CIA, MI6 or PLO: Who Really Brought Down Abu Nidal?
Abu Nidal in 1976. Via Wikipedia.
Obituaries in the broadsheet press, particularly the Times and the Telegraph, often provide a valuable source of information on British intelligence history.
However, as you might expect, they can be a bit cryptic.
Take the June 2021 Times obituary of MI6 officer Hamilton McMillan which states:
'...he formed a close bond with Duane Clarridge, the flamboyant head of the CIA's counter-terrorism centre. McMillan's imaginative strategy, supported by the CIA's resources, led to the neutralisation of the main international terrorist threat of the day, just as that success was becoming focused on Britain' (ref 1).
We are not told what the threat was, but we are given a time-frame by the mention of Clarridge, who retired from the CIA in 1987, in the midst of the Iran-Contra Scandal.
We get a bit more help from Christopher Andrew's official history of MI5. The chapter on counter-terrorism in the late 1980s, mentions ‘the most active and brutal international terrorist group of the time, the Abu Nidal Organisation (ANO),' which 'threatened a series of attacks on British interests' in an attempt to force the release of the gunmen responsible for the 1982 shooting of Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador to the UK (ref 2, p.734).
Such attacks may have included the attempted assassination of the Queen in Jordan in 1984, which the future head of MI6 chief, David Spedding was credited with averting while head of station in Amman.
The fullest information about the Anglo-American response comes, characteristically, from the US side. Clarridge's autobiography states that the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) got an early break with a significant recruitment from inside the ANO, and its analytical staff were able to assemble much more information than they had expected (ref 3, ch.20).
In their book, The Secret War Against the Jews, intelligence writers John Loftus and Mark Aarons charge that key CIA intelligence on ANO came from Abu Iyad, the intelligence chief of the mainstream Fatah faction of the PLO (ref 4, p.476). While their account mixes verifiable facts with much more speculative material, this element is plausible. After he was assassinated by the ANO in 1991, several Western diplomats told the Chicago Tribune that Abu Iyad had provided information on terrorism to the CIA and European intelligence services (ref 5).
Abu Nidal's biographer, Patrick Seale reports that the Abu Iyad believed that his overtures were being ignored by the Europeans, particularly the British, although Abu Nidal seems to have believed that the British were at the centre of efforts against him (ref 6, pp.271-2).
Clarridge records that the CIA's efforts uncovered a key British connection, "an ANO funding channel through the London branch of the Bank of Credit & Commerce International" (ref 3, ch.20). At some point in the late 1980s, Abu Nidal's personal banker in London, Ghassan Qassem, became a British intelligence agent (ref 7). Although he worked for MI5, Middle East terrorism was the the focus of a joint MI5-MI6 section, so MI6 officers like McMillan probably had input into Qassem's case (ref 8).
According to Clarridge, his strategy for countering the ANO was 'was to publicly expose his financial empire and his network of collaborators', a high-profile approach at odds with the CIA's traditional clandestine methods. Information was spread firstly by diplomatic démarches against countries where ANO was operating, and secondly through a Department of State publication, The Abu Nidal Handbook (ref 3, ch.20).
Although many countries were induced to act against the ANO network, the core of the organisation remained difficult to penetrate. However, Abu Nidal's increasing paranoia led Clarridge to believe that his campaign was having its effect. In 1987, the ANO killed hundreds of its own fighters in Lebanon and Libya. Clarridge recounts:
Years later in London, I was reminiscing over pink gins in our club, the Oriental, with a foreign-intelligence colleague, a great bear of a man and dear friend. We agreed that we had succeeded in beating Abu Nidal in a way we had never anticipated, that the techniques of publicity and other actions to stimulate paranoia had succeeded beyond our wildest hopes (ref 3, ch.20).
This as close as Clarridge comes to acknowledging a British role in his campaign. A glance at the photograph accompanying the Times obituary suggests a very strong likelihood that the 'great bear of a man' accompanying Clarridge was Hamilton McMillan. With that, it seems the mystery presented by the obituary is solved.
However, there may be more to the story. Abu Nidal's paranoia probably owed as much to inter-Palestinian politics as Western machinations. After the PLO were driven out of Lebanon in the early 1980s, many of their disgruntled former fighters gravitated to the ANO. From a tightly-controlled terrorist organisation, the Lebanese wing of ANO grew into an overt militia, with aspirations for Palestinian political renewal, and an increasing willingness to re-engage with Fatah. The purges restored Abu Nidal's dominance of an organisation threatening to spin out of his control (ref 6, p.293).
There were also suspicions that some of the new wave of recruits had always been agents of Abu Iyad. Certainly, after the purges began, many would gravitate towards the protection of the PLO (ref 6, p.311).
Ultimately, Abu Nidal's biggest struggle may not have been with the British or Americans, or indeed with the Israelis, but with his fellow Palestinians.
References
Ref 1: Hamilton McMillan obituary, The Times, 8 June 2021.
Ref 2: Christopher Andrew, Defence of the Realm, The Authorized History of MI5, Allen Lane, 2009.
Ref 3: Duane R. Clarridge with Digby Diehl, A Spy For All Seasons: My Life in the CIA, Scribners, 2002.
Ref 4: John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews, St Martin's Press, 1994.
Ref 5: Ray Moseley and Chicago Tribune, Envoys: PLO Official was Informer, Chicago Tribune, 21 March 1991.
Ref 6: Patrick Seale, Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire, Random House, 1992.
Ref 7: William C. Rempel and Douglas Frantz, BCCI's Arms Transactions for Arab Terrorist Revealed, LA Times, 30 September 1991.
Ref 8: Philip H.J. Davies, MI6 and the Machinery of Spying, Frank Cass, 2004.