--Agency that fomented conflict now asked to prevent it--

By Michael Moran, Opinion
MSNBC

OCT. 27, 1998 - Only in the moral desert of the Middle East could the Central Intelligence Agency be described as “an honest broker.” Yet under the accords signed by Yasser Arafat and Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday, that is precisely the role envisioned for the spy agency. Can an institution renowned for covert warfare and disinformation play hall monitor to the Israelis and Palestinians?

EVER SINCE THE first brick of the Berlin Wall fell to the ground in 1989, the CIA has fretted about its future. What greater nightmare, after all, than world peace for an organization founded and armed to fight the great ideological struggle against communism?

Well, the CIA is nothing if not adaptable. Taking a page from NATO - the other great Cold War institution now policing peace agreements - the CIA has apparently concluded that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

WYE THE CIA?

There is nothing inherently controversial about what the CIA is being asked to do. Under the Wye accords signed last week, the agency is asked to help verify that Arafat’s Palestinian Authority is carrying out its commitment to uproot the infrastructure of terrorism in areas under its control. In fact, the CIA has been doing just that for several years now, looking into Israeli charges of Palestinian laxity and generally finding Arafat’s police doing a competent, if somewhat heavy-handed job.

The CIA also has been intimately involved in verifying past international accords. It helped verify Syrian, Egyptian and Israeli compliance in the cease-fire that followed the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. It had a role ensuring U.S.-Soviet arms control pacts were “verifiable.” It even set up shop in Bosnia to keep the NATO peacekeepers there fed with the latest intelligence.

What’s different this time is that the CIA is no longer working in the shadows.

“The CIA would be an implementer of policy here, which is a big departure, and I think it’s something we have to look into,” said Sen. Richard Shelby, a Republican member of the Senate Intelligence Committee that oversees the agency. He went on to say he would press for congressional hearings on the issue. Sandy Berger, the national security advisor, promises the CIA will not be enforcing the accord, only observing.

CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE

Yet the potential for problems is enormous. CIA Director George Tenet, intimately involved in the Wye talks and negotiations in Israel that preceded them, has put his agency between the rock and the hard place. It is being asked, essentially, to assuage Israel’s security concerns while at the same time giving the Palestinians a leg to stand on when Israel makes accusations.

The Palestinians, inevitably, will look to the CIA for guidance: Who should we arrest? What kind of speech should be considered inflammatory? Should Hamas, the political party, be outlawed along with the terrorist group?

Already, just three days after the accords were signed, two ugly scenarios based on actual events can be imagined:

Scenario 1: CIA blamed for violence

On Saturday, Arafat’s Palestinian police raided the headquarters of Arafat’s Fatah wing of the PLO in the West Bank town of Ramallah. The stated aim was to confiscate unlicensed weapons, one of the many complaints Israel pressed home at the Wye talks.

But the raid went awry and a 17-year-old Fatah activist from a politically powerful local family was shot and killed by one of the Palestinian policemen. Five others were arrested when hundreds of Palestinians flooded into the streets and threw rocks and bottles in protest.

The CIA’s role has not begun, of course. But it is not hard to imagine the link that would be drawn had it started. Many Palestinians would view the Ramallah raid - and the subsequent killing - as encouraged if not actually planned by the CIA. Retaliation could not be ruled out.

Scenario 2: CIA blamed for failing

Monday afternoon, on the lonely road outside the divided town of Hebron, unknown gunmen shot and killed a security guard at an electrical power station serving the nearby Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba.

Almost immediately, Israeli politicians framed the attack as an example of the Wye accord’s shortcomings.

It is not a good start for the accord signed at Wye,” said Israeli President Ezer Weizman. “It says that an agreement is needed to prevent such things in the future.”

Of course, such killings cannot be prevented. The idea is absurd. But the first time it happens during the CIA’s watch, you can be sure that the agency will feel the heat.

ONTO THE BANDWAGON

As difficult and unlikely as this new role may be, it’s a far cry from the oblivion many saw the agency careening toward just a few short years ago.

Shorn of its enemy, the USSR, the CIA tested a number of new markets before jumping on the peacekeeping bandwagon. For a while, “economic espionage” was all the rage, especially when the United States was in recession. A scandal involving bribery in France - and the expulsion of several U.S. agents caught red-handed - sent that idea back underground.

The agency basked briefly in its correct prediction that Yugoslavia would break up.

Yet by 1994, when a presidential commission on the CIA was convened, the very survival of the CIA appeared to be in doubt. Among the missteps that had tarnished the agency:

A failure to predict the breakup of the USSR.

A failure to raise the alarm about Iraq’s intentions toward Kuwait.

The discovery that Aldrich Ames, the most serious mole in agency history, had been selling secrets to the Soviets and then the Russians over a decade.

A deliberate effort to undermine U.S. policy in Haiti aimed at returning democratically elected President Jean-Bertrande Aristide to power.

A demonstrated inability to provide meaningful intelligence about America’s post-Cold War enemies, including the Iraqis, North Korea and the world’s shadowy terrorist networks.

Basking in the glow of its new “police and verify” role, the CIA must be pleased. Together with its booming counter-narcotics operations in Colombia and other Latin American countries, the spies have not only survived but they’re back out in the cold. Of course, they’re wearing name tags now, but one has to adapt.