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

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  At CIA, we had taken on a public role with which many of us inside the building and many on Capitol Hill and elsewhere were distinctly uncomfortable. At a personal level, we all had poured vast amounts of energy into the challenge. Sitting in a room with Palestinians and Israelis isn’t like sitting in a room with corporate department heads or even divorce lawyers. For starters, I knew, absolutely knew, that for the first three or four hours, we initially would have to listen to exactly what we had heard at previous meetings—a litany of grievances. That was the given, and we had no choice but to take it, knowing that at any moment maybe 40 percent of what we were hearing simply wasn’t true. It was also a given that somewhere in the middle of the session there would be a family argument so heated that we feared that both parties were going to come to blows. That’s just the way things were. The Israelis and Palestinians yell and scream at each other. There’s nothing in the least Anglo-Saxon that happens in these negotiations.

  I was on standby for the July 2000 Camp David summit. The security issues were not uppermost in the discussions at first. The talks had moved on to other issues and involved new players, at least on the Israeli side. Netanyahu was gone, replaced by Barak. Arafat, though, was still in charge on the Palestinian side and, as ever, was difficult, if not impossible to move. The principals involved had almost no leverage where he was concerned. Madeleine Albright had a love-hate relationship with the chairman that, by then, was more on the “hate” than the “love” side of the line. President Clinton might have moved him, but Arafat confounded even Clinton’s best efforts.

  On the surface, it was stunning just how much the Israelis were prepared to sacrifice in the name of reaching some sort of lasting accord and hard to understand why Arafat could say no. Yet CIA’s assessment in advance of the summit was that while Barak was coming to Camp David to conclude a framework agreement for a permanent settlement, Arafat had no such intention. Arafat believed that he had a firm commitment from Barak to turn over three Arab villages near Jerusalem. When by mid-May it became clear that he was not going to get the villages anytime soon, Arafat concluded that he could not trust Barak to deliver on his promises. Barak’s argument that his tenuous situation at home required him to preserve his political capital for the final-status talks rather than spend it on a series of interim steps did not hold water with Arafat. The chairman had come to the summit because he did not want to insult President Clinton. But without a return of villages and Israeli flexibility, he would wait out the current effort.

  Ten days into the talks my standby status changed. A worried Madeleine Albright called and asked if I would come up to Camp David on the afternoon of July 22 to try to persuade Arafat to negotiate on the basis of Barak’s plan. Geoff O’Connell, who was Stan Moskowitz’s successor, and I huddled with a despairing Albright and the peace team in her cabin. She told us that the negotiations had more or less collapsed after that famous photograph of Barak and Arafat urging each other to go first as they entered the president’s cabin. In fact, neither Arafat nor Barak had met with each other since. Albright asked me to visit the chairman and try to persuade him to come back to the table.

  I went to Arafat’s cabin and told him that the Israelis would never again extend an olive branch like this. I reminded him of how much the president had done to move the peace process forward. “Now,” I said, “you have to come back to the table.” I asked him directly if he was willing to negotiate. If not, it was time for everyone to go home. To my surprise, the chairman immediately agreed, saying that he was ready to consider anything the president put before him. The whole conversation lasted about fifteen minutes, and we were shortly back at Albright’s cabin.

  Obviously expecting the worst, the secretary was stunned but energized by the news. She ordered us back to Arafat’s cabin and had the State Department’s top Arabic interpreter, Gemal Helal, accompany us to ensure there was no communication problem. Back we went, and Arafat again pledged to negotiate, but this time with an important caveat: he could never compromise Jerusalem’s status. He went on at considerable length about the Armenian community, its desire to be part of a Palestinian state, and the need to bring an Armenian representative to Camp David immediately to participate in the talks. In retrospect, he was laying down a marker that would allow him to say no.

  The rest of the day was spent shuttling between the Palestinians and the Israelis. We felt we were close to a deal on most of the security issues. Albright hosted a dinner that evening and invited both Arafat and Barak. To our surprise, Barak refused to attend. We later learned that he had retreated to his cabin shortly after the first day of the talks and had not come out since, except for solitary walks.

  After a few hours’ sleep, we returned to Camp David and took part in a long round of bilateral and multilateral security discussions. The president was expected back at Camp David around 3:30 P.M. Albright ordered us all to meet and pull together what we would tell him. Shortly before the meeting, we got together with Mohammed Dahlan and Shlomo Yanai, who had been hammering out the details of a security agreement. There were six issues: early warning, air space, emergency deployment, demilitarization, counterterrorism, and the Jordan Valley. Both Dahlan and Yanai told us that their discussions were going well, and they outlined their proposed solutions. While there were some minor differences, they were confident that they could resolve them before meeting with the president. I relayed that back to Albright, and she gave the president a very encouraging report after he arrived.

  The president convened the negotiating session and, to my surprise, remained in the chair leading the effort until the meeting ended in the middle of the night. He began by telling the group, “We have a lot to do. Let’s go through the agenda as quickly as possible. Where there is agreement, we will move on and concentrate on where there is disagreement. Everyone should operate on the basis of two assumptions:

  —No one is bound by anything they say without a comprehensive agreement.

  —Let’s assume that we can ultimately reach a deal on who controls what territory.”

  Shlomo Yanai opened the discussion by reviewing Israel’s need for early warning sites on Palestinian territory from which they could detect border intrusions. Yanai outlined a proposal for setting up three early warning sites. Yanai’s proposal closely matched what he and Dahlan had told us was acceptable earlier in the afternoon. Clearly anticipating a positive Palestinian response, Yanai turned the floor over to Dahlan.

  Dahlan opened by complaining that all the agenda items were Israeli. He told us that the Palestinians had their own requests. They would not raise them now, but he reassured us that he thought the Israelis were capable of meeting them. Dahlan then stated, “We said we understood the Israeli need for early warning sites. We did not say that we agreed with them.” Uh, oh, I thought, something had happened in the three or four hours since our meeting with Yanai and Dahlan.

  The rest of the session followed that script. Yanai would propose a solution, and Dahlan would object. The president did a magnificent job trying to bridge gaps and come up with creative ideas to resolve differences. When we broke to get some sleep, I thought we were close to an agreement. Again, I made the long drive to Washington, but shortly after getting to bed, I was summoned back to Camp David. By the time I arrived, the talks had collapsed. Eventually the parties went home empty-handed.

  In October 2000 the various parties reconvened in Paris. By then the Intifada, the Palestinian uprising, was a week old, and we were trying to come up with something dramatic to stem the violence. Madeleine shocked me by turning my way early in the meeting and saying, “You take this over.” Reluctantly, I did. I mentally ran through my talking points, and in fairly short order we came up with ten steps that needed to be taken—ten steps that both sides agreed on, a big breakthrough. While Dennis Ross went off to summarize the ten steps and get them on paper, Arafat left to visit French president Jacques Chirac, and everything started to go wrong again.

  With Chirac, t
he Palestinian chairman seized on the most controversial of the ten points—an investigation into the causes of the Intifada. In our meeting, both sides had accepted an American-led tribunal, with input from the European Union, but Arafat pressed Chirac for an international court, a show trial with a stacked jury that Israel would never agree to. Chirac backed Arafat, and we were at stalemate yet again.

  Barak didn’t even bother to appear a little over a week later at Sharm el-Sheikh for the summit hosted by Clinton and Mubarak. Egypt occupies a unique position in the Middle East. The Saudis make the same claim, for cogent reasons, but Cairo, not Riyadh or Medina or Mecca, is the intellectual capital of Islam. Egypt is a nation of some seventy-five million people, three times the population of Saudi Arabia, with a gross domestic product four times the size of Syria. That alone would make it important, but like Saudi Arabia, it also sits at a crossroads of international terrorism. The Muslim Brotherhood was born in Egypt; Anwar Sadat was assassinated there. Egypt, allied with other Arab countries, has fought four wars against Israel, in 1948, in 1967, in 1968–1970, and again in 1973. It’s still the country that Palestinians most look to, however forlornly, as their protector.

  Umar Suleiman has been head of the Egyptian intelligence service for many years. A general as well as an intelligence chief, Umar is tall and regal looking, a very powerful man, very deliberate in his speech. He’s also tough and engaging. In a world filled with shadows, he is straight up and down. Umar has also done as much behind the scenes as anyone else I can think of to try to bring peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis. That was true when the United States was still engaged in the process. It’s even more so now that we are long gone from it. When nobody was trying to go see Hamas, when nobody was talking to the Palestinians, when nobody was talking to the Israelis, when nobody was pushing forward with innovative ideas to try to get people talking to each other, Umar was on the ground taking risks.

  I didn’t know Hosni Mubarak as well, but he has been one of our most reliable partners in fighting terrorism and in trying to bring peace to the Middle East. Ours wasn’t a peer-to-peer relationship. He was a very important historical figure. He had been president of Egypt since 1981, following Sadat’s murder. He barely escaped assassination himself in 1995, while in Ethiopia; four years later, he escaped death again when he was nicked by an assailant’s knife. He has a tremendous amount of wisdom, but although a serious man, he also had a lighter side. The October 2000 summit at Sharm el-Sheikh was an example. Umar Suleiman and I had spent the entire day locked in a room with the Palestinians and the Israelis trying to strike a security bargain. When we were through, I went off to brief Yasser Arafat on the details, while Mubarak drowsily took a seat in the corner of the room. Arafat had a way in these circumstances of looking at me as if I were speaking in an incomprehensible foreign language. This was typical of him; he was buying time to think things through. But on this occasion, the situation was not business as usual. From the corner of my eye, I saw Hosni Mubarak, the president of Egypt, host of the conference, and the closest thing Palestine had to a guarantor, looking at me and Arafat and twirling his finger beside his head, the universal symbol for “This guy you’re talking to is nuts!” I went on with the briefing—I am a trained professional, after all—but it wasn’t easy, especially when Mubarak dissolved into quiet laughter over his little gag.

  Trust with Arafat was always problematic. Particularly in the last year of the Clinton administration, he saw how desperately the American president wanted peace—for humanitarian and strategic reasons, and to establish a legacy. Arafat always wanted one more thing, and one more thing was never enough because what he really wanted was for the peace process to be ever-active and eternally unresolved. Keeping the process going gave Arafat leverage. Walking up to the edge of agreeing and then backing away made him a central player on the world stage. It stamped him as legitimate. His own people would see him splashed all over CNN. And he loved having CIA right in the middle of negotiations. In the Middle East, CIA is a powerful talisman. He got what he could from us, and from that point on gave little back.

  When the Bush administration came to power, they did not hold Arafat in high regard. The Clinton team had made him a central part of the peace process. Yet Arafat could never get the deal done. Therefore—and it was a view I supported—there would be no more letting him in the front door. No more conveying the image of him as a global player. No more reward for behavior that led us nowhere.

  As the administrations changed, my role, and that of CIA, in the negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis changed, too. The Bush administration also had a more traditional, and perhaps more appropriate, view regarding CIA’s involvement. They clearly weren’t comfortable with the Agency’s filling the semi-diplomatic function we had taken on over the last few years. They wanted to bring it under their own roof. I did, however, make one last effort at the administration’s behest. In early June 2001, I flew out to Amman, Cairo, and Tel Aviv. I don’t think the Bush people expected much to come out of my trip—to them, it was more like a duty call—but after a week of intense negotiations and constant shuttling from capital to capital, we managed to produce what became known as the Tenet Security Work Plan, a very clear, very straightforward timetable that laid out the steps both sides had agreed to take to strengthen the security framework.

  And that, too, like so much else, was never implemented. Dennis Ross was gone by then. There was no attempt to replace him with someone else whose job was to think about this issue day and night, and thus there was very little push on the political side. Colin Powell had flown out in late June to try to get something moving politically, but despite his best efforts he was unable to succeed. Once more, we had edged up to a workable cease-fire, and once more, it had withered and died before it could ever take root. In the absence of a political process, this was inevitable. Soon afterward, I made a determination that there was no role for us to play anymore. As I always saw it, our part in the process was to be an honest broker, but after June 2001, there was nothing left to broker honestly. Better to retreat, protect our institution, liaison with both the Israelis and the Palestinians, report accurately and honestly to all sides what was happening on the ground—the classic work of an intelligence agency—and step back out of the light.

  Or so we thought. During the spring of 2002, CIA found itself in the middle of one other highly public crisis. On April 2, some two hundred Palestinians, about fifty armed, broke into the Church of the Nativity, one of the holiest places in all of Christendom, while fleeing an Israeli Defense Force incursion into Bethlehem. The site is administered by a coalition of clerics from the Armenian, Roman Catholic, and Greek Orthodox churches and is built over what Christians believe to be Christ’s birthplace. Barricading themselves in the Church, the Palestinians presented a terrible dilemma to the Israelis in what would turn out to be a very lengthy standoff. Many of the clergymen who worked at the site remained inside as “voluntary hostages,” hoping that their presence might deter bloodshed.

  Early on, the Israelis called on CIA’s senior man in the region, Geoff O’Connell, and asked him to intercede with the Palestinians to help end the standoff. What made the situation especially dicey was that some Palestinian officials would have dearly loved for the Israelis to overreact, damage the holy site, perhaps kill the monks along with the terrorists, and stir up international outrage.

  Geoff contacted a senior Palestinian official. Within a couple days they came up with a plan. The Israelis had given Geoff their bottom-line negotiating position—a handful of the most wanted men holed up in the church would either have to go on trial or be immediately exiled from Israeli-or Palestinian-controlled territory. With difficulty, Geoff got the Palestinians to agree to the exile arrangement. Then the Israeli side had a change of heart. Shin Bet officials apologetically told O’Connell that they were unable to complete a deal that they had previously proposed. To make matters worse, the Israelis asked CIA to back
off and let European negotiators try to bring the situation to closure. Back off we did.

  Over the ensuing several weeks Israeli snipers killed or wounded not only several Palestinians but also church workers who were mistaken for terrorists. The Israelis also cut off food entering the site. Before long, conditions inside were rapidly deteriorating.

  After three weeks of getting nowhere, the Israelis came back to Geoff and said, “Look, we really need you to get involved again. We can’t let this drag on much longer.”

  So Geoff reengaged with the senior Palestinian official while CIA officers entered the church and made direct contact with some of the Palestinians taking refuge there. Although Geoff briefed the Europeans at every step along the way, they were still unhappy that we were once again involved, supplanting their efforts. The Europeans had been dealing with the families of the men under siege in the church, failing to recognize that the real decision making was not with them but with Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian National Authority.

  After much back-and-forth, O’Connell struck a deal once again. It looked like a happy ending. The Israelis started taking down the barricades around the church, but then it was Arafat’s turn to renege. This situation exemplified the difficulties involved in bringing peace to the Middle East. Finally Arafat agreed to most of the elements of the deal, but there was still one sticking point: the weapons the Palestinians had taken into the church with them.

  The Israelis quite naturally didn’t want the Palestinians to leave heavily armed, just as they had arrived. But Arafat insisted that the Israelis could not have the weapons. Our theory was that he didn’t want Israeli forensics to later show that these same weapons had been used in terrorist attacks. That would have handed Israel a PR victory.