Black September in August?

A deadly Palestinian attack force may be coming back to life

His plans had been made for weeks. Returning from his meeting with President Reagan in Washington, Egypt's President Anwar Sadat intended to visit Salzburg, one of his favorite cities. But suddenly last week, with no explanation, he canceled his trip. Four days before, a Palestinian guerrilla named Mohammed Daoud Mohammed Auda was shot while sitting in a Warsaw hotel cafe, but survived. The two incidents reflected the violent and convoluted world of the terrorist, where motives are often murky and alliances shift rapidly. Indeed, intelligence experts believe that the week may also have marked the reappearance, after seven years, of Black September, the notorious band of Palestinian terrorists whose attack on the Israeli team at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich led to the deaths of eleven Israeli athletes.

The series of events that apparently influenced Sadat's decision not to go to Austria began two weeks ago when customs officials in Vienna stopped two Palestinians whose luggage was found to contain an arsenal of five automatic weapons and six hand grenades. Intelligence sources believe that the two were members of a reborn Black September, and that their probable aim was to assassinate Sadat. The Palestinian radicals have been at odds with him ever since he negotiated a peace treaty with Israel, and their goal is to keep the Israeli-Arab conflict alive in the hope that Israel will eventually be overpowered.

The Austrian government did not accuse the two men of an anti-Sadat plot. Instead, it charged them with "illegal import of war materials," staged a hasty trial in which one was found guilty and the other innocent, and prepared to expel them to Lebanon.

The possible revival of Black September was chilling news. P.L.O. Chairman Yasser Arafat may or may not be directly involved; for that matter, it has never been established to what degree he was connected to the Black September organization in the past. Experts on terrorism believe that the leader of the revived group is Salah Khalaf, better known as Abu Iyad, the P.L.O.'s "Interior Minister" and, as it happens, one of Arafat's top aides. In September 1970, Abu Iyad first launched the Black September terrorist group as a result of bitter fighting that year between Palestinian fedayeen and Jordan's King Hussein, a conflict that had led to the P.L.O.'s expulsion from Jordan.

Last week another deadly melodrama was taking place in Warsaw. The central figure was Mohammed Daoud Mohammed Auda, 44, also known as Abu Daoud, who has been accused of participating in two of Black September's most famous operations: the Olympic attack and, in 1973, the murder of two U.S. diplomats in Khartoum. Abu Daoud was sitting at a table in the second-floor cafe of Warsaw's Victoria Inter-Continental Hotel last week when a young man suddenly appeared and hit him with five pistol shots. Abu Daoud was seriously wounded; the assailant escaped.

Who was behind the attack? Perhaps the Israelis, as Abu Daoud himself suggested. They certainly had motive enough. But Israeli intelligence officials insist that they would not undertake such a mission in a Communist-bloc country where infiltration and escape would be so difficult for the hit man. The attack could also have been the work of Abu Daoud's enemies within the Palestinian guerrilla movement, where motives are always obscure. Or, confounding all the experts, it could even have been, as Warsaw rumor had it, merely an affair of the heart.

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