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| Terror Networks |
| Aristotle Onassis, the Palestinian Fatah, and Sirhan Sirhan (Part 1) |
| 2004-07-05 |
| This article was written by me, Mike Sylwester, based on a book titled Nemesis by Peter Evans. In December 1971 Aristotle Onassis’ ex-wife Tina met with their daughter Christina to ask her to stop badmouthing her current husband Stavros Niarchos, a man long hated by Aristotle Onassis. Christina was Niarchos’s niece and step-daughter, since he had been married to Tina’s sister Eugenie and was now married to Tina herself. Among the accusations that Christina kept repeating about Niarchos was that he had murdered Eugenie. In order to give Christina a broader perspective, Tina informed Christina that her father Aristotle had financed the assassination of Robert Kennedy. The next day Christina passed this information on to her brother Alexander Onassis, who subsequently placed some related papers into a safe-deposit box. After that, Alexander told his lover Fiona Thyssen that these papers would prevent his father Aristotle from harming Fiona, a woman long hated by Aristotle Onassis. Since Fiona was 16 years older than Alexander, Aristotle considered her to be a gold-digger and wanted her out of Alexander’s life. Several months later Alexander showed some of his papers to Yannis Georgakis, a lawyer who was close to the entire Onassis family. The papers included photocopies of pages from the notebooks of Sirhan Sirhan, who had assassinated Robert Kennedy. During the weeks before the assassination, Sirhan would place himself into a hypnotic state and write stream-of-conscious thoughts into a notebook. On one page Sirhan had written at the center of a roundel, amid Arabic writing, the single name Fiona. On another page he had written 2 Narkos!. On a third page, between the lines One Hundred thousand Dollars and Dollars and One Hundreds, Sirhan had written in Arabic: they should be killed, next to which he had written the number three. It was obvious to Tina, Christina and Alexander that for some reason Sirhan had been hypnotized into a fixation on killing three people -- Fiona Thyssen, Stavros Niarchos, and Robert Kennedy -- who had long been fiercely hated by Aristotle Onassis. ================ In the fall of 1974 a 34-year-old photographer HélÚne Gaillet was stranded in Paris on her way to a job in Africa, because the job was canceled. A year earlier she had met Aristotle Onassis at a dinner party in New York, and he had told her to call him if she ever needed a place to stay in Paris. She called his number but was told he was away on his private island, Skorpios, in the Aegean Sea. Several minutes later, however, Onassis returned her call and invited her to join him in Skorpios. He would fly her there at his own expense. She accepted his invitation and subsequently spent several days with him there. During that time they had a short affair, which included a series of intimate conversations about their lives. By that time his health was failing (he died four months later), so he was in a confessional mood. During one of those conversations he told her, "You know, HélÚne, I put up the money for Bobby Kennedy’s murder." ================== In May 1968 the above-mentioned lawyer Yannis Georgakis was serving as the chief executive officer of Olympic Airways, which was owned by Aristotle Onassis. Georgakis was informed by a Mossad official serving in Israel’s embassy in Paris that Onassis was meeting regularly in Paris with a Palestinian terrorist named Mahmoud Hamshari. About a week later Onassis informed Georgakis that a Palestinian terrorist group had demanded $1.2 million in protection money from Olympic Airlines, threatening to blow up the company’s airliners if the money was not paid. Onassis said he had reached an agreement with Hamshari and now needed $200,000 from the company’s funds to pay the first installment of the protection money. Onassis assured Georgakis that the subsequent installment payments would be arranged "off the books" and channeled through Onassis’s Panama corporations. Reluctantly, Georgakis agreed to provide the $200,000. He asked to be included in any future negotiations between Onassis and Hamshari, but Onassis assured him that the entire agreement had already been settled and that no further negotiations should occur. Onassis flew to New York with the $200,000 in cash. He put all the money into a shopping bag and gave it to his long-time chauffeur, Roosevelt Zanders, who personally delivered the money to someone in an apartment at United Nations Plaza. As instructed by Onassis, Zanders did not ask for a receipt for the money. To be continued. |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |