Deportation of Alleged PLO Members Tied to FBI Report

An FBI report that lays the foundation for the government’s attempt to deport eight Los Angeles-area immigrants because they allegedly belonged to a violent Marxist faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization describes the group as “one of the most ruthless terrorist groups of modern times.”

The bureau’s report on the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine suggests that its reach is international, including “secret cells” in other countries and ties to other terrorist groups, but stops short of asserting that it has a presence in the United States with the exception of “a propaganda magazine” circulated in this country.

The 45-page document, which was obtained by The Times, was completed in 1985 in the FBI’s Washington headquarters. The government last week unsuccessfully attempted to present the report in Immigration Court in its bid to keep the immigrants in prison.

The FBI report was apparently first used last April when Immigration and Naturalization Service officials successfully kept out of the United States a Palestinian, Suleiman Shehadeh of Long Beach. He was charged with traveling abroad to attend a Popular Front conference in Syria with the intention of ultimately engaging in PFLP activities in this country.

INS attorneys last week charged that Shehadeh’s trip was financed by Khader Musa Hamide, the key defendant in the deportation case and who the government alleges is the leader of the PFLP in California--charges he has denied. Shehadeh denied the charges against him but never appealed and is now serving in the army of Jordan.

A Shoddy Job

FBI Agent Frank Knight, an expert in international terrorism in the agency’s Los Angeles office and who is understood to have played an important role in the government’s current deportation case, presented the Popular Front report at Shehadeh’s Immigration Court hearing last April.

Los Angeles attorney Jorge Gonzalez, a member of the legal team defending the eight immigrants, also represented Shehadeh and was given a copy of the FBI report last April by the government, he told The Times.

A nationally recognized expert on international terrorism, who has no connection with the case, critiqued the FBI report and concluded that the agency did a shoddy job.

“It’s not very thorough scholarship,” said the expert, who asked not to be named. “Its sources are secondary and not the best ones.”

Worse, he said, the FBI work contains several factual errors about the Popular Front, possibly because the agency was “willing to accept (unproven) assertions and speculations.”

The document surfaced again last Tuesday at a bond hearing for the seven Palestinians and a Kenyan woman who were arrested last month by INS agents after an extensive FBI investigation.

At the bond hearing, INS attorney Melainie Fitzsimmons attempted to introduce the FBI report to help prove that the defendants were national security risks because of their Popular Front membership and should be denied bail.

Fitzsimmons told U.S. Immigration Judge Roy J. Daniels that the government’s evidence could only be shown to the judge in private because the U.S. attorney general had determined that the case involved national security issues. The judge said, however, he could not abide by those terms and declined to look at the evidence.

Five of the immigrants were then freed by the judge on their own recognizance; three posted low bonds.

The unclassified FBI work is designed to portray the PLO faction as “an international terrorist organization.” But the report does not attempt to investigate whether the PFLP, founded in December, 1967, has any presence in the United States.

“There isn’t any connection between any entity, organization or person in the United States and the Popular Front,” said Dan Stormer, the immigrants’ lead defense counsel. “It’s a piece of research trash.”

Nubar Hovsepian, director of the nonprofit American Middle East Peace Research Institute--a fund-granting foundation based in Cambridge, Mass.--and an adviser to the immigrants’ legal team, said the report took a “pathological approach” to the Popular Front as “a code word” for terrorism.

FBI and INS officials won’t publicly discuss the evidence in the case. However, they are understood to value the FBI document as an accurate account of the Popular Front’s history and the scope of its violent operations abroad.

Government prosecutors apparently recognize that the next link in their argument--that the defendants belonged to the Popular Front and participated in the faction’s activities in this country--will be more difficult.

Under the little-used deportation section of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, the government doesn’t have to prove that the immigrants engaged in overt terrorism.

Under the law, aliens may be deported if they “knowingly circulate, distribute, print or display” material that advocates “the overthrow . . . of the Government of the United States” or if they advocate or teach the “doctrines of world communism.”

But beyond this, Fitzsimmons of the INS outlined at last week’s hearing that the government’s case will allege that the immigrants did much more than simply possess or distribute two pro-Popular Front magazines that were subpoenaed from Hamide. Indeed, she indicated that the government has evidence that the defendants took part in a wide range of Popular Front activities, including fund raising, demonstrations and the teaching of the faction’s doctrines.

In bolstering its case against the Popular Front, the FBI report contains a 16-page chronology of what it calls 30 “major international terrorist” events sponsored by the group between 1968 and 1984.

Included are a number of well-publicized airline hijackings and other actions, ranging from a 1968 hijacking of an El Al jetliner on a flight from Rome to Tel Aviv (no one was hurt in this first-ever airliner hijacking by a Palestinian group) to a 1984 attack by “four PFLP commandos” on a civilian bus in Southern Israel (one person was killed, seven were injured).

The analysis purports to show that some of this violence in recent years occurred outside of the Middle East, in Europe and Africa. This latter point, however, is disputed by defense team adviser Hovsepian.

“Any (violence) beyond 1977 outside the arena of conflict (the Middle East) is not the PFLP,” Hovsepian contended.

The FBI report asserts that PFLP was “the first terrorist group to take the fight for the Palestinian cause beyond the limits of Arab-Israeli borders” and that the Popular Front has been establishing “secret cells” in other countries. It does not name those countries.

Not all of the Popular Front’s activities are violent, the report says. “Many of its operations were carried out simply to raise money. . . . Reports do indicate that Libyan leader Col. Moammar Kadafi gave a sum of $1 million to (Popular Front founder) George Habash (in 1971) to use for the purchase of more weapons and ammunition (but that) the group’s main source of income came from its hijackings and kidnaping operations.”

The FBI notes that “a great many of the PFLP’s operations have been carried out jointly with various European and Far Eastern terrorist organizations, “namely the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Japanese Red Army.” These contacts, as well as ties to Irish, Iranian and Basque guerrillas, “promoted the PFLP . . . to a member of an international terrorist network,” the reports says.

Up until about 1974, the report notes, all of the Popular Front’s military-type operations “were masterminded” by Habash’s longtime associate, the late Dr. Wadi Hadad, with whom Habash had established a medical practice in Amman, Jordan, in the 1950s.

It was Hadad, the FBI says, who in 1973 recruited the infamous international terrorist “Carlos,” who first surfaced that year “as a PFLP operative” when “he forced his way into the London home of a prominent British Zionist.”

Among “major terrorist attacks” allegedly carried out by Carlos on behalf of the Popular Front, according to the FBI, were a bloody 1972 machine gun attack at the Tel Aviv airport; a guerrilla attack at the Munich Olympics that same year, and the 1976 hijacking of a French jet to the Entebbe, Uganda, airport.

The international terrorist expert who studied the FBI document at The Times’ request said its section on Carlos was a good example of how the agency accepted speculation without verifying it. Carlos, he said, wasn’t involved.