Bypassing official channels, the CIA’s Tel Aviv station chief, Jeff O’Connell, secretly shuttled between Israel’s domestic security agency, the Shin Bet, and Yasir Arafat’s Kurdish-born chief financial adviser, Mohammed Rashid. Within three days, O’Connell helped find a way to extricate both sides from the –bloody standoff by arranging for 38 militants to be given safe passage from the church to Gaza and Europe. When they refused to hand over their weapons to the Israelis, O’Connell stepped in again to save the deal. The CIA collected the arms and supervised the gunmen’s exodus from the fourth-century basilica into exile.
This time the job looks even stickier. Someone has to rescue George W. Bush’s Roadmap from the death match between Israel and the Palestinian extremists of Hamas. A top priority for the Bush administration is to strengthen the PA’s prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas–“making sure Abbas doesn’t lose before he even gets started,” in the words of one White House official, who adds: “The window we are in right now is critical.” To make peace, Abbas needs leverage against both the radical Islamists and the hard-line Israeli government. That means rebuilding the PA’s security apparatus into an effective policing and intelligence-gathering force. The CIA would seem like the first choice to direct the overhaul. There’s only one problem: the last thing anyone in the administration wants is to cast a shadow on Abbas’s independence.
According to intelligence sources in Jerusalem and reports in the Israeli press, a team of CIA specialists is likely to arrive in the region soon. (A delegation of State Department and CIA officials led by veteran envoy John Wolf headed to the area this weekend.) A U.S. official in Washington denies that the CIA is sending its own team and insists that the CIA will play only a limited role. But who else can do the job on deadline? The agency has been quietly working with the PA for years, sometimes as trainers and advisers, sometimes (as in Bethlehem) as intermediaries. This spring a special CIA team evaluated the PA’s forces. The team recommended a massive reorganization and housecleaning. “The intelligence flow has been going from the Palestinian Authority to the radicals, instead of the other way around,” says one Western intelligence official in Jerusalem.
Stopping the militants by force is out of the question for now, Palestinian officials insist. The PA’s forces are too weak, and the radicals are too popular. “We won’t go into an internal, bloody fight for any reason,” says Ziad Abu Amr, the PA’s chief negotiator with Hamas. “It isn’t worth it.” Instead, he tells NEWSWEEK, the PA will keep trying to talk the militants into joining a temporary ceasefire. But Sharon isn’t waiting for Hamas to listen. Last week the Israeli prime minister described the PA’s leaders as “crybabies who let terror run rampant.” After a suicide bombing killed 17 Israelis in central Jerusalem, he retaliated with Hellfire missile strikes against Hamas militants in Gaza, killing 19 Palestinians. Hamas, in turn, promised more suicide bombings and warned that no Israeli would be safe from terror. With or without the CIA, the region may be fated to another long summer of bloodletting.
