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.
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