Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Each man carried a bulging briefcase which contained the details of their secret mission. Success would have a dramatic effect on Israel’s relationship with Hamas and the new generation of Middle East political leaders. The men about to board the plane for their long flight to Houston, Texas, knew that any of those leaders would block what they hoped to achieve.

One leader was Bashar al-Assad, at thirty-four-years-old, the president of Syria for the past six years. He came to office after his elder brother, Basil al-Assad, had been groomed by their father, Hafez al-Assad, the country’s long-serving tyrant, to take over. When Hafez died in June 2002, it should have been Basil who became president leaving Bashar to pursue his career as a London-trained eye surgeon where he had received his degree and met his wife. But one foggy night in January 1994, Basil crashed his Mercedes outside Damascus with fatal consequences and Bashar found himself lined up by his father to ensure the Assad dynasty continued.

Mossad analysts decided he could become one of the “potentially more open and progressive Arab leaders who might rule with a broader vision of the world.” That hope steadily faded. On foreign policy issues above all, in his determination to cast Syria as the Arab champion of resistance to American and Israeli dominance, Bashar al-Assad had, in Meir Dagan’s words, “clearly shown he has his father’s political DNA.” Bashar al-Assad had, it was broadly assumed, approved the Syrian-inspired assassination of the former Lebanese leader, Rafiq Hariri. The murder led to violence in Beirut and had forced Bashar to pull Syria’s troops out of Lebanon. In a defiant speech in Damascus, the president made it clear the withdrawal was not permanent. His other ambition was to reoccupy the Golan Heights.

The men on the plane suspected Iran’s president Ahmadinejad would have no hesitation in dispatching one of his death squads to murder the Fatah delegation as further proof he would do anything to ensure he remained on track for achieving his aim to “wipe Israel from the face of the earth.” The Fatah quartet had taken great care to ensure that Hamas’s volatile leader in Gaza, Mahmoud Zahhar, was unaware of what was afoot. The day before, each man had slipped quietly out of Gaza and through Ezez, the main Israeli checkpoint crossing from the Gaza Strip into Israel. Behind them they left men who smoked the shisha pipe, the water pipe smoked throughout the Middle East, and listened to the recordings of Umm Kulthoum, the region’s iconic female Arab vocalist, and dreamed of the destruction of the Jewish state. Encouraged by the Hamas election victory, it had become a living, vibrant hope.

The Fatah group had been brought to Ben Gurion airport in a taxi provided by the Israeli government, who were aware there was also one other powerful group who would violently oppose what they hoped to achieve with that “back door channel.” It was Hezbollah. The organization represented the divide between two great branches of Islam that stretches back to the early history of the religion. While the Sunnis were the major branch throughout most of the Islamic world, the Shias had a larger number of followers in Iraq and south Lebanon and were dominant in Iran.

The division extended to the terror organizations. Osama bin Laden is a Sunni, al-Qaeda is predominantly Sunni and continues to be financed by Saudi Arabia, which is a Sunni society. Hezbollah is a Shia organization, which relies heavily on organizational support from Iran, who continues to supply it weapons. In the wake of Hamas’s political victory, Iran had further fostered its common cause against Israel with Hezbollah. While Jibril Rajoud was secretly meeting with Uri Saguy in safe houses provided by Mossad, Mahmoud Zahhar met with Hezbollah’s leader in Lebanon, Hassan Nasrallah, the chief power-broker of the 1.4 million Shia community in the country. Intelligent, charismatic, and a born street orator, Nasrallah’s entire career had been shaped by Israel’s repeated interventions in Lebanon from the civil war in the mid-1970s to when the Israeli Defense Force had unilaterally withdrawn from southern Lebanon after years of failing to subdue Hezbollah.

Just as his brother’s death had led to Bashar al-Assad becoming Syria’s president, it was an assassination that had paved the way for Nasrallah’s rise to absolute power. In 1992 an Israeli gunship killed Nasrallah’s mentor, his predecessor Abbas Moussawi. Since then Nasrallah has survived similar attempts by Mossad to kill him with explosives planted in both his home and his office in Beirut. Each failure to assassinate him has enhanced his status across the Arab world. Feted in Damascus and Tehran by its leaders, his photograph was displayed in the teeming streets as an example “of being able to take the blows dished out by Israel and remain standing” (he told the author).

Born in August 1960, the eldest of nine children, Nasrallah aspired to be a cleric from an early age. In his teens he was sent to the great Shia theological center in Najaf in Iraq. During his two-year study he met Moussawi and became an early disciple. He returned to Lebanon during the Israeli invasion of the country in 1982 and became a commander in Hezbollah. He showed an aptitude for military tactics, which went with his by now well-honed political skills. When Israel withdrew in May 2002, Nasrallah was by then firmly established as Hezbollah’s leader and was hailed in the Muslim world as the Arab warlord who had triumphed over Israel. In 2005, he orchestrated Hezbollah gaining twenty-nine seats in the Lebanese parliament following the departure of Syrian troops twenty-nine years after they had first arrived in the country.

Tehran launched a propaganda campaign to make him a living legend. Feature films, television “documentaries,” and books were devoted with one simple message: while secular ideologies, from pan-Arabism to Arab socialism, had failed to liberate an inch of Arab territory, Islamism—in its Iranian Khomeinist version—working through Hezbollah, had achieved “total victory” over Israel in Lebanon.

Now, on that February day in 2006, Hezbollah, working with Hamas, was preparing to launch an even greater assault on the Jewish state. For the eight men ensconced in their first class seats on the way to Houston, the hope was that they could thwart that attack.

The seating arrangement on the plane was a reminder of the deep divisions that divided their people and why they had agreed to make their long flight to Houston. The four Israelis sat on one side of the cabin, the Fatah group on the other. During meals and visits to the bathroom, they exchanged little more than polite conversation. But for the most part, they either dozed or studied the documents in their briefcases.

During the past weeks there had been discreet contacts with Edward P. Djerejian, the sixty-five year-old former United States ambassador to Israel and Syria. He had been approved by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to act as moderator for the discussions that would take place at the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston. It is widely regarded as one of the most secure think tanks within the United States. The choice of Djerejian was also an astute one. An experienced Arabist and also trusted by Israel, he was calm and his authority was accompanied by a sense of humor. He had told Dr. Rice, to whom he would report progress, that “it’s going to be like chairing the United Nations.” One of Djerejian’s first tasks would be to tell the two teams that he would be totally impartial. It was a necessary reminder: for the past several decades the centerpiece of America’s Middle East policy had revolved around its relationship with Israel. While there had been what former CIA director, George Tenet, had called “blips on the radar,” the combination of Washington’s unwavering support for Israel, and its own efforts to spread democracy through-out the region, had inflamed Islamic opinion. In Arab capitals the bond between the two countries was seen as based on shared strategic interests and the demands promoted by the powerful Jewish lobby within the United States. Even though other special-interest groups had some effect on aspects of U.S. foreign policy, none had managed to convince Americans, as the lobby had, that America’s interests and those of Israel were essentially identical.