Death of a Terrorist

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.

Two weeks ago, Abu Hassan heard from the Christian Maronite leadership that the Israelis had assigned a new assassination squad to get him. A week before that he had protected a young Christian leader, Dany Chamoun, from a Palestinian mob, and the Christians were repaying the favor. Despite the warning, Abu Hassan is not known to have taken extra precautions. When TIME Correspondent Dean Brelis asked him a few months ago if he was worried about the Israelis' determination to kill him, he replied: "They're the ones who should be worried after all their mistakes. But I also know that when my number is up, it will be up. No one can stop it."

Palestinian investigators quickly traced the assassination to three mysterious --and missing--foreigners. TIME has learned that as many as 14 Israeli agents, some of them veterans of the Lillehammer debacle, were involved in the operation. The most curious of the known suspects was a woman later identified as traveling on a British passport issued in 1975 in the name of Erika Mary Chambers. Three months ago, she rented an apartment overlooking the Rue Verdun. She appeared to be an eccentric middle-aged spinster, known to her neighbors as Penelope, who loved stray cats and sketched street scenes from her window.

The second suspect was a nondescript, self-styled "technical consultant" with a clipped British accent who arrived from Geneva a fortnight ago. He used the name Peter Scriver and carried British passport number 260896. After checking into the Hotel Mediterrannee in west Beirut, he rented a Volkswagen from the Lenacar agency. At about the same time, a blond, friendly man who called himself Roland Kolberg and carried Canadian passport number DS 104277 checked into the Royal Gardens Hotel, also in west Beirut, and rented a gray Simca, also from Lenacar Kolberg said he was a sales representative tor Regent Sheffield, Ltd., a New York producer of cutlery and kitchenware. Nobody at the firm has ever heard of Kolberg; British officials say that no passport was ever issued in the name of Peter Scriver.

Some time on Jan. 17, the P L O believes, Penelope met with Scriver and Kolberg and told them what she had observed of Abu Hassan's movements on the Rue Verdun. After that, Scriver apparently drove his rented Volkswagen to a secret garage, equipped it with explosives and detonating devices, then slipped out of Lebanon, possibly on a Middle East Airlines flight to Athens Around 2:30 in the afternoon on Jan 22 someone parked the Volkswagen in the Rue Verdun about 100 yds. from Abu Hassan's apartment. Palestinian investigators speculate that Penelope had been watching the street from her apartment as Abu Hassan arrived an hour later, and that she used a radio device to detonate the bomb at the precise moment his station wagon passed the Volkswagen. In fact, TIME has learned the explosion was set off by a timing device that Israeli agents had planted on Abu Hassan's car.

In the confusion that followed Penelope left the apartment, after having filled all the cats' dishes with food. The Palestinians believe that she drove to the Christian port of Jounieh and later was spirited out of Lebanon on an Israeli gunboat. Her car, which also had been rented from the Lenacar agency, was still missing at week's end, but police found Kolberg s rented Simca abandoned beside the seashore at Mameltein, five miles from Jounieh. It contained no clues.

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