Lefthome
11-13-2004, 12:20 PM
Arafat's Death (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04318/411379.stm)
Saturday, November 13, 2004
By Dennis Roddy
As will happen when the fates are kind, Yasser Arafat caught up with the plans for his funeral this week. After a week stubbornly comatose, he was taken from a Paris hospital and flown home for burial.
The United Nations put its flags at half staff and world leaders offered condolences so profuse one would think the dear departed had never ordered the massacre of Olympians at Munich, schoolchildren at Ma'alot, civilians at airports. Such judgment is to be expected in a diplomatic corps incapable of telling a warrior statesman from an armed kleptomaniac.
In Sarasota, Fla., D. Lowell Jones was having none of it. His thoughts were with two graves far from Ramallah, where he had buried a pair of friends killed on Arafat's orders.
"I'll just be glad to see the old terrorist put in the ground and sink straight down to hell," Jones said.
He remembered standing by the fresh graves of Cleo Noel Jr. and George Curtis Moore, two men who were machine-gunned by Arafat's Black September gang on March 2, 1973, immediately after the future statesman sent the coded order: Cold River.
A month earlier, the United States had re-established diplomatic relations with Sudan, after a six-year breach caused by the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Cleo Noel was dispatched to Khartoum to become ambassador, relieving Moore, the charge d'affaires. Both men had worked together in Khartoum in the "American Interests" section, a diplomatic fiction set up when a nation doesn't have an embassy. Lowell Jones was in charge of security. The trio became close and Jones was impressed by the commitment Moore and Noel showed toward getting their nation on a good footing with the Arab world.
That same month, the Israeli Air Force, in an act of stupidity, shot down a Libyan airliner that had strayed over Israeli air space. The newly established dictator, Moammar Gadhafi, demanded action. He had been funding Arafat's terrorists for a year and, as the story later emerged, insisted that something be done. Arafat sent a team to Khartoum, where they raided a party at the Saudi embassy, and took Noel, Moore and a Belgian diplomat, Guy Eid, hostage.
As a team from the State Department landed in Khartoum, Arafat was picked up on a National Security Agency intercept. James J. Welsh, an intelligence analyst with NSA, later told the story.
"Didn't you understand the order?" Welsh said Arafat told his operatives. "Have you carried out Cold River?"
Noel, Moore and Eid were taken to a basement and mown down.
Sally Moore and Lucille Noel found work in the State Department after they were left widows. Jones never forgot the day he helped bury his colleagues and wondered: had he still been managing security in Khartoum, would he have noticed something? Could he have saved at least one man? He'd always been after Noel and Moore never to attend the same functions in risky places.
The only person who didn't seem wracked by doubt was Arafat. A year later he gave a speech at the United Nations, still wearing his holster. He alternated between terrorism and negotiation and was given the Nobel Peace Prize, notwithstanding the fact that, almost immediately afterward, he broke the peace.
Jones, now retired from the State Department, watched as President Bill Clinton trotted out Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to shake hands and move toward a Palestinian state.
"I remember holding back my tears and gritting my teeth and saying 'give it a chance, give it a chance. Let be what has to be,' " Jones said. "But the old son of a bitch continued to be what he was: a self-centered, power-hungry terrorist."
Yesterday, as Arafat's coffin bounced across a mosh pit in Ramallah, and people fired weapons into the air, heedless of the laws of physics that suggest some innocent might take a bullet through the top of the head, a cold rain fell over Arlington, over the graves of Cleo Noel and Curt Moore.
Saturday, November 13, 2004
By Dennis Roddy
As will happen when the fates are kind, Yasser Arafat caught up with the plans for his funeral this week. After a week stubbornly comatose, he was taken from a Paris hospital and flown home for burial.
The United Nations put its flags at half staff and world leaders offered condolences so profuse one would think the dear departed had never ordered the massacre of Olympians at Munich, schoolchildren at Ma'alot, civilians at airports. Such judgment is to be expected in a diplomatic corps incapable of telling a warrior statesman from an armed kleptomaniac.
In Sarasota, Fla., D. Lowell Jones was having none of it. His thoughts were with two graves far from Ramallah, where he had buried a pair of friends killed on Arafat's orders.
"I'll just be glad to see the old terrorist put in the ground and sink straight down to hell," Jones said.
He remembered standing by the fresh graves of Cleo Noel Jr. and George Curtis Moore, two men who were machine-gunned by Arafat's Black September gang on March 2, 1973, immediately after the future statesman sent the coded order: Cold River.
A month earlier, the United States had re-established diplomatic relations with Sudan, after a six-year breach caused by the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Cleo Noel was dispatched to Khartoum to become ambassador, relieving Moore, the charge d'affaires. Both men had worked together in Khartoum in the "American Interests" section, a diplomatic fiction set up when a nation doesn't have an embassy. Lowell Jones was in charge of security. The trio became close and Jones was impressed by the commitment Moore and Noel showed toward getting their nation on a good footing with the Arab world.
That same month, the Israeli Air Force, in an act of stupidity, shot down a Libyan airliner that had strayed over Israeli air space. The newly established dictator, Moammar Gadhafi, demanded action. He had been funding Arafat's terrorists for a year and, as the story later emerged, insisted that something be done. Arafat sent a team to Khartoum, where they raided a party at the Saudi embassy, and took Noel, Moore and a Belgian diplomat, Guy Eid, hostage.
As a team from the State Department landed in Khartoum, Arafat was picked up on a National Security Agency intercept. James J. Welsh, an intelligence analyst with NSA, later told the story.
"Didn't you understand the order?" Welsh said Arafat told his operatives. "Have you carried out Cold River?"
Noel, Moore and Eid were taken to a basement and mown down.
Sally Moore and Lucille Noel found work in the State Department after they were left widows. Jones never forgot the day he helped bury his colleagues and wondered: had he still been managing security in Khartoum, would he have noticed something? Could he have saved at least one man? He'd always been after Noel and Moore never to attend the same functions in risky places.
The only person who didn't seem wracked by doubt was Arafat. A year later he gave a speech at the United Nations, still wearing his holster. He alternated between terrorism and negotiation and was given the Nobel Peace Prize, notwithstanding the fact that, almost immediately afterward, he broke the peace.
Jones, now retired from the State Department, watched as President Bill Clinton trotted out Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to shake hands and move toward a Palestinian state.
"I remember holding back my tears and gritting my teeth and saying 'give it a chance, give it a chance. Let be what has to be,' " Jones said. "But the old son of a bitch continued to be what he was: a self-centered, power-hungry terrorist."
Yesterday, as Arafat's coffin bounced across a mosh pit in Ramallah, and people fired weapons into the air, heedless of the laws of physics that suggest some innocent might take a bullet through the top of the head, a cold rain fell over Arlington, over the graves of Cleo Noel and Curt Moore.