Globe-Trotting With Arafat

Before his private jet arrives in any country, PLO leader Yasser Arafat always reloads his Smith & Wesson revolver. His plane is filled with arms, stacked in crates in the rear of the plane and even in the aircraft’s bathroom, ready for use by his entourage. Such are the precautions Arafat takes against arriving in a hot landing zone where the welcoming honor guard might turn out to be an assassination committee.

Traveled for 40 Hours

These and other aspects of Arafat’s frenetic life are reported in the February issue of Vanity Fair, in a long article by T. D. Allman who traveled for 40 hours and through four countries with the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The extended, hectic interview--in which Arafat never told Allman where he was going until they were on landing approach--took place as Arafat began the round of activity that led to the announcement last month that the United States was ready to talk to the PLO.

The story is noteworthy because it apparently is one of the first, if not the first, to give Arafat the kind of full-scale treatment usually reserved for royalty, tycoons and movie stars such as Michelle Pfeiffer, who is on the cover in a slinky gold Calvin Klein dress. As such, it may represent Arafat’s rapid ascent from renegade terrorist to statesman to international celebrity, a status that few would have dreamed of a couple of months ago. The account covers Arafat’s romantic life, his clothes, his beard, his communications system, his living habits and his sleep patterns with the devotion of television’s “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”

And it is fascinating.

A ‘Secret Pilot’

For instance, Arafat employs a gun-toting “secret pilot,” a member of his group designated to take over the plane’s controls should the actual flight crew prove treacherous.

“If any pilot tries to divert the chairman from his destination,” the man, who refused to give his name, told the magazine, “if they try to turn the plane to the right or left, I take over the cockpit and make sure the chairman goes straight ahead to where he wants to go.”

Allman was able to learn these details only by the skin of his teeth. He was given 10 minutes notice to get from the Tunis Hilton to Arafat in his plane, warmed up for take off. Allman reports that he made it in nine minutes and 50 seconds, including a hasty shower, dressing wet and losing 25 seconds waiting for an elevator and searching for his passport.

Allman also writes that when he told others he would be interviewing Arafat, inquiring minds in America most wanted to know why Arafat doesn’t shave.

No Time to Lose

Arafat’s answer: “. . . To save time. I haven’t 15 minutes a day to lose. Also, in our area of the world this is not something bad, to have your beard. Also, how can I shave in the midst of guerrilla warfare? . . . So tell them please: it would be very difficult for me to waste 15 minutes shaving, because I would lose 450 minutes a month--7 1/2 hours!”

Time is an obsession for Arafat. Lifting off from Mauritania, the PLO chairman glanced at his Rolex and noted that he was on the ground in the African country for two hours and 11 minutes, 13 minutes off his record for an official visit. For Arafat’s purposes, the world is “divided into One-Week Countries, Three-Hour Countries, and No-Wait Countries--according to how much time his hosts require to prepare for his arrival,” Allman writes.

In three days last year, an Arafat aide told the magazine, Arafat traveled to “Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Iraq, Pakistan, Thailand, China, Bangladesh, India, Thailand and Pakistan again, Saudi Arabia again, Iraq again, and then went back to Saudi Arabia for a third time--all in one trip.”

Arafat’s ceaseless traveling and spartan tastes currently leave little time for a love life. But Allman reports that Arafat had “at least two serious affairs while living in Lebanon.” One woman was assassinated in 1972 and the other, Aliiya al-Sulh, the daughter of Lebanon’s first prime minister, became strictly a political alliance, according to one of Allman’s sources.

Broader Perspectives

New Perspectives Quarterly, whose publisher is wealthy Los Angeles liberal Stanley K. Sheinbaum--among a group of American Jews who had a widely publicized meeting with Yasser Arafat in Sweden late last year--is dropping off 110,000 subscriptions forms with the U.S. Postal Service this week.

Paul Koplin, the magazine’s business and marketing director, says the mailing--featuring a letter from futurologists Alvin and Heidi Toffler--is a big step in increasing the 2-year-old magazine’s circulation from about 10,000 to the 50,000-to-60,000 range. While this may seem a modest ultimate goal, Koplin said the numbers represent a sort of critical mass for contemporary affairs journals such as New Perspectives Quarterly. It takes a circulation of about 50,000 to make a magazine influential in all the right places, he said, noting that magazines such as Foreign Affairs, the Washington Monthly and Granta are in that ballpark.

The new mailing follows a test mailing of 75,000 last fall, a venture that didn’t pay off as hoped because the negative presidential campaign was turning off many potential subscribers to the entire spectrum of political discourse. As small magazines go, New Perspectives--which merged with the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara about a year ago--already has a fairly high profile because many of the magazine’s articles are excerpted as op-ed pieces in major U.S. newspapers.

Due Out Today

Meanwhile, the winter issue of the quarterly, always devoted to a single theme, is due out today. The issue exams perestroika’ s implications for communism by those who should know--politburo ideologists in Beijing, Budapest and Moscow. Other contributors include “a former Romanian ambassador to the U.S. now under house arrest in Bucharest,” the top economic adviser to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Liu Binyan, a leading Chinese journalist who has been expelled from the Communist Party twice and is one of the most prominent writers in China today.

The entire issue is titled “Atari Communists: From Hardline to Software.” In his introduction, editor Nathan Gardels outlines the subject. “A specter is haunting the Communist world--the specter of economic failure. While supermarkets, shopping malls and personal computers describe the post-industrial West, the economies of the East are still struggling with the abacus and the cabbage, the slide rule and the smokestack. In a cruel paradox of history, the future has left the vanguard behind,” Gardels writes.

Subscriptions to New Perspectives are $20 per year and may be obtained by writing to the magazine at 10951 W. Pico Blvd., Second Floor, Los Angeles, 90064. The magazine is also available on many newsstands at $4.95 a copy.