Terrorism: The Life and Crimes of a Middle East Terrorist

By Jay Peterzell/Washington

On Aug. 30, 1982, a well-dressed Palestinian from Iraq named Adnan Awad walked into the U.S. embassy in Bern, Switzerland, and announced that he had just left a bomb in his Geneva hotel room. He said he had been ordered by the May 15 Organization, a Baghdad-based terrorist group known to intelligence agencies, to blow up the Geneva Noga Hilton. But when he arrived in Geneva, he found he could not go through with it. Now he was appealing to the U.S. for help.

The diplomat who had been talking to Awad in a soundproofed embassy room picked up a telephone to alert the Swiss federal police. He told them a bomb disguised as a suitcase was hidden under the bed in Awad's seventh-floor hotel room. As a bomb squad raced to the hotel, Awad poured out details of his short-lived career as a terrorist. Suddenly, the American was called out of the room. When he came back, he was angry. The police had found Awad's suitcase right where he had said it would be -- but there was no bomb in it. "You're crazy!" the diplomat said. "What are you trying to pull?"

Afraid the Americans might not help him, Awad frantically insisted that he was telling the truth. He drew a diagram of the suitcase, showing where thin sheets of plastic explosive were sewn into the lining and how the batteries and detonator were embedded in a sheet of plastic along the bottom edge of the suitcase. The diplomat reluctantly called the Swiss police again and talked them into sending the bomb squad back to Awad's hotel. Several tense hours ) passed. Finally, a call came through: the Swiss had found the bomb.

That was just the beginning of Awad's coming in from the cold. As he related his story to the Americans and the Swiss, then to Israeli, German and other officials in Bern, it became clear that he held the key to a major terrorist mystery. Just three weeks earlier, a bomb had exploded on a Pan Am jet flying from Tokyo to Hawaii; it killed a Japanese teenager and injured 15 other passengers. That bomb too was made of plastic explosive. It had easily passed through security checks designed to detect metal weapons and stop hijackings rather than bombings.

The Pan Am explosion left few clues. The most intriguing was a short length of 24-kt. gold-plated nickel wire that was driven into the body of the dead Japanese boy. Was this the bomber's telltale "signature"? Investigators thought the bomb was planted by a man who occupied the seat under which it exploded but who got off in Tokyo, before the fatal leg of the journey. But who was the man? And where had he come from? Awad's evidence would put the pieces together. Based on his debriefing, the U.S. government undertook an eight-year investigation that ultimately implicated the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein in anti-American terrorism.

That probe is expected to culminate early this year in Greece with the murder trial, stemming from the 1982 Pan Am bombing, of the May 15 Organization's top operative, a slim, dedicated young Palestinian named Mohammed Rashid. Although the U.S. wished to extradite and prosecute him, Athens will try Rashid under the 1971 Montreal Convention, which permits those charged with attacks on airliners to stand trial in the country holding them. Through dozens of interviews with current or former U.S. officials and other sources, TIME reconstructed the steps by which Rashid was uncovered as one of the Middle East's most wanted terrorists.

Awad's involvement with Rashid began in Baghdad. A former captain in the Syrian army, Awad had knocked around the Persian Gulf for a few years before he and one of his brothers settled down in Iraq. By 1982 he had his own construction firm and a lucrative contract to lay foundations for a string of warehouses at Baghdad's military airport. Early that year he met a handsome 30-year-old expatriate from Jerusalem named Mohammed Rashid. Awad knew Rashid was with the fedayeen -- freedom fighters -- but that was not unusual among Palestinians. Awad would go on picnics with Rashid and his wife Fatima, an attractive, Austrian-born woman with freckles, long blond hair and a healthy interest in firearms. Her real name, according to Western files, was Christine Pinter.

One day Rashid introduced Awad to someone new: a short, tough-looking, energetic man with the strong, deep voice of someone used to giving orders. It was Rashid's boss -- Abu Ibrahim, also known as Husayn al-Umari, the 46-year- old chief of the May 15 Organization. The date was June 6, 1982 -- the very day Israel invaded Lebanon. That afternoon as the expatriates sat in Rashid's living room watching the bloody assault unfold on television, Abu Ibrahim turned to Awad and asked angrily whether Palestinians like him were willing to help their country or only cared about making money. "Of course I want to help," Awad replied.

Awad soon learned that while the May 15 Organization was tiny, it had a global reach, with safe houses as far away as Bangkok. The group had pulled off bombings in London, Rome, Vienna, Antwerp, even Nairobi. Rashid bragged to Awad about blowing up the El Al airline office in Istanbul right under the nose of the Mossad, Israel's military intelligence agency. Afterward, he said, he had sneaked up behind an Israeli officer and stuck a note on his jacket making fun of the Mossad. Now Abu Ibrahim vowed to answer the Israeli invasion with a wave of bombings.

Rashid and Abu Ibrahim alternately cajoled and browbeat Awad into agreeing to blow up the Geneva Noga Hilton, which Abu Ibrahim said was owned by a Jew who he claimed sent a lot of money to Israel. Realizing he had got in over his head, Awad began avoiding Abu Ibrahim. Then one morning Awad went to his construction site at Baghdad's military airport and found that he and his 60 workers were locked out. The officer in charge said he had orders to shut down the job until Awad talked to Abu Ibrahim again.

Awad felt he had no choice. He knew that the Iraqi government paid for May 15 members' rent and gasoline and provided Abu Ibrahim with documents, untraceable license plates and security guards. Now the May 15 chief had shown that with a word from him, the Iraqi military would bring Awad's business to a halt. Awad realized that he could not continue his life in Baghdad if he defied the bombmaker, and he headed for Abu Ibrahim's villa in the wealthy diplomatic quarter of southwest Baghdad. Abu Ibrahim welcomed the reluctant terrorist and personally trained him. At one point, Awad asked what would happen if the Iraqi police found the bomb in his suitcase while he was at the airport. "Don't worry," Abu Ibrahim replied. "The Iraqis know about everything we do."

By early August, Awad was ready. The day before he left for Geneva, he said goodbye to Rashid and Pinter. The couple was headed for the airport with their two-year-old son on a terrorist mission of their own: it turned out to be the bombing of the Pan Am flight to Hawaii. "We'll all meet back in Baghdad in three weeks," said a confident Rashid.

His prediction was wrong. Awad's desperate journey would end in a Geneva hotel room when he found himself talking aloud to a bomb in his suitcase. Torn between fear of Abu Ibrahim and horror at the idea of killing innocent people, Awad prayed that the bomb would explode then and there, taking him with it. The next morning he decided to go to the authorities.

While Awad was astonishing officials in Bern with his detailed reports, other evidence piled up. A May 15 member en route from Baghdad was arrested in Tunisia with a suitcase bomb like Awad's. Under interrogation, the man admitted that he and another May 15 member, called Abu Saif, had put a bomb on a Pan Am flight from London's Heathrow Airport to New York. The bomb had been found on Aug. 25, 14 days and 40,000 miles later, unexploded, when the aircraft landed in Rio de Janeiro. It had not blown up because the bombers inadvertently broke off the safety pin, leaving the tip stuck in the bomb.

Meanwhile, the Swiss asked Awad to prove that he was working for Abu Ibrahim by telephoning Baghdad. He reached the bombmaker's wife. He hadn't been able to get a room at the Hilton, he told her; he had run out of money. A few days later, a courier showed up in Switzerland carrying $1,500 in cash and a photo of Awad. It was Abu Saif. A search of his shoulder bag showed that part of a maroon vinyl liner had been cut out: the missing fabric had been used to wrap the bomb found in Rio.

There was even the telltale signature that linked all the bombs: a gold- plated nickel wire like the one that had been removed from the body of the Japanese youth killed in the blast over Hawaii. Identical wires were found in the Rio, Geneva and Tunis devices, in each case attached to a commonly available E-cell electronic timer made by Plessey, USA, an electronics firm based in White Plains, N.Y. All three bombs used a distinctive, homemade version of the easily procurable high explosive PETN. All were powered by AAA- size batteries from the same manufacturer and the same lot. Clinching the case, the Hawaii bomber had left a fingerprint on the stub of his plane ticket. The print was identified as Mohammed Rashid's.

In March 1982, the State Department took Iraq off its list of countries that support terrorism. The move cleared the way for the U.S. to support Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. By late 1982, however, growing evidence that an Iraqi- backed group was behind a wave of bombings against U.S. targets led to a mini-revolt in the American government. "I was very upset," says Noel Koch, then the Pentagon's top official for counterterrorism policy and now a security-management consultant. "I called my colleagues at State and asked, 'What the hell are we doing?' " They didn't like the policy either, but the decision to tilt toward Iraq in the war had been made at the top of the U.S. government. "It was a fact of life," says Koch. The officials soon realized that there would be no retaliation against Iraq. If they were going to do anything about the attacks masterminded in Baghdad, it would have to be limited to identifying, tracking and prosecuting specific individuals responsible for the Hawaii bombing. With Awad's testimony they just might pull it off.

The Israelis had a different idea. They saw Awad's defection as a chance to blow a hole in the Palestinian underground. Israeli officials asked to speak to Awad alone, and they gave him a lie-detector test. Then they made an offer. "Your life is at a dead end," a Mossad officer told him. The Israelis would give him $5 million to start a new life in Paris. There he would continue to be involved with the Palestinian freedom fighters, and to boost his credibility, the Swiss would make it look as though he had carried out his mission in Geneva. A bomb would go off at the Hilton, and there would be smoke, damage and simulated injuries. Once in Paris, Awad would help Israel identify the members of the terrorist network, one by one.

Awad turned the Israelis down flat. He did not want to be involved with terrorism at all, he said. If he were willing to do that kind of thing, he could have done it for the Palestinians; why should he do it for the Israelis? Instead, in early 1984 Awad agreed to go to the U.S., enter the Witness Protection Program and testify against Rashid.

For the next four years, while an increasingly frustrated Awad waited in America, U.S. intelligence agents hunted Rashid without success. The CIA occasionally got word that he had been spotted, but always too late. Through it all, the bombings continued, and Abu Ibrahim remained a sore point in U.S.-Iraqi relations. In late 1984, as the war with Iran drained resources, U.S. officials claim, Iraq finally agreed to force him into retirement. Rashid and many other May 15 assets simply transferred to a Palestine Liberation Organization commando unit known as the Special Operations Group. "The terrorism continued, just under a different name," says Vincent Cannistraro, who left the CIA this fall as head of analysis and operations for the agency's counterterrorist center. According to associate deputy FBI director Buck Revell, Rashid is a prime suspect in the 1986 P.L.O. bombing of a TWA flight to Athens that killed four Americans.

Three years after the Justice Department asked him to move to the U.S., Adnan Awad finally appeared in court. In July 1987, based on his testimony and other evidence, a federal grand jury indicted Rashid, Pinter and Abu Ibrahim for the 1982 Hawaii bombing and other actions. Now the U.S. government was armed with an indictment, but Rashid's trail had grown cold. The search kicked into high gear. In early 1988, electronic intercepts and other intelligence tracked Rashid to a house in Khartoum, where he was living with Pinter.

The U.S. asked the government of Sudanese Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi to arrest Rashid. "The Sudanese position was that they were providing hospitality," says a knowledgeable former official. "As long as Rashid didn't do anything against them, they didn't want to get involved." That led to a debate in Washington: Should the FBI kidnap Rashid on Sudanese soil? Officials decided instead to keep a close eye on the Palestinian bomber and hope he traveled to a country where he could be arrested. In early May 1988, the CIA learned that he was planning to go to Greece. Not the perfect spot, given the Papandreou government's sympathy for the P.L.O., but it would do. Fearing that the Greeks would be reluctant to take legal action against Rashid, the American embassy told them only that a man carrying a fake Syrian passport would be landing at Athens airport on May 30. "The Greeks were happy to arrest him," says a former official directly involved in the case. "Once he was in custody, we told them it was Rashid. They said, 'Oh, shit!' "

For two years the Greeks resisted American efforts to extradite the accused bomber. Rashid's wife, still living in Khartoum, was even permitted to visit him in jail at least twice using a Greek passport and a fake name, although she too was under U.S. indictment. Nor does the story end with the decision last September by Prime Minister Constantine Mitsotakis to prosecute Rashid as part of his tougher line on terrorism. Two months ago, Rashid discovered the identity of the key witness against him. Since then, U.S. officials have learned, the supposedly retired Abu Ibrahim has dropped in on Awad's brother in Baghdad and confiscated his passport. The implied threat that harm may come to Awad's family if he testifies against Rashid is not hard to fathom. Adnan Awad and Mohammed Rashid, their lives so painfully bound together, can each make the other pay a stiff price when Awad finally confronts his former comrade-at-arms in a court of law.