"a Would-Be Palestinian Rambo"

By George J. Church.

He goes by a variety of names: Abul Abbas, Mohammed Abbas, Mohammed Abul Abbas Zaidan, Abu Khaled. He has been an ally and enemy of Syria's, a colleague and critic--simultaneously--of Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat's. Until a few weeks ago he was one of the more obscure leaders within the fragmented P.L.O., a member of its ten-man executive committee but directly in charge of only a splinter of a splinter, with perhaps fewer than 100 hard-core followers. His supposed allies openly deride Washington's characterization of him as a terrorist mastermind. Says one P.L.O. official in Tunis: "Abbas is a would-be Palestinian Rambo, big on brawn with some cunning. The problem is he has no brains."

Indeed, after the Achille Lauro hijacking, Abbas is widely regarded within the P.L.O. as a bungler who has gravely damaged the organization. Whether or not the U.S. and its allies ever manage to catch him and bring him to trial, his future is as questionable as his present whereabouts. At week's end, as the P.L.O. executive committee was about to convene in Baghdad, some of Arafat's adherents were talking of expelling Abbas from that body.

Getting rid of him, however, may not be so easy. Though his alliance with Arafat has never been more than a marriage of convenience on both sides, Arafat needs to demonstrate a hold on P.L.O. factions outside Arafat's own group, Fatah; Abbas is very nearly the only splinter leader available for that purpose. He is also a symbol of a particular type of Palestinian: the generation that grew up in refugee camps, became guerrillas in early manhood, and never accepted any goal but the establishment of a full-fledged Palestinian state, or any method of achieving it except armed struggle. He is not an especially appealing symbol. Abbas usually dresses in fatigues and dark sunglasses and sports a bushy mustache, but his powerfully built body is turning to fat. He nervously chain-smokes cigarettes and has a reputation as a woman chaser. He can be charming when he chooses, but is often said to be merciless to his enemies. He is believed to have planned a particularly brutal raid on the northern Israeli resort of Nahariya in 1979; the four Israelis who died included a four-year-old girl whose brains were dashed against a rock. Abbas has a considerable sense of selfimportance: during his days as a guerrilla commander in the P.L.O. state-within-a-state in southern Lebanon, he rode around Beirut in a Mercedes with as many as eight bodyguards. Well before the Achille Lauro hijacking, he had a penchant for bizarre and ineffective operations. In 1981 he tried to infiltrate raiders across the Lebanese border into Israel by hot-air balloon and hang glider; they were killed or captured.

Within the P.L.O., Abbas has always been a hard-liner well to the left of that body's mainstream. From its formation in 1964, the P.L.O. has been an umbrella organization for a bewildering variety of groups (Arafat's Fatah is by far the largest) that have little in common but the dream of a Palestinian state. Divided by strategy (whether to rely on diplomacy, guerrilla war or some uneasy amalgam of both) and the rivalries of their leaders, the groups have split and recombined endlessly. In 1974 Arab states proclaimed the P.L.O. "the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people." That designation, reaffirmed in 1982, is the foundation of the P.L.O's power in international affairs. But formal recognition of the P.L.O. has never prevented the Arab nations from furthering their own feuds by backing one P.L.O. faction against another. P.L.O. fighters have been shot at not only by ) Israelis but by Jordanians, Lebanese, Syrians and each other. In 1978 a bomb demolished the eight-story Beirut headquarters of Abbas' Palestine Liberation Front, killing more than 180 people. Presumed bombers: a rival faction. Presumed target: Abbas, who had left the building before the blast.

Abbas' career, indeed, could serve as a handy capsule illustration of P.L.O. factionalism. He was born in Haifa in 1947, a year before that city became part of the newly created state of Israel. He was taken to Syria a decade later and grew up in the Yarmuk refugee camp near Damascus. Though one U.S. official last week characterized Abbas as "an uneducated thug," he studied English and Arabic literature at the University of Damascus.

In the 1960s Abbas joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, then and now a Marxist-oriented group headed by George Habash, who is still a power in the P.L.O. Finding the P.F.L.P. not radical enough, Abbas shortly after followed a former Syrian army officer named Ahmed Jabril into a splinter group calling itself the P.F.L.P.-General Command, which also still exists as part of the P.L.O. After being expelled from Jordan in 1971, the P.L.O., and Abbas with it, set up shop in Lebanon and grew into a major power, which, however, became enmeshed in the Lebanese civil war that began in the mid-1970s. By 1976 Syria had intervened, at first on the side of Lebanese Christians. Despite his Syrian youth and education, Abbas thought Damascus was fighting on the wrong side. He left the pro-Syrian P.F.L.P.-General Command to help found the Palestine Liberation Front and became its military commander, at times leading its guerrilla fighters against Syrian troops.

The Abbas faction of the P.L.F. (it is now splintered into three fragments) is believed today to be financed partly by Iraq, an enemy of Syria's. Abbas travels under an Iraqi diplomatic passport. Italy last week cited diplomatic immunity as partial justification for letting Abbas go rather than extraditing him to the U.S.

The P.L.F. split in 1983, and again Syria was the cause. After being expelled from Beirut following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, P.L.O. guerrillas loyal to Arafat settled in the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli. Rival factions backed by Syria staged an armed attack on them. Part of Abbas' P.L.F. sided with Syria, but Abbas threw in his lot with Arafat, and when Arafat lost, joined him in exile in Tunis. Their alliance became formal last November.

, That month, Arafat finally managed to convene a meeting of the Palestine National Council, a parliament-in-exile for the theoretical Palestinian state, in the Jordanian capital, Amman, and have himself re-elected chairman. Abbas showed up to give Arafat needed support from someone outside Fatah, and Arafat named Abbas to the P.L.O. executive committee.

It was always a strained alliance. While serving on the committee, Abbas quarreled publicly with his chief. When Arafat and King Hussein of Jordan last February signed an accord pledging themselves to diplomatic efforts looking toward the eventual creation of a JordanianPalestinian confederation in the West Bank and Gaza, now occupied by Israel, Abbas repudiated it on the ground that only an independent Palestinian state was acceptable. Arafat's loyalists, for their part, were openly contemptuous of Abbas. Said one, after listening to Abbas harangue a crowd about the necessity of liberating Palestine by force: "He is nothing but hot air." Now, in the wake of the Achille Lauro, the P.L.O. looks weaker and more out of favor than ever. Even so, it cannot be written off. Despite the feuds and even internecine bloodshed, Arafat year after year manages somehow to keep it in existence and even retain some power.

In part it is the power of veto: the P.L.O. is widely thought to have the ability to upset any Middle East peace settlement by terror attacks. But also someone has to speak for the Palestinians, and for all the P.L.O.'s divisions, no realistic substitute has yet been found. Says one U.S. diplomat: "The equation has not been changed. You cannot say, 'These bozos have no place.' No one in the West Bank or in Gaza or anywhere else is saying, 'Let's finish with the P.L.O.' " So the P.L.O. lurches and stumbles on.

With reporting by John Borrell/Tunis