The Levanter Read Online Free Page A

Our Enemies? Stripped of all the dialectical circumlocutions, his answer to that question could be summed up as, “Those who now falsely profess to be our friends ”.
    How were we to distinguish between false professions of faith and true ones? Simple. All would be regarded as suspect until tested in secret. How tested? The PAF had its own security service and its own sources of information. It would conduct its own secret courts-martial. Lists of convicted traitors would be published; PAF purification squads would carry out the court’s sentences. Only thus could the Palestinian movement be purged of the poison of the Great Betrayal and become purified.
    What Ghaled meant by “purification” and “purified” had soon become clear. Only five or six well publicized “courts-martial” death sentences and “purification” squad executions had been necessary. After those demonstrations there were few men of sense and substance in the Fertile Crescent who did not see that it was better to contribute to the PAF’s fighting fund than to run the risk of being named on one of Ghaled’s purification lists.
    The PLO denounced him as a criminal extortionist. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine dissociated itself from the PAF and its “revisionist” leader Ghaled’s “adventurism”. The Jordanian government outlawed him. In Lebanon he was wanted on various felony charges. As Frank Edwards had said, he was poison.
    “As far as I can see,” I said, “this character is completely unrepresentative of the Palestine guerrilla movement. I’m not talking about what he used to be when he was with Al Fatah, Frank. I’m talking about what he has become lately.”
    He nodded. “I Suppose it’s the extortion bit that you don’t like. Would you feel that he was more representative if he planted bombs on foreign airliners or in Israeli supermarkets?”
    “Yes I would.”
    “I can tell you one thing. This extortion thing wasn’t started to line his own pockets. The PLO cut off his supplies and subsidies. He had to turn somewhere. Maybe the Russkis are helping him, maybe the Chinese, but he still has to have some cash to operate.”
    “But to operate what? Does he really believed that he is serving the Palestinian cause with this purification racket of his?”
    “No, that’s a means to an end.”
    “What end?”
    “Why not ask him? You talk as it you already know what he’s become lately - a mere extortionist. That’s the PLO line and I don’t buy it I don’t know what he’s become. That’s why I’m interested in him, and curious. I’d like to know what he’s up to.”
    “Okay,” I said. “I’ll try and find out.”
    I called Melanie Hammad then and told her to go ahead with the arrangements for the interview.
    “At once,” she said. “I am pleased to be of service, Mr. Prescott. There will, of course, be certain conditions.”
    I would have been surprised if there had not been. “What conditions, Miss Hammad?”
    “The interview must not be published until two days after it has taken place. Security, you understand. And there can be no photographs taken.”
    “Okay. Accepted. What else?”
    “The interview must be tape-recorded.”
    “I don’t use a tape recorder for interviews. I take notes.”
    “Salah will wish it. He will not ask you to submit your copy to him before you file your story. Obviously that would be difficult but he will wish for an exact record of what is said.”
    “Very well.”
    “I will supply the two recorders.”
    “Two?”
    “You also must have an identical record.”
    “I don’t need one.”
    “That will be Salah’s wish.”
    “Okay. Anything else?”
    “I will telephone you tomorrow with arrangements for the following day.”
     
    We met in the early afternoon at the museum in Beirut - ”I am known to too many people at the St. Georges Hotel, Mr. Prescott” - and two tape recorders on the front seat of the car were committed to my care.
    Miss