Though many accounts of the Entebbe and Mogadishu skyjackings claim that they were carried out by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, led at the time by Dr. George Habash, this is not the case.
Rather, they, as well as the 1975 attack on the OPEC Conference in Vienna, were all organized by Dr. Waddi Haddad and carried out by members of Haddad’s PFLP (External Operations)2 group. While many observers assume the PFLP (EO) and PFLP were the same organization, this belief is not supported by most serious histories.
Along with Habash, Waddi Haddad had been a founding member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Arab National Movement before it. As the PFLP moved rapidly leftwards in the period following the Six Day War, Haddad came to represent old guard hostility to the Front’s new Marxist-Leninist orientation.3 At the same time, he was the politburo member charged with establishing the PFLP’s External Operations branch, responsible for armed activities outside of Israel/Palestine.4 Such activities took on great importance in the wake of Israel’s 1967 victory.
Thus, one possible source of confusion is that the PFLP (EO) was originally part of the PFLP and acted with its approval.
The External Operations branch, acting under the authority of the PFLP, carried out the Dawson’s Field skyjackings in 1970, precipitating the civil war in Jordan.5 Given the disaster this ended up inflicting on the Palestinians—thousands of civilians killed, and the expulsion of the guerilla from the country—“external operations” fell into disfavor.
In this moment of retreat and demoralization, many militants urged that skyjackings and attacks on civilians be repudiated: a PFLP “conference of the leftist phenomenon” argued in February 1972 that hijackings in particular represented “a fundamental point of dispute between the Left and Right in the PFLP… not only because they contradicted adherence to Marxist-Leninist theory, but also because they invited much damage to the Palestinian revolution.”1
For Haddad, however, operations in Europe and elsewhere, whether against military or civilian targets, remained legitimate and useful weapons in the war against Zionism and imperialism.
According to some accounts, Haddad left or was ejected from the PFLP in 1972, taking the External Operations branch with him.2 According to others, he remained a PFLP member for a number of years despite being marginalized, keeping the External Operations group active as an unsanctioned, rogue outfit.3
Authors who claim the PFLP (EO) post-72 was simply a deniable but unofficially sanctioned PFLP section do not appear credible, as they never seem able to provide any proof with which to substantiate their allegation. Rather, they exploit the two groups lack of hostility toward one another, stretching this to imply that they remained one and the same. Examples of these good relations include Haddad’s continued contributions to the PFLP,4 and the fact that Habash spoke at Haddad’s funeral in 1978.
As a splinter group, the PFLP (EO) was deprived of the logistical and practical support it had previously enjoyed from the broader Palestinian national movement. This new situation was compensated for by the support Haddad subsequently received from various anti-American Arab governments—Iraq, Algeria, Libya, and the PDRY5—and eventually from the KGB, which was secretly supporting his activities by 1975.6
As part of the strategy of attacking targets outside of the Middle East, Haddad soon forged ties with a number of European anti-Zionist organizations, both legal and illegal. The Venezuelan adventurer Carlos who had joined Haddad’s network in 1970, was prominent in this process, and was personally responsible for recruiting several activists from the Frankfurt radical scene, including Wilfried Böse, Brigitte Kuhlmann, and Johannes Weinrich, all founding members of the RZ.7
While both popular and left-wing accounts tend to attribute the Entebbe and Mogadishu skyjackings to the PFLP, the accounts attributing these operations to Haddad and the PFLP (EO) seem far better documented. We are convinced of this by simply cross-referencing various facts, and examining reports of Haddad’s activities in this period.
While there is a frustrating dearth of English-language material examining the relations between the two groups, and the PFLP proper may have chosen not to dispel this confusion at the time, this does not change the fact that by 1972, the “regular” PFLP and Haddad’s PFLP (EO) were two distinct organizations.
In late 1977, Waddi Haddad suddenly became afflicted with what seemed to be an aggressive type of leukemia. Despite the best efforts of doctors in Algeria and the German Democratic Republic, he died on March 28, 1978.
His funeral in Baghdad was attended by leaders from all sections of the Palestinian resistance.
In the thirty years since his death, it has been revealed that the controversial Palestinian guerilla commander was in fact poisoned by Mossad, the Israeli secret service. While the timing coincided with the Mogadishu skyjacking, it would seem that this assassination had been decided upon in the wake of Entebbe.8
As a publication of the U.S. Special Operations Command’s Joint Special Operations University approvingly notes, “Upon his death, the organization he had headed dissolved, and attacks on Israel and Israeli interests declined precipitously.”9