ARAFAT: FROM GUN-RUNNER TO DIPLOMAT

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP05-01219R000300420001-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 3, 2012
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: April 3, 1981
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/03: CIA-RDP05-01219R000300420001-6
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PORMAIT 1,10?2/A
ARAFAT' FROM
GUN-RUNNERgr
TO DIPLOMAT
As Lord Carrington prepares to meet the PLO chief,
Brian Crozier examines the man who has cultivated
moderation to earn respectability for his cause
e is squat and paunchy,, and orates__
in high-pitched, staccato Arabic.
He has heavy-lidded eyes, an
?
aquiline nosct_a_ short _beard and is
invariably-, pictured with three or four days'_
stubble requiring a skilfully selective shaving,
policy He is nearly always seen. toting a
-gun and is never without his-it-rah?head-
gear, or kciffiyeh, which both proclaims_
nationalism and (it is said)hides his
baldness. _
By now, this physically unprepossessing_
man with his battle fatigues and dark glasses.,
Yasser Arafat, is one of the most famous
?peo?plein the world. Whatever his merits as a
leader of irregular warriors, he must be ac-
corded genius rating as a PR man for
himself and for the nio?vement he leads, the
Palestine Liberation Organisation.
It is not difficult to demonstrate that he is,
or has been, associated with PLO groups
practising pure terrorism. Yet he achieved
the exceptional distinction of being the first
non-governmental leader, apart from Pope
Paul VI, to address the United Nations
General Assembly. And, ewiecia.11.v_c1ir.ing
I.
I S.
widespread recognition the -PLO- as. a
qiiasi-.over-nmentic44?bocia?lide
governments feel the need to e ? lish
yenodwlaittatici
such-tfringastate of Palestine.
Clearly a man who can pull off-CM-kit?id of
paradoxical feat deserves attention, and
possibly respect.
His(original name was Rahman Abdel-
Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini)and he
was born in Jerualem in 1929 (although some
accounts insist that the year was 1928).
There is a useful symbolism in the name
"Arafat", which is also a hill south of Mecca
which has religious importance.
His father was a prosperous merchant,
who later dissipated much time and money
trying in vain to establish a family claim to
valuable property in Cairo through unco-
operative Egyptian courts. To help him in
his litigation, he moved to Cairo with his
family (including Yasser's sister and two
brothers) and opened a small shop there.
It was in Cairo, then, that Yasser Arafat
served his political apprenticeship and gain-
ed his first experience of war. Politics: while
studying at Cairo University (in those days,
Fuad I) for his degree in civil engineering, he
became the leader of the Palestinian
students. War: at 20, he was running guns
42
? 0
II I :?
for the Arab side in the fighting of 1948-49
which led to the creation of Israel and to the
exodus of Palestinians who, collectively,
became his life's cause.
Guerrilla war fascinated the young Yasser
Arafat, and the prolonged troubles of
1951-52 which drove the British out of the
Suez Canal Zone gave him a ready-made
battle theatre. Soon he was both training and
leading the Palestinian and Egyptian com-
mandos who harassed the British.
After graduating, the young man receive
more formal training at the Egyptia
military academy, notably in the making an
utilisation of explosives. It was as a demoli
tions expert and commissioned lieutenant in
Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egyptian army that
the Suez Affair of 1956 brought him a fresh
opportunity for battle experience, this time
fighting the French as well as the British at
Port Said and Abu Kabir.
The ill-fated Anglo-French expedition
was short-lived, and Yasser Arafat began to
think about earning a living. He worked
briefly in Cairo, as an engineer, then moved
to a land of greater opportunity ?.Kuwait.
There he set up a contracting firm before
siglti_g_csini.951.aszn engineer with the
Sultan's public works department.
There was never any likelihood, however,
that Arafat might opt for the obscurity of
civilian life: politics and political violence
already had him in their grip. While in
Kuwait, he edited a magazine, Our
Palestine, which served as the rallying point
for the nationalistic outrage of Palestinian
exiles. There too he trained Palestinian com-
mandos for raids inside Israel. In the tradi-
tion of revolutionaries, he donned a new
name as a cloak for his clandestine work,
and it was as Abu Amar that he joined the
organisation with which his name is always
linked: Al-Fatah.
If Arafat carries an Islamic symbolism,
Al-Fatah is full of the symbolism of struggle
and violence. It is a kind of reverse acronym
of Harakat al-Tahrir el-Watani al-Falastini
(Movement for the Liberation of Palestine).
In Arabic, those initials (HTF) mean death.
Reverse them (fath) and they spell conquest.
Even now, some mystery surrounds the
birth of Al-Fatah, but it seems that it grew
out of the clandestine meetings of the early
Fifties. For years it made militant noises but
did not act militarily. In January 1965,
came its first recorded action. That year
continued on page 45
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Release 2012/01/03: CIA-RDP05-01219R000300420001-6
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/03: CIA-RDP05-01219R000300420001-6
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/03: CIA-RDP05-01219R000300420001-6 r
Arafat greets Libya's
Colonel Muammar Gadaffi
at an Arab summit
conference in Tripoli
during December 1977
Arafat the diplomat
continued frotn page 42
Arafat became a full-time revolutionary,
giving up his job in Kuwait to take the
leadership of AI-Fatah's fledgling military
arm Al-Assifa ( The Storm). At that time
Al-Fatah remained relatively obscure. The
limelight was hogged by the original PLO,
which President Nasser had set up at a
conference of the Arab League in Cairo the
previous year to bring various Palestinian
groups together.
Not unnaturally, it was,stilled as well as
sponsored by the dominant personality of
Nasser, who saw it as one of the many in-
struments of his pan-Arab policy. Two years
after Al-Fatah's emergence as a fighting
organisation, the PLO was giving little sign
of life. Then came the traumatic test of the
Six Day War of June 1967. The PLO's army
offered battle to the advancing Israelis and
was utterly defeated.
It was, of course, in good company, for
the armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria soon
shared in the general Arab humiliation. In
the prevailing gloom came YasserArafat's
opportunity. Nasser had set up the PLO, at
least in part, to divert attention from Al-
Fatah. Arafat, spurning Nasser and Cairo,
had made a deal with Syria, which offered
bases from which the commandos of Al-
Assifa could stage hit-and-run sabotage
raids into Israeli territory.
Untainted, therefore, by the defeat of the
PLO, Arafat quite suddenly became the
stuff of legends. Such was his aura (despite
protestations of his distaste for a personality
cult) that money and supplies from Arabs
began to pour in. And so did volunteers.
It was during this heady period that
Arafat showed his capacity for strategic
thinking. He aimed to unite the Palestinians,
whatever their ideologies, under his banner.
And he saw the achievement of Palestinian
statehood as the natural culmination of a
protracted struggle in which neither the
Israelis nor the Arab world, from the Gulf to
the Atlantic, would ever be allowed to forget
the Palestinian cause.
The first of these aims took him a couple
of years to realise. He made an uneasy
alliance with Dr George Habash, the ex-
treme Left-wing leader of the Popular Front
for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). And
Al-Fatah joined the demoralised PLO.
Twice, Arafat challenged the established
leadership of the PLO. His first attempt,
during the PLO's fourth annual conference
in July 1968, failed, when he attracted only
38 of the 100 votes in the council elections.
Next time round, in January 1969, he
swept the board. Three months later Arafat
formed the Command of the Aimed Strug-
gle. Initially, the independent-minded
Habash stayed out of it. But in February
1970, the PFLP also joined what was restyl-
NOW APRIL 3, 1981
ed the Joint Command. Since then, Yasser
Arafat's leadership of the Palestinian
militants has never been seriously challeng-
ed. Which does not mean that the shifting
and proliferating Palestinian groups in-
variably seek his authority before acting.
, The fact that Arafat does not necessarily
control every group which ostensibly looks
to him for leadership has helped him to
cultivate and maintain, with surprising suc-
cess, a reQutation as a moderate., Equally, it
suits the niare-51-equMinlIjiT,Zfreme of the
It is the genesis and the
structure of Black
September that shatters
Arafat's moderate credentials,
Palestinian groups that the spokesman,
diplomat and "travelling salesman" of the
PLO should have a moderate image.
It is quite clear, to give a example, that
Arafat and Al-Fatah had nothing to do with
the spectacular actions of the PLFP in 1970,
when it hijacked airliners and dynamited air-
craft on an airstrip outside Amman.
The moderate credentials of Yasser
Arafat need, however, to be looked at with
some care, and a good point to start the
search is with the shattering events of 1970 in
Jordan. In that country and in Lebanon, the
fedayeen (meaning those ready to sacrifice
their lives for freedom) had become a state
within the state. There were some 20,000
fedayeen in Jordan and 4,000 in Lebanon.
After desultory clashes with the Lebanese
forces in April and October, Arafat
negotiated a precarious truce.
In Jordan, the situation ran wild. There
were clashes between the fedayeen and the
Jordanian army in February, and again in
June. King Hussein was in a conciliatory
mood. In August, however, he backed ten-
tative plans for negotiations between Egypt
and Israel, and the fedayeen made the major
error of attempting to take over Amman and
other Jordanian cities.
There had to be a showdown, and the
fedayeen were no match for the well-trained
Bedouins of the royal forces, with their utter
contempt, as desert Arabs, for the effete,
town-dwelling Palestinians. The fedayeen
were badly mauled in 10 days of bloody
fighting in September and on the 27th Arafat
was forced to sign a face-saving truce with
King Hussein. ( `