PARIS, Sept 6: A former high-level US diplomat living in Paris, John Gunther Dean, has contacted French daily Le Monde to reveal that back in 1979 when he was stationed in Beirut, PLO leader Yasser Arafat personally obtained the liberation of 13 US hotages who had been held by Iran since 1978.

Mr Arafat’s pesonal role in the liberation of the hostages had, according to Mr Dean, never before been made public.

Mr Dean had at the time obtained the authorization of then US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to enter into negotiations with the PLO in Beirut.

He says he met local Palestinian representatives at least 40 times.

Entering into contact notably with Abu Jihad, a close adviser of President Arafat who was assassinated by the Mossad in Tunis in 1988, he sought the PLO’s assistance in liberating some of the US hostages captured on Nov 4, 1979.

According to his testimony, as recounted in Le Monde’s latest issue, “they took it upon themselves to go to Teheran (to fetch the US captives), and came back with thirteen (US) hostages on Thanksgiving Day 1979.”

In spite of their act, and Mr Arafat’s personal intervention, notes Mr Dean with sadness today, “nobody ever thought of thanking him for what he did.” Nor ever making public the PLO leader’s role in liberating the US hostages.

The remaining hostages - ostensibly with Palestinian support too - were liberated a year later, shortly before the arrival in power of Ronald Reagan on Jan 20, 1981.

His predecessor, Jimmy Carter, always blamed his defeat on his seeming inability to liberate all of the US hostages who had been captured by suporters of Ayatollah Khomeini more than two years before.

Mr Gunther, who is retired from the Foreign Service and has chosen to spend his retirement years in Paris, says today that he finds “shameful” the way in which Yasser Arafat has been treated by the United States, and this because, in his estimation, “Arafat has always tried to work with the West.”

Asked why he decided to make public these, and other revelations, only today, almost a quarter-century after they took place, John Gunther Dean says simply that he is “one of the many Americans” who have become “worried” about a US foreign policy which has become “unilateral and isolationist.” He says too that he is also firmly opposed to any American attack on Iraq.