Finis for The Master Terrorist?

By David Brand

The U.S. State Department last year described it as "the most dangerous terrorist organization in existence." Its leader is possibly the world's most wanted man, accused of killing or wounding nearly 1,000 people, most of them innocent people, in attacks around the world over the past 15 years. But last week there were reports that this ferocious dealer of death and destruction, Abu Nidal, 52, head of the Libyan-based Fatah Revolutionary Council, is ill and possibly dying in a hospital in the Libyan capital of Tripoli, his illness variously reported to be cancer and heart disease. Declared a Cairo-based official of the Palestine Liberation Organization, from which the terrorist leader broke away in 1973: "Abu Nidal is in a very tough way."

So, by all accounts, is his organization. With many Palestinians who once saw their future through the barrel of a gun now seeking a seat at the peace table, a senior P.L.O. official claims that the terrorist network is disintegrating. And it is doing so in a shower of blood. P.L.O. officials recount how three of Abu Nidal's top lieutenants were shot at his house near Tripoli late last year and their bodies buried under tons of concrete. In all, says the P.L.O., 25 associates have been murdered at the house, and other F.R.C. members suspected of disloyalty have been executed in Syria and Lebanon.

The killing is largely the result of a struggle throughout much of the Middle East between followers of Abu Nidal (a nom de guerre for Jaffa-born Sabri Khalil al-Banna) and supporters of P.L.O. leader Yasser Arafat. In southern Lebanon, according to the P.L.O., about 150 F.R.C. followers have died in clashes between the two groups over the past two years.

The demise of the F.R.C. and Abu Nidal says a great deal about the changing climate throughout much of the Middle East. One powerful curb on Abu Nidal's activities is the apparent turn to moderation of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who is seeking to bring his country out of isolation. Last October Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak bluntly told the Libyan that improved relations with Cairo depend on Gaddafi's abandoning his support of terrorism. So hostile has Gaddafi become to terrorist groups that some reports place Abu Nidal not in a hospital but under house arrest in Tripoli.

Another Arab leader who has seen the antiterrorist light -- or at least wants the world to think he has -- is Arafat, whose credibility rests on dissociating his mainstream Palestinian movement from the murderous activities of Abu Nidal. Arafat's recognition of Israel and renunciation of terrorism last December -- however grudging and ambiguous -- helped isolate Abu Nidal in the Arab world, and may have intensified the infighting within F.R.C. ranks. The P.L.O.'s concern is that the taint of terrorism could deny it a major role in Israeli-proposed Palestinian elections. Last week Arafat persuaded a meeting of Arab foreign ministers in Tunis to urge Presidents Bush and Gorbachev to recognize the P.L.O. as a major force for peace.

Arafat particularly wants to be seen as a peacemaker at the United Nations, where he is trying to win recognition of the P.L.O. as the representative of a Palestinian state. The U.S. has threatened to withdraw its contribution to the U.N. if such a resolution is passed.

Although the P.L.O. may profit from the perception that it rejects Abu Nidal's movement, terrorism's tentacles are spreading. Alliances are said to be forming in Lebanon between followers of the F.R.C. and members of the pro- Iranian Shi'ite Hizballah. "I spend more time worrying about the fractionalization of terrorism than I do about the disintegration of ((Abu Nidal's)) organization," says a Western diplomat in Cairo. "Smaller groups are harder to find."

With reporting by Dean Fischer/Cairo