Salah Mesbah Khalaf (), also known as Abu Iyad () (1933 – 14 January 1991), was deputy chief and head of intelligence for the Palestine Liberation Organization and the second most senior official of Fatah after Yasser Arafat. The United States and Israel believed him to have been a founder of the Black September Organization. Suspected of having helped the CIA to break up Abu Nidal's so-called "Abu Nidal Organization", Khalaf was assassinated by a member of that organization in 1991. Palestinians, and many onlookers, generally believe Abu Nidal was responsible for his death. Some believe the order came from Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Early life Khalaf was born in northern Jaffa in 1933, close to Tel Aviv. His father, who came from Gaza, ran a grocery in Carmel Market, where half of his clients were Jewish and he spoke Hebrew, which his son also picked up from companions among Sephardic Jews. One of his uncles was married to a Jew. He dates his first feelings of animosity towards Jews to an incident in 1945, when he was taunted by Jewish youths for being an Arab while riding over to visit relatives. They smashed his bicycle, and, on returning home, he learnt that Jewish friends had falsely reported that he had knifed Jews in Jaffa, at a time corresponding to the bicycle incident. He was arrested, aged 11, by British police, beaten up and sentenced to a year of house arrest. On expiry of the sentence, he joined the 'lion cubs' of the Al-Najjada militia founded by his school principal Muhammad Nimr al-Hawari, which inculcated a rejection of racism, bigotry, and parochial loyalism, and taught him how to retaliate to violence with violence. His family abandoned Jaffa by boat for Gaza on 13 May 1948, as part of a general flight inspired by news of the Deir Yassin massacre and a sense of Jewish military superiority. They fully expected to return as an expected tide in the fortunes of war changed, enabling the Arab armies to drive back to Zionists. He moved to Cairo in the early 1950s, enrolling in the Dar al-Ulum teacher's college. There, in 1951, he became a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Collaboration with Arafat, role in the PLO In 1951, Khalaf met Yasser Arafat at the al-Azhar University—where he studied literature—during a meeting of the General Union of Palestinian Students. He returned to Gaza in