(As appeared in the Weekly Standard)

Since the Bush Administration is ready to send George Tenet, director of central intelligence, to the Middle East in an effort to rekindle security talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians, it's time to ask, Why? Haven't we gone down this road before, and don't we know--even if we understandably choose not to confess--that the CIA unintentionally aided and abetted Palestinian terrorism against Israelis? If Tenet's mission leads to the CIA's helping Yasser Arafat rebuild and improve the Palestinian Authority's intelligence and security apparatus--which is what Langley had been doing, first quietly, then openly, after the Oslo accords--how can the Agency keep Arafat and his minions from again using U.S. training, equipment, and money against the Jewish state? Almost everything one learns in counterterrorism--communications, technical and physical surveillance, small-unit tactics, the analytical and psychological understanding of terrorist operations--can have an offensive terrorist application.

Make no mistake: The PA files seized by the Israelis in March in operation Defensive Shield--documents which Francis Taylor, the State Department's director of counterterrorism, recognized as authentic and Arafat described as "a big lie"--clearly reveal that the Palestinians' primary intelligence and security agencies were intimately involved with terrorist operations against the Israelis. Arafat's political-paramilitary organization, Fatah, the principal force within the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority, is on display as the proud mother of the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, one of the primary groups sponsoring suicide-bombing operations. Arafat's money man, Fuad Shubaki, has his fingerprints all over the terrorist paper trail and the PA's arms-smuggling network. The documents show Arafat, who vigorously used his keys to the PLO treasury for 30 years to discriminate between friends and enemies, supervising closely the expenditure of funds for the intifada, ensuring that families of wounded and dead Palestinian fighters and terrorists get money, but not too much money.

Before Arafat decided to unleash the Al Aksa Intifada in the fall of 2000, the prevailing view in CIA circles was that Langley's tutorials had made the Palestinian intelligence and security organizations better able to fulfill their police and counterterrorist responsibilities under Oslo. And they undoubtedly had. It is reasonable to suspect that by the mid-1990s Fatah was no longer rich in Soviet and East German-trained terrorist talent. Wars against the Israelis, Lebanese, and Syrians, Israeli counterterrorist strikes, seafront indolence in Tunisian exile, and just aging certainly had degraded the sharpness of Fatah as an intelligence and terrorist organization. Fatah obviously wasn't feeble--a Middle Eastern guerrilla-terrorist outfit by definition has, like the Mafia, a certain innate predatory frame of mind, allowing it to understand instinctively the essentials for survival. But Tawfiq Tirawi, who was in charge of the PA's General Intelligence Organization on the West Bank, probably learned something from Langley. The documents clearly show that the West Bank GIO was making use of Israeli intelligence information (perhaps passed by the CIA) to warn "brothers" sought by Israel for terrorism. If Langley was doing its job well--and Tenet always insists that the Agency is first rate--then it provokes the question: What did the CIA teach the Palestinian intelligence and security organizations that they could not have used against the Israelis? CIA counterterrorist operatives, paramilitary officers, analysts, and technicians aren't diplomats. They are primarily mechanics, not loquacious, peace-loving theoreticians.

And if Tenet and the Directorate of Operations--the CIA's clandestine service, which oversees the intelligence and security liaison relationship with the Palestinian Authority--don't want to answer that question (the answer would be classified), then they and the administration could perhaps explain why they believe the Palestinian security and intelligence organizations have been transformed in three months into responsible parties, who can safely receive guidance and information from Americans. (The answer to that certainly isn't classified.) Won't any effort by the Americans to rebuild and unify the Palestinian intelligence and security organizations actually make the PA more, not less, capable of orchestrating effective terrorist attacks?

After all, the effectiveness of terrorists goes up, not down, when the authority behind them is better organized, financed, and informed. From reading the documents and applying just a little common sense, it would appear that there are only three principal Palestinian players in the terror war against Israel: the Islamic militant groups Islamic Jihad and Hamas, and Fatah. Within Fatah, it appears there is some competition, and vastly more cooperation, between the General Intelligence Organization, the Preventive Security Organization, the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, and Tanzim, the chief paramilitary organization. You don't see in the documents the smallest hint that any arm of Fatah is trying to stop the anti-Israeli terrorist activity of any other arm. The documents also show that the Palestinian Authority had little difficulty collecting intelligence on members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah, as well as ordinary Palestinians, whom the PA is regularly extorting, jailing, and not infrequently assassinating for "collaboration" with Israel.

If the Palestinian Authority's security and intelligence services were fractured, which is what the Bush administration and the CIA must obviously believe since the administration now wants Tenet to unite the various organizations, it's by no means clear that Fatah's "diversity" diminished its effectiveness. Money, weapons, the ingredients for suicide bombs, assassination orders, and intelligence gathered on the Israelis apparently have moved adequately well through the PA's bureaucracy and the various Palestinian groups and terrorist organizations. By Arafat's managerial standards, exceptionally well, since even small issues of finance--the expenditure of a few hundred dollars, out of a PA monthly operating budget of perhaps $90 million--returned to him for his signature or his office's approval. Is there some reason to think that if the terrorist-supporting Palestinian officials in one security organization were merged with those in another security organization, the combination would produce counterterrorist officers willing to kill their former comrades-in-arms who continue the fight the Zionist enemy? These will obviously not be the CIA's earlier Palestinian liaison contacts, since the Israelis have, it strongly appears, either jailed, killed, or are searching for key players in the Agency's post-Oslo circle of Palestinian counterparts.

Does Tenet believe that the leaders and their principal underlings in the PA's major security and intelligence organizations weren't directly involved in the terrorist attacks on Israel? If he does, he should say so. To put it another way, has the Directorate of Operations ever assessed the culpability of its Palestinian interlocutors with the same thoroughness it once deployed to discover whether Agency officers were aiding and abetting torturers in Latin America? Though it's easy to believe that powerless middle-class and lower-class Palestinians who've had their lives battered and impoverished by Arafat's despotism would want to start afresh and rid the Palestinian Authority of its gangsters and holy warriors, it's more difficult to imagine that the primary beneficiaries of Arafat's police state--the officials of the intelligence and security services--would want to damn, let alone purge, themselves for their behavior. If Tenet and the officers of the Directorate of Operations who've had the closest contact with Palestinian intelligence and security types believe that their Palestinians somehow don't fit these despotic norms, it would be nice to know why and compare their names with those the Israelis are more than willing to discuss publicly.

The documents the Israelis seized strongly suggest that Arafat's war against Israel was a powerful force for fraternity and faith among Palestinian intelligence and security officials, from the highest to the lowest ranks. Where is Tenet going to find new men for the reformed and unified security service? Where are these sinners-turned-realists hiding in sufficient numbers? Or does the Bush administration now believe that Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon's incursions into the West Bank have finally cracked the will of the hardest nuts within the Palestinian Authority's ruling apparatus? If they have, it is ironic, since important voices within the administration--preeminently Secretary of State Colin Powell--have strongly suggested that Sharon's tactics were woefully counterproductive.

Unfortunately, this assessment is most likely unfounded. Say what you will about the hard core of the Palestinian national movement, they're not pussycats. It is possible--just barely--to envision the warriors and terrorists of the Palestinian Authority seeing reason after months of nonstop pounding, say a six-month version of the battle of the Jenin refugee camp. But is such a change of heart likely after Jerusalem, not to mention Washington, showed itself fearful of engaging the Israeli Army in urban warfare in the densely packed streets of Gaza? Israel's West Bank incursion in March probably won't prove sufficient to provoke common Palestinians to rise up against their well-armed overlords in such numbers as to convince the rank and file of the intelligence and security apparatus to perform a palace coup, whitewash their own minds, and become one with the poor, suffering Palestinian people.

Or are Yasser Arafat and his muscle men supposed to change profoundly because of outside Arab pressure--the Bush-Abdullah two-step, where the Americans pressure Sharon to be peace-loving and generous and the Saudi crown prince and other Arabs compel Arafat to fight terrorism?

This Scenario is surreal. The Arab states, which have mercilessly exploited the Palestinian cause for their own purposes, have only twice forced Arafat to do anything that he adamantly didn't want to do. And both times it was Arab armies--the Jordanians in Jordan in 1970 and the Syrians in Lebanon in 1982-83--that brought Arafat and his guerrilla-cum-terrorist elite to heel. Arafat must surely giggle when contemplating the idea of the Saudis' arm-twisting him into zero-tolerance of jihad. The Saudis just held their first-ever telethon on behalf of the Palestinian intifada in which millions were raised in support of Palestinian "martyrs." The word "martyr" (shahid) has iconic status in Arabic, particularly when applied to the struggle against the Israelis. The poor Palestinian who gets caught in Israeli-Tanzim crossfire may be a martyr for the cause, but the suicide bomber who cuts to pieces a dozen Israelis is the idealized shahid. When Saudi officials proclaim they don't discriminate between money that goes to civilian victims of Israeli "aggression" and to the families of suicide bombers, they are implicitly conceding that they support kamikaze holy warriors. They know this, the average Saudi watching television knows this, and so does Yasser Arafat. Arafat even painfully appreciates this point (see the documents), since the Palestinian Authority has been very upset with the Saudis for giving money directly to Hamas, the preeminent Islamic fundamentalist group in the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas, of course, makes no pretense of rejecting suicide bombing, in which it zealously engages.

Saudi crown prince Abdullah doesn't have to fear the "Arab street" rising up in indignation because Israeli "aggression" prevents an Israeli-Palestinian peace; he has to worry about the Wahhabi religious heartland of his country, in the Najd region, rising up against any effort by the Saudi rulers to grant the Jewish state legitimacy and security. Odds are that Arafat, who has had a love-hate relationship with the Saudi royal family for 30 years, knows the essentials of Saudi society all too well. The House of Saud at home winks at its Wahhabi bedrock faithful, telling them by word and deed the much-vaunted "peace initiative" of Abdullah isn't serious, that it's window dressing for a Washington that has gotten a little rowdy since 15 Saudi terrorists, led by a renowned and much admired member of one of Arabia's most prestigious families, killed 3,000 Americans. The historian of the Middle East Bernard Lewis has given the most apposite description of the Saudi Wahhabis. Imagine, Professor Lewis suggested, the state of Texas being seized by the Ku Klux Klan, who then use the state's oil wealth to propagate their extremist gospel around the world. That the Bush administration now appears to embrace the Saudis in a joint quest for peace in the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation is evidence that the American war on terrorism may soon become farce.

The CIA's continuing dance with Palestinian terrorists who have salaried jobs as Palestinian Authority security and intelligence officials certainly shows that the "realist" folks at the Agency and at the State Department, who have been distinctly uncomfortable with the president's black-and-white axis-of-evil speech, are on the verge of exempting Palestinian nationalism, now intertwined with irredentist, holy-warrior terrorism, from any lasting American censure. When Palestinian terrorists kill Israelis, it doesn't take long before some State Department official reaffirms America's support for a Palestinian state, its hope for Crown Prince Abdullah's "peace initiative," and the need for a resumption of security talks. Arafat hears the State Department director of counterterrorism describe the Israeli-seized documents of the Palestinian Authority as authentic, and then hears Ambassador Taylor add, "We are continuing to study those documents and to draw our own conclusions about what they mean. We've not completed that." Arafat knows that what Taylor really said is that the State Department won't be damning him or his men for their actions.

If you were Arafat, would you conclude that your terrorist tactics, which have killed more than a few U.S. citizens in Israel, had in any way incurred America's wrath? Many average Palestinians may hate Arafat, but in the larger Arab Muslim world, particularly among the radical and Islamist set to whom Arafat has always been attentive, he's recaptured glory he hasn't known in years. And if you're an Arab Muslim in the Middle East who has listened sympathetically to Osama bin Laden's enrapturing message that the United States doesn't have the stomach to engage in a knock-down fight against Muslims willing to die for their faith, can you see proof of bin Laden's promise in the Bush administration's actions toward the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation? Can you look nearby, at Iraq, and see the Americans becoming more hesitant in their plans? Timidity towards Iraq and an increasingly frenetic solicitousness toward the Israeli-Palestinian peace process helped create the widespread perception of American weakness throughout the Middle East in the 1990s.

The State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency have stubbornly refused to see the big picture of Islamic militancy. For them, bin Laden is more a man than a phenomenon: an isolatable problem that can be fought here and there with U.S. troops or paramilitary advisers, but that has rather limited philosophical implications for U.S. policy in the Middle East. Our actions toward Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, or Iran should not, in this view, radically change because of September 11.

These foreign-policy professionals would much prefer not to see the Saudi holy warrior as part of the continuing clash between Western and Islamic civilizations. To do so would overturn a central tenet of their working philosophy. To wit, America's support of Israel--not America's position as the preeminent Western power--is the root cause of American-Muslim tension in the Arab world. The Near East Bureau at the State Department has been stubbornly blind to the concurrence of Israel's victories over its Arab foes and the extraordinary increase of American influence throughout the region. A foreign service officer has been more likely to receive kudos for writing about Israeli settlements than chronicling the depredations of Arafat's men against the Palestinian people, or the Lebanese Shiites, whom the PLO ransacked for over ten years. And the CIA, which usually mirrors the State Department's analysis and mood in the Middle East, is perhaps even more hostile to any interpretation of the region that doesn't cast Israel as the overwhelming cause of anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world. The Directorate of Operations, which has usually set the tone for the CIA and certainly does under Tenet, has a particularly difficult time escaping the prism of the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation. Like diplomats, case officers in the Middle East usually find the Arab world warm and ingratiating. It is very easy for U.S. officials in the region to mistake hospitality for profound friendship, and to allow personal rapport to define professional reporting. Meanwhile, juxtaposed with the Arabs are the Israelis, who are easily among the rudest people on earth. Within the CIA, such personal chemistry matters enormously.

Many of the most consequential assets the clandestine service's Near East Division has ever had have been Palestinian. It is an excellent bet that most, if not all, of these foreign agents were actually emissaries of Yasser Arafat to the U.S. government at a time when it was illegal for Washington to have official contact with the PLO. Those contacts helped shape a distinctly pro-Palestinian clandestine service. More so than the State Department's foreign service, the Operations Directorate is historically ill-suited to entangle itself with a Palestinian movement with which it has developed its own unique, covert, and (understandably) affectionate relationship.

Ever since Vice President Dick Cheney's trip to the Middle East in March shifted the focus of the administration from war with Iraq to the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation, the CIA and State Department analyses have dominated thinking in Washington. Their understandings of the Arab Muslim world have now caused the Bush administration's war on terrorism to run aground. Where the president's axis-of-evil speech should have led Washington to abandon Arafat, the Palestinian Authority, and the Oslo "path to peace," we have seen Assistant Secretary of State William Burns and CIA director Tenet trying hard to give all three a new lease on life. Now the administration is embracing Crown Prince Abdullah's "peace initiative," when it should have had the vice president inform the crown prince privately that the United States isn't confident that the House of Saud is a stable dynasty, seeing that it depends on the oppression of Arabian Shiites who sit atop most of Saudi Arabia's oil. He could have added that American support for a plebiscite in the Hijaz--the region containing the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina, which the Saudis in 1925 stole from the Hashemite family (now the ruling dynasty in Jordan)--might be a good idea since it isn't clear that the Arabs of Hijaz like living under foreign domination. He could have also suggested that the United States was seriously considering freezing all of the assets of any Saudi who gives money to a known terrorist group or to a Saudi missionary organization that spreads pro-holy war, anti-American propaganda.

Since September 11, the Bush administration could have decided to embrace the cherished Middle Eastern tradition of machtpolitik. And everyone would have understood clearly. But instead we have CIA director George Tenet headed for the West Bank to drink tea again with Palestinian "intelligence and security forces" who probably had a hand in killing Americans. CIA penetrations of Middle East terrorist groups are supposed to prevent the loss of life, not advance it. But such twists and turns in the Bush administration's war on terrorism reveal the newfound flexibility of America's foreign policy. When President Bush was recently in Paris, he remarked that the United States and France share fundamental values. It would appear, alas, that the president wasn't kidding.


Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

© Copyright 1997-2004 United States Committee For A Free Lebanon. All rights reserved.

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