Perhaps the PLO's biggest heist was the robbery, in early 1976, of the British Bank of the Middle East, which had its worldwide headquarters in Beirut. On January 20 members of Force 17, under the command of Ali Hassan Salameh, occupied the bank by blasting through an exterior wall it shared with the Catholic Capuchin Church. Two days later a team of Corsican locksmiths and safecrackers hired by the PLO arrived in Beirut and were taken immediately to the bank, where they began work to crack the main vault. On January 24 they accomplished their mission and for the next two days looted all the money and valuables in the vault and the safe-deposit boxes. The main vault contained thousands of gold bars and millions of dollars in Lebanese and foreign currencies, as well as stock certificates and other valuables. The safe-deposit boxes were also loaded with currency, gold, jewelry, and stock certificates. So great was the volume of material carried out of the bank that it had to be hauled away in trucks. The loot was divided up, with the PLO keeping two-thirds and the Corsicans receiving one-third.

Once the job was completed, a chartered DC-3 landed at Beirut International Airport, and the Corsicans flew away with $200 million in gold, jewelry, and currency. Sometime in mid-March another chartered aircraft, a Bristol Britannia Series 300 four-engine turboprop, arrived in Beirut and was met by gunmen from Force 17. Under their watchful eyes, three truckloads of loot, worth close to $400 million, were loaded aboard the Britannia. In the early-morning hours, after all the loot had been loaded on board. Arafat, Abu Iyad, and Salameh arrived, and the plane departed for Geneva. The three men returned two days later on the same aircraft, after presumably depositing their loot in numbered Swiss bank accounts. Other secret accounts were maintained in Lebanon (Beirut), Cyprus (Nicosia), Greece (Athens), and West Germany (Dusseldorf).

In the following months the PLO sold many of the stocks and bonds found in the bank vault back in their original owners for 20 or 30 cents on the dollar. In many cases Arab governments and top officials were only too eager to buy back their assets since they had been illegally obtained in the first place, and disclosure of the fact that they possessed such large sums of money or owned companies doing business with their own governments would have been very embarrassing. So successful was the "fire sale" that in October 1976 a second shipment of funds and other valuables, worth an estimated $250 million, was sent to Switzerland. Once again Abu Iyad and Salameh were on board the chartered aircraft.

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