The Levanter Part 1

ERIC AMBLER.

The Levanter.

Levanter 1n (Levant, the countries of the eastern Mediterranean, + - er).

1. A native or inhabitant of the Levant.

2. A s.h.i.+p trading to the Levant, rare.

3. A strong and raw easterly wind in the Mediterranean. Also fig.

Levanter 2n (f. Levant v + - er) One who absconds; esp. one who does so after losing bets.

From Webster's Third New International and The Oxford English dictionaries.

Chapter 1.

LEWIS PRESCOTT.

May 14.

This is Michael Howell's story and he tells most of it himself. I think that he should have told all of it.

He may not be the most persuasive of advocates in his own cause, and, as the central figure in what has come to be known as The Green Circle Incident, he is very much the defendant; but he alone can answer the charges and give the necessary, explanations. It is upon his own words that he will be judged. In his sort of predicament declarations of sympathy and understanding from outsiders are apt to sound like pleas in mitigation. Instead of strengthening his case, my contributions could very well weaken it. I told him so.

He, however, did not agree.

'Supporting evidence, Mr Prescott,' he said earnestly; 'that's what I need from you. Tell them what you know about Ghaled. Give it to them thick and strong. I can tell them what happened to me, but they have to understand what I was up against. They'll believe you.'

'My opinion of a man like Ghaled formed in the course of a single interview isn't evidence.'

'It will have the weight of evidence. I don't expect you openly to side with me, Mr Prescott - that would be asking too much-but don't, I beg you, play into the hands of my enemies.'

Fruity and false; this was the Levanter speaking. I gave him a bleak look.

'I am not playing into anybody's hands, Mr Howell, least of all your enemies'. I would have thought I had made that sufficiently clear'.

'To me, yes.' He held up a finger. 'But what about the public and the news media? How can I vindicate myself, and the Agence Howell, when important independent witnesses, those who know the truth, choose to remain silent?'

'I wrote a three-thousand-word feature on the subject, Mr Howell,' I reminded him. 'I don't call that remaining silent.'

'With respect, Mr Prescott, your Green Circle article gave only a smattering of the truth.' He began wagging the raised finger at me. 'If I am to be believed, I must tell it all. In that telling I need your help. I ask you to stand up with me and be counted.'

I paused before replying: 'You may find yourself wis.h.i.+ng that I had remained seated.'

'I am prepared to take that risk. What we have to do between us, Mr Prescott, is to tell the whole truth. That is all, the whole truth.'

He made the telling of the whole truth sound very simple. He may even have believed that, in his case, it was.

For the record: at the time of which I am now writing I had neither met Mr Howell nor even heard of his existence.

As a senior foreign correspondent working for the Post-Tribune syndicated news service, I am based in Paris. Two months prior to the Incident I had been a.s.signed temporarily to the Middle-East to cover the visit of a US Secretary of State making yet another attempt to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. The tour had ended in Beirut and it had been there that I had encountered Melanie Hammad.

My wife and I had met her originally in Paris at the apartment of mutual friends. Knowing her to be a freelance contributor to French and American fas.h.i.+on magazines, I had been surprised to find her sitting next to me at a Lebanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs press conference.

'A little off your usual beat, aren't you?' I asked after we had exchanged greetings.

She raised her eyebrows. "This is my home. Didn't you know that I was an Arab?'

'I knew that you were from the Lebanon.'

In Paris she had been an attractive young woman with sultry eyes who dressed well, spoke several languages and knew the high-fas.h.i.+on people. She had been helpful to my wife in the matter of getting special discounts on perfume, I remembered.

'Here,' she said firmly, 'I am an Arab first and a Lebanese second.

'Muslim or Christian?'

'My parents are Maronite Christian, so I suppose I am too.' She lowered her voice to a whisper. 'At present I am observing for the Palestine Action Force.'

'I see." I a.s.sumed that she was joking and added with a smile: 'Unofficially, I take it."

'I could scarcely do so officially.' She did not return the smile. 'We could talk about it later if you wish.' Her fine eyes became intense. 'I think you might be interested, Mr Prescott.'

I hesitated. She seemed to be serious; but the only Palestinian Action Force I knew of was a splinter guerilla group led by a man named Salah Ghaled with a gangster reputation. It was difficult to think of the elegant Miss Hammad as in any way connected with him. Still, I was intrigued.

'All right,' I said. 'I'm at the St Georges. If you're free we might have lunch.'

The syndicate's Middle East bureau has an office in Beirut. The man in charge is an Englishman named Frank Edwards who also acts as a stringer for one or two British newspapers. Before meeting Miss Hammad for lunch I made some inquiries.

Edwards laughed. 'So, our Melanie's picked on you, has she? I thought she was after the New York Times man.'

'What are you talking about?"

'She's press agent for the Palestinian Action Force.'

'But my wife and I know her. She's one of the Paris fas.h.i.+on girls.'

'In Paris she may be a fas.h.i.+on girl, but in this part of the world she's a Palestinian activist. Ghaled recruited her when she was a student at the Sorbonne and he was still with El Fatah. Her old man's rich, of course, or the police would be leaning on her. He owns that new office building you can see from the St Georges and a few more like it as well. She doesn't have to work for a living, and, anyway, where Ghaled is concerned it's love. We've got loads of stuff on them both. Do you want me to get it out?"

'I think I'll see what sort of a pitch she makes first.'

'I can tell you that now. Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice. Moderation is another name for weakness. I'm told that she can be very persuasive. You get handed an expurgated version of the PAF manifesto and, to warm the c.o.c.kles of your heart, a mimeographed copy of the "Thoughts of Salah Ghaled".'

'She could have given me that in Paris.'

'There you weren't writing about the Middle East.'

However, in one thing Edwards had been mistaken. Melanie Hammad had more to offer than pamphlets.

'You have,' she informed me, 'a reputation for being truly objective and independent, of not accepting uncritically a consensus of opinion, even when it would be prudent to do so.'

That's very flattering, Miss Hammad, but I hope you're not suggesting that I am in any way unique.'

'I am not so stupid. There are other Americans like you of course. But they are not often here, and when they are they have no time to listen. I know what is said about the Palestinian Action Force, It is said that they are criminals using the Palestinian cause for their own ends, that Salah Ghaled deserted El Fatah when they were under attack, that he is no fighter for freedom but a mere gangster. You may be inclined to believe these things. You will at least have taken note of them. But you may also question and wonder if this received view, this consensus may be wrong. Given the chance, I think that you would prefer to form your own opinion.'

'But since n.o.body has asked me to form an opinion about Mr Ghaled and his Palestinian Action Force . . .' I left the rest of the sentence in the air.

'I am asking you.'

'Unfortunately you are not my New York editor.'

'You have wide discretion. Your wife told me so. I am speaking of an important personal interview by you, Lewis Prescott. It would be exclusive, of course.'

I thought for a moment.

'Where would this exclusive interview take place?'

'Here in Lebanon. In secret naturally. Great discretion would have to be observed.'

'When would it take place?'

'If you agree today, I think I can arrange it within twenty-four hours."

'Does Mr Ghaled speak English or French?'

'Not well. I would be the interpreter. You have only to say the word, Mr Prescott.'

'I see. Well, I'll let you know later today.'

Edwards whistled when I told him of the proposal. 'So Ghaled wants to come out of the woodwork!'

'Has he been interviewed much before? Hammad mentioned that she had done pieces on him.'

'That was when he was an El Fatah man. Since he started the PAF caper he's been underground most of the time. The Jordanians put a price on his head and the PLO people in Cairo tried to persuade the Syrians to crack down on him.

The Syrians wouldn't quite go along with them on that, but he's had to keep his nose clean there and be careful. Though he's based in Syria he never sends his goon squads into action on Syrian territory. He's poison here, of course. He could use an improved image, a little respectability.'

'Frank, you're not suggesting, I hope, that, to please pretty Miss Melanie Hammad, I'd do a clean-up job on him.'

Edwards held his hands up defensively. 'No, Lew, but I am reminding you that a personal interview of the kind you do tends to become a profile of the inst.i.tution with which the person interviewed is generally identified. If you were to do a job like that in this case you'd be giving Ghaled a lift, the sort of international ident.i.ty that he doesn't at present have.'

'If I were out to do a piece on the Palestinian guerilla movement, which I am not, would I choose Ghaled as representative of it?'

'Representative?' He looked blank for a moment, then shrugged. 'There are ten separate Palestinian guerilla movements, more if you include groups like the PAF. You might do worse than choose Ghaled. He's been in one or other of the movements since he was a boy.'

'Isn't he a maverick, though, a far-out fanatic?'

'They're all far-out fanatics. By hatred out of illusion, the lot of them. They have to be. They couldn't have survived otherwise.'

'No moderates at all? What about Ya.s.sir Arafat?'

'He isn't a guerilla, he's a politician. He's against Palestinians killing Palestinians instead of Israelis. If he ever as much as hinted that a peaceful settlement with Israel might some day be possible, he'd have his throat cut within the hour. And it would be someone like Ghaled who'd order the cutting. Ghaled might even do the job himself.'

'Well, I can see that you think he's interesting.'

'Yes, Lew, I do.' He screwed up his eyes. 'You see, since The Second Betrayal....'

'Come again?'

'That's what Ghaled calls the 'seventy-one Jordanian government crack-down. The first crack-down in 'seventy, when Hussein's army turfed the guerillas out of Amman, was The Great Betrayal. The Second Betrayal was the mopping-up operation that followed a year later. A lot of the steam has gone out of the guerilla movement since then, at least as far as the El Fatah and the PFLP are concerned. You could say that events have proved Ghaled's original point for him. That alone makes him interesting. Personally I happen to think that he's got something more.'

'A hunch or reasons?'

'A hunch. But if Melanie had asked me, I'd have jumped at the chance of an interview.'

'Okay then. I'll jump. We'd better wire New York. Can we put Ghaled's name in a cable from here?'

'Not unless you want to be tailed by the police.'

'Is it that bad?'

'They'd probably tip off the local El Fatah bureau, too. I told you. He's poison.'

It took me some two hours with the bureau flies to find out why.

Salah Ghaled had been born in Haifa, the eldest son of a respected Arab physician, in 1930, when Palestine was under the British Mandate. His mother had been from Nazareth. He had attended private schools and was said to have been an exceptionally gifted pupil. In 1948 he had been accepted as a student by the Al-Azhar University in Cairo. He was to have studied medicine there, as his father had. That programme, however, had been interrupted by the first Arab-Israeli war.

The attacking forces were those of the Jordanian Arab Legion and an irregular Arab Liberation Army. On the defensive at first, but later counter-attacking, was the Hag-anah, the Jewish army fighting to preserve the newly proclaimed State of Israel. Charges of atrocities committed against non-combatants were made freely by both sides. An Arab exodus began.

Over eight hundred thousand Arabs went; some in panic, some because they thought that they were leaving the field clear for an advancing Army of Liberation. All expected soon to return to their land and their homes. Few ever succeeded in doing so. The Palestinian refugee problem had been born. Among those early refugees had been the Ghaled family from Haifa.

They suffered less than many of their fellow refugees; Ghaled senior was a doctor and had money. After a few weeks in a temporary camp the family moved to Jericho. At that point Salah could have gone to Cairo and the university as planned. Instead, and apparently with his father's blessing, he joined the Arab Liberation irregulars. This was the army which had boasted that it would 'drive the Jews into the sea'.

When, a year later, the war ended, with the Israelis more firmly established on dry land than ever and the Arab forces in hopeless disarray, Salah Ghaled had just turned eighteen. He had fought in an army which had been not only defeated but humiliated as well. Both defeat and humiliation had to be avenged. In Cairo, where he at last went to pursue his medical studies, he was soon drawn into student politics. According to a statement he made some years later, he there became a Marxist. He never qualified as a doctor. In 1952 he went to work as a 'medical aid' in an UNWRA Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan.

The guerilla movement was in its infancy then; but he seems to have been a natural leader and was soon heading his own band of 'infiltrators', as they were called by the Israelis, in raids across the Jordanian border into Israel. As he was still on the UNWRA payroll as a medical aid, it was necessary for him to use a cover name. The one he chose was El-Matwa - Jack Knife-and before long it had achieved some notoriety. One of Jack Knife's exploits, the shooting-up of an Israeli bus, was believed to have provoked a shattering Israeli reprisal raid. Among the Palestinian militants success was measured by the violence of the enemy's reaction. Jack Knife's reputation as a local leader was now established. When Egyptian intelligence officers came looking for Palestinians who knew the border country and would be willing to serve with the fedayin, Ghaled was among the select few who were approached.

The Egyptian fedayin were heavily-armed commando forces. Operating from Egyptian and Jordanian bases, they penetrated deep into Israeli territory, murdering civilians, mining roads and blowing up installations. The Sinai campaign of 1956 put an end to their activities, but among the Palestinians the fedayin idea persisted. The guerilla groups which now began to be formed were trained and organised by men like Ghaled who had soldiered with the Egyptian fedayin. One of the larger groups became known as El Fatah and Ghaled was one of its early leaders.

In 1963 he was wounded in the left leg during an Israeli reprisal raid. The wound was serious and the early treatment of it inadequate. Towards the end of the year his father advised him to go to Cairo for corrective surgery.