Europe's Black September

EUROPEANS last week were only too well aware that they were now in the front lines of a new war of terror between Israelis and Palestinians. Israel's intelligence service warned that Black September--the Arab terrorist group responsible for the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich--planned at least ten new operations in the Middle East and Europe. In Brussels, SHAPE headquarters similarly told Europeans to expect more terror. What could be done about it? Not much; the enemy was within.

West Germany's attempts last week to guard against terrorists served to illustrate the problem. Airport authorities scrutinized every arriving Arab and turned dozens of them back. Bonn's Interior Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, called a meeting of state ministers, who agreed on a plan to require visas of all arriving Arabs, to run security checks on those already in the country, to investigate all militant organizations, and to strengthen security at airports, embassies and office buildings.

The West German security measures, sensible as they were, provided no real deterrence. Nor will a special antiterrorist police unit that Bonn plans to organize. There are just too many potential terrorists. West Germany has an Arab population of more than 55,000 (including at least 6,000 Palestinians). Authorities know of the existence of six secret political organizations and perhaps 100 subsidiary groups.

Some Arabs are directly involved in violence. The home of an Iraqi arrested last month in Cologne contained 49 weapons and parts of 50 more. Other Arab activists conduct routine intelligence activities, such as tracking Israeli delegations and logging the movements of Israeli planes. El Al crews report that since the beginning of the year, they have been followed during almost every European stopover from the time they leave the airport on arrival until they take off again.

Another center for Arab terrorism is Italy, as evidenced by the number of Arab hijackings that have started at Rome's Fiumicino Airport. The terrorists' life in Italy is made relatively easy by the fact that the government is determined to remain on good terms with the Arab states, and extreme leftist Italian groups provide hospitality and support. After explosions at Trieste last month destroyed four oil-storage tanks and 140,000 tons of oil, Black September immediately claimed credit; some observers believe, however, that the work was really done by Italian anarchists to whom the Arab group merely loaned the use of its name.

The Munich raid was only the most dramatic example of Arab terrorism in Europe. There were assassination attempts in London last year on a Jordanian ambassador and an Iraqi ex-Premier. In The Netherlands, the parents-in-law of Andre Spitzer, one of the Olympians slain at Munich, received a stream of telephone calls threatening the lives of Spitzer's widow and baby daughter. Eventually, Israeli security agents had to help the Spitzers leave the country secretly. Only France seems to have been spared such incidents, presumably because Arab terrorists do not wish to embarrass a government that is supplying jet fighters to Libya.

In an interview with TIME Correspondent James Bell in Beirut, a young Palestinian described the range of his organization's activities in Europe. "We are everywhere now. We are all over Western Europe, and there are many Palestinians among the 12,000 Arab students in the U.S. We have our own businesses, like the Diplomat nightclub in Rome, which the authorities closed last April. But there are a lot more. There are travel agencies that can arrange things. There are laundries and grocery stores. But of course these businesses are not solely businesses. They are also collection agencies, mail drops, meeting places, points of contact."

Arabs have also turned skyjacking into a highly profitable enterprise. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine extorted $5,000,000 from Lufthansa last February. The Black September movement may have got a cut of that, as well as a piece of the $445,000 stolen from the Beirut branch of the Royal Bank of Canada last month.

In all their activities in Europe, the terrorists have access to Arab business offices as well as embassies and consulates, which often provide money, or even a quick change in passports. The Algerian, Iraqi, Egyptian and South Yemenite embassies are said to be especially helpful; the Libyans are also cooperative, particularly at their consulate in Geneva. "So," says one Palestinian, "even if they were to close all of Al-Fatah's 23 branches in Germany, we'd get along."

Until those sources of support are dried up, ordinary police measures will likely prove ineffective against the Black September terrorists. Yet the world community is only beginning to put its diplomatic defenses in order. European Foreign Ministers meeting in Rome last week agreed to put terrorism on the agenda of the Common Market summit scheduled for October. In Washington, the White House turned the task of coordinating a global war on terrorism over to the State Department, which planned to mount a campaign against terrorism at the United Nations General Assembly session that begins this week. But considering the Assembly's past record on the Middle East, any world war on terrorism is likely to be frustrating, danger-fraught and, quite possibly, neverending.

qed qed qed

The Arabs, of course, are not the only terrorists who have found skyjacking profitable. Last week three Croatian nationalists--all members of the neofascist, anti-Tito Ustase movement --pulled out guns during the flight of an SAS DC-9 from Goeteborg to Stockholm and forced the pilot to land at Malmoe. They threatened "a new Munich tragedy" unless the Swedes gave them $105,000 in ransom and released seven convicted Croatian terrorists from prison. When the government complied, the gunmen freed the 86 passengers aboard and, with six of the seven released terrorists (one refused to go with them and was returned to prison), flew south to Madrid. The Croatians, who would not find many countries willing to welcome them, surrendered when Spanish authorities refused to provide amnesty--or fuel to fly elsewhere.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.