Washington for MEN 22 October 1998

The Central Intelligence Agency, a target of stand up comedians' ridicule and jokes is to have an unprecedented high public profile as it moves from the shadows of cloak and dagger operations into the to the shining spot light of world diplomacy. The CIA is on the threshold of a new ear: policing and securing the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. With negotiators still working on Friday 23 October toward important, breakthroughs at Wye conference a CIA role in refereeing security disputes between Israeli and Palestinian authorities was settled.

CIA overseas operatives would resolve Israeli-Palestinian disputes over the arrest of suspected terrorists, the management of border checkpoints and other security issues. The plan, developed over two years of back-channel talks between the parties and CIA Director George Tenet, would place the U.S. spy service in an unfamiliar, though not unprecedented, diplomatic role.

State Department sources close to Wye talks said the accord would include a timetable for the arrest and punishment of suspects identified by Israeli authorities as being involved in terrorism. The CIA would oversee the meting out of justice. Some within the agency are uncomfortable with the plan because it puts in a highly visible position an agency used to operating quietly, if not invisibly, overseas. CIA officials refused to comment saying they have not been briefed!

Mr Tenet met with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and senior Israeli officials several times over the past two-plus years, according to State Department spokesman James Rubin. After several times refusing to acknowledge Tenet's role, Rubin said Thursday the CIA chief and his aides were participating ``to facilitate efforts to combat terrorism and to promote cooperation.'' Palestinian officials pushed for CIA mediation, according to diplomatic officials and Mideast experts familiar with the negotiations.

The Palestinians were concerned that U.S. lawmakers believed Israeli accusations that Arafat's Palestinian Authority was secretly condoning anti-Israeli terrorism. In at least one case 17 months ago, the CIA vouched for the Palestinian version of events in a secret briefing for senators. The CIA will be a ``needed witness to balance Israel's claims of noncompliance by Palestinians,'' top Palestinian law enforcement official Jibril Rajoub told reporters on Thursday. Israel complains that suspects involved in serious terrorist incidents are frequently arrested by the Palestinians and jailed for short periods on minor charges, then released.

The deal would create a three-party mediation system in which Palestinian and Israeli security officials could present disputes to a CIA arbiter. ``What was clear was the need for an independent arbiter,'' said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute who spoke to Associated Press. Israeli officials said Netanyahu had agreed to release scores of Palestinians held in Israeli jails, but not ``those with blood on their hands.'' Still unresolved, but nearing solution, was setting up a safe-passage route for Palestinians to cross back and forth between the West Bank and Gaza, Israeli sources said. Rand Corp. analyst Graham Fuller, a former senior CIA official who spent 20 years in the Middle East, told the Associated Press that there was nothing new about a quasi-diplomatic role for the CIA. Especially under former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, ``the CIA was used as a quieter form of diplomacy between states when the White House did not want to have negotiations fully paraded in public prematurely,'' Fuller said. ``And the CIA was directly involved in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations for withdrawal of the Palestine Liberation Organisation from Beirut after Israel attacked Lebanon in 1982.'' _