Going Underground

A year ago, a radical guerrilla organization called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine brusquely commanded the world's attention by hijacking four commercial airliners and holding hundreds of passengers hostage in the blazing Jordanian desert. That taste of glory was short-lived. Determined to crush not only the P.F.L.P. but all the freewheeling guerrilla groups, King Hussein and his army chased them out of Amman and penned them in in a mountainous area near the Syrian border. Two months ago, 30,000 royal troops, mostly Bedouins, attacked again and wiped out that last guerrilla pocket. The fedayeen either surrendered to the King or fled to friendlier Arab countries. George Habash, the soft-eyed physician who still leads the militantly Marxist P.F.L.P., is determined to continue the fight. In his first interview with a Western newsman since last year's hijackings, he told TIME'S Gavin Scott: "We are beaten. We are having a very hard time. But from these hard times we will build a real underground."

If such remaining Arab monarchs as Hussein and Saudi Arabia's King Feisal have any say, Habash will not be building anything. The Saudi King is anxious to bring Hussein and the relatively moderate Al-Fatah guerrillas together to negotiate a modus vivendi that will allow the fedayeen to continue their hit-and-run attacks on Israel. The P.F.L.P., however, will be pointedly excluded from any such parley. "We do not care for the Reds of the Popular Front," said a Saudi leader last week.

Habash returns the compliment. In a Beirut office plastered with Mao posters and such artifacts as a U.S. seal torn from the American embassy in Amman 18 months ago, Habash said Hussein and Feisal are among his targets. "Feisal is part of the enemy camp," he told Scott. "He is working for the petroleum companies. Regimes like his want the resistance to be part of their planning. They want to rule us. We say it is more important to have the masses than to have $5,000,000 from Saudi Arabia."

The Common Man. Habash was sharply critical of Al-Fatah Leader Yasser Arafat, not only for accepting a Saudi subsidy but also for misreading Hussein's intentions last September. "The big error," said Habash, "was that certain commando groups--I am speaking of Fatah--did not recognize that the Jordanian regime is reactionary and ordered by American imperialism. Because Jordan is Arab and because Hussein is an Arab name, they thought he would not attack. But the threat was exactly like the danger we face from Israel. There is no difference between Hussein and Moshe Dayan."

Habash is shrewdly sensitive to popular opinion. Thus, because the P.F.L.P. has been widely censured for blowing up commercial jets, Habash indicated that hijackings will cease. "We are not a terrorist party," he said. "We are revolutionaries. We will not practice terror but revolutionary violence, taking as targets things that the common man will understand." Last week, as if to underscore his point, a section of the 1,068-mile Tapline, which carries Saudi Arabian oil to the Mediterranean, was mysteriously blown up.

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