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

by George Tenet;Bill Harlow

  Once again, O’Connell came to the rescue with an idea. “We’ll throw the weapons in the sea!” he announced. For a while everyone thought that was a splendid solution. But once again the deal came undone. The Israelis wanted the weapons thrown in the Mediterranean, and the Palestinians wanted them thrown in the Dead Sea, closer to their territory. You can’t make this stuff up.

  Finally, O’Connell came up with plan B, or maybe it was plan C—the United States would take control of the weapons and hold them in perpetuity. All the negotiators present agreed, but it was up to their seniors to bless the concept. Geoff called me and had me track down Arafat. I reached the chairman in Egypt and congratulated him on the deal.

  “Deal? What deal? I know nothing of a deal,” he blustered, in typical fashion. In the end we convinced all sides that this was as good an arrangement as they were going to get, and after thirty-eight days, control of the Church of the Nativity was returned to its rightful owners.

  I only wish our broader involvement in the peace process had met with similar success. Yet, however much I regret the outcome, I wouldn’t have foregone the process itself. In all our dealings with the Israelis and Palestinians, we negotiated in good faith. When Israel asked us to back off, we backed off. When the Palestinians needed their hand held, we held it. Ultimately, I told both sides, the United States can’t want peace in their region more than they do.

  Once you got involved in the peace process, it was difficult not to be totally consumed by it. We had very deep bonds with the Israelis, who were like us in so many ways. The relationships that we developed with their intelligence professionals were deep and meaningful ones. They became personal. Dany Yatom, Efraim Halevy, and Avi Dichter would become lifelong friends. These were people I could rely on. These were people we could talk to. We had common motives and concerns.

  At the same time, it was hard not to develop affection for the Palestinians. I understood that they wanted to put themselves in a better place. Politics and historical animosities were not things that the security talks alone were going to overcome. But my view was that if there was some way we could improve the lives of these long-suffering people, we should try it. Yes, it was an emotional environment. But there was enormous talent and potential on both sides. There was great possibility. It was never a matter of being pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian. I was pro–both sides.

  It is clear that both parties bear ultimate responsibility for the success or failure of the process. We cannot tell the Israeli prime minister what his security needs are. We cannot tell the Palestinian prime minister what his security needs are. But the United States, during this period and on this issue, occupied a special role. And that worked, not only to security and moral benefit but also to the benefit of the world at large.

  Although our strategy was focused first and foremost on the Israelis and Palestinians, there were other dividends. It gave us greater legitimacy in the Arab world because we showed dignity and respect in dealing with the Palestinian people. It allowed us to show the Arab street that we cared about an issue that the Islamists and the terrorists used as a mobilizing grievance. Because we were seen as fair, doors opened for us. Not just with intelligence chiefs throughout the region, but also with heads of state, so that when we really needed their help, they would be there for us. That time was coming soon. Almost always, that last impenetrable barrier to peace had the same name: Arafat.

  CHAPTER 6

  Arafat

  The one constant in the Middle East during my time in office was Yasser Arafat. From his first appearance on the cover of Time magazine in 1968 through his final years confined by the Israelis to his headquarters in Ramallah, until his death in December 2004 in Paris, Arafat was the face—for good and bad—of the Palestinian struggle.

  His own security chiefs knew his limitations. Often they recognized the need for change; they understood there was no accountability built into the system. But it was clear to me that they would never break ranks with the Old Man, as we often urged.

  Arafat was a hero of the revolution, the leader of his people. The one hard and unavoidable fact was that the peace process could not succeed without him, and he did not want it to succeed in any way acceptable to Israel or the United States. There were many times in the negotiating room that we all hoped he would disappear. Yet the moment he was out the door, we seemed to talk about no one else.

  The Israelis knew Arafat. They knew him better than anyone else in the world, and the debate would always be: Who is he? Does he have a strategy? I was having a long discussion about this one night with Shlomo Yanai, then head of military planning for the Israeli Defense Forces. Shlomo is an old tanker; he’d been badly burned in one of the battles. A strategic thinker, he is someone whom I came to rely on for his integrity and forthrightness.

  After much back-and-forth, he finally said, “Answer the following question: Is Arafat Moses or is he Ben Gurion?” Then he answered himself: “He’s Moses. He will never do the deal. He will never sign an agreement. He will never compromise his position because he wants to take his people to the Promised Land. The Promised Land for Arafat is Jerusalem, and he will never concede.” It was as insightful an analysis of Yasser Arafat as I’d ever heard.

  Though the United States had long ago established relations with Arafat, it would be misleading to characterize them as friendly. After all, it was Arafat’s organization that was involved in many terrorist acts in the 1970s and 1980s. Although he shared a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, Arafat turned his back six years later on the best peace offer Palestine might get in our lifetime. There were times the man drove me nuts, and times when I wanted to hug him. He was far and away the most complicated person with whom I ever dealt. I never knew which Arafat was going to show up, but I always knew that whichever one did, there would always be a story to tell afterward.

  One of the first times I met him was at a dinner at the Greek Orthodox archbishop’s residence in Bethlehem. I was still the deputy DCI then, but I sat next to Arafat, underneath a painting of the Last Supper, in a room packed with guns. I remember looking at that painting, looking at my plate, contemplating all the religious tension that already colored everything in Bethlehem, and thinking, It’s over. I’m done for. This might be my last supper, too.

  The Palestinian on my right was someone I had never met before. Halfway through the meal, I turned to him and said, “So, what did you do before this?”

  “I was in an Israeli prison for seventeen years,” he answered.

  “Why did you go to prison?” I asked.

  “I blew up an Israeli school bus,” he replied in a matter-of-fact manner.

  This is going to be different, I recall thinking. You’re not in Kansas anymore.

  Arafat was very solicitous of me during the meal and even took food off his plate and moved it to mine, saying he was worried I didn’t have enough to eat. After dinner I happened to mention that I was Greek Orthodox, and with that news Arafat warmed up even more. Apparently he had some affinity for the Greeks.

  All of a sudden Arafat started rolling out gifts, insisting on photos, the whole grand host thing. In the years to come, he would get angry with me, or we would go at each other, but it never became personal between us and that moment of connection never faded. I would walk into Arafat’s headquarters and there would be forty or fifty people all talking at the same time, yelling, laughing, telling lies to each other because they didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings by telling the whole truth, and I would think to myself, This is just like the Greeks I knew growing up in Queens.

  The truth is, I love the Israelis—their passion for life, what they’ve done to stand up for themselves, and what they’ve done in establishing their state—but I bonded with the Palestinians as well. And Yasser Arafat was part of that. I couldn’t keep myself from liking him. “Friend” is always an odd word when you hold a job like DCI. Maybe “marriage of convenience” is more accurate, but that doesn’t ful
ly capture how I felt about Yasser Arafat, either.

  There were all the eccentricities, the unpredictability, the constant theater. To truly set Arafat off, all you had to do was say the word “Kuwaitis,” and he would be gone. “Ah, the Kuwaitis, they can go to hell,” he would say, “but not with my money!” I never knew what they had done to offend him; maybe he had an account frozen in some Kuwaiti bank. But he was never going to forgive or forget.

  We used to have a pool among ourselves whenever we went to see Arafat over how long it would take him to say, “I’m still suffering,” a constant refrain with him. We’d each pick a time and put our money down. Since I was generally leading the conversation from our side, I would keep a close eye on my watch and then, at just the right moment, ask him, “Oh, Chairman Arafat, how are you?” The answer: he was still suffering, always.

  I remember the time the Israelis sent some low-level emissary along, someone we had never heard of. Arafat took one look at him, pulled himself up in high dudgeon, and shouted, “Can you believe they sent this boy coffee to see me?” We guessed he meant “coffee boy.”

  There was also the time we were at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Paris—in October 2000, at another conference negotiating a peace that we would never achieve—when Boogie Ya’alon, the chief of general staff for the Israelis, called Arafat rais, which means “president.” In front of Madeleine Albright and the delegations from all sides, Arafat went into a sudden rage. “You will call me General Arafat! I was the greatest general in the Egyptian army!” I didn’t even know he was in the Egyptian army, much less a general or a great one. But I wasn’t about to correct him.

  Initially, the Bush administration wanted me to stay out of the peace process business and leave things in the hands of the diplomats. That was fine with me. But on June 1, 2001, there was a horrendous terrorist attack on a Tel Aviv disco called the Dolphinarium. Twenty-one young Israelis, mostly Russian immigrants, were killed by a suicide bomber. The carnage shocked the Israelis, and it appeared that the already ugly atmosphere in the region was about to get even uglier.

  So, a few days later, I was dispatched to the area to see what could be done to revive peace efforts, trying to construct a workable security agreement that might allow the political process to go forward.

  We were in the Israeli cabinet room, right outside Ariel Sharon’s office, putting the final touches on a possible pact, when the Israelis began demanding a side agreement, some sort of cover they could hide behind if things went sour or, more likely, could leak to the press to sabotage the whole process.

  “No sides,” I told them.

  “No deal,” they said.

  Over eight days, we shuttled between the two sides and put together what our team believed to be a fair proposal, resurrecting and enhancing old ideas and generating new ones that would have required tough actions against their own people.

  The pact, called a “work plan,” was a detailed list of specific steps that would lead to resumed security cooperation, enforce strict compliance to a cease-fire, suppress terrorism, and redeploy the Israeli Defense Forces to positions they had held eight months earlier. Among other things, it called for an immediate halt to hostilities, the arrest of terrorists by the Palestinians, an easing of travel restrictions imposed by the Israelis, and a pullback of Israeli troops. Eventually, after a cooling-off interval, the plan envisioned implementation of peacemaking suggestions laid out in April 2001 by the Mitchell Commission, a five-member fact-finding body led by former senator George Mitchell that looked into the causes of and possible solutions to the Intifada.

  By the evening of June 11, our work was done and we convened one last trilateral meeting to make a final appeal for acceptance. I said, “Frankly, we are out of time. More innocent Palestinian and Israeli civilians continue to die. Israeli children who died last week were not soldiers carrying weapons. The three Palestinian women who died yesterday were not engaged in terror or violence. Courage and risk to stop all violence against your respective peoples must start tonight. There must be a return to normal life for the Israeli and Palestinian people. All these things can happen. They must happen. They will happen if you live up to your obligations in the work plan we have presented. But these words must be followed by actions that are embodied in the paper I have presented. The Palestinians must apprehend terrorists and provide transparency into their actions. The Israelis must not attack innocent Palestinian civilians. But in truth, I cannot feel this more than you. And Geoff O’Connell cannot preside over meetings that only result in words. I will not let him do this. We want to help you. Allow us to do that tonight by responding affirmatively so that we can begin tomorrow.”

  The next morning, the Israelis said yes. Then began the long wait for an answer from Arafat.

  I traveled to Jerusalem, where I saw Arafat’s principal advisors—Saeb Erakat, Mohammed Dahlan, Jabril Rajoub, and some others—around noon, told them the Israelis had agreed to the terms we had all been hashing over, and gave them until four o’clock to sign on as well. When my deadline passed with no response, I told my people at our hotel in Tel Aviv to tell the airplane crew to get ready and then to put our luggage out on the street. I had learned something from Bibi at Wye.

  Then I called the Palestinians to say I was going home—no harm, no foul, but I wasn’t hanging around to see what would happen. I was in the hotel dining room, preparing to leave, when I got a call from my friend Saad Khair, Jordan’s intelligence chief, saying that if I went back to see Arafat, he’d give me the deal. Umar Suleiman followed that with another call; Mubarak also wanted me to go see Arafat. Jabril Rajoub chimed in as well: “Come back. The old man will sign.”

  So I went back up the hill to Ramallah.

  Israeli security and military officials provided an escort from our hotel, but as always, they had to drop us off several hundred yards from Arafat’s door, a no-man’s-land of sorts that separates Israel from the Palestinian Authority. For that trip, my party and I climbed into our armored vehicles, with my security detail in the front and back cars and us in the middle. Going to see Arafat was often eventful. On a similar trip two days earlier, just as we entered Palestinian territory, we pulled around a curve and found a pickup truck blocking the road with its hood up and two Palestinians standing alongside. The setting was a textbook scenario for an ambush or assassination. What’s more, two Israeli settlers had been killed in the area earlier that day when they inadvertently wandered into the wrong zone.

  As my staff shouted at the Palestinian truckers and they shouted back, I wondered if we were going to be added to the day’s death toll. After about thirty seconds of this, our Suburbans blasted over rocks that lined the side of the road and careened into Arafat’s compound. Thankfully, this trip was less eventful.

  When we arrrived, Arafat wasn’t at the door to greet me as he usually was—a bad sign. The expression on his face when I got inside augured even worse: the same look my mother used to give me when she was really, really angry.

  Arafat continued glowering for a while, and then said, “I have to have a side agreement with you about this agreement.”

  “No,” I told him. “Sharon wanted one, too, and I told him he couldn’t have one. I’m going to treat both sides equally. Besides,” I said, “you are going to leak it to the press and ruin the deal.”

  When I was through, he looked at me, smiled, and said, “That’s right.” Almost immediately he said, “Okay, no side agreement. But I want to write you a letter.”

  “Mr. Chairman,” I answered, “I think the cease-fire agreement you have is important and fair—but, I cannot want it more than you do. If you do not want to take the deal as is, I will go home. And I do not want a letter!”

  Arafat continued to insist on a letter. After spending five minutes going round and round over it, Geoff O’Connell said, “If the chairman wants to write you a letter, he can write you a letter. After all, he is the president of the Palestinian people.”

  Of cou
rse, Geoff was right. At that moment, it looked like Arafat wanted to kiss him. I wanted to throttle him. I knew we had just guaranteed several hours more of painful dithering.

  There were just three Americans in the room: Geoff, John Brennan, one of my most senior advisors, and me. Arafat had only two aides with him, and they began discussing what might go into the letter. With each draft paragraph, Arafat would retreat to the next room, where he had twenty or thirty advisors sitting. I heard lots of shouting.

  “What’s going on?” I asked John Brennan, who speaks Arabic.

  “Nothing good,” he told me.

  While Arafat’s side was yelling at each other, I got on the phone and updated Bill Burns, the very able assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, and Jonathan Schwartz, a senior State Department lawyer who helped ensure that nothing I agreed to was inconsistent with U.S. policy or other agreements we were party to.

  We negotiated three paragraphs this way. Finally, I thought we were done. After the third paragraph of the letter had been completed, Arafat walked in and said, “I want one more thing.” I objected; the bazaar was closed.

  We were in the middle of one of these exchanges when a burst of automatic weapons fire rocked the headquarters. After a quick exchange of furtive glances between the chairman and his lieutenants, Arafat and his aides said in virtual unison, “Celebrations. Don’t worry. No danger. People are celebrating something.” Earlier in the day, effigies of Bill Burns and me had been burned in the streets of Ramallah.

  At last, around two in the morning, we were done, or seemingly done. Arafat sent the three-paragraph letter out to be typed, leaving me alone in his office with John and Geoff. By then, my back was killing me, so I lay down flat on the floor. That’s where I was when the chairman walked in, saw me, said, “Oh, I do this for my back when it hurts as well,” and proceeded to lie down next to me and started talking, with his nose about two centimeters away from mine. I could see Brennan and O’Connell thinking, Oh, great! Get off the floor before the cameras show up!