The terrorist I knew

published 25/08/2002 at 00:45 by Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens sheds no tears for Abu Nidal, but admits to a small twinge of nostalgia.

I wasn't exactly sad to see the paunchy cadaver of Abu Nidal, photographed so callously undraped in a Baghdad hospital bed. Presumably his torso was exposed so as to belie the unworthy suspicion that he had been machine-gunned by his hosts. The official story - that he had shot himself several times in the head - seems just as acceptable. But I did feel a twinge of nostalgia. I met the man in Iraq in 1975, before he achieved celebrity and notoriety, and for years afterwards, as one of the few hacks to have interviewed him, I was guaranteed a moment of TV or a swathe of ink every time he mounted an atrocity. (This is partly how I learned the useful lesson that the world of the 'terrorism expert' is made up of the most incompetent amateurs.)

When we met, he raved briefly about how he was the true leader of the Palestinians and then inquired if I knew Said Hammami. Mr Hammami was at that time the PLO envoy in London and had written a fine series of articles in the Times, exploring the possibility of mutual recognition with the Israelis. I replied that I did know him, and Abu Nidal told me to warn Hammami against the consequences of treason to the revolution. I passed on the threat, and not long afterwards Abu Nidal had him shot down in his office. This was the beginning of an orgiastic campaign of murder, extending through the airports of Rome and Vienna to Egypt and back to London, where the attempted killing of the Israeli ambassador in 1982 was the trigger for the Begin-Sharon invasion of Lebanon.

The PLO leadership always maintained that Abu Nidal was a double-agent, and he certainly killed a lot of their people (Patrick Seale wrote a very interesting book on this hypothesis). What's interesting for now is that, though he pimped in his time for a number of regimes from Syria to Libya, and was a mercenary as well as a psychopathic killer, it was invariably to Baghdad that he returned. He was spattered with the blood of civilians in innumerable countries, and with the blood of many Palestinian patriots, but Saddam's people were always glad to see him again.

Currently the Bush administration is rather flailing in its double-barrelled allegation that Hussein (a) possesses weapons of mass destruction, and (b) incubates and encourages international terrorism. Well, without 'smoking gun' proof - which I wouldn't much care to see, if you phrase it like that - it might still be argued that Saddam must like the idea of WMDs very much, since he is willing to risk so much rather than disown them. I think so, don't you? As for the 'terror' factor, the evidence of a direct Al-Qaeda connection is decidedly slim, but Abu Nidal was wanted everywhere for crimes hardly less vile, and the Ba'athists gave him a villa and a secure base as a matter of course. That must tell us something.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair