18 Years Waiting for a Gavel to Fall

On a rain-soaked Saturday afternoon nearly two decades ago, a handful of young Palestinians gathered at the Glendale Civic Auditorium to prepare for an evening fundraiser. The event -- a night of ethnic food, folk dances and political speeches delivered in Arabic -- would be attended by an estimated 1,200 men, women and children, most of them immigrants from the Middle East.

It had been promoted as a festival to celebrate the 18th anniversary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist-oriented faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The underlying purpose, organizers said, was to generate donations for "the homeland," in particular to provide medical care and schooling in Palestinian refugee camps.

"People," the crowd would be reminded that night in the call for contributions, "the revolution will not continue, and the march to Palestine will not go on, with words alone."

The preparations seemed fairly unremarkable. Posters were taped to walls. Palestinian magazines, including copies of a PFLP publication, Al Hadaf, were arranged on tables. A troupe of amateur dancers practiced a folk dance known as the dabka.

Before the rehearsal, one dancer removed the American flag from its standard on the stage and leaned it against a back wall in the wings. This did not pass unnoticed.

Earlier that day, FBI Special Agent Frank H. Knight had hidden himself inside an engineering booth outfitted with a window that overlooked the auditorium. He would remain at his post deep into the night, snapping rolls of pictures, recording snippets of the speeches and narrating what he saw into a tape recorder.

For three years Knight had been tracking a number of these Palestinians, suspecting they were agents of the PFLP, an organization with a mixed record of social good works, military operations and terrorist strikes. Unable to convince FBI headquarters that he had evidence of illegal activities, Knight had come to Glendale with a new plan.

He brought with him an agent from the Immigration and Naturalization Service: If he could not prosecute the Palestinians, perhaps he could have them deported.

Knight did not speak Arabic, and many of his conclusions about that Saturday, Feb. 15, 1986, would be based on intuition. He reported, for example, that the music, speeches and "general mood" all "sounded militaristic." He thought it suspicious that some men in an opening procession were dressed in khaki shirts and camouflage trousers.