An "adopted son " who lived with fear—and dealt it out
At 3:35 last Monday afternoon, a Chevrolet station wagon carrying five Palestinians drove slowly down the Rue Verdun in west Beirut. As it passed a parked Volkswagen, a huge plastique bomb turned the street into a violent shambles of smoke and flames. The occupants of the station wagon were mortally wounded; four passersby, including a German nun and an English student, were killed, and 18 others were injured.
The most important passenger in the station wagon was Ali Hassan Salameh, better known as Abu Hassan; he was accompanied by four bodyguards. Abu Hassan, 36, was a trusted lieutenant of and potential successor to Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization. As chief planner for the terrorist organization Black September, Abu Hassan was behind the raid at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games in which eleven Israeli athletes were killed, and a wide assortment of other terrorist attacks and murders. Five times the Israeli intelligence organization, Mossad, had tried to kill him; the most memorable failure was a 1973 operation in Lillehammer, Norway, that resulted in the death of an innocent Moroccan waiter who the Israeli hit team thought was the "Red Prince," their code name for Abu Hassan. The Israelis wanted him dead perhaps more than anyone else; he had staged too many spectacular raids, had killed their agents and made them look like bunglers. Last week they finally got him.
When news of Abu Hassan's death reached Arafat in Damascus, the P.L.O. leader said quietly, "We have lost a lion." Arafat had admired Abu Hassan's father, Hassan Salameh, a Palestinian leader who was killed when his headquarters was blown up by Haganah, the Israeli underground, during the 1948 war. The young Hassan went to the American University of Beirut, majoring in engineering, and by the late 1960s had joined the inner circle of Arafat's al-Fatah organization. Besides his activities in behalf of Black September, he was in charge of Fatah's overall security; in recent years he was also known as a skilled fixer with contacts ranging from European radical groups to Western embassies. To Arafat he was an "adopted son." The P.L.O. leader was one of the pallbearers at Hassan's funeral in Beirut, which was attended by 50,000 Palestinians. "Stand proud," shouted a grieving Arafat. "We bury a martyr!"
A dashing figure whom a friend once called a "panther with an I.Q. of 180," Abu Hassan had not only dispensed terror, but lived with it for years. "I really need a vacation," he remarked a year ago, "maybe a beach in Brazil or the Caribbean. But I can't just go out and get on an airplane. I don't know if I can ever fly from one country to another again." For several months he had been staying off and on in an apartment just off the Rue Verdun with his second wife, Georgina, a former Miss Universe. Last month he ordered heavy steel rollers installed in the windows.