Abu Nidal

Abu Nidal, whose real name was Sabri al-Banna, was a Palestinian terrorist and the leader of the Abu Nidal Organization. He was a target of Israeli intelligence operations. According to the former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe, arms dealers like John Knight and Sidem International Limited acquired arms from Yugoslavia and sold them to Mohammed Radi Abdullah, who in turn sold them to Nidal and other Palestinian groups. Radi was unaware of Pearson's Israeli connection.¹

Ben-Menashe wrote that Radi later presented his case to Nidal in Baghdad, claiming he had been unwittingly used by Pearson. Nidal believed his story and put out the word that Radi was "clean," placing the blame on Yasser Arafat's group.¹

Ben-Menashe also wrote that Nidal was involved in the Achille Lauro attack in 1985, which he described as an Israeli "black" propaganda operation. In his account, Rafi passed instructions to Radi, who then relayed orders to Abul Abbas to carry out a cruel attack. Abbas was reportedly receiving millions from Israeli intelligence officers posing as Sicilian dons.¹ These accounts rest on Ben-Menashe's book alone.

BCCI

Abu Nidal's accounts were held at the Sloane Street branch in London of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), whose manager, Ghassan Qassem, passed information on them to British and American intelligence. A State Department report of July 1987, "Abu Nidal's Terror Network," stated that the organization's commercial network was run from the INTRACO building in Warsaw by Samir Hasan Najm al-Din (Samir Najmeddin), who held "a general account at a major West European Bank [BCCI in London]" and was "responsible for forwarding all major contracts to Sabri al-Banna for final approval."² The CIA learned, in an operation against BCCI that ran from 1986 to 1990, of the bank's role in "handling the finances of Sabri Al-Bannah or Abu Nidal, and his terrorist organization."³ According to the Kerry-Brown Senate Report, by 1986 "the State Department knew that the terrorist Abu Nidal was using the bank to finance his operations in Europe."⁴

After BCCI's closure in July 1991, a British judge, on the application of the bank's liquidators, refused to let the Senate subcommittee receive BCCI documents held in the United Kingdom without the written "permission" of the depositors concerned, "such as Abu Nidal." In July 1991 The Guardian, quoting what it described as a confidential French intelligence document of February 1988, reported that the Kuwaiti embassy in London had paid 60 million dollars into Abu Nidal's BCCI account in 1987.³⁵