The account of the confrontation in Jordan leads Abu Daoud to an interpretive impasse. He is highly critical of Palestinian organizations that openly sought to undermine Hussein's regime, arguing that it was their machinations that allowed the king to vindicate his showdown with the Palestinians in September 1970. At the same time, Abu Daoud admits, rather inconsistently, that he too favored overthrowing the monarchy, but through different means. While his quibble may be with strategy rather than objectives, he never adequately explains how the appropriation of Jordan would have helped regain Palestine.

The case for the Munich hostage takeover is similarly unsettling. Though the Israelis bombed Palestinian civilians in Lebanon with careless abandon in the early seventies, it was high-profile operations like Munich that Western governments remembered, much to the PLO's detriment. Even certain Palestinian officials legitimately wondered how hostage-taking would recover occupied land, particularly at a time when the PLO officially rejected--to the displeasure of many Arab governments--the notion of establishing a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

Munich was carried out by the Black September organization, a secret tributary of Fatah, the PLO's largest faction. It was established in 1972 by Abu Iyad, Abu Daoud and Abu Mazen. Even before its founding, however, a major operation ordered by Abu Iyad was carried out in its name: the assassination in November 1971 of Jordanian prime minister Wasfi al-Tal. Al-Tal had not only masterminded the PLO's ouster from Jordan--in the process manipulating and antagonizing Abu Iyad--he was trying to set up a pan-Arab structure that would have limited the military autonomy of the Palestinian organizations.

Abu Daoud goes into considerable detail to correct long-held misperceptions of the Munich operation. His account was persuasive enough for the Germans to issue an arrest warrant on him. He admits to having planned Munich and maintains that the person long thought to have directed the operation, Ali Hassan Salameh, had nothing to do with it. Rather, Salameh, who became Arafat's liaison to the CIA, had established a separate Black September, which, though it carried out several attacks in Europe, was never regarded as the real thing.

As Abu Daoud reconstructs the Olympics operation and its aftermath, one of the motives for his memoir becomes apparent: not so much to defend his legacy as to rectify it, to remind readers of what it is he actually did and did not do. Abu Daoud wants to delay anonymity, a justifiable incentive for a public confession, but he also does not want to be remembered for the wrong reasons. That is because in 1973 the Jordanian regime almost rewrote his story.

In February of that year, Abu Daoud was arrested in Amman and held for several months. During this period he endured torture and a death sentence, later reversed by King Hussein on the advice of the head of the Jordanian intelligence services, Abdel Rasoul Kilani. The Jordanians forced Abu Daoud to admit to a version of the Munich operation that, paradoxically, absolved him of responsibility while blaming others. This had the dual effect of discrediting Abu Daoud among Palestinians and sending the Israelis in the direction of men who had not participated in the hostage takeover. Indeed, in April 1973 Ehud Barak--now Israel's prime minister--led a commando team to Beirut to murder a trio of Palestinian officials, supposedly to avenge Munich. Not one of them, Abu Daoud maintains, had been involved in the Olympics affair.

While Abu Daoud was in prison, Black September seized more hostages, this time at the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Khartoum, to secure his release. Two American diplomats, Cleo Noel and G. Curtis Moore, as well as a Belgian counterpart, were shot after being detained for hours. With unusual timorousness Abu Daoud dispatches the story in a few lines. He may now know that Noel and Moore were part of an exceptional group of Americans who were willing to accept the Arab world on its own terms. He does not know, however, that the wife of one of the men traveled to Beirut not long afterward and, in response to a remark that the Arab world must have seemed a bitter place after her husband's assassination, observed that perhaps the explanation for that senseless act had to be sought in the squalor of the Palestinian refugee camps.

Doubtless Abu Daoud would value the story. For he spent too long a time buffeted by the misreadings that have shaped the recent history of his people.

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