New York Sun - June 15, 2007 <http://www.nysun.com/article/56622>
Hamas Takes Over Gaza Security Services
BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun June 15, 2007
WASHINGTON — An Iranian-financed group considered terrorists by America and Israel now control the preventive security services the CIA helped erect 14 years ago in Gaza.
That is one implication of the Hamas victory this week over what remained of Fatah forces loyal to President Abbas in the territory the Jewish state won from Egypt in 1967 then vacated in 2005.
Mr. Abbas, absent from Gaza yesterday, announced that he was dissolving the government, an end to the power-sharing negotiations that have been on and off since the Islamist party Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Arab legislature in January 2006. Secretary of State Rice spoke with Mr. Abbas on the phone yesterday. At a reception with foreign ministers from the Baltic states, she said, "We fully support him and his decision to try and end this crisis of the Palestinian people and to give them an opportunity ... to return to peace and a better future."
But those words are likely cold comfort for Mr. Abbas, whose forces were not only routed in Gaza, but lost a key propaganda war when Hamas gunmen displayed what they said were CIA documents and Israeli license plates recovered from the Palestinian Authority security buildings. They said the items linked the president's party, Fatah, to the CIA.
World Net Daily's Aaron Klein first broke the story of the document stash yesterday, publishing an interview with a spokesman for the Hamas allied Popular Resistance Committee, Muhammed Abdel-El. He told Mr. Klein, "The CIA files we seized, which include documents, CDs, taped conversations, and videos, are more important than all the American weapons we obtained the last two days as we took over the traitor Fatah's positions."
A CIA spokesman yesterday declined to comment. But a former CIA operations officer who worked in the Middle East, Robert Baer, said it was a major blow to Fatah, the party founded in 1966 by Yasser Arafat that America sought to prop up during the Oslo process as the CIA and Egyptian security services trained its members in the hopes that they would take action against jihadists such as Hamas.
"They are going to identify Fatah with the CIA. Fatah equals CIA is not a good selling point. They are going to show a record of training, spying on Hamas, that's about it. It's what we all knew. But the point is they have undermined the secular Palestinians for a long time. No one wants to be publicly associated with the CIA in the Middle East, except for maybe the Albanians," Mr. Baer said.
Mr. Baer said that most of the training the CIA provided in the Oslo years, aid codified in the Wye River Accords in 1998 between America, Israel and the Palestinian Authority, was fairly low level. "What we did was throw money at them. We give them dumb training, soft interrogation techniques, reports writing. All this stuff is a total waste of time. They will never get to the point where they do anything more than transmit a report verbally to someone they trust. That is just the culture."
The CIA began meeting with members of Fatah after the 1972 Munich attacks by Black September against the Israeli Olympic wrestling team.
In this period, former CIA officers have described the relationship as more diplomatic than the support and training mission in the Oslo years. Four years ago, one CIA officer with intimate knowledge of this effort said the spy novel "Agents of Innocence," by Washington Post columnist, David Ignatius, while fictionalized, provides a rough outline of the CIA's relationship in the 1970s and early 1980s with envoys of Arafat in Lebanon. Mr. Ignatius in the preface to the book says his account is fiction, and describes only the "Lebanon of the mind."
The former chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle, yesterday said he never understood the CIA's policy towards the Palestinian Arab security services during the Oslo years. "The decision of the CIA to assist Fatah was a mistake from the beginning and this is the most recent consequence," he said. "Why we thought it was in our interest to work with a police force that routinely murdered its opponents and existed largely to keep a corrupt Arafat organization in place is beyond me."
Meanwhile, in Washington, the defeat for Fatah was a blow for a White House that has encouraged in recent months renewed final status negotiations between Israel and the Mr. Abbas.
According to one administration official, the president has not yet decided whether he will use the occasion of the fifth anniversary of his June 24, 2002, speech demanding that Palestinian Arab leaders be free of terror to call for enhanced final status talks leading to a Palestinian Arab state.
This source also said the White House is concerned that violence in Gaza might spill over to the West Bank. "If you were Hamas right now would you just consolidate your gains and lay off Ramallah?" this source asked.
Mr. Bush will meet on June 19 with Prime Minister Olmert of Israel in talks that will almost certainly weigh heavily on whether any kind of peace process is salvageable in light of the Hamas victories in Gaza.
Mr. Bush also met yesterday with American Jewish leaders who discussed the developments in Gaza.
The executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Malcolm Hoenlein, said he found the president was still committed to many of the policies he originally laid out in 2002. "It was very productive meeting," Mr. Hoenlein said. "We covered a wide range of issues and the president was very responsive. For over an hour, he addressed vital foreign policy issues. He stressed his commitment to democratization, the war on terror and stability in the Middle East."