Anywhere else in the world, it would be an unusual role for the spooks from Langley. But here, the CIA has emerged as a kind of political problem-solver, maybe the only party that can mediate deals between the two untrusting sides. Palestinians tend to view American political figures as guardians of Israeli interests. Israelis take the same suspicious view toward European brokers. The CIA, with its strong ties to security agencies on both sides and its disinterested approach, has a leg up on the other mediators. “State [Department] can’t do it. We know what they’re doing. Who else is going to do it?” said a retired CIA officer who worked closely with Palestinians and Israelis. But mediation also embroils the agency in the region’s political wrangling, a condition that might not be conducive to the CIA’s primary goal of intelligence-gathering. The issue looms large as CIA chief George Tenet prepares to make another trip to the area, this time to help reconstruct Palestinian security agencies devastated in last month’s Israeli invasion of the West Bank.
The CIA’s relationship with the PLO dates back to the late 1960s, when the group was embarking on a wave of high-profile hijackings and bloody attacks. That relationship was temporarily suspended, according to the CIA officer, over terror incidents like the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Though it would be decades before Washington officially recognized the PLO, the CIA was already gleaning intelligence from such disreputables as Ali Hassan Salameh, who headed the notorious PLO-offshoot known as Black September. Washington viewed these men as terrorists, but the CIA figured no one provides better information on radical groups than the radicals themselves. “We always gave the Americans more intelligence than Israel provided. We’ve always been a bigger asset,” says Amin al-Hindi, who met CIA agents regularly in Tunis during the 1980s and now heads Palestinian General Intelligence in Gaza. The former CIA official confirms the U.S. got “early warnings” about pending attacks and received from the PLO one of the early dossiers on a Saudi dissident named Osama bin Laden.
The idea that it takes a militant to root out one was one of the principles that guided the establishment of Palestinian security agencies in the West Bank and Gaza after the 1993 Oslo peace accord. The CIA helped Palestinians build the bureaus by co-opting some of the Jewish state’s staunchest enemies–graduates of the Israeli prison system who were ready to embrace the peace deals. The CIA taught the security agencies management skills, but, says the officer, it never provided training in lethal tactics.
For a while, the formula worked. But as peacemaking turned to bloodletting in the last 19 months, some Palestinian men in uniform have reverted to targeting the Jewish state. Israel says weeding them out should be the main focus of Tenet’s reform plan for the agencies, along with reconstituting the myriad bureaus into one security force that will prevent attack on Israel. “These agencies are done with. Tenet will help them build new ones that aren’t tainted with terrorism,” one Israeli security official said.
But Americans familiar with the vagaries of the region say the task is infinitely more complicated. Unless Israelis agree to real political concessions, Palestinians who venture to crack down on militants will be viewed as collaborators. Tenet has enough respect from Palestinian officials to initiate certain reforms, like uniting some of the agencies under a new security leadership. “Tenet is a rare character in the U.S. He has a real understanding of what is going in the Middle East,” said Rashid Abu-Shbak, the deputy head of Palestinian Preventive Security in Gaza. But others feel Tenet should begin by telling the Israelis to stop bombing Palestinian security compounds and by helping rebuild those destroyed in the Israeli assault of the West Bank. “George has no instant fix for this,” the retired CIA man said. “My assumption is that they realize they can’t create an antiseptic security system.” Not unless the agency can mediate another agreement–this one for real peace.
