Buying the Night Flight (31 page)

***

I was trying to get to the "base of the lighthouse," which was indeed always dark even as the lighthouse shone its light across a darkened sea. It was very much the same job as a psychiatrist's: to listen and to understand, to get at the trauma and let it speak. Terrorism was the symptom of breakdown, and I knew I was dealing first-hand with one of the epi-themes of our era.

***

After going through the "rounds" of getting to know the
PLO
and its strange and often dark ways, and thus building confidence, my next step was to try to get to know the leadership -- not, then, an easy move.

Despite my feeling that interviewing leaders is actually one of the more tiresome of life's concerns, from the first time I went to Beirut in 1969, I started working on interviewing Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and, to many, the number one terrorist in the world. For an amazing number of years, eight actually, nothing happened. I applied through the information offices (never the way to get to the top men) and I reapplied in all sorts of ways.

I saw others, but I didn't see him. I met Abu Jihad, the head of the
PLO
military wing, in Damascus, and he and his wife inexplicably gave a Thanksgiving dinner for me. Since he was even harder to see than Arafat, that was extremely nice -- but he wasn't Arafat. I interviewed Abu Iyad, who really
is
head of the terrorist wing, and

I was held in an Arab embassy where we talked for an hour until he returned to wherever it is shadowy figures such as he return to -- or I would have been held responsible for anything that happened to him. But he wasn't Arafat either.

Finally, in the spring of 1977, an interview was arranged through a mutual friend, a Palestinian doctor, and I arrived in the broken city of Beirut on a Saturday evening that was my birthday. It was heart rending, seeing those piles of blackened bricks where once the beautiful white city on the sea had been, and the next night I crossed over to the Fakhani section to meet Arafat. The meeting took place in the impeccable, bourgeois apartment of his secretary, a plump and buxom woman who bustled about bringing piles of food to everyone.

Actually Arafat surprised me, as I was often to be surprised in these interviews I now seemed destined to do.

For one thing he was far less harsh in person than in his pictures. He smiled and laughed easily, his face expressive and his odd, poppish eyes cushioned by the pouches that lay underneath them. There was, of course, the heavyset body, the headscarf or
kaffiyeh,
and the self-conscious khakis. He looked like a cross between GI Joe and the Buddha.

I was expecting the worst. I knew that interviews with him (with any "revolutionary" leader) were often filled with nonproductive rhetoric. So my relief grew when I soon saw it becoming something quite different.

"We are embarking upon a new program," he said with intensity, "a program of international legitimacy." Here is where you have to be able to read the hieroglyphics -- the Rosetta stones of the liberation fronts -- in order to figure out what is really being said. And what he was saying, this April of 1977, was that whereas before the
PLO
program had recognized no course of action except "armed struggle," now it would work through the
UN
and other respectable bodies.

"Do you understand the importance of what I am saying?" he asked me at one point, his eyes narrowed. "This is a very important signal."

The "international bandits" of the world were embarking upon an all-out program of diplomacy, to gain respectability in preparation for the formation of a "Palestinian state."

And now he talked about that state, something he had always denied before. He said there could indeed be federation or confederation with Jordan, but only after an independent state had come into being. He vehemently denied that what he was saying was only "tactical."

When I pressed him on recognition and guarantees for Israel, he said that "the formation of a Palestinian state will solve (our problems with Israel) for the next twenty years."

"Why twenty years?" I pressed him, suspicious.

"From your questions," he answered, smiling a patient-impatient, oddly avuncular smile, "I can understand that you are asking for guarantees for Israel. I only say twenty years because by that time I will be dead. Others will have to work out the future." He then went on to renounce terrorism and to approve enthusiastically the new contacts between
PLO
representatives and "any Israelis or Jews who recognize the Palestinian people."

We started at 10:00 p.m. and we ended at 2:00 a.m. In between we finished off platefuls of typical Arab food. Just before 2:00 a.m. he said that of course he could not
fully recognize Israel at this time,
throwing up his hands and saying, "You are asking from the victim everything."

Yet I knew that he had in fact given to me in this curious interview an
implicit recognition.
On the side, his people told me they were thinking about de facto recognition of Israel in the first stage of settlement, with de jure recognition coming in the final stage.

And as I left him that strange early morning in that grotesquely wounded city that I had loved so much, this man that many saw as the new Attila the Hun smiled broadly and said, "I am optimistic, yes, I am optimistic."

As I got to know these Palestinians better -- but never, believe me, as an outsider, really to
know
them -- I kept searching for the secret to Arafat's leadership. What was his "genius," this chubby man with the stubble of beard? As I talked with his people, I began to see him as a kind of moderate, a juggler of passions who let a thousand flowers bloom in order to hold his then-disparate movement together. His were the welcoming arms that closed around every Palestinian, no matter what that man had done, or what horror he had committed, and tried to lead him back to the fold.

Indeed it was only half a year later that I saw him again -- but now in a totally different manner. Now it was December of 1977, immediately after Anwar Sadat's stunning trip to Jerusalem. Now all of the hopes of Arafat, expressed to me only that last spring, were dead. This time, after the glory and drama of the Cairo Conference where Israelis and Egyptians met for the first time, he agreed to see me but only on the basis that it would be all off the record. Unhappy about it, I nevertheless agreed. And I found quite a different man.

It was as though he were drained of all energy. He spoke from the heart. His words, which I can here only paraphrase, were really cries of anguish. He had been in Cairo with Sadat. They had been talking about the new initiatives in the
UN
. He, Arafat, had left by plane to go to Libya to try to patch things up with Qaddafi for Sadat. In midair the plane was called back by Sadat: something urgent. Then Arafat was taken to the front rows of the meeting of the Arab Socialist Union, where Sadat had called an extraordinary session; he was even placed in a front-row seat. Sadat then proceeded to inform the population that he was going to try to make a breakthrough by going to Jerusalem. Arafat sat there, stunned, incredulous, unbelieving, and, above all, deeply and deliberately humiliated.

"Georgie Anne," he told me, "we were both sitting on a high platform, Sadat and me. Then he pushed me off. He -- he is still up there. But I -- I am down. I am finished." It was a strange, dread cry for help that I cannot easily forget.

I saw Arafat twice after that. Once in 1978, he had been sick -- the flu it was -- and I waited several days (what non-journalists never really understand is that it is the ability to wait and outwait, not perception, or aggressiveness, or intelligence, or penetrating questions, that mark the good journalist!) and so I waited. Finally, on a Saturday, I recall, they said he was better. I trotted up to the apartment again and there saw Yasser Arafat -- the scourge of the world, to many -- sitting in bed in his blue starched pajamas with blue flowered sheets and a white chenille bedspread. He and Mahmoud Labadi, his excellent press man, and I sat there eating candied apricots ... and talking.

The last time I saw him, in March of 1980, he was, again, a different man. Now he had just come back from Teheran and was foolishly ecstatic. He had thrown the
PLO
's lot with Khomeini (even at the time, I thought this quite mad) and was trying to help negotiate the hostages' freedom ....

***

During these years the correspondent's role was changing. Diplomats could not get to these revolutionaries, for the revolutionaries blamed them for their problems. We had become the new diplomats -- the new intermediaries in the world -- the surrogates for nations. And the diplomats -- the good ones -- were jealous. One American, seasoned and experienced, remarked to me with unmistakable yearning, after I had been smuggled into Syria on a
PLO
"visa," "If only I could once do that!" But they couldn't. That was left to us -- the intermediaries, the in-between people, the people who didn't have to be there.

Interestingly enough, I have found that guerrillas ... terrorists ... freedom fighters ... whatever you choose to call them, understood us and our role perfectly -- in many ways they understood it better than many Americans. Only once, for instance, was I ever accused by any of them, anywhere, at any time, of being a
CIA
agent, and that was for a reason.

One of the leading
PLO
diplomats one night at dinner kept accusing me of being
CIA
, until I quite lost my cool and snarled at him something about how they really didn't deserve anything because they were so hopeless and never could analyze anything correctly, etc., etc.

After a hurt silence he finally looked at me and said, "I'm sorry. You see, we needed a contact with the
CIA
and we were just hoping you could be it."

***

Dealing with the Palestinians also had its most awful days and nights of terror for us as well.

Bob Allison,
CBS
correspondent, and I were sitting in the Sheraton dining room one night in Cairo, gazing from our privileges out over the massed humans and dusty dreams and sobering squalor that was Cairo. Suddenly Bob got a phone call from his office, and when he came back to the table, he was shaking his head.

"You won't believe this," he said as he sat down, wearing now that special, exhausted look of the correspondent who has been called away on one too many 2:00 a.m. flights to nowhere. "Some Palestinian terrorists in Khartoum have taken a group of diplomats and are holding them." He paused. "The American ambassador is among them."

By 2:00 a.m., arrangements all behind us, we were sitting on the single Sudanese Airways night flight to Khartoum, south from Egypt, down into the endless northern deserts of Africa.

As dawn was breaking over the vast desert city of Khartoum, where Chinese Gordon had fought off the Mahdi's dervishes in the 1890s, only to have his head end on one of the Mahdi's spikes and the British Empire in this part of Africa fall apart, we landed. After checking into a small downtown hotel at 6:00 a.m., we were off immediately by taxi and by foot to the sprawling residential area where the Palestinians were holding the diplomats in the Saudi embassy. It was a grim story ....

A typical diplomatic party had been held the night before at the Saudi embassy, a big, four-storied modern stucco villa that was as utilitarian as it was tasteless. Into the midst of the proper and dutiful crowd, representing all the establishments and structures of the world, suddenly had swept a band of Palestinians, faces ghoulishly masked with black ski masks and hands holding the ever-present Kalashnikovs. They took five guests: American Ambassador Cleo Noel, the American charge Curt Moore, a Jordanian, and two other Arabs.

When I heard this, my sorrow increased. Curt Moore I had met on a previous trip through Khartoum. A tall, bespectacled man, he was one of the finest officers I knew. Ironically, Curt was a splendid Arabist; he understood the Arab complaints. It shows, again, how little it mattered what we personally thought -- or did -- in terms of the world's "causes."

On foot, I reconnoitered the area. The streets around the embassy were now closed to the public by the police. But journalists could get right in front of the Saudi embassy and see the terrorists pacing the balconies in their grotesque black masks.

I was walking back and forth, wondering exactly what to do, when, catty-cornered from the Saudi embassy, I saw some people on a balcony soberly surveying the situation. They looked like Americans.

"May I come up?" I yelled, taking a chance.

"Come on," they answered.

I had happened upon what turned out to be the American command house, which was the only building in the immediate area still occupied. From the balcony upstairs we could look across a span of several hundred feet, onto the balconies of the Saudi embassy, and virtually into the masked eyes of the madmen.

From different places and voices we got bits and pieces of information. The terrorists wanted some of their fellows released from prison. If they did not get that, they would kill the diplomats. My mind was filled with the picture of Curt Moore again, the last time I saw him, sitting in his office at the back of the embassy and telling me with such intelligent, informed sympathy about the very things that were driving these terrorists to such insanity.