http://www.hirhome.com/iraniraq/plo-iran.htmGrand Theater: The US, The PLO, and the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Why did the US government, in 1979, delegate to the PLO the task of negotiating the safety of American hostages at the US embassy in Tehran?
Historical and Investigative Research - 10 Dec 2005
by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/iraniraq/plo-iran.htm___________________________________________________________
Late in 1979, student followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamist coup d’Etat that followed the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79, attacked the US embassy in Tehran and took about 90 hostages. Khomeini would not receive US officials for negotiations, he said, because the United States was “Great Satan.” But the US government proposed, and Khomeini accepted, that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) be the mediator. The PLO eagerly participated because, it said, it wanted to help protect American lives... And then the PLO in fact obtained a promise from Khomeini that the safety of the hostages would be guaranteed (it was). The New York Times quipped that “Yasir Arafat is so busy playing statesman,”[1] but the New York Times had eagerly built Arafat up for the role (as shown below), helping this antisemitic terrorist organization to shine on the world stage as powerbroker and benefactor. One is entitled to wonder: What in the world is the PLO? How does it get away with this? This piece will seek to throw some light on these questions.
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Introduction
This piece is the second in a series of articles that HIR is producing to fill out the historical background necessary to understand US president George Bush Jr.'s ongoing war on Iraq. So you may be wondering: What is the relevance of the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 to a US war against Iraq taking place in the year 2005?
In 1979, as I will argue, the US ruling elite produced the Iranian ‘hostage crisis’ in order:
1) to raise the prestige of Khomeini's loudly anti-Israeli Islamists, who took over Iran; and
2) to raise the prestige of the PLO.
As I will show, these two objectives were subgoals of a more general strategy to support Islamist Iran against secular Iraq, and simultaneously to generate a diplomatic process towards a PLO state on Israeli soil -- precisely what the US government is also doing now (and what it did in between). The point of all that will be explained further below and in subsequent pieces, but I give a general picture of the present situation in the appendix.
In sum, a proper understanding of the hostage crisis of 1979, I aim to show, will help us see just how consistently pro-PLO, pro-Iran, and pro-Islamist -- and in consequence how anti-Israeli -- US policy has been over the years. This piece will focus on the PLO side of the equation; the coming pieces will take a closer look at the Iranian connection.
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Table of Contents
( hyperlinked █ )
█ Introduction (above)
█ The PLO is asked to mediate the hostage crisis
█ The geopolitical game of the US ruling elite in the Iranian hostage crisis
■ Exhibit A: The PLO’s behavior
■ Exhibit B: Jimmy Carter’s behavior
■ Exhibit C: The behavior of US Intelligence and the State Department
█ But. . .why does the US attack Israel? Is it for oil?
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The PLO is asked to mediate the hostage crisis _____________________________________________________
The Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 forced the Iranian shah (or king) Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to flee the country. The shah had been a repressive, right-wing US puppet (more on this in forthcoming pieces). After his exile, the de facto head of state, soon to be made de jure head of state, became the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a leader of the opposition forces and an Islamist terrorist who achieved undisputed total power when he violently defeated the progressive workers movements that had joined his Islamist forces in fighting against the shah (more about this important struggle in forthcoming pieces).
The PLO had not been a mere observer in the events leading up to Khomeini's rise to power. In fact, the PLO had been training Iranian guerrillas since the early 1970s. As a token of thanks for this, once in power, the Ayatollah Khomeini immediately seized the Israeli diplomatic mission in Tehran and gave it to the PLO.[2] Also: “Arafat received a pledge from Ayatollah Khomeini that the Iranians would ‘turn to the issue of victory over Israel’ after Iran had consolidated its strength.”[2a] The PLO had been calling (still is) for the destruction of Israel, so that is what “victory” meant.[2b] Khomeini took to denouncing Israel every opportunity he had.
Later that year, as many will vividly remember, student followers of Khomeini in Tehran, protesting that the US had allowed the exiled shah into the US for medical treatment, seized the US embassy in Tehran on 4 November and took hostage those in it, producing the ‘hostage crisis.’ They would not release the hostages, the students said, until the US turned the shah over for trial in Iran. Many were shocked. But what was truly shocking was this: four days later The New York Times announced that the PLO, a terrorist organization, “had begun efforts to protect the lives of Americans held hostage.”
“UNITED NATIONS, N.Y., Nov. 7 -- Palestine Liberation Organization officials said in interviews here today that a two-member PLO delegation, headed by a leader of Al Fatah, the main guerilla group, had arrived in Teheran and had begun efforts to protect the lives of Americans held hostage by students in the United States Embassy.”[3]
(For those of you whose eyes are popping, I have provided a scan of the original NYT piece in the footnote.)
And why was the PLO doing this?
“In response to a question as to whether the initiative of the PLO was an effort to improve its image, [PLO spokesperson Rahman] said: ‘It is what we consider our moral responsibility toward a group of human beings.’”
Really.
The New York Times also reported that, “Zehdi Labib Terzi, the chief Palestinian observer here, said that the delegation had been the idea of Yasir Arafat, head of the PLO.” But somebody else was claiming the credit for planting the idea in Arafat's head: the US government. In fact, there had been a formal request, as reported in the same NYT piece:
“In Washington, Representative Paul Findley, Republican of Illinois, said that he telephoned Mr. Arafat in Beirut yesterday and proposed the mission, knowing that Mr. Arafat was a friend of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.”
This may require a pause for proper digestion. Yasser Arafat was not nobody. In 1979, he was a friend of the Ayatollah Khomeini, whom he had helped install in power, and an American congressman was boasting to the press about having phoned “Mr. Arafat” to ask if he could help the United States, a superpower, in a crisis. The PLO didn’t merely oblige this US congressman but announced happily that it had the problem licked:
“Mr. Terzi said: ‘We have great hope the Iranian students will respond to our appeal.’ The aim of the mission as reported from here last night was to seek the release of the hostages. Today, Mr. Terzi and Mr. Rahman spoke of protecting the hostages’ lives.
The PLO delegation in Teheran ‘will just sit down and reason with the students,’ Mr. Terzi said, adding: ‘We have learned how to handle such cases.’”[4]
Do you see anything incongruous in how these PLO officials swaggered? They breezily announced that they would free the hostages in Tehran! The next day they ‘limited’ themselves to claiming they would protect the hostages’ lives. And how? They’d sit down with the students and talk it out because the PLO, they said, was quite good at this. How nice. But at the precise moment these PLO officials spoke, 7 November 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini -- an iron-fisted, repressive Islamist terrorist -- was putting a rubber stamp on what had been obvious for months: that he was the supreme, absolute, and totalitarian ruler of Iran.[5] This Ayatollah Khomeini had publicly endorsed the takeover of the US embassy in Tehran, and the PLO had yet to have its first official contact with Khomeini on the hostage issue. But the PLO was already announcing the problem solved? The PLO did not behave like a stateless terrorist group fighting for a scrap of land in the Middle East; it strode like an imperial power on its way to deal with a vassal state.
If it waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck...
What am I saying? That perhaps the PLO was in reality an imperial power dealing with vassal states? That would be absurd. But a slightly different proposal is not absurd, and it will easily account for the PLO’s behavior. Make two assumptions: 1) the PLO was (and is) a covert US pet, and 2) so was Khomeini. Now the interpretation becomes that the United States, a de facto imperial power with client states and organizations all over the world, was producing its own Grand Theater. This explains why the whole idea of PLO mediation came from the US ruling elite.
Let us call this my hypothesis.
Is it reasonable? Let us first see whether my hypothesis can account for how the two PLO officials above swaggered. Here is my proposal: In the glare of the spotlight, overconfident PLO mercenaries who understood that the profile of their organization was being raised by their patron superpower, and who could see that the outcome was foreordained, became too giddy and spoke too boldly in their first press appearances on this matter, going so far as to attribute the whole initiative to Yasser Arafat (see above), and to declare the problem solved already. A mistake.
But my hypothesis can neither stand nor fall on how it accounts for such a small detail as this; it must be evaluated against a background of facts. And it must form part of a reasonable theory. What theory would this be? In other words, if the Iranian ‘hostage crisis’ was US-produced Grand Theater, what was the purpose of it?
I claim it had two immediate objectives:
1) To raise the prestige of the PLO, the better to generate a diplomatic process leading to a PLO state on Israeli soil.
2) To present Islamist terrorism as a supposedly effective way to oppose Western, and especially US, imperialism, the better to win many Muslims to this ideology.
Is this reasonable?
The first claim will be shocking if you hold to the mainstream hypothesis that the US is an ally of Israel. And the second will be shocking if you hold to the mainstream hypothesis that the US ruling elite fights Islamist terrorism. (The idea that the US ruling elite was sponsoring an enemy state may also trouble you, but that is not what I am proposing -- I think the Iranian ruling elite is allied with the US ruling elite, and the rest is theater).
However counter-intuitive my proposals may at first seem, what matters is whether they agree with the historical evidence.
I have researched the history of US foreign policy towards the Jewish people and state since the 1930s to the present, and this evidence supports the view that the US ruling elite -- contrary to the common belief -- is an enemy of Israel. These findings will mostly not be addressed in this piece, but you are free to consult them.[5b] As for Islamist terrorism, though its foot soldiers certainly do hate the United States, their leaders are in my view allied with the US ruling elite, which sponsors this ideology in part because it assists US imperialism, as it destabilizes the great Asian powers with Muslim populations on their borders: Russia, China, and India. It is Jared Israel who first proposed this interpretation.[5c]
The question of US policy towards Iranian Islamism, and of the US's broader geopolitical strategy in Asia, will be taken up more fully in other HIR pieces, still to come. Here below I will evaluate, against a background of relevant facts, my hypothesis that the US ruling elite meant to raise the PLO's prestige in 1979, and that, in order to do this, it set the Iranian ‘hostage crisis’ in motion.
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The geopolitical game of the US ruling elite in the Iranian hostage crisis
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Exhibit A: The PLO’s behavior
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Here is a basic question:
What should follow the PLO’s arrogant declaration, made without first speaking to Khomeini, that the PLO will solve a hostage-taking which Khomeini has publicly endorsed, in Khomeini’s country, where Khomeini is the supreme, autocratic, and totalitarian ruler?
The answer to this question will be a ‘prediction’ and what it states will depend, naturally, on our working hypothesis. So let us consider two competing hypotheses.
The mainstream hypothesis:
Assumptions: The US ruling elite is an ally of Israel and an enemy of Islamist terrorism. The PLO is what it seems: a stateless terrorist group. And the Islamist terrorist Khomeini is also what he seems: the enemy of the US.
Relevant facts not under dispute: Khomeini is the leader of a new Islamist state, using the hostage crisis to raise his prestige in his own country and on the world stage as a supposed challenger to the United States, calling the US ‘Great Satan.’[5d] The request for PLO mediation has been made by -- of all countries -- ‘Great Satan’: the United States.
Prediction: As a consequence of the PLO’s absurd effrontery, a product of ‘Great Satan’ intervention, Khomeini will protect his prestige and rule out any role for PLO mediation.
My hypothesis:
Assumptions: The US ruling elite is an enemy of Israel. The PLO and Khomeini are both covert instruments of the US ruling elite, which is using both instruments to conduct Grand Theater on the world stage, one purpose of which is to make the PLO shine in a positive light the better to use it against Israel.
Analysis: Under these assumptions, Khomeini will have to allow the PLO to play its role and shine, despite its effrontery. Why? Because this is what the US ruling elite wants, and they call the shots. Of course, it will be necessary first to get PLO officials to tone it down a bit in public, so as not to embarrass Khomeini too much because Khomeini is playing his own role: that of defiant anti-American leader. He has to look fearless.
Prediction: After some corrective official statements by the PLO to the effect that, ahem, the PLO really can’t do anything unless Khomeini gives permission, because Khomeini is the boss, Khomeini will allow the PLO to act as mediator, letting this terrorist organization shine as supposed protector of American lives.
Of course, the above are not really predictions, because we are looking at the past, not making guesses about the future. But that matters little. What matters is which hypothesis is most consistent with the facts. Science can look forwards or backwards; what a scientist may not do is defend absurdities.
Let us now review what happened.
The day immediately after the PLO’s Zehdi Labib Terzi made his strikingly confident statements that the PLO would solve everything quickly, The New York Times reported statements from the PLO that sounded a different note:
“…PLO officials here [in Tehran], appearing somewhat embarrassed, were saying that there had been no offer of mediation. The organization’s observer at the United Nations, Zehdi Labib Terzi, had said the trip was aimed at insuring safety of the hostages. The PLO officials here appeared to be concerned that the organization not seem to be intruding itself into the situation against the wishes of the Ayatollah.
‘The PLO office in Teheran has never announced such a thing and never has anything been said about mediation,’ said Sakher Darvish, the Palestinian spokesman here. ‘This is spread by the press agencies and we completely deny the matter.’
...The PLO has said at its Beirut headquarters that the mission to Teheran was inspired by ‘humanitarian objectives.’ Officials here, however, were guarded in their comments, knowing that any mediation must have the approval of Ayatollah Khomeini.”[6]
But even as the PLO corrected its exuberance of the day before, there was no question that its profile was being raised. The same NYT article wrote that,
“The PLO appeared to be the strongest hope of negotiating the release of the hostages after Ayatollah Khomeini last night refused any meeting with former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, named by President Carter as special representative in the embassy crisis.”
The PLO: “the strongest hope,” according to The New York Times.
And then, two days later, again consistent with my hypothesis, there was the following NYT front page headline:
“NEW IRAN OFFICIAL REAFFIRMS DEMAND [THAT] US TURN OVER SHAH BUT CONFERS WITH PLO AIDES”[7]
Consider the context. The “NEW IRAN OFFICIAL” was Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, Iran’s new foreign minister in the government that Khomeini had just appointed. The shah was the repressive right-wing US puppet whom the Khomeini movement had replaced, and he was hated in Iran. The world was told that the seizure of the US embassy and its hostages was in retaliation for the US having allowed the shah to enter the United States for medical treatment. First the students, then Khomeini, and now Khomeini’s new government were refusing to release the hostages unless the shah were turned over for trial in Iran. So what we learn above is that, though the Iranians may have been snubbing US representatives, they certainly were talking to the PLO. The headline above was saying that the Iranians were tough mothers but the PLO might be able to deal with them.
It was front page news in the New York Times that the new Foreign Minister of Iran met with the PLO.
But if you think that is amazing, consider the subtitle for the same article, written in lower case type:
“Foreign Minister Also Meets U.S. Chargé”
This was a reference to “L. Bruce Laingen, the American chargé d’affaires under guard in the [Iranian] Foreign Ministry building since the takeover of the embassy.” So, in the middle of a hostage crisis at the US embassy in Iran, The New York Times was treating the meeting of Bani-Sadr with the PLO as more important than his meeting with the highest-ranking US embassy official in Iran at the time.[8]
The same article explained that “The new [Khomeini-appointed] Foreign Minister met this morning with two officials of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Abu Walid and Hani al-Hassan, head of the PLO’s office here…Dr. Bani-Sadr was scheduled to meet with them again.” But The New York Times assured its readers that the Ayatollah Khomeini, not the PLO, called the shots in Iran, a point that apparently required clarification: “But they [the PLO] cannot make any move without approval from the Ayatollah.”
Something else that is worthy of note is the representation of the PLO in The New York Times as brave peace-seekers.
“A PLO official said they must decide soon whether to drop the efforts. Already the leaders of Al Fatah, the main guerrilla group in the PLO, are under attack from more radical [Palestinian] organizations…”
So the most prestigious print source in the world told its readers that the PLO was taking political risks to help the hostages; the PLO, therefore, should be considered moderate, said the NYT, relative to “more radical organizations.” This is precisely the representation that was required to launch, a little over a decade later, the Oslo ‘Peace’ Process, which the US forced Israel to participate in (consult the footnote), and which brought the PLO into Israeli soil, from which position it has been much better able to murder innocent Israelis and indoctrinate the West Bank and Gaza Arabs into its ecstatic genocidal ideology.[9] So this is consistent with the hypothesis that we are looking at US-driven political theater meant, in part, to raise the prestige of the PLO in order to attack Israel -- so long as we assume, that is, that the New York Times does the bidding of the US ruling elite, as HIR has repeatedly argued.[9a]
On November 17th, a NYT headline announced:
“IRAN SAID TO PLEDGE HOSTAGE PROTECTION; P.L.O. Reported to Get Assurance During Endeavors in Teheran on Behalf of Americans.”[10]
The body of the article explained:
“BEIRUT, Lebanon, Nov. 15 -- Iranian officials told the Palestine Liberation Organization that they would protect the lives of the Americans and others being held hostage at the United States Embassy in Teheran, Arab officials close to the Palestinians said here today.
The assurances were said to have been made by telephone to Yasir Arafat, the guerilla leader, after his representative visited Teheran last week…
…Palestinian leaders now believe that outside diplomatic endeavors have no chance of success for the time being. But they keep open the possibility that the PLO may step in again at a later stage.
Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, Iran’s director of foreign policy, is understood to have told [PLO official] Abu Walid…that the Iranians would call in the PLO if they decided to free the hostages.”
So, readers of The New York Times were told that the PLO had secured the safety of the hostages, and might yet free them. Again, this is consistent with my hypothesis. In fact, the PLO swaggered so mightily at this time that it allowed itself to insult the United States publicly in the middle of its mediation process, explaining that it was not acting impartially but taking Khomeini's side, which the US, by the way, took sitting down.[10a]
One week later The New York Times carried another headline that made the PLO the center of everything:
“PLO HINTS AT SHIFT IN IRANIAN DEMANDS: Aide Says US Hostages Might Be Freed if Shah Is Returned, but Captors Press Demands”[11]
The body of the article explained that the demand was no longer for the Shah to be handed over to the Iranians for trial, but merely that he leave the US.[11a] Apparently, the Ayatollah Khomeini was not as tough as he seemed. But the PLO evidently was very powerful:
“Reporters reminded [PLO spokesman Mahmoud] Labadi that the Iranian students holding the hostages threatened to kill them if the United States let the Shah go anyplace but Iran. ‘That is not true,’ he said. ‘If the Shah is sent to Mexico there would be no problem…’”
Amazing. Total confidence was back: the PLO had become the de facto Foreign Ministry of Iran, speaking for its government. In that capacity, as the same article reported, the PLO organized an Iranian delegation and arranged meetings for them with the representatives of various Arab governments.[11b]
Many months later, escaped Iranian officials declared that the PLO had in fact been behind the whole thing from the beginning:
“On Oct. 12, 1979, a senior P.L.O. delegation, including Abu Jihad, Abu Walid (who is in charge of ''special operations'') and Col. Husni Ghazi al-Hussein, arrived in Teheran. Iranian officials who have fled the country claim that this P.L.O. team, in a series of meetings with Iranian revolutionary leaders arranged by Abu Hassan, proposed the assault on the United States Embassy that took place on Nov. 4. It is impossible to prove or disprove this report in the absence of further details. But Western European intelligence sources report that Abu Hassan was one of the counselors who urged Khomeini to reject any prompt resolution of the embassy occupation, and that the original assault force included several Iranians who had been trained at Palestinian camps in Lebanon.”[11c]
What happened, in the end?
The shah was not turned over to Iran, but instead spent time in Egypt, Morocco, Bahamas, and Mexico. And the hostages, precisely as the PLO promised, were not killed. The US proposed buying the freedom of the hostages to the tune of $5.5 billion.[12] On 21 January 1981, the hostages were freed; they had been treated well.[13] The payment to Iran was closer to $8 billion -- it was called the “largest private financial transfer in history,” and it came in very handy for Iran’s war with Iraq, which raged since September 1980.[13a]
[Iran used the money to buy US weapons, which the US sent secretly throughout the Iran-Iraq war. When exposed, this was called the ‘Iran-gate’ scandal (or the Iran half of the ‘Iran-Contra’ scandal, because Ronald Reagan was simultaneously training the Contra terrorists who murdered innocent peasants in Nicaragua). But that's another story, to be told in a forthcoming piece.]
By the time the hostages were released, the PLO was keeping itself out of this particular spotlight because the Arab states had taken Iraq’s side against Iran in the Iran-Iraq war, and the PLO couldn’t afford to be opposing the entire Arab world (Iraq had an Arab ruling elite, and the Iranians are not Arabs). Still, the PLO got to shine quite a bit, dressed up as a positive diplomatic force on the world stage.
The behavior of the PLO, then, is consistent with my hypothesis. And so is the behavior of the president of the United States, to which I now turn.
Exhibit B: Jimmy Carter’s behavior
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As you may recall, the officially given reason for allowing the exiled Iranian shah into the US had been that he needed medical treatment. According to Khomeini, admitting the shah had been the trigger for taking the US embassy hostage, and he was promising not to release the hostages unless the shah were turned over by the United States for trial in Iran. But had the US really admitted the shah for medical reasons? On 21 March 1980, a NYT editorial proposed instead that “The [shah’s] medical emergency may have been a convenient pretext.”[14]
Why this suggestion?
The New York Times was addressing a question that many people had to be turning over in their minds because, obviously, “President Carter did know that to admit the Shah would run at least a diplomatic risk.” In fact, “[Carter] was warned that admitting the Shah might jeopardize the [US] embassy.” And yet despite all this Jimmy Carter allowed the deposed Iranian dictator into the United States. This provided quite a bit of fodder for speculation, because the shah, after all, was universally reviled. If admitting him into the United States carried a significant probability of losing the US embassy in Tehran to an armed mob, Carter obviously should have left him outside, whether or not the shah needed US medical treatment.
It turns out, however, that the shah didn't even need US medical treatment. As the NYT piece explained, “[David] Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger had made the Shah a symbol of American constancy,” and David Rockefeller, who was a personal friend of the shah, “favored the Shah’s permanent residence in the United States as the least that should be done for a former ally.” So it is more than a little suspicious that “The Shah’s condition was diagnosed mainly by a single doctor engaged by David Rockefeller.” This doctor must have been less than honest because there was, apparently, no medical emergency requiring a US hospital: “[The shah’s] health did not require him to come to the United States after all...there is no special magic to the hospitals in New York.”
So why did Jimmy Carter let the shah in?
After pointing out the problems with the official story, The New York Times proposed this alternative: that Carter's move was perhaps meant “to test Iran’s tolerance for the Shah’s permanent residence in the United States.” This is a remarkable hypothesis. Are we to believe that Carter, despite having been warned that this might cost him the US embassy in Tehran, with 90 people in it, let the shah into the United States, anyway, just to see if something bad really would follow? The New York Times would like you to think that the people who run superpower states approach foreign policy like the child who, warned not to stick his hand into the hornet's nest, does it anyway -- to see what happens. This is absurd under any circumstances, but more so with an impending US presidential election, and Carter running for a second term, as was the case.
One does not resolve an apparent absurdity by proposing a bigger one.
My hypothesis says that Khomeini belonged to the US ruling elite, and that Jimmy Carter needed to produce the appearance of a provocation so that Khomeini could seize the US embassy in Tehran. The point? To get the Grand Theater rolling. And why? Because Jimmy Carter wanted to raise the profile of both Khomeini and the PLO, his clients. Losing the US election was neither here nor there for Carter -- it was part of the US ruling elite's Grand Theater (Reagan's policies towards the PLO and towards Iran were Carter's[14a]).
Is this absurd?
Not if it agrees with the evidence. A forthcoming HIR piece will examine US policy towards Iraq and Iran, and the relationship of the Ayatollah Khomeini to the US ruling elite of both parties, Democrat and Republican; here, let us focus on Jimmy Carter's pro-PLO diplomacy.
Only two years before, in 1977, Jimmy Carter had been working overtime to give the PLO the dignity of a ‘government in exile,’ as opposed to the dignity of a terrorist organization, and had been energetically pushing for the idea of a PLO state.[15]
This is what The New York Times wrote in 1977:
“[Congress] watches, with a mixture of admiration and doubt, Jimmy Carter’s efforts to reassure the Israelis while trying to get them back to the pre-1967 borders with a new Palestinian ‘homeland’ on their flank.”[15a]
If Congress had “admiration” for the president’s Middle East diplomacy, which involved trying to force the Israelis to give up strategic territory won in a defensive war in which Israel's Arab enemies had meant to exterminate the Israeli Jews, what does this mean?[15aa] That the US government, across the board, favored an anti-Israeli policy.
And who would Carter's “Palestinian ‘homeland’” be for? Two months later, the Associated Press wrote this (my emphasis):
“Reports in the state-controlled Egyptian news media said the Americans were suggesting that the Palestinians form a government in exile as one way of making themselves eligible for [the] Geneva [peace conference]. The argument, the reports said, was that the Palestine Liberation Organization cannot now be invited because it does not represent a state.”[15b]
If “the Americans” wanted the PLO to have the dignity of a “government in exile” so it could participate at the Geneva peace conference, then the US ruling elite was obviously trying to create a PLO state. And Jimmy Carter was passionate about this. A few days later, The New York Times wrote,
“[US] Sec[retary] of State Vance agrees with Arab nations... [and] observes [that] US is anxious over Israeli refusal to accept 2 Arab pre-conditions to conf[erence], including relinquishment of most of the territory occupied since '67 war and acknowledgement of right for existence of some kind of Palestinian state. [He] remarks [that] if Israelis continue to refuse to make commitments before conference, Pres Carter has said that he would publicly issue peace plan.”[15c]
The PLO was murdering innocent Israeli civilians, consistent with its founding charter mandate, which openly calls for the destruction of Israel via the extermination of the Jewish people.[15d] And yet US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance was pretending that the problem was the “Israeli refusal to accept...right for existence of some kind of Palestinian state.” But that's not the end of it. As you can see above, either the Israelis would cooperate with Jimmy Carter's effort to create a PLO state in the West Bank and Gaza, or Carter would launch the process leading to such a state without involving the Israelis: “if Israelis continue to refuse to make commitments before conference, Pres Carter has said that he would publicly issue peace plan.” The anti-Israeli stance of the United States government was simply extreme. And Carter's position is uncannily similar to the threats that George Bush Sr. delivered to the Israelis in 1991, when the US finally succeeded in getting an Israeli government to participate in the effort to create a PLO state.[15e]
The next year, in 1978, when Israel tried to defend itself from PLO attacks against its civilians, launched from PLO bases in southern Lebanon, United States President Jimmy Carter forced the Israelis to back down.[16]
The above is all consistent with my hypothesis, and makes it entirely unsurprising that Jimmy Carter should have tried to improve the PLO's image the year after, in 1979, by setting in motion the 'hostage crisis.' By contrast, the mainstream hypothesis, namely, that the United States ruling elite favors Israel, is not supported by the above mountain of relevant facts.
From this perspective, the spectacularly flawed and disastrous Delta Force operation to rescue the hostages looks like more Grand Theater, there to convince everybody that everything had been tried and now a diplomatic solution—buying the hostages to the tune of $8 billion, as it turns out—would have to be found.
But there are other facts, as well, that support my hypothesis. I turn to these next.
Exhibit C: The behavior of US Intelligence and the State Department
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Just seven years before the taking of the hostages in Tehran, at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich,
“members of the Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage by the Palestinian terrorist organization Black September…the attack led directly to the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes…”[17]
According to a State Department document unearthed by historian Russ Braley, and reproduced on the web by World-Net Daily in 2002, US Intelligence knew, at least as early as 1973, that Black September was just a cover for Yasser Arafat's Al Fatah, the controlling core of the PLO.[18] Indeed, the document says: “no significant distinction now can be made between the BSO [Black September Organization] and Fatah.” The document further explains that “The collapse of Fatah’s guerrilla efforts led Fatah to clandestine terrorism against Israel and countries friendly to it.” It concludes: “Fatah leadership including Arafat now seem clearly committed to terrorism.”
The 1973 State Department document was sent to American embassies all over the world, and they were instructed as follows: “This brief should not be attributed to CIA in any way, and owing to extreme sensitivity of information it should be conveyed orally only.” So the State Department preferred that the general public not know these things about the PLO.
But why? Why was the confirmation that the PLO was responsible for the Munich massacre, and that it would henceforth focus on terrorist activity, so “sensitive” that the public shouldn’t know about it? Why was it so “sensitive” that, beyond the recipients of this document, the few who could be privy to this information should get it only as a rumor, rather than a claim officially confirmed by US Intelligence?
The mainstream hypothesis that the US government is opposed to terrorism and allied with Israel would seem to require the US to make this information public in order to embarrass the PLO, because nobody denied back then that the PLO was a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel. If you accept the mainstream hypothesis, then, it is not merely awkward but absurd that the US State Department should have protected the PLO. And if degrees of absurdity can be contemplated, then the US State Department's behavior is radically absurd, because the PLO was guilty of murdering US diplomats -- that is to say, employees of the US State Department.
On that point, consider what else the 1973 State Department document mentioned above says:
“Question of link between Black September Organization (BSO) and Fatah has been subject of much public discussion since murder of US diplomats in Khartoum. Fatah leader Arafat has disavowed connection with BSO, and many in Arab world and elsewhere have pointed to Arafat’s disavowal as justification for continuing financial and other support for Fatah.
…Arafat continues to disavow publicly any connection between Fatah and terrorist operations. Similarly, Fatah maintains its pretense of moderation vis-à-vis the Arab governments, a pose which most of these governments find convenient for their public position toward the Palestinian cause.” [emphasis added]
Diplomats are supposed to be sacrosanct in international law, so the murder of diplomats is about as serious as a crime gets. But the US didn't want to prosecute. On the contrary, the State Department -- the employer of the US diplomats whom the PLO murdered in Khartoum -- made clear in this 1973 document that assisting the PLO’s “pretense of moderation” was vital to the United States government. It kept this information secret and assisted Arafat’s denials, it appears, to avoid inflaming the American public against the PLO, and to foster a political climate that made it possible for the Arab states to support the PLO under guise of furthering “the Palestinian cause.”
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