. v. Arafat.
Emanuel Winston is a commentator and Middle East analyst. His articles appear often on Think-Israel and Gamla. He is a member of the Board of Directors and a research associate of the Freeman Center For Strategic Studies (http://www.freeman.org/online.htm).
