FROM PRESIDENTIAL ASSASSINATION TO INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM
History usually repeats itself. If you have lived two lives, as Gen. Pacepa has done, you have a good chance of seeing that reenactment with your own eyes. The Kremlin’s cover-up of President Kennedy’s assassination vividly recalls the cover-up of the 1973 assassination of Cleo A. Noel Jr., the U.S. ambassador to Sudan. At that time, Pacepa was still an adviser to the president of Romania and deputy head of that country’s espionage service. Here is the insider’s view of what really went on then. There are lessons to be learned here not only about the handling of the JFK assassination but about the conduct of today’s international terrorism.
In 1973, PLO leader Yasser Arafat’s liaison officer for Romania, Hani al-Hassan (nom de guerre Abu Hasan), let his Romanian contact know that Arafat had sent a commando unit to Sudan headed by his top deputy, Abu Jihad (né Khalil al-Wazir), to carry out an operation codenamed “Nahr al-Barad” (Cold River) as payback for the destruction of a Palestinian training camp by Israeli fighter jets eleven days earlier. Abu Jihad’s task was to take a few American diplomats in Khartoum hostage whom Arafat wanted to use as bargaining chips to “free” Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian assassin of Robert Kennedy.
“Stop him!” Ceausescu yelled when Pacepa told him the news. Ceausescu knew that Arafat had been trained in terrorism at the KGB’s Balashikha special-operations school,1 and he now feared that, due to his close relationship with Arafat, his carefully cultivated world image that he was independent of Moscow might be compromised.
It was too late. After President Nixon refused the terrorists’ demand, the PLO commando unit executed three of their hostages: U.S. ambassador Cleo A. Noel Jr.; his deputy, George Curtis Moore; and Belgian chargé d’affaires Guy Eid.
In 1978, Pacepa was granted political asylum in the U.S. Soon after, a former analyst for the National Security Agency (NSA) provided Pacepa solid evidence that Arafat himself had ordered those murders. He also gave Pacepa the transcripts of the secretly recorded radio communications between Arafat and Abu Jihad in the operation. According to these documents, on March 2, 1973, at around 8:00 p.m. local time, Arafat radioed the order to execute the hostages. Because an hour later the international media had still not reported the killing, Arafat reiterated, via his Racal radio the order to kill the hostages. Later that same day, Arafat radioed his gunmen again, telling them to release Saudi and Jordanian diplomats and to surrender themselves to Sudanese authorities. “Explain your just cause to [the] great Sudanese Arab masses and international opinion. We are with you on the same road.”
The U.S. government never charged Arafat with this crime in a court of law or even in the court of public opinion. Hence Arafat, who played a major role in creating today’s international terrorism, was granted the Nobel Prize for peace in 1994. Four years later, Arafat was received with grand honors at the White House, where President Bill Clinton highly praised him.2
The 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi that murdered Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three of his subordinates on September 11, 2012, was the assassination of U.S. Ambassador Noel revisited. Both had been carried out by Muslims armed with Soviet-made rocket-propelled grenades, Kalashnikovs, and Molotov cocktails; both organizers were known; and both remained unpunished. After days of secret deliberation, the Obama administration claimed to have discovered the “real” culprit: Innocence of Muslims, an obscure documentary movie made by an unknown Israeli-American director, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula (aka Sam Bacile). The U.S. administration officially informed the world that the murders in Benghazi and the assault on U.S. embassies all over the Middle East were simply “spontaneous” reactions to the film. Case closed. Just as Arafat’s murder of ambassador Noel is still closed.
To make this conclusion credible, no result of the autopsy on Stevens’s body was released. According to the Arabic media, he “was sexually raped before being killed by the gunmen who stormed the embassy’s building in Benghazi.”3 Ambassador Stevens was quietly buried in his native town. Not with national honors at Arlington Cemetery, as Ambassador Noel was.
It is even more noteworthy that no representative of the Obama administration attended the October 2012 ceremony honoring Ambassador Stevens’s heroism. The highest officials present were former U.S. Secretary of State George P. Schultz, former Undersecretary of State Thomas R. Pickering, and the Libyan ambassador to the U.S.4
One can only hope that the president’s administration will expose the truth about both assassinations and establish measures to protect the United States from other similar terrorist attacks.