At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  I wasn’t so sure, so I went in search of Yitzhak Mordechai, the Israeli defense minister, who had arrived at Wye less than a day earlier. Mordechai was a serious man who instinctively distrusted the showmanship of populist politicians. Madeleine Albright had told me to ignore the luggage, but I could barely get into the building without tripping over it, so I called out to some sheepish-looking Israelis standing nearby, “What’s with the bags? You guys going somewhere?” Then I found Mordechai and asked him to take a walk. “Here’s where we are and what we have,” I told him, and went on to lay out the security negotiations to date. “Look,” he said, “I’ll go talk to them. I will get us to ‘yes.’” And with that, the bags returned to the rooms and we got back to business. Perhaps the Israelis were just doing some sort of scripted, good cop/bad cop routine, but whatever the backdrop, it worked. Mordechai was critical to the final stages of the security negotiations, including some concessions that put us over the top.

  At last, on Wednesday, October 21, at a 6:00 P.M. meeting, a deal was reached.

  Days of negotiation followed. In the end the Israelis agreed that a thirty-day plan would be developed in the field jointly between Palestinian and Shin Bet officials, that it would be coordinated within seven days with Chief of Staff Mofaz and Director Ayalon, that all Palestinian entities would have to adhere to the plan—an important point for the Israelis, as Dahlan could not speak for the West Bank—and that cooperation would be continuous. Finally, CIA agreed to host biweekly trilateral meetings to assess implementation, enhance communication, and help the two sides overcome obstacles. I then asked Defense Minister Mordechai if the agreement meant that the security file was closed. The defense minister said yes.

  The Israelis were taking an enormous risk, betting that the Palestinians would fulfill their obligations. Mordechai had been indispensable in selling the agreement to his political leadership. The Palestinians needed our help in building their security. We agreed to do so. But in return, I said to them, “At the end of the day, only one thing matters—performance. The credibility of the CIA is on the line. There will be no second chances.” We all seemed to be on the same page on security issues, but there was one final matter yet to be resolved: Jonathan Pollard.

  Jonathan Pollard had been convicted in 1986 on one count of passing top-secret material to the Israelis while working as a navy intelligence analyst. He was then (and still is) serving a life sentence at a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina. Many people in the intelligence community believed that Pollard hadn’t been motivated by love of Israel alone. There were indications that he offered to spy for other countries as well. But many Israelis considered Pollard to be a soldier, and this was the Israeli ethos—leave nobody on the battlefield. It was understandable on one level, but I was still shocked to hear Pollard’s name arise in the middle of these negotiations. We were there to broker peace, not to pardon people who had sold out their country.

  Martin Indyk recalls that Pollard came up at the first meeting President Clinton had with Netanyahu at Wye. I was not at that meeting. After the session, according to Martin, Sandy Berger asked the president whether Bibi had raised the issue of Pollard. The president said yes, and that he had told Bibi he would deal with that at the end.

  On Tuesday evening, the president had asked Dennis Ross how important Pollard was to Bibi. Dennis felt that Pollard could be released but that he should be saved for the final negotiations—some months or years ahead. Ross told Clinton he thought he could get this deal without Pollard.

  On Thursday, Sandy Berger called a session that included me, Dennis Ross, Madeleine Albright, and some others, and that’s when Sandy dropped what for me was a bombshell. “You need to be aware of the fact that Netanyahu has put Pollard on the table,” he said.

  “No,” I responded. “You’re wrong. Pollard is not on the table.” And with that I got up and walked out of the room. Sandy followed me out. “This is ridiculous,” I told him. “Pollard has nothing to do with what we are doing here.”

  “Look,” he said, “the president hasn’t agreed to anything, but I promise to give you a shot at the president if the Israelis put this back on the table.”

  I talked the matter over with Stan Moskowitz, who was just as alarmed as I was about the possibility of the Israelis using our legitimate desire for peace to spring Pollard. Then I stewed over it myself for a few hours until I knew what I had to do. I’d just negotiated the security arrangement. If Pollard were included in the final package, no one at Langley would believe I hadn’t had a hand in that, too. In the margins, the deal would reward a U.S. citizen who spied on his own country, and once word of that got out (and that would take a nanosecond or two), I would be effectively through as CIA director. What’s more, I should be. I would have no moral capital left with my troops. Better to go out on my own, first, especially when I felt so strongly about the issue.

  Finally, I called Stephanie, to be certain I was doing the right thing.

  “You’re right,” she told me after I had explained the situation and told her I was going to resign if the president wouldn’t hold the line. “Stick to your guns.”

  About midnight that Thursday, Madeleine came up to me and said, “If you’re going to say anything to the president about Pollard, now is the time to say it.”

  “Why?” I asked, but she just repeated herself.

  “If you’ve got something to say, say it now.”

  Madeleine was absolutely critical here; she knew a terrible deal when she saw one and she knew that releasing Pollard would put me in an impossible position. As soon as Madeleine was gone, I cornered Sandy and told him I needed to see the president alone.

  “What do you want to talk with him about?” he asked. Sandy sounded agitated, but that might have been the strain of the summit, not my request. Everyone’s nerves were getting a little raw by then.

  “Pollard,” I told him.

  Within the hour, I was led into a back room where the president was waiting—just the two of us alone. I’d seen Bill Clinton plenty of times by then, in Cabinet meetings—although I attended only those that dealt with national security—at Camp David, during the Peacemakers summit at Sharm el-Sheikh, and other places. We had a good professional relationship, but nothing had prepared me for this. I was flying solo now.

  “Mr. President,” I began, “I just need to make you aware of something. We’ve done a security agreement here that I think is important. As a result, I think the negotiations may succeed, but if Pollard is released, I will no longer be the Director of Central Intelligence in the morning. This is an issue that has nothing to do with this set of negotiations.”

  I can be an emotional guy. But I was very calm at this moment, very matter-of-fact. I knew what had to be done. “I’ve worked very hard to restore morale at the agency,” I continued. “I think our efforts are paying off, but I also just negotiated this security agreement. Everyone knows that. If a spy is let out as a consequence of these negotiations, I will never be able to lead my building.” I went on to say that other people needed to be consulted here—the attorney general, for example—but the bottom line, I said, “is that it’s just the wrong thing to do. I just want you to know that I appreciate the fact that you’ve allowed me to serve and I appreciate the opportunity you’ve given me, but I won’t be your CIA director in the morning.”

  When I was through, the president thanked me, and I walked out of the room uncertain whether I would still have a job come morning.

  The talks meanwhile continued through the night—the president really was indefatigable. My part in the deal-making was officially done, even if my stake in the deal was, at least to me, larger than ever.

  At six that morning, Stan and I were sitting in a small room off the main negotiating area with some of the Israeli and Palestinian participants, including Bibi Netanyahu and Mohammed Dahlan, when the president came walking in with Arafat and led him to Netanyahu so they could shake hands and seal the deal. After a round of c
ongratulations, everyone began filing out of the room.

  Stan and I were the last ones remaining when Dahlan turned at the door and said, “There will be one more thing.”

  No, we told him, it was done. Didn’t he see the handshake?

  “You wait,” he said. “The Israelis always want one more thing.”

  That, of course, is exactly what the Israelis say about the Palestinians, but in this instance, Dahlan was correct.

  When we walked into the big dayroom next door, Netanyahu was sitting in the corner, in an obvious funk, with Clinton talking to him. Finally, the president came over to us and said, “We have a problem. Netanyahu still wants Pollard.”

  Dennis Ross would later tell me that he and the president went off to the bathroom to have a private conference after Netanyahu had tossed in the Pollard monkey wrench again. According to Dennis, he asked the president if he had promised Pollard to the Israelis. Clinton said no, but reading between the lines, Dennis believes that the president had all but walked up to that point.

  “You don’t have a choice,” Dennis remembers telling the president. “If you promised Bibi you would release Pollard, then you have to release him. But this agreement is too good for Bibi to give up. Hang tough, and we will get a deal.”

  According to Indyk, the president met with Netanyahu one more time and told him that he would not be able to give him Pollard because the Director of Central Intelligence would resign. Netanyahu said in that case the deal is off. As we would soon learn, the story had already leaked and the Israeli press was reporting that Netanyahu would be bringing Pollard home with him on the plane when he left for Israel. Martin remembers an Israeli journalist calling him and asking if it was true that Pollard was going to be released. No way, Martin said.

  Somewhere in this same time frame, Yitzhak Mordechai broke ranks to come over and sit next to me. “You know,” he said, “we really must have Pollard.”

  “Mr. Minister,” I answered, “with all due respect, it’s inappropriate. Let’s flip sides here. Put yourself in my position, and I think you’ll see that this is just not something I will ever agree to. If the decision is made over my head, there’s nothing I can do about it, but there is no budge from my position.”

  I went back to my room after that. Clearly, I had become a more prominent player in these negotiations than I had ever expected. I knew I was right but, still, I felt uncomfortable.

  I wasn’t alone for long. I was barely settled in before John Podesta, Clinton’s chief of staff, called. John was not pushing, just delivering a message. “The vice president asked me to phone you,” he began. “Do you know how important this agreement is?”

  “Yes, I know it’s very important.”

  “Well, the Israelis won’t sign unless they get Pollard.”

  “John,” I told him, “this agreement is in their interest. They will sign it. Do not give them Pollard.” Just so there could be no misunderstanding, I repeated my position. “If you give them Pollard, I’m done, but you don’t have to. They will sign this agreement because it is in their interest. Just hold fast.”

  I was confident that my position on Pollard was the correct one—but that didn’t stop me from feeling an enormous amount of self-imposed pressure. What if I am the reason this whole peace process collapses? I thought. I took a stroll with Dennis Ross along Wye’s boardwalk and told him that I didn’t think I had any choice other than to adopt the stance I was taking but that I was really worried about becoming a human roadblock to peace. “Don’t worry,” Dennis said to me. “In the end we will get the deal.”

  News of Pollard’s supposed release spread quickly outward from the Israeli media. Before long the White House started getting heat from all kinds of people, including then House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who called the president to oppose Pollard’s release. This cemented the president’s determination not to release Pollard.

  I do know that when Stan Moskowitz and I next saw the president, he clearly had made up his mind. Instead of sidestepping the subject, he put his arm around Stan, looked at me, and said, “Why don’t we swap Stan for Pollard?” he joked.

  And of course the Israelis did do the deal, just as Dennis and I were convinced they would. This was a game of chicken; Netanyahu and company were holding out to the last minute to see if we would blink. The Palestinians signed on, too. The Wye River Memorandum, as the final agreement became known, was as much in their interests as it was in the Israelis’, and for a precious short time, we could congratulate ourselves on a job well done.

  I passed up the Wye River signing ceremony that Friday afternoon in the East Room of the White House. I didn’t think it was any more appropriate for the Chief Spy to be seen there than it would have been for me to show up for the photo session at the start of the negotiations.

  The day after the signing ceremony, Stephanie and I had a private lunch with King Hussein and Queen Noor at the house they kept on River Road in Potomac, not far from my own house but a thousand real-estate zones removed. “I’m really proud of what you did in that negotiation,” the king told me. But for me, it was the king who deserved congratulations. His appearance at the negotiations had been heroic, given his failing health. King Hussein died three and a half months later. About a month before the king died, I had flown to see him at the Mayo Clinic. Stephanie had given me some holy oil from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem with instructions to pass it on to Queen Noor and let her know that we were praying for a miracle. Before he died, the king went to the effort of sending Stephanie a touching letter of thanks for her gesture.

  When I was with King Hussein, I always felt that I was in the presence of wisdom and history, and yet when I met him for the first time, at his own palace, he had come up to the car I arrived in, opened the door himself, and said to me, “Good morning, sir. It’s good to meet you.” For a guy from Queens, having a king call him sir made quite an impression. I was forty-two years old then, new to my work, a rookie in the presence of a legend. In the years since, I’ve often wondered what impact his wisdom would have had in helping all of us avert the mess we find ourselves in today.

  A few months after Wye, the New York Times came out with a story that all but quoted my conversation with the president at Wye, including my promise that I would resign if Pollard walked. I was in the middle of one of Washington’s great dining experiences, at L’Auberge Chez François, in Great Falls, Virginia, hosting a raucous dinner with a bunch of visiting Australian intelligence officials, when someone called from Langley to say that the White House wanted me to deny the Times story. “No,” I remember saying. I told my spokesman, Bill Harlow, to simply say, “No comment.”

  Was this the peace to end all peace? Hardly. It was only a beginning, but the Palestinians were ready to act in a way they had not acted before. As a result of security cooperation, the instances of terrorism from 1996 to 1999 plummeted. The two parties deserve the lion’s share of the credit, but CIA officers were critical to building and opening lines of communication. And the United States was diplomatically engaged as well. As Stan Moskowitz had said, CIA was nurturing trust with the Palestinians. Our diplomats were pushing Arafat, and he trusted us because they were also pushing the Israelis. Counterterrorism worked because security and diplomacy were joined at the hip. What CIA’s role provided to our government was a basis to help intervene in the coming years, to give the political process the oxygen it needed to keep breathing.

  CHAPTER 5

  Beyond Wye

  Between the close of the Wye summit in October 1998 and the end of September 2000, no terrorist attacks occurred inside Green Line Israel—an interlude in the violence that seems almost impossible to conceive of today. Then, on September 28, 2000, Ariel Sharon, the leader of Israel’s opposition Likud Party, visited the Temple Mount in Old Jerusalem, home to the remains of ancient Jewish temples, as well as the Dome of the Rock and the al Aqsa mosques, and maybe the most contentious piece of real estate known to man.

  Shar
on’s announced purpose was to look into complaints by Israeli archaeologists that Muslims were vandalizing the site, but he arrived flanked by a thousand Israeli soldiers and policemen, on the day after an Israeli army sergeant had been killed in a terrorist attack. About a day later, the Second Intifada began, and the peace process was effectively in shambles. Over the next half decade, roughly 950 Israelis would be killed, more than half of those in Israel proper and many in gruesome suicide bombings. Through the end of 2005, some 3,200 Palestinians would die.

  It wasn’t for want of trying that the Middle East peace process collapsed. I participated in three more major pushes for peace in the Middle East during the Clinton administration: the epic Camp David summit that got under way on July 11, 2000, and ran virtually nonstop for two weeks; the follow-up meeting in Paris that began October 4, 2000, less than a week after peace was shattered yet again by the outbreak of the Second Intifada; and the October 16–17 summit at Sharm el-Sheikh, co-chaired by Clinton and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

  The security arrangement we had hammered out at Wye River was always the foundation for these meetings and helped both sides to understand what reciprocal security really meant. The Palestinians and the Israelis created joint operation centers and began training people who could help enforce the peace and ensure compliance with the agreements. All the while, we were working to increase the Palestinians’ operational capabilities to give them more credibility in the eyes of the Israelis so they could take action against terrorists in their midst. And for a critical two years what we had put together at Wye, and the work we had done to implement it, actually worked, perhaps not by the letter of the agreement but at least in spirit.