Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Dagan gave them all the same response. Hamas would focus initially on issues like education, health, and social affairs: these had been the cornerstone of its election success. But for that it would need funding, including $52 million the Palestinian Authority received from Israel. While Hamas had shown by entering the democratic process that it was already on the road from being an outlawed terrorist organization to a mainstream political force, to give any lasting meaning to its new status it must renounce the mainstay of its previous existence: the destruction of Israel. Until it did so, there could be no meaningful dialogue with Hamas. Dagan had reminded his callers that traditionally it had been Israel’s hard-liners rather than the moderates who had made concessions. Menachem Begin, a terrorist turned peacemaker, had surrendered the Sinai in return for a peace treaty with Egypt. Another Israeli warrior, Yitzak Rabin, had given his own life to try and broker peace with other Arab neighbors; in the end he had been assassinated by an Israeli extremist. More recently Ariel Sharon, once the hero of the Israeli Right, had earned their fury by ending the right of Israeli settlers to occupy Gaza.

Given Hamas’s links to Iran and Syria, Israel would have to consider very carefully how far it could trust Hamas before relaxing its vigilance. And Hamas had swept to power with its pledge to uproot corruption. Yet some of the worst abuses were in the Palestinian security forces. Created by Yasser Arafat, it consisted of a dozen separate agencies that totaled sixty thousand members, a large number to protect a total Palestinian population of less than 4 million in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel had accused the force of failing to prevent attacks on Jewish targets; Hamas had continued to proclaim during the election that the security forces were used by Israel to kill Hamas militants. The truth lay somewhere in the middle. Both Mossad and Shin Bet had its informers inside the security forces. They had been used to pinpoint targets for the Israeli air force to kill. Equally, Hamas supporters in the security forces had helped suicide bombers to be smuggled out of Gaza and the West Bank to strike inside Israel. For the majority of Palestinians, the security forces had done little to halt lawlessness in the territories. Meir Dagan believed the Hamas promise to reform the services and bring to trial its leaders, who had become multimillionaires by siphoning off millions of dollars, intended to improve security, into their numbered bank accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. He was prepared to use Mossad’s resources to track down those accounts. But not yet. He wanted to see what else Hamas would do.

Mossad’s analysts, who had miscalculated so badly the Hamas victory, were understandably cautious about predicting what the future would hold. Ever since the Oslo Accords, the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships had maintained a dialogue at some level, ranging from intense peace negotiations in 2000 to the limited contacts of the past three years due to the ongoing violence. In none of those contacts had Hamas been involved—except to send its suicide bombers from Gaza and rockets from the West Bank into Israel.

It was not only Hamas’s electoral triumph that the analysts studied; it had come at a time when Israel itself was undergoing a political upheaval. Kadima, the centrist party that Ariel Sharon had created, continued to attract members. Was this in part a sympathy vote for its founder, or was it evidence that Israelis were growing tired of the hard-line Likud Party and the indecisive Labor party? Ami Ayalon, the former head of Shin Bet and now a Labor parliamentary candidate for the coming elections in March, had said there could be no further “unilateral withdrawal from the Palestinian territories.” But the acting Labor prime minister, Ehud Olmert, had insisted that if Labor won the next election, in March 2006, he would “relinquish parts of the West Bank and maintain a Jewish majority elsewhere, but I would prefer to do this in agreement with the Palestinians.”

Did this mean he was willing to negotiate with Hamas? He refused to say “at this stage.” But Dagan wondered if this was a piece of political doublespeak. (Kadima brokered a deal with Rafi Eitan and his Pensioners Party with its seven seats. They would join Kadima’s coalition government to ensure Olmert was elected prime minister. Shortly afterward there were attacks on Israel by a suicide bomber followed by rockets. Hamas denied any complicity in the attacks. Dagan told his Monday morning conference, “Life as usual.”)

The one certainty was that the Hamas victory had brought substantial gains by Islamic radicals in Egypt and Lebanon. In his own analysis, Meir Dagan had shown a political clarity that always surprised his people. He had told his senior staff at their Monday morning conference following the election: “There is a huge transition going on across the entire Middle East. It will be many months before we can see beyond the present unpredictability. That is the nature of big historic change. It’s simply the way it is. We must be ready to accommodate it—whatever it brings. But the truth is that neither Israel, the United States, Britain, and the countries of Europe can ignore the popular will of the Palestinian voters. Their turnout was an impressive 78 percent. No other democratic country can claim to have recently achieved such a turnout. We should see it as a sign that democracy may well have taken root. We should take this into account when making decisions. That does not mean rushing to judgment. It means being realistic.”

On May 14, 2006, Britain’s Intelligence Security Committee issued its report on the London terrorist bombings of July 7, 2005. Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller was cited as saying: “Even with the wisdom of hindsight I doubt whether MI5 could have done much better than it did, given the resources available to us at the time and the other demands placed on us. Neither can we guarantee to stop future attacks.”

While Meir Dagan admired her honesty, he also saw it as the inevitable result of MI5’s failure to recognize the threat posed by Islamic terrorism from the end of the 1990s. It had taken what Dagan termed “the ultimate wake-up call of 9/11 to galvanize American intelligence.” He found it depressing to read Dame Eliza’s judgment that MI5 was still taking the attitude that attacks by Islamic extremists were unavoidable. “It may be realistic, but it also sounds complacent. Intelligence should not be touched by complacency,” he told his aides. They were sentiments that would guide Mossad into the future.

On a cool morning in February 2006, eight middle-aged men were allowed to bypass the stringent security checks at Ben Gurion International Airport outside Tel Aviv. Four were Israelis, casually dressed. The Arabs wore dark suits and neatly knotted neckties. Little known outside their communities, the group had been given a pivotal role on the seesaw of Middle East politics. The Arabs were senior members of Fatah and were led by Jibril Rajoud, the party’s hard line national security adviser. The Israeli quartet was headed by Uri Saguy, a trim, quiet-spoken man who had once been head of Israeli army intelligence.

Only Meir Dagan and Ehud Olmert, soon to be prime minister of Israel, and the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, knew the purpose of the trip was to establish a “back door channel” between Israel and Fatah that would effectively sidetrack Hamas’s overwhelming political dominance over the Palestinian parliament.

And, not for the first time, President George W. Bush had personally approved this secret intervention in the affairs of an elected government.