Free Republic

In June 2002 I wrote a column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune regarding Yasser Arafat's responsibility for the 1973 assassination of two United States State Department officers -- Ambassador Cleo Noel and charge d'affaires Curtis Moore -- in Khartoum, Sudan. The column was based on accounts of the events in David Korn's Assassination in Khartoum, Neil Livingstone and David Halevy's Inside the PLO, and the testimony of former National Security Agency analyst Jim Welsh. Welsh has doggedly purused the story for over thirty years as a result of his personal involvement in disseminating a warning relating to the communications intercepted...

The three ambassadors who died violent deaths were Cleo Noel Jr.,killed in March 1973 when Palestinian terrorists struck an embassy in Sudan; Adolph Dubs, killed in 1973 when Afghan police stormed a hotel room where he was being held by terrorists; and Arnold Raphel, who died in 1988 when a plane crashed. Receiving waivers as longtime diplomats with military service were William Rivkin and Philip Crowe. Rivkin, who died in 1967, served as ambassador to Senegal, Gambia and Luxembourg and spent five years of in the Army during World War II, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Crowe, who...