Battle Ready

building actions during my return to the U.S.; their permanent representatives added greatly to the undertakings of our embassy and consulate.

I flew to Ramallah, where I had a typically pleasant meeting with Arafat; he once again promised to take the actions necessary to implement the Tenet plan.

Noon came and we began preparing for lunch.

“Umm,” I asked myself, “should I give him the word during lunch?” I thought on that. “No,” I concluded, “I’ll wait till afterward.”

About halfway through the meal, people all of a sudden started running around with panicked looks, cell phones were firing up, aides were whispering in Arafat’s ear. I can understand enough Arabic to pick up on alarms and excitement. They had gotten word of the Karine A takedown.

I watched Arafat across the table, trying to gauge his reaction. He seemed both confused and dismissive. (One of his defense mechanisms is to deny bad news and seem indifferent to it, both at the same time.)

Finally, I asked him, “What’s going on?”

“It’s nothing. Forget it.”

“Well,” I said, “I know about the Karine A, I know about its cargo, and I know the Israelis were going to mount an operation to take it down. It looks like they’ve done that.”

“That is not true,” he shot back. “This was not our ship. It’s an Israeli plot. This is an Israeli setup.”

I gave him a skeptical smile and a shake of the head.

But later, after the ship’s master admitted Palestinian Authority involvement and the TV news was filled with pictures of the ship and the huge amount of weapons aboard, Arafat vowed to investigate. The investigation never happened.

Meanwhile, I gave Arafat’s top subordinates a warning. “Look,” I told them, “you better think hard about how you want to respond to this thing. I’m not sure it will be a good idea to try to shift the blame… or claim an Israeli plot. There’s evidence that leads right back to you. We and the Israelis know that Chairman Arafat made payments to the Iranians, bought the weapons, and chartered the ship; we know that the captain of the ship is a Palestinian Authority guy; and he is now spilling his guts.”

The situation was obviously looking bad for the Palestinians.

At this point, Arafat dumped the blame on one of his own people. It was an obvious scam. The guy could never have put out that kind of money without Arafat knowing about it.

There was no doubt that Arafat had his hand in the cookie jar big-time, and I was in fact just a little shocked that the Israelis didn’t just say, “Screw the talks.”

So the Israelis really surprised me by ignoring Arafat’s trickery. They just let it pass. They now had a tremendous military success, and they were proud of it — not only because it was a well-executed military operation but, more important, it put them at an advantage over him. “No, go on with the talks,” they said. “We’re not going to do anything.” Yet every day they released more pictures of the Karine A and the weapons they found in its hold.

For a change they had cleverly handled a potentially messy event. Usually they just went in there with brute force. This time, they put the Palestinians on the defensive in a really slick way.

I spent the next day in Jerusalem and Jericho with Palestinian officials, urging them to take serious action against the extremists who were responsible for the violence and to make a genuine commitment in the Trilateral Committee to implementing the Tenet plan. As always, they seemed willing to move forward, but were unable to take real steps in that direction because authorization had not come from the top.

On the sixth, at our initial Trilateral meeting of this session, I laid out our plan… pleasantly surprised at the absence of the usual theatrical outbursts. Everyone immediately accepted our proposals to work with each other and with our representatives on the ground to meet our timetables and goals. I began to think that our new approach to the talks might succeed. The takedown of the Karine A just may have had a sobering effect on everybody. My hopes were up.

The next day, Aaron and I left for the States with renewed hope. I couldn’t wait for the next trip.

Over the next two months, my heart sank. The spiral of violence grew more horrific. The continuing violence, together with Arafat’s failure to do more to stop it, diminished President Bush’s faith in the peace process. In his view, the Karine A affair had taken the credibility of Arafat to a new low. It was hard to see how he could rebuild it. Members of Arafat’s own political movement and security forces were now taking part in the attacks against Israel.

As a result, the plan for me to go back was put on hold.

In February, a small measure of hope returned when Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia made a truly remarkable offer: If there was a peace agreement, the Saudis would recognize the State of Israel. Twenty-two other Arab nations supported this initiative.

It started to get a momentum of its own; and the President decided that it represented an opening. In a Rose Garden speech on March 7, with Vice President Cheney and Secretary Powell by his side, he announced that I would return to the region for another attempt to get a cease-fire and implementation of the Tenet plan. During this time, the Vice President and Secretary Powell would also visit the region. The Vice President would travel to ten countries and link up with me at the end of his journey. This was a high-level effort to get things moving. I was scheduled to leave in mid-March.

ROUND THREE

We took off on March 13. As our Continental Airlines jet approached Tel Aviv, the passengers began to sing songs of peace. They knew I was on board; they were singing encouragement.

Since our last trip, there had been an endless series of attacks and counterattacks. The Israelis had occupied most of the Palestinian territories and Arafat remained restricted to his Ramallah headquarters. The U.S. had pressed Sharon to withdraw his forces as I arrived, in order to establish a positive environment for my mission. One of my first pieces of business was to determine Sharon’s reply.

After I deplaned, I went through the now-standard briefings, then went immediately to see Prime Minister Sharon. He had positive news: He would withdraw his forces from Area A, the areas in Palestinian territory previously agreed to be under their security force control.[87]

The good news meant the trip was off to a positive start, but I knew that gestures of goodwill didn’t last long in this environment.

The second day brought things back to reality as nine Palestinian kids were killed by a mine in Gaza near security positions protecting Israeli settlements. It was almost certainly planted by the Israelis to take out people trying to sneak up and fire onto these positions. What happened, I think, is the kids got in there to play, something went wrong, and the mine went off. Accusations flew: Was this a remotely detonated mine controlled by the IDF? If so, did the IDF deliberately kill the kids?

Wherever truth lay, the incident gave the Palestinians a club to beat the Israelis with. Inevitably, the controversy made my mission harder.

Yet in my meetings over the next few days with senior Israeli and Palestinianofficials and key members of the Trilateral Committee, I sensed a far more serious focus and readiness than ever before to make the process work. I had given all the participants homework in my absence, and they had actually done it: I had asked them to list what they could agree on and how they understood the agreement. And then I wanted them to list their disagreements, so we could focus on these.

To my enormous surprise, they weren’t that far apart. I’d expected a debate on every issue. I’d expected they’d be all over the map. But that didn’t happen. They were actually pretty close. Right at the beginning, there was a lot they could work with.

The first Trilateral Committee meetings were extremely encouraging. There were no political statements, heated accusations, or theatrics. Every member was ready to work. Each side developed a first cut at “a Tenet Work Plan,” detailing their take on the measures and timelines needed for implementation.