Agents of Innocence

7

Beirut; December 1969

The climate back home was cool to new operations in the Middle East. The agency’s top officials were preoccupied with Vietnam and Laos. The senior analysts who prepared the National Intelligence Estimates regarded the Palestinian guerrillas as a passing phenomenon, irritating but ultimately irrelevant.

The real issues in the Arab world, the old hands insisted, were the same ones that had preoccupied the agency for the last fifteen years: Nasser of Egypt, known in the agency by the cryptonym SIBLING, and his endless flirtations with Washington and Moscow; the militant regime in Syria, which the United States had tried to topple in 1956 with Operation WAKEFUL, setting off a long string of coups and countercoups; and the King of Jordan, known in agency cables as NORMAN, who was sustained in part by CIA subsidies paid through a covert operation codenamed NOBEEF.

But the Near East Division chief, who regarded Rogers as a protege, liked the idea. His name was Edward Stone, and he was a sturdy old ex-military man. In his many years of service, Stone had come to the view that when the analysts all agreed on something, they were nearly always wrong.

Stone asked Hoffman to send along a cable explaining why the agency should get more involved in collecting intelligence about the Palestinian guerrilla groups. With that, said Stone, he might be able to sell the project to the Deputy Director for Plans, as the head of the clandestine service was known.

Hoffman drafted a long cable, outlining the “objective factors” that made Fatah an appropriate target for high-level penetration.

First, said the station chief, the commandos were becoming an increasingly powerful force in Lebanon. The previous month the Old Man had met secretly in Cairo with the Lebanese Army commander and signed an accord that would give the guerrillas responsibility for policing the Palestinian refugee camps and allow them to conduct military operations against Israel from designated areas of South Lebanon. The “Cairo Agreement,” as it was called, was a disastrous step for the Lebanese government, since it undermined Lebanon’s sovereignty over the commando groups. There were rumors that some of the Lebanese Army officers who had helped negotiate the agreement had received payoffs from Fatah.

A corollary of the Cairo Agreement, Hoffman noted, was that the Lebanese intelligence service, the Deuxieme Bureau, would be withdrawing its network of agents from the refugee camps and curtailing its operations against the fedayeen. That was also a disaster. The Deuxieme Bureau, though controlled by Lebanese Christians, had agents in every Moslem sect and political faction. It had informants on every street corner in the Sabra and Shatilla camps. When they were withdrawn, warned Hoffman, the best source of intelligence about the Palestinians would be gone.

Second, Hoffman explained, there were diplomatic reasons why it made sense to have a back-channel line of communications open to Fatah. The United States was embarked on a serious effort to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict through negotiations. The new administration had contact with all the parties-except the PLO.

Third, the station chief said, the guerrillas were becoming more dangerous. When it was founded in 1964, the PLO was a nonentity, a propaganda forum sponsored by the Egyptians to keep hotheaded Palestinians under control. The organization had been transformed by Fatah’s ethic of revolution and guerrilla war. It had become, said Hoffman, a “loose cannon.”

The PLO’s guerrilla exploits thus far had been laughable, Hoffman stressed. Fatah’s daily communiques were works of Arab poetry, boasting of imaginary battles and nonexistent attacks against Israelis. But the Arab papers printed the communiques, and the headlines enhanced the guerrillas’ mystique. “Fatah Forces Wipe Out Israeli Patrol,” “PLO Commandos Destroy Israeli Mobile Unit in Jordan Valley,” “Commandos Down Israeli Jet, Attack Several Settlements.” The Fatah propagandists were shameless. A few days ago, the station chief noted, they had taken credit for the death of an Israeli colonel, claiming that he had been killed by a Fatah land mine when, in fact, the poor man had died in a traffic accident.

The problem, Hoffman concluded, was that the PLO leaders weren’t fooled by their own rhetoric. They knew that in the long run, guerrilla warfare against the Israelis was hopeless, and they were looking around for other weapons. The only one that worked, from their standpoint, was terrorism.

As an appendix to his cable, the station chief included the text of a recent communique issued by the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, titled “Final Warning to the World to Stay Away from Israel.” The document contained an unsubtle threat of airplane hijackings. It announced: “Don’t Travel to Israel! Stay Neutral! Be Safe! Keep Away!”

“The DDP says he doesn’t understand what he’s being asked to approve,” said Hoffman, when he had read the response to his cable. “Normally, I would tell him to go screw himself. But in this case, he has a point.

“To be frank, I’m not even sure I understand what we’re asking him to approve, and I wrote the fucking cable! So bear with me while I belabor the obvious.”

Rogers nodded.

“Is this an agent recruitment?” demanded Hoffman.

“No,” said Rogers. “Not yet.”

“Then what is it?”

“Our source is calling it ‘liaison.’

“Oh yeah? Well that’s bullshit, and you can tell him I said so. In the meantime, what are we supposed to tell Langley we’re doing out here?”

Rogers thought a moment.

“Tell them,” said Rogers, “that we are in the development phase of what we expect will be a penetration of the senior leadership of the Fatah guerrilla organization. For now, we are using a Lebanese agent as talent spotter.”

“Not bad,” said Hoffman. “It sounds almost plausible.”

And that was exactly what the DDP approved in early December 1969.