Abu Nidal's oldest relationship in Eastern Europe was with Yugoslavia, where Palestinians had been going to study in large numbers since the 1960s. When Abu Nidal broke from Fatah in 1974, he managed to poach some of Fatah's students in Yugoslavia and used them to start recruiting in earnest, causing violent clashes between his supporters and Fatah's. In April 1980, his men in Belgrade threw a bomb at a car in which Abu Iyad was thought to be traveling. Not wanting further headaches of this sort, Yugoslav intelligence decided to open a line to Abu Nidal.
The Yugoslavs considered Abu Nidal a terrorist and did not approve of him. But they ignored his activities in the hope of persuading him not to forge links with separatist movements inside Yugoslavia and not to conduct his bloody feud with Fatah on their territory. He, of course, exploited such tolerance for all it was worth. From 1980 onward, he kept a secret representative in Belgrade: first Ali al-Farra (Dr. Kamal), then Iyad Muhammad (the husband of one of his nieces), then Ali Afifi, followed by others. As a result, from 1980 to 1985, Yugoslavia became the organizational center for Abu Nidal's European operations. Weapons were stored there; his teams of assassins coming in from Libya or Lebanon used Yugoslavia as a staging post on their way to other destinations; and weapons were moved from there into the rest of Europe. Inside the organization, Yugoslavia was considered "semisecure" in the sense that if its members got into trouble, the organization could usually strike an under-the-table deal with the Yugoslavs to get them out of it.
