Byline: Tony Horowitz Wall Street Journal
A visit to the hideout of Abul Abbas, one of the world's most wanted men, begins with a rubber-burning drive down the back streets of the Iraqi capital.
The driver loops twice past an anonymous house in an anonymous neighborhood, honking each time so guards can check that the Mercedes isn't being tailed. On the third pass, the car veers into the driveway. Stern young men with submachine guns lurk in the bushes. At the door of the one-story villa, a guard frisks a visiting reporter and tests his tape recorder - with the machine's microphone pointed at the journalist's neck.
Abbas, leader of the Palestine Liberation Front, waits in an office decorated with photos of his commandos setting off in speedboats to strike Israel. "I am sorry for the welcome," he says, gesturing at guards posted by his window. "This is my life."
Abbas' life, as it unfolds in a three-hour interview over tea, Turkish coffee and two packs of Marlboro cigarettes, is the chilling tale of the making of a terrorist. It begins in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria and leads to this Baghdad lair, where Abbas plotted the 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking and this year's attack on a Tel Aviv beach, which ended America's dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Now, with his Iraqi patron, Saddam Hussein, under siege by U.S. forces, Abbas thinks the time may soon be ripe for renewed commando warfare.
"We see this as the battle for Palestine," he says of the Persian Gulf conflict. "Winning it will get us closer to …
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