Kidnaping in Vienna, Murder in Athens

An epidemic of political violence and murder shattered the peace of a week in which millions of people throughout the world honored the birth of Christ. The most dramatic incident was the kidnaping of eleven oil ministers in Vienna. Then, in Athens, the chief of the CIA office in Greece was slain by three gunmen as he returned home from a Christmas party. In Lebanon, an estimated 250 people were killed and another 400 kidnaped in that country's civil war. In Argentina, more than 85 leftists died in clashes with the army as President Isabel Peron struggled to maintain power (see story page 47). In Ethiopia, another U.S. civilian was kidnaped by Eritrean rebels, bringing to five the number of Americans held by the Eritreans. "We have been saying it for years," observed one intelligence official in Israel, the primary target of Arab terrorist attacks. "The world is facing a new wave of organized terror. But who has paid attention?"

Absurd Charge. Now everyone is, including some Arab and Palestinian leaders who had previously supported terrorism. Suddenly they found the terror pointed in their direction. Breaking into a meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), six people, five men and a woman, held captive more than 60 people, including eleven oil ministers. After all-night negotiations with the Austrian government, the terrorists secured an Austrian Airlines DC-9 and took the ministers and some 30 other members of their delegations to Algiers, Tripoli, and back to Algiers again before releasing them. No one aboard the plane was hurt, but three were killed and eight others wounded in the initial assault in Vienna. Salah Khalaf, the No. 2 man of Fatah, the largest Palestinian commando group, denounced the attack on OPEC'S headquarters as a "criminal act" designed to "undermine the nature of the Palestinian struggle at a time when it is producing major victories on the international level."

Farouk Kaddoumi, head of the political department of the Palestine Liberation Organization, charged that the aim of the terrorists was to split OPEC and deprive the Third World of its most effective weapon against the West. It was so counterproductive to Palestinian goals, he added darkly, that it must have been engineered by American imperialists and Zionists—a patently absurd charge.

Who, in fact, were the six members of the so-called Arm of the Arab Revolution that assaulted OPEC headquarters? Their leader was probably a flamboyantly notorious Latin American terrorist who goes by the name of "Carlos" (see box). Two others, according to Algerian authorities, were Palestinians, and one was Lebanese. Two were European, one an unidentified woman in her early 20s, possibly Irish or English, and the other Hans-Joachim Klein, 28, who worked in a lawyer's office in Frankfurt and associated with radicals.