The Last Days (20 page)

 

By this point, everyone on the NSC knew what the president was thinking.

They knew he was considering sending forces in not just to rescue Bennett's team and any DSS agents out there that might still be alive but also end the Palestinian civil war and bring some semblance of order to the disputed territories. Their staffs were feverishly working on a range of tactical military options, target packages, intelligence needs, and subsequent diplomatic scenarios. But the president knew none of them were ready to talk details yet. This meeting, therefore, was to talk about strategy, not tactics.

Specifically, if the United States went in, what geopolitical objectives would they want to achieve? What
could
they achieve? More to the point, should the United States back any one of the factional leaders now battling it out in the streets of Palestine? Could one of them reasonably be able to become a U.S. partner for peace?

For this the president turned to Erin McCoy. The president had known McCoy all her life and he trusted her judgment. Over the past thirty-one years, he'd not only watched her grow up, he'd seen her emerge as one of the Central Intelligence Agency's most effective operatives, following in her late father's footsteps.

When Erin had graduated as an Arabic specialist from the Defense Language Institute, the MacPhersons flew out to Monterrey, California, to celebrate with her. When she'd completed the CIA's Arab-language undercover training program in Casablanca, they met her in Paris to celebrate at her favorite Moroccan restaurant. When she'd been chosen for the “Bennett assignment,” MacPherson had personally grilled her for hours until he was satisfied beyond the shadow of a doubt that she could handle the job. And now she was all grown up, and he wanted her assessment of the situation.

“Erin, there aren't too many people who have a better idea of what I'm hoping to accomplish and the facts on the ground than you do,” MacPherson began. “So here's what I need. Give me your take on who could end up replacing Arafat, and if there's anyone in particular we should get behind. Now, I'm operating under the assumption—based on all of our meetings prior to the trip—that we're not inclined to trust one of Arafat's longtime political cronies, be it Saeb Erekat or Hanan Ashrawi, or one of the major Fatah leaders. But I don't really know much about these factional leaders waging the war right now—Dahlan or Rajoub or that other guy.”

“Barghouti?”

“Exactly. I mean, who are these guys? Are any of them are actually capable of making peace when the dust settles?”

McCoy wasn't quite sure where to begin.

She knew the dossiers on these guys inside and out. Ever since the CIA had assigned her to work on Bennett's team and the Medexco deal began gaining steam, she'd made it her mission to become an expert on all things Palestinian. But the president wasn't asking for factoids. He was asking for her assessment of their character and their potential for leadership.

McCoy asked Ziegler for a glass of water, and then began her narrative with the leading “candidate” to succeed Arafat, and perhaps the most powerful man in Palestine at the moment—Mohammed Dahlan.

Dahlan, she explained, served as head of the Palestinian Preventative Security Forces in Gaza from 1995 through 2002, resigned to go into business and make money for a few years, and then came back into government under Abu Mazen as head of all Palestinian security forces and effectively the “Interior Minister,” though he didn't officially hold that title. Tall, dark, and dashing, with a dazzling smile and closely cropped black hair, Dahlan was married with three children. He was fluent in Hebrew, passable in English, had a huge power base in Gaza and the West Bank, and long fancied himself the rightful heir to Arafat, though he'd made a tactical decision to back Mazen when Arafat appointed Mazen as prime minister back in 2003.

Born in 1961, in a refugee camp in Gaza, Dahlan began life under the control of the Egyptian government. He was six in June of 1967 when the Israelis won the Six Day War. From that point on, he lived under Israeli occupation and thus began a deep and passionate hatred of the Israelis. As a teenager, he joined Arafat's Fatah, the armed political base of the PLO, began launching terrorist attacks against the Israeli Defense Forces, and eventually rose to become a commander of operations for Fatah. Between his twentieth and twenty-fifth birthdays, Dahlan was arrested ten times by the Israelis. That's where he learned fluent Hebrew, in Israeli prisons.

The Israelis' mistake, McCoy said, was ever letting him go. In 1987, almost as soon as Dahlan got out of an Israeli prison, he became one of the young leaders of the first intifada uprising against Israel. He recruited young people to become terrorist cell leaders. He trained them. He supplied them. Again he was arrested. Again he was released. This time he was deported to Jordan, where he fled to Egypt, then fled to Iraq, then eventually slipped back into the West Bank.

His rap sheet of terrorist acts went on page after page, and he had an unfathomable network of other terrorist factions with which he worked. At times he would sidle up to the Islamic radicals and encourage their actions. At other times, when he had power and was worried the Islamists were gaining too much power at his expense, he'd clamp down on them, imprisoning hundreds of Hamas and Islamic Jihad radicals and even tipping off the Israelis and Americans about the whereabouts of wanted terrorists.

At best, Dahlan's record was schizophrenic, McCoy observed. A few years before, he was the alleged mastermind behind the bombing of an Israeli bus in Gush Katif and then another bloody series of attacks against Israelis in Gush Katif and Netzarim a month later. A few months later, Dahlan and his deputy, Rashid Abu Shabak, were believed to be behind a series of mortar attacks against Israelis. Then it was rocket attacks against Israeli buses. In one, an American citizen and three kids had their legs blown off.

“Back at CIA headquarters, we've actually got tapes of intercepted telephone calls where Dahlan is ordering rocket and other terrorist attacks. The Israelis have their own tapes. Eventually, the Israelis had enough,” McCoy explained. “They realized they'd made a mistake to keep jailing Dahlan and then letting him go. So they turned up the heat. Israel tried to take him out, but they missed.”

 

“OK, tell me about Rajoub,” the president continued.

McCoy proceeded to give a brief profile of the longtime chief of Palestinian security forces in the West Bank. Essentially, she began, Colonel Jibril Rajoub was Dahlan's counterpart, but he was responsible for a much larger swath of territory and thus potentially more powerful. Paunchy, dark skinned, balding, and with a small mustache, Rajoub hardly looked like a mafia boss. But he was not to be underestimated.

Vulgar, crude, and blunt, he had a ferocious temper—frequently on display—and he instilled fear in the hearts of those who lived under his rule. He brazenly took on Palestinian rivals. He was known for organizing bloody attacks on Israeli civilians. He was even known to torture journalists who wrote stories criticizing him. Some on the West Bank actually privately referred to him as the “Palestinian Saddam.”

Rajoub was born in 1953 on the West Bank, in a little town near Hebron. At age seventeen, Rajoub—a rising young commando and recruiter in Arafat's Fatah—was captured by the IDF, tried in an Israeli military court, and sentenced to life in prison for throwing grenades at Israeli soldiers. Like Dahlan, Rajoub learned Hebrew in prison and English from television. Released in May of 1985 during a prisoner exchange between Israel and the PLO, Rajoub again became active in terrorist operations against the Israelis, becoming a key commander during the first intifada, which erupted in December of 1987. Like Dahlan, Rajoub was also eventually expelled by the Israelis, in his case to Lebanon in 1988. And also like Dahlan, Rajoub slipped back into the West Bank, and eventually was targeted by the IDF for assassination. Three Israeli mortars landed on Rajoub's home one night, but he narrowly escaped, unharmed.

Rajoub's relationship with Arafat was also complicated, McCoy explained. He'd once been fired by Arafat, and they'd had numerous behind-the-scenes run-ins. The difference with Dahlan was that Rajoub wasn't so open in public about his interest in succeeding Arafat. But his relationship with the Islamic radical groups was probably just as tenuous as Dahlan's because at times he'd fought against them to keep them from gaining too much power, while at other times he'd made common cause with Hamas and Islamic Jihad to strengthen his political base.

On May 27, 1998, for example, Rajoub told an Al Jazeera television reporter that, “We view Hamas as part of the national and Islamic liberation movement…. At the top of my list [to defeat] is the occupation and not Hamas. We are not interested in arrests.”

Time after time, Rajoub had been quoted supporting an armed campaign of terror against the Israelis. Once, during a lecture at Bethlehem University, Rajoub told a crowd of students, “We sanctify the weapons found in the possession of the national factions which are directed against the occupation…. If there are those who oppose the agreement with Israel, the gates are open to them to intensify the armed struggle.” Another time, he told a reporter that the only way for Palestinian terrorism to go away was for the Israeli prime minister “to remove all the settlers from the West Bank and Gaza and transfer them to hell,” and then warned that he and his forces would “distribute weapons to the Palestinian residents and return to the armed struggle.”

“If someone contacted this guy and asked him to stand down his forces for the sake of peace, would he listen?” the president asked. “Would he do it?”

“Not likely,” McCoy said bluntly. “He's got too much invested to go down without a fight. And there's no way he's going to let Mohammed Dahlan climb to the top of the greasy pole and rule in Arafat's place. He thinks Dahlan is a playboy, not a serious player. There's no way he's going to bow down to and kiss Dahlan's ring—and there's no way he's going to kiss yours either, Mr. President.”

 

The president bombarded McCoy with questions.

Bennett was impressed with her command of information. So were Ziegler and the rest of the NSC. As far as Bennett could tell, neither Mohammed Dahlan nor Jibril Rajoub sounded like men with whom the U.S. could work. Neither sounded like men inclined to establish the kind of peace treaty for which he'd been sent to achieve. But if there was any hope of salvaging the peace process at all, they had to find somebody they could work with. And then what? Would the U.S. really be in a position to take sides? To influence who seized control and who didn't? To choose the next Palestinian leader in the midst of a civil war? The whole thing seemed preposterous. But something inside the president drove him to keep looking, and for this Bennett was grateful.

 

McCoy moved to the next name on the list.

Marwan Bin Khatib Barghouti was another “son” of Arafat fighting viciously for control, another Fatah member long imprisoned by the Israelis, and then, almost inexplicably, released to cause more death and destruction. Born in 1959, Barghouti grew up initially under Jordanian occupation, and was only eight years old when the Israelis won the Six Day War and seized control of the West Bank and Gaza.

Barghouti was a natural leader at an early age. At Bir Zeit University, a hotbed of Palestinian radicalism, he quickly emerged as student council president, became active in Arafat's youth militia and helped organize terrorist attacks against Israel during the first intifada, from 1987 through 1992. Then he, too, was arrested, tried, and convicted, and spent seven years behind bars in an Israeli prison before being deported. There he also learned Hebrew, and developed the reputation among young Palestinian militants as the leader of a new and rising generation.

In 1989, McCoy noted, though he wasn't even in the West Bank or Gaza, Barghouti became the youngest member ever elected to the Fatah Revolutionary Council. He came back to the West Bank in 1994, and went on to be elected from Ramallah as a representative to the Palestinian Legislature Council in 1996.

Along the way, Barghouti emerged as the Secretary General of Fatah, rejected the Oslo peace accords between Israel and Yasser Arafat, and became the head of the Tanzim, an armed youth faction of Arafat's political party. In that capacity, he began stockpiling German MP-5 submachine guns via Jordan and Egypt, building a network of commandos, and accruing a budget of more than $2 million. He also helped create and lead the Al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigades, one of the most dangerous and radical of the Fatah factions, responsible for many of the suicide bombings that killed Israeli and American civilians from 2000 onward.

McCoy whispered something to Ziegler, who then opened up a file cabinet, pulled out a floppy disk, and loaded it into the computer on his desk. A moment later, McCoy was directing the president and the NSC principals to a series of Power Point slides on a large screen monitor in the Situation Room.

McCoy began at the top, reading a quote by Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the Arab language
Al-Quds
newspaper: “Marwan Barghouti has always identified with the grass roots rather than the [Arafat] leadership…. His star really came into it its ascendancy after he spoke out against the Palestinian Authority leadership.”

“That, Mr. President, is what makes Barghouti a potential successor to Arafat,” said McCoy. “He's got a very strong grassroots network of fighters. He's willing to do anything to keep and maintain power. And he's fearless—he and his followers absolutely don't care if they live or die. They're not quite as committed as the devoutly religious Islamic fighters. But they're close. They're very well organized and, from what my guys can tell, they're moving into the streets and into the battle against Dahlan and Rajoub's forces with a vengeance.”

McCoy flashed more Power Point images on the screen, all excerpts from Barghouti's thick CIA dossier. Much of the material was obtained from the Mossad and Shin Bet and it was a chilling read.

Slide 37: “On April 14, 2002 an IDF force in Ramallah arrested Marwan Barghouti, head of the Fatah supreme committee in the West Bank and leader of the military wing of the Al-Aqsa [Martyrs] Brigades, which between September 2000 and April 2002 carried out thousands of terror attacks against Israel, including suicide bombings.”

McCoy nodded to Ziegler. He pushed a button and the image changed.

Slide 38: “Marwan Barghouti served as Secretary General of Fatah in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, a member of the Palestinian legislature, head of the Tanzim, and the founder of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which has carried out a large number of deadly terrorist attacks killing scores of Israelis and wounding hundreds. In the framework of his activities, he has received large amounts of funds from different sources both inside and outside Israel. Among these sources is the Palestinian Authority. The specific allocations of these funds were authorized by the actual signature of Yasser Arafat. These funds were used by Marwan Barghouti to finance many activities carried out by terror cells in the West Bank.”

McCoy had Ziegler advance the image to the next slide, but this time she stayed quiet. Everyone read the material silently. The evidence, a partial list of “the more heinous terror attacks” for which the Israelis believed Marwan Barghouti was implicated, spoke for itself.

January 17, 2002—the shooting attack during a bat mitzvah celebration at a banquet hall in Hadera. Six Israelis were killed in this attack, twenty-six were injured.

January 22, 2002—the shooting spree on Jaffa Street in Jerusalem. Two Israelis were killed, thirty-seven wounded.

February 25, 2002—the shooting attack in the Jerusalem residential neighborhood of Neve Ya'acov. One Israeli policewoman was killed, nine Israelis were wounded.

February 27, 2002—the murder of an Israeli at a coffee factory in the Atarot industrial zone of Jerusalem.

February 27, 2002—the suicide attack perpetrated by Daryan Abu Aysha at the Maccabim checkpoint in which two policeman were injured.

March 5, 2002—the shooting spree at the Tel Aviv Seafood restaurant. Three Israelis were killed, thirty-one wounded.

March 8, 2002—a suicide terrorist was killed in Daheat el Barid as he was on his way to carry out an attack in Jerusalem.

March 27, 2002—the interception of an ambulance and the confiscation of an explosive belt that was being smuggled from Samaria into Barghouti's terrorist infrastructure in Ramallah.