Terrorism: The Life and Crimes of a Middle East Terrorist

On Aug. 30, 1982, a well-dressed Palestinian from Iraq named Adnan Awad walked into the U.S. embassy in Bern, Switzerland, and announced that he had just left a bomb in his Geneva hotel room. He said he had been ordered by the May 15 Organization, a Baghdad-based terrorist group known to intelligence agencies, to blow up the Geneva Noga Hilton. But when he arrived in Geneva, he found he could not go through with it. Now he was appealing to the U.S. for help.

The diplomat who had been talking to Awad in a soundproofed embassy room picked up a telephone to alert the Swiss federal police. He told them a bomb disguised as a suitcase was hidden under the bed in Awad's seventh-floor hotel room. As a bomb squad raced to the hotel, Awad poured out details of his short-lived career as a terrorist. Suddenly, the American was called out of the room. When he came back, he was angry. The police had found Awad's suitcase right where he had said it would be -- but there was no bomb in it. "You're crazy!" the diplomat said. "What are you trying to pull?"

Afraid the Americans might not help him, Awad frantically insisted that he was telling the truth. He drew a diagram of the suitcase, showing where thin sheets of plastic explosive were sewn into the lining and how the batteries and detonator were embedded in a sheet of plastic along the bottom edge of the suitcase. The diplomat reluctantly called the Swiss police again and talked them into sending the bomb squad back to Awad's hotel. Several tense hours ) passed. Finally, a call came through: the Swiss had found the bomb.

That was just the beginning of Awad's coming in from the cold. As he related his story to the Americans and the Swiss, then to Israeli, German and other officials in Bern, it became clear that he held the key to a major terrorist mystery. Just three weeks earlier, a bomb had exploded on a Pan Am jet flying from Tokyo to Hawaii; it killed a Japanese teenager and injured 15 other passengers. That bomb too was made of plastic explosive. It had easily passed through security checks designed to detect metal weapons and stop hijackings rather than bombings.

The Pan Am explosion left few clues. The most intriguing was a short length of 24-kt. gold-plated nickel wire that was driven into the body of the dead Japanese boy. Was this the bomber's telltale "signature"? Investigators thought the bomb was planted by a man who occupied the seat under which it exploded but who got off in Tokyo, before the fatal leg of the journey. But who was the man? And where had he come from? Awad's evidence would put the pieces together. Based on his debriefing, the U.S. government undertook an eight-year investigation that ultimately implicated the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein in anti-American terrorism.

That probe is expected to culminate early this year in Greece with the murder trial, stemming from the 1982 Pan Am bombing, of the May 15 Organization's top operative, a slim, dedicated young Palestinian named Mohammed Rashid. Although the U.S. wished to extradite and prosecute him, Athens will try Rashid under the 1971 Montreal Convention, which permits those charged with attacks on airliners to stand trial in the country holding them. Through dozens of interviews with current or former U.S. officials and other sources, TIME reconstructed the steps by which Rashid was uncovered as one of the Middle East's most wanted terrorists.