TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/011491/0114005.000

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                                                                                WORLD, Page 28

TERRORISM

The Life and Crimes of a Middle East Terrorist


In an exclusive report, TIME traces the connection between Iraq
and a top operative for a shadowy Palestinian group

By JAY PETERZELL/WASHINGTON


    On Aug. 30, 1982, a well-dressed Palestinian from Iraq named
Adnan Awad walked into the U.S. embassy in Bern, Switzerland,
and announced that he had just left a bomb in his Geneva hotel
room. He said he had been ordered by the May 15 Organization,
a Baghdad-based terrorist group known to intelligence agencies,
to blow up the Geneva Noga Hilton. But when he arrived in
Geneva, he found he could not go through with it. Now he was
appealing to the U.S. for help.

    The diplomat who had been talking to Awad in a soundproofed
embassy room picked up a telephone to alert the Swiss federal
police. He told them a bomb disguised as a suitcase was hidden
under the bed in Awad's seventh-floor hotel room. As a bomb
squad raced to the hotel, Awad poured out details of his
short-lived career as a terrorist. Suddenly, the American was
called out of the room. When he came back, he was angry. The
police had found Awad's suitcase right where he had said it
would be -- but there was no bomb in it. "You're crazy!" the
diplomat said. "What are you trying to pull?"

    Afraid the Americans might not help him, Awad frantically
insisted that he was telling the truth. He drew a diagram of
the suitcase, showing where thin sheets of plastic explosive
were sewn into the lining and how the batteries and detonator
were embedded in a sheet of plastic along the bottom edge of
the suitcase. The diplomat reluctantly called the Swiss police
again and talked them into sending the bomb squad back to
Awad's hotel. Several tense hours passed. Finally, a call came
through: the Swiss had found the bomb.

    That was just the beginning of Awad's coming in from the
cold. As he related his story to the Americans and the Swiss,
then to Israeli, German and other officials in Bern, it became
clear that he held the key to a major terrorist mystery. Just
three weeks earlier, a bomb had exploded on a Pan Am jet flying
from Tokyo to Hawaii; it killed a Japanese teenager and injured
15 other passengers. That bomb too was made of plastic
explosive. It had easily passed through security checks
designed to detect metal weapons and stop hijackings rather
than bombings.

    The Pan Am explosion left few clues. The most intriguing was
a short length of 24-kt. gold-plated nickel wire that was
driven into the body of the dead Japanese boy. Was this the
bomber's telltale "signature"? Investigators thought the bomb
was planted by a man who occupied the seat under which it
exploded but who got off in Tokyo, before the fatal leg of the
journey. But who was the man? And where had he come from?
Awad's evidence would put the pieces together. Based on his
debriefing, the U.S. government undertook an eight-year
investigation that ultimately implicated the Iraqi regime of
Saddam Hussein in anti-American terrorism.

    That probe is expected to culminate early this year in
Greece with the murder trial, stemming from the 1982 Pan Am
bombing, of the May 15 Organization's top operative, a slim,
dedicated young Palestinian named Mohammed Rashid. Although the
U.S. wished to extradite and prosecute him, Athens will try
Rashid under the 1971 Montreal Convention, which permits those
charged with attacks on airliners to stand trial in the country
holding them. Through dozens of interviews with current or
former U.S. officials and other sources, TIME reconstructed the
steps by which Rashid was uncovered as one of the Middle
East's most wanted terrorists.

    Awad's involvement with Rashid began in Baghdad. A former
captain in the Syrian army, Awad had knocked around the Persian
Gulf for a few years before he and one of his brothers settled
down in Iraq. By 1982 he had his own construction firm and a
lucrative contract to lay foundations for a string of
warehouses at Baghdad's military airport. Early that year he
met a handsome 30-year-old expatriate from Jerusalem named
Mohammed Rashid. Awad knew Rashid was with the fedayeen --
freedom fighters -- but that was not unusual among Palestinians.
Awad would go on picnics with Rashid and his wife Fatima, an
attractive, Austrian-born woman with freckles, long blond hair
and a healthy interest in firearms. Her real name, according
to Western files, was Christine Pinter.

    One day Rashid introduced Awad to someone new: a short,
tough-looking, energetic man with the strong, deep voice of
someone used to giving orders. It was Rashid's boss -- Abu
Ibrahim, also known as Husayn al-Umari, the 46-year-old chief
of the May 15 Organization. The date was June 6, 1982 -- the
very day Israel invaded Lebanon. That afternoon as the
expatriates sat in Rashid's living room watching the bloody
assault unfold on television, Abu Ibrahim turned to Awad and
asked angrily whether Palestinians like him were willing to
help their country or only cared about making money. "Of course
I want to help," Awad replied.

    Awad soon learned that while the May 15 Organization was
tiny, it had a global reach, with safe houses as far away as
Bangkok. The group had pulled off bombings in London, Rome,
Vienna, Antwerp, even Nairobi. Rashid bragged to Awad about
blowing up the El Al airline office in Istanbul right under the
nose of the Mossad, Israel's military intelligence agency.
Afterward, he said, he had sneaked up behind an Israeli officer
and stuck a note on his jacket making fun of the Mossad. Now
Abu Ibrahim vowed to answer the Israeli invasion with a wave
of bombings.

    Rashid and Abu Ibrahim alternately cajoled and browbeat Awad
into agreeing to blow up the Geneva Noga Hilton, which Abu
Ibrahim said was owned by a Jew who he claimed sent a lot of
money to Israel. Realizing he had got in over his head, Awad
began avoiding Abu Ibrahim. Then one morning Awad went to his
construction site at Baghdad's military airport and found that
he and his 60 workers were locked out. The officer in charge
said he had orders to shut down the job until Awad talked to
Abu Ibrahim again.

    Awad felt he had no choice. He knew that the Iraqi
government paid for May 15 members' rent and gasoline and
provided Abu Ibrahim with documents, untraceable license plates
and security guards. Now the May 15 chief had shown that with
a word from him, the Iraqi military would bring Awad's business
to a halt. Awad realized that he could not continue his life
in Baghdad if he defied the bombmaker, and he headed for Abu
Ibrahim's villa in the wealthy diplomatic quarter of southwest
Baghdad. Abu Ibrahim welcomed the reluctant terrorist and
personally trained him. At one point, Awad asked what would
happen if the Iraqi police found the bomb in his suitcase while
he was at the airport. "Don't worry," Abu Ibrahim replied. "The
Iraqis know about everything we do."

    By early August, Awad was ready. The day before he left for
Geneva, he said goodbye to Rashid and Pinter. The couple was
headed for the airport with their two-year-old son on a
terrorist mission of their own: it turned out to be the bombing
of the Pan Am flight to Hawaii. "We'll all meet back in Baghdad
in three weeks," said a confident Rashid.

    His prediction was wrong. Awad's desperate journey would end
in a Geneva hotel room when he found himself talking aloud to
a bomb in his suitcase. Torn between fear of Abu Ibrahim and
horror at the idea of killing innocent people, Awad prayed that
the bomb would explode then and there, taking him with it. The
next morning he decided to go to the authorities.

    While Awad was astonishing officials in Bern with his
detailed reports, other evidence piled up. A May 15 member en
route from Baghdad was arrested in Tunisia with a suitcase bomb
like Awad's. Under interrogation, the man admitted that he and
another May 15 member, called Abu Saif, had put a bomb on a Pan
Am flight from London's Heathrow Airport to New York. The bomb
had been found on Aug. 25, 14 days and 40,000 miles later,
unexploded, when the aircraft landed in Rio de Janeiro. It had
not blown up because the bombers inadvertently broke off the
safety pin, leaving the tip stuck in the bomb.

    Meanwhile, the Swiss asked Awad to prove that he was working
for Abu Ibrahim by telephoning Baghdad. He reached the
bombmaker's wife. He hadn't been able to get a room at the
Hilton, he told her; he had run out of money. A few days later,
a courier showed up in Switzerland carrying $1,500 in cash and
a photo of Awad. It was Abu Saif. A search of his shoulder bag
showed that part of a maroon vinyl liner had been cut out: the
missing fabric had been used to wrap the bomb found in Rio.

    There was even the telltale signature that linked all the
bombs: a gold-plated nickel wire like the one that had been
removed from the body of the Japanese youth killed in the blast
over Hawaii. Identical wires were found in the Rio, Geneva and
Tunis devices, in each case attached to a commonly available
E-cell electronic timer made by Plessey, USA, an electronics
firm based in White Plains, N.Y. All three bombs used a
distinctive, homemade version of the easily procurable high
explosive PETN. All were powered by AAA-size batteries from the
same manufacturer and the same lot. Clinching the case, the
Hawaii bomber had left a fingerprint on the stub of his plane
ticket. The print was identified as Mohammed Rashid's.

    In March 1982, the State Department took Iraq off its list
of countries that support terrorism. The move cleared the way
for the U.S. to support Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. By late
1982, however, growing evidence that an Iraqi-backed group was
behind a wave of bombings against U.S. targets led to a
mini-revolt in the American government. "I was very upset,"
says Noel Koch, then the Pentagon's top official for
counterterrorism policy and now a security-management
consultant. "I called my colleagues at State and asked, `What
the hell are we doing?'" They didn't like the policy either,
but the decision to tilt toward Iraq in the war had been made
at the top of the U.S. government. "It was a fact of life,"
says Koch. The officials soon realized that there would be no
retaliation against Iraq. If they were going to do anything
about the attacks masterminded in Baghdad, it would have to be
limited to identifying, tracking and prosecuting specific
individuals responsible for the Hawaii bombing. With Awad's
testimony they just might pull it off.

    The Israelis had a different idea. They saw Awad's defection
as a chance to blow a hole in the Palestinian underground.
Israeli officials asked to speak to Awad alone, and they gave
him a lie-detector test. Then they made an offer. "Your life
is at a dead end," a Mossad officer told him. The Israelis
would give him $5 million to start a new life in Paris. There
he would continue to be involved with the Palestinian freedom
fighters, and to boost his credibility, the Swiss would make it
look as though he had carried out his mission in Geneva. A bomb
would go off at the Hilton, and there would be smoke, damage
and simulated injuries. Once in Paris, Awad would help Israel
identify the members of the terrorist network, one by one.

    Awad turned the Israelis down flat. He did not want to be
involved with terrorism at all, he said. If he were willing to
do that kind of thing, he could have done it for the
Palestinians; why should he do it for the Israelis? Instead,
in early 1984 Awad agreed to go to the U.S., enter the Witness
Protection Program and testify against Rashid.

    For the next four years, while an increasingly frustrated
Awad waited in America, U.S. intelligence agents hunted Rashid
without success. The CIA occasionally got word that he had been
spotted, but always too late. Through it all, the bombings
continued, and Abu Ibrahim remained a sore point in U.S.-Iraqi
relations. In late 1984, as the war with Iran drained
resources, U.S. officials claim, Iraq finally agreed to force
him into retirement. Rashid and many other May 15 assets simply
transferred to a Palestine Liberation Organization commando
unit known as the Special Operations Group. "The terrorism
continued, just under a different name," says Vincent
Cannistraro, who left the CIA this fall as head of analysis and
operations for the agency's counterterrorist center. According
to associate deputy FBI director Buck Revell, Rashid is a prime
suspect in the 1986 P.L.O. bombing of a TWA flight to Athens
that killed four Americans.

    Three years after the Justice Department asked him to move
to the U.S., Adnan Awad finally appeared in court. In July
1987, based on his testimony and other evidence, a federal
grand jury indicted Rashid, Pinter and Abu Ibrahim for the 1982
Hawaii bombing and other actions. Now the U.S. government was
armed with an indictment, but Rashid's trail had grown cold.
The search kicked into high gear. In early 1988, electronic
intercepts and other intelligence tracked Rashid to a house in
Khartoum, where he was living with Pinter.

    The U.S. asked the government of Sudanese Prime Minister
Sadiq al-Mahdi to arrest Rashid. "The Sudanese position was
that they were providing hospitality," says a knowledgeable
former official. "As long as Rashid didn't do anything against
them, they didn't want to get involved." That led to a debate
in Washington: Should the FBI kidnap Rashid on Sudanese soil?
Officials decided instead to keep a close eye on the
Palestinian bomber and hope he traveled to a country where he
could be arrested. In early May 1988, the CIA learned that he
was planning to go to Greece. Not the perfect spot, given the
Papandreou government's sympathy for the P.L.O., but it would
do. Fearing that the Greeks would be reluctant to take legal
action against Rashid, the American embassy told them only that
a man carrying a fake Syrian passport would be landing at
Athens airport on May 30. "The Greeks were happy to arrest
him," says a former official directly involved in the case.
"Once he was in custody, we told them it was Rashid. They said,
`Oh, shit!'"

    For two years the Greeks resisted American efforts to
extradite the accused bomber. Rashid's wife, still living in
Khartoum, was even permitted to visit him in jail at least
twice using a Greek passport and a fake name, although she too
was under U.S. indictment. Nor does the story end with the
decision last September by Prime Minister Constantine
Mitsotakis to prosecute Rashid as part of his tougher line on
terrorism. Two months ago, Rashid discovered the identity of
the key witness against him. Since then, U.S. officials have
learned, the supposedly retired Abu Ibrahim has dropped in on
Awad's brother in Baghdad and confiscated his passport. The
implied threat that harm may come to Awad's family if he
testifies against Rashid is not hard to fathom. Adnan Awad and
Mohammed Rashid, their lives so painfully bound together, can
each make the other pay a stiff price when Awad finally
confronts his former comrade-at-arms in a court of law.