Word: amman
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...Jordanian capital of Amman, two days of closed-door discussions between supposed peace partners yielded far more ambiguous conclusions. At their first meeting since the Achille Lauro hijacking, King Hussein and Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, hammered out at least a temporary continuance of their Feb. 11 agreement to reach a negotiated settlement with Israel. The two thereby blunted Israeli hopes that the P.L.O. might be squeezed out of the peace negotiations...
...direct peace talks with Hussein was on track. The Labor Party leader returned to Jerusalem after an eleven-day visit to New York, Washington and Western Europe, visibly buoyed by the Jordanian monarch's response to his Oct. 22 U.N. speech, in which Peres promised to go to Amman or "any location" to hold direct peace talks. Hussein had called the Israeli offer "a positive one in its spirit...
...expectations that Hussein would cast the P.L.O. and Arafat into outer darkness at the Amman meeting were soon doomed to disappointment. Even so, the P.L.O. leader was uneasy as he arrived from Baghdad on Monday for his session at Hussein's Al Nadwa Palace. He had reason for anxiety. Hussein was infuriated by the Achille Lauro hijacking. The King was even more irked by the collapse of an Oct. 14 meeting in London between British Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe and two P.L.O. representatives, one of whom scuttled the session by refusing to acknowledge Israel's right to exist...
Evidently fearing the kind of daring U.S. air interception that the Achille Lauro hijackers encountered, Arafat made the 500-mile journey from Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, to Amman by automobile. Seven top P.L.O. leaders accompanied him to the palace for the 2 1/2-hour meeting with Hussein. The ! next day Arafat held a three-hour session with Jordanian Prime Minister Zaid al Rifa'i. Later, however, the P.L.O. leader claimed that Hussein was not upset in their meeting. Said he: "Jordanian-Palestinian relations are too strong to be affected by an event here or an event there...
After his meeting with Hussein, Arafat paid a courtesy call on the Soviet ambassador in Amman. As it happened, less than 24 hours later Moscow announced that it had received good news about its own brush with the vagaries of Middle Eastern terror. Three Soviet diplomats kidnaped in Beirut on Sept. 30 had been released in that city, 28 days after the body of a fourth Soviet kidnap victim, Consular Secretary Arkadi Katkov, was found with a bullet through the head. The P.L.O. had nothing to do with the Soviet kidnapings, for which the hitherto unknown Islamic Liberation Organization claimed...