In the latter case, the car bombs were combined with a powerful command-detonated explosive device planted at a packed cinema which it took responsibility on 1 October 1981 with a phone call to the French newspaper, L'Orient-Le Jour.

[4] The sixth incident took place at 9:55 am the following day, 2 October, when a Peugeot car packed with over 100 pounds of explosives was detonated outside the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) offices in the Fakhani neighbourhood in West Beirut, where Abu Jihad worked.

[9] FLLF operations came to a sudden halt just prior to the June 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, only to be resumed the following year with four huge car bomb attacks: the first one on 28 January 1983 struck a PLO headquarters at Chtaura in the Syrian-controlled Beqaa Valley, killing 40.

On 6 February, shortly before 2 pm., a car bomb exploded and devastated the Palestine Research Center offices in West Beirut, leaving 18-20 people dead and at least 115 wounded.

This arrangement violated the terms of an earlier 1975 Memorandum of Agreement with Israel, yet continued when American diplomat John Gunther Dean took over from Parker in 1978, and covered an even wider spectrum of regional issues.

To that end, it first dispatched a team of agents to assassinate the PLO figure, Abu Hassan Salameh, who acted as the key intelligence intermediary for these exchanges with the US.

[22] Dean later provided a detailed eyewitness account of the episode and its aftermath to both the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum[23][24] and the ADST Foreign Affairs Oral History Project.

[32][2] The fact that Israel was behind the formation of the FLLF emerged in the early 1980s when an officer who had served with one of its coordinators, Meir Dagan, was shocked by the operations undertaken by the group and made an anonymous complaint.

[2] The aim of the series of operations was to: cause chaos among the Palestinians and Syrians in Lebanon, without leaving an Israeli fingerprint, to give them the feeling that they were constantly under attack and to instill them with a sense of insecurity.

Two journalists from Yediot Ahronot investigated a story purporting that he ran a secret unit in Lebanon whose mission was to instigate terrorist events that would justify an incursion.

[35] Bergman also argued that the explosives used in operations were drawn from material conserved by an IDF bomb disposal unit from the spoils of war with the enemy – rockets, grenades and mines – in order to minimize the chance of their being traced back to Israel if they were discovered.