John Weisman: Direct Action

Lesser mortals were flown to ISOLATION TROPIC, the huge CIA explosives-and-mayhem school at Harvey Point, North Carolina, or to clandestine sites in South Carolina, Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Florida, where they received training from retired case officers and paramilitary contract employees. Everyone from the senior instructors at the Farm to the grizzled ex-Special Forces sergeants in Ocala agreed the Palestinians were excellent students-and DCI Tenet issued commendations to all involved. Then, when those excellent students returned to the West Bank and Gaza, instead of using what they’d learned to muzzle Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the PSS officers promptly turned every bit of their new tradecraft skills against the Israelis.

Sass could see U.S.-financed Beretta pistols tucked ostentatiously into the Palestinians’ waistbands. The youngsters reminded him of the neighborhood gangbangers of his childhood. Out of habit he shook the M4 carbine in its custom roof rack to make sure it was properly secured. “This is a cluster fuck waiting to happen,” he said adamantly.

“Orders is orders,” O’Toole said. But Sass was right and everybody knew it. The embassy’s rules of engagement specified that all American diplomatic convoys had to provide twenty-four-hour notice of the precise time and specific route to the Palestinian Authority. Automatic weapons were to be unloaded and kept out of sight.

So far as Jim McGee’s DynCorp crew was concerned, the only thing the embassy was doing by giving out their route and insisting on dangerous ROEs was providing aid, comfort, and intelligence to the enemy. And diplomatic milk run or not, McGee insisted that all of his people maintain what he called Condition Orange. That meant weapons loaded, rounds chambered, safeties on, no matter what the State Department rules might be. If crap hit fan, it wasn’t going to be McGee’s people who came home in body bags.

It wasn’t that he’d taken sides, either. It was a matter of operational security pure and simple.

McGee’d been in Israel just over six months now. And being a former Delta trooper, he hadn’t needed more than a few days to evaluate the situation on the ground pretty damn thoroughly. But even a novice could have seen the Palestinian security apparatus was completely penetrated by the same terrorist elements the PA was pledged by treaty to eliminate.

Worse, the situation in Gaza was deteriorating by the day. Each of Gaza’s separate regions was under nominal control of one of the Palestinian Authority’s local Palestinian Resistance Committees. In point of fact, the entire Strip was run by a crime syndicate headed by a Bedouin clan led by one Jamal Semal-Duma, a fifty-year-old drug and weapons smuggler who lived in Rafah, the city that straddles the Gaza-Egypt border. Not that anyone at the embassy cared. The only thing the cookie pushers at the embassy seemed to care about was the process. The talking. The back-and-forth.

It didn’t take a genius to understand that the Palestinians were bringing more and more heavy weapons into Gaza. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that sooner or later they’d manage to smuggle a chemical or biological bomb-or worse, the makings of a dirty nuke-into the Territories, or into Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv, where the top-five list of targets included the U.S. embassy.

But those facts, inescapable to McGee, never seemed to cross the embassy’s radar. Nor did the nebulous but still unquestionable link between the Palestinian terror organizations and al-Qa’ida, or the similar liaison between the Palestinian militants and Hezbollah, which was a creation of Seppah-e Pasdaran, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Or the ultimate unthinkable: a marriage of convenience between Tehran and al-Qa’ida. But not according to AMEMBASSY Tel Aviv. The way McGee saw it, the first thing they handed out to new arrivals from Washington was a set of blinders. So far as McGee was concerned, the call letters for AMEMBASSY Tel Aviv should be SNE-for “see no evil.”

MCGEE’D SPENT HIS FIRST WEEKand a half in Israel reacquainting himself with the country. He called a few of his old contacts from an Israeli special forces unit with which he’d once cross-trained and listened to their assessments of the current situation. He sat in the security office and read a thick sheaf of reports. He listened as a political officer briefed him on the Embassy’s rules of engagement. And he spent five days traveling through the Gaza Strip with a PSS liaison security officer.

The Palestinian was careful to keep McGee away from the Palestinian Authority’s weapons factories and the arms caches run by Hamas and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, as well as the tunnels under Rafah through which the PA smuggled weapons, explosives, and drugs. But McGee had had enough intelligence training at Delta to be able to observe discreetly. And he knew what to look for. And although he’d betrayed no hint of it to the PSS liaison, he spoke Arabic well enough to understand that the PA officer was telling everyone they met to keep their mouths shut in front of the American.

And when he and his team assumed their duties, it didn’t take McGee long to realize American officials who traveled outside the Green Line 4were being observed and targeted. Security vulnerabilities were being probed every time the embassy ran a convoy into Gaza or the Territories. And what with all the heavy weapons and who-knows-what-else being brought through the tunnels from Egypt, McGee was convinced it was only a matter of time until there was a significant attack on American diplomatic interests in the Jewish state.

McGee had gone to the embassy’s regional security officer to make his feelings known. The RSO, both a realist and a professional, agreed with everything McGee said. But the bottom line was that at embassies-especially at this particular embassy-political considerations just about always won out over security realities. It was, the RSO said ruefully, all about appearances.

Unlike those in Kabul and Baghdad, for example, Tel Aviv’s armored Suburbans were not equipped with the sorts of black-box variable-frequency oscillators that would remotely detonate roadside bombs at distances of 200 meters or more. The ambassador didn’t mind the VFOs masquerading as TV satellite dishes that were mounted on the embassy’s exterior. Approach within 250 meters of AMEMBASSY Tel Aviv with a remote-controlled car bomb in your car or on your body and you’d simply self-destruct long before you’d get anywhere near the building.

But he’d forbidden the RSO to equip any of the embassy security vehicles with similar devices. Forbade because it was ambassadorial doctrine that outfitting Tel Aviv’s FAVs with such markedly proactive devices might incense the Palestinian Authority. Not equipped, the RSO explained, because the ambassador said VFOs would indicate the United States believed the PA to be thoroughly riddled through with bomb-planting terrorists.

The fact that the Palestinian Authority was in point of fact thoroughly riddled through with bomb-planting terrorists didn’t seem to make a whit of difference. Frankly, McGee was dismayed at what passed for diplomacy these days.

But then, McGee didn’t get a vote. Because Sergeant First Class James Edward McGee, United States Army (Retired) was a civilian contractor. A hired gun. A merc. He was one of two shift leaders for a sixteen-man DynCorp detachment that worked out of the Tel Aviv embassy’s Regional Security Office. His formal job description entailed augmenting State’s overextended Diplomatic Security Service agents by providing protective details for diplomats as they pursued their jobs, and furnishing visiting VIPs with competent American watchdogs.