International terrorism has taken on the aspects of a big corporation. The Palestinian Liberation Organization is believed to have up to 50 million Pounds Sterling invested in the City of London as a result of donations from the Arab oil states and ransom paid in terrorist operations.
These claims were made in a book. “The Carlos Complex” published here today. The authors, Ronald Payne and Christopher Dobson, who write for the Sunday Telegraph, named President Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya as the chief bank-roller of the Palestinian terrorists and employer of Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, otherwise known as “Carlos” who is wanted in many countries for terrorist acts, assassination and murder.
The authors also say that while the European Common Market countries are taking an increasingly active role to combat international terrorism, the United States is a “weak sister”. After the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, the U.S. set up an inter-departmental working group on terrorism “but it does not seem to have made much of an impact.” Payne and Dobson wrote.
The PLO acquisitions in the City of London represent only a portion of the terrorist organization’s business assets, the authors said. (The City of London is London’s financial district, roughly equivalent to Wall Street in New York.) The terrorist revenue in 1974 amounted to more than 120 million Pounds Sterling, Payne and Dobson estimated. “Terrorism has acquired a political and military infrastructure.” they wrote.
“There are office staffs, $5000-a-month men equipped with company cars and secretaries. Some are concerned only with money matters or public relations, but others still on the planning staffs dictate memos to girl secretaries urging plans for assassination and bombing, assessing what might be the effects of various activities.”
QADDAFI AS CHIEF PAY-MASTER
The book described Qaddafi as the chief paymaster of international terrorism. It claimed that he paid Carlos 1 million Pounds Sterling to kidnap Saudi Arabian Oil Minister Shiekh Yamani and other delegates to the OPEC conference in Vienna in December, 1975. Qaddafi also supports terrorists in countries as far apart as Ireland and The Philippines. He paid 25 million Pounds Sterling to the leftists in the Lebanese civil war and another 40 million Pounds Sterling to various Arab terror groups before the Lebanese conflict.
According to the authors. Qaddafi was behind the abortive attempts to assassinate U.S. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger after the Yom Kippur War because he objected to the Israeli-Arab disengagement agreements. Qaddafi and Carlos were behind the July, 1976 hijacking of the Air France jet to Entebbe, Uganda.
Carlos did not participate in the hijacking because his photograph and fingerprints are well known to Interpol, the writers said. But it was Carlos who put the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in touch with Wilfred Boese and Gabriele Kroecher-Tiedemann, the terrorists who were killed in the Israeli rescue operation at Entebbe.
Another Carlos associate, Antonio Degas Bouvier, was Carlos’ teacher and accomplice in the latter’s attempt to murder Edward Sieff, the Anglo-Jewish philanthropist and president of Mark and Spencer department stores at his London home on December 30, 1973, Payne and Dobson said.
COOPERATION AGAINST TERRORISM
The writers believe that Israel is now impressed with the cooperation it is getting in Europe at the police level, notwithstanding the French government’s behavior in the Abu Doued affair. They noted that Britain, France and West Germany are now working together in a Common Market convention against terrorism and even before the convention was signed the security forces of those countries worked out their own operational arrangements backed by constant unofficial contact in all three capitals and in Geneva and Brussels.
The authors predicted that following the Entebbe affair, the international terrorist network will focus increasingly on the struggle in southern Africa. They warned of the growing danger that the terrorists will gain control of a nuclear or chemical weapon. They said that terrorism will continue as long as the Soviet bloc and the Arab states give it aid and shelter. “The Carlos Complex-A Pattern of Violence” was published here by Hodder and Stoughton.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
