Posted Thursday, August 27, 1998

Londoin, Thursday, August 27, 1998

'Palestinian Candidate' plot to kill Arafat By Alan Philps in Jerusalem MOSSAD, the Israeli spy service, borrowed the plot of the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, in which a captured American soldier js brainwashed to kill a US politician, in an attempt to assassinate Yasser Arafat, the PLO leader. According to the newspaper Haaretz, the idea was proposed in 1968 by the then chief psychologist of the Israeli navy, Major Benjamin Shalit. Despite doubts among some members of the Intelligence community about the "idiotic idea" Mossad found an impressionable, 28-year-old Palestinian and brainwashed him to shoot Mr Arafat without thinking. The man, codenamed Fathi, was trained in a shooting gallery, with portraits of Mr Arafat popping up for him to shoot between the eyes. For months he was told: "Arafat js bad for the Palestinians and should be eliminated."

When the mind control seemed to be working, Fathi was infiltrated at dead of night into an unnamed Arab country, but gave himself up to the nearest police station and revealed all. The Israelis had a back-up scenario. They gave Fathi a booby-trapped radio which they hoped would blow up the Palestinian leadership if, as some suspected would happen, he revealed the plot. "The radio was stuffed with 300 grams of explosives and it was rigged to blow up when it received a signal. The signal was sent, but it did not blow up because of a technical fault," said the author of the article, Ronen Bergman. The spy bungle recalls previous notorious failures in the assassination business: the CIA once tried to get the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, to smoke an explosive cigar. He has since given up smoking. According to the newspaper's informant, a former military intelligence operative called Rafi, many agents saw the whole affair as a bad joke which Major Shalit had foisted on the leadership. They said they were "splitting their sides" as the "Palestinian Candidate" headed off on his mission.

Our comment  AS is well known, and confirmed by an entry in the diary of Colonel Erwin Lahousen, chief of Abwehr II, the counter-intelligence and sabotage section of the Abwehr (Nazi military Intelligence), Adolf Hitler had personally given orders in 1942 that even during the war there were to be no attempts at assassinating enemy leaders or military personalities. There are no known instances where this order was disobeyed. (About killing domestic enemies, of course, he was less squeamish).

The above news item is reproduced without editing other than typographical

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