The Israelis' mistake, McCoy said, was ever letting him go. In 1987, almost as soon as Dahlan got out of an Israeli prison, he became one of the young leaders of the first intifada uprising against Israel. He recruited young people to become terrorist cell leaders. He trained them. He supplied them. Again he was arrested. Again he was released. This time he was deported to Jordan, where he fled to Egypt, then fled to Iraq, then eventually slipped back into the West Bank.
His rap sheet of terrorist acts went on page after page, and he had an unfathomable network of other terrorist factions with which he worked. At times he would sidle up to the Islamic radicals and encourage their actions. At other times, when he had power and was worried the Islamists were gaining too much power at his expense, he'd clamp down on them, imprisoning hundreds of Hamas and Islamic Jihad radicals and even tipping off the Israelis and Americans about the whereabouts of wanted terrorists.
At best, Dahlan's record was schizophrenic, McCoy observed. A few years before, he was the alleged mastermind behind the bombing of an Israeli bus in Gush Katif and then another bloody series of attacks against Israelis in Gush Katif and Netzarim a month later. A few months later, Dahlan and his deputy, Rashid Abu Shabak, were believed to be behind a series of mortar attacks against Israelis. Then it was rocket attacks against Israeli buses. In one, an American citizen and three kids had their legs blown off.
"Back at CIA headquarters, we've actually got tapes of intercepted telephone calls where Dahlan is ordering rocket and other terrorist attacks. The Iraelis have their own tapes. Eventually, the Israelis had enough," McCoy explained. "They realized they'd made a mistake to keep jailing Dahlan and then letting him go. So they turned up the heat. Israel tried to take him out, but they missed."
"OK, tell me about Rajoub," the president continued. McCoy proceeded to give a brief profile of the longtime chief of Palestin ian security forces in the West Bank. Essentially, she began, Colonel Jibril Rajoub was Dahlan's counterpart, but he was responsible for a much larger swath of territory and thus potentially more powerful. Paunchy, dark skinned, baIding, and with a small mustache, Rajoub hardly looked like a mafia boss, But he was not to be underestimated.
Vulgar, crude, and blunt, he had a ferocious temper — frequently on display — and he instilled fear in the hearts of those who lived under his rule. He brazenly took on Palestinian rivals. He was known for organizing bloody attacks on Israeli civilians. He was even known to torture journalists who wrote stories criticizing him. Some on the West Bank actually privately referred to him as the "Palestinian Saddam."
Rajoub was born in 1953 on the West Bank, in a little town near Hebron. At age seventeen, Rajoub — a rising young commando and recruiter in Arafat's Fatah — was captured by the IDF, tried in an Israeli military court, and sentenced to life in prison for throwing grenades at Israeli soldiers. Like Dahlan, Rajoub learned Hebrew in prison and English from television. Released in May of 1985 during a prisoner exchange between Israel and the PLO, Rajoub again became active in terrorist operations against the Israelis, becoming a key commander during the first intifada, which erupted in December of 1987. Like Dahlan, Rajoub was also eventually expelled by the Israelis, in his case to Lebanon in 1988. And also like Dahlan, Rajoub slipped back into the West Bank, and eventually was targeted by the IDF for assassination. Three Israeli mortars landed on Rajoub's home one night, but he narrowly escaped, unharmed.
Rajoub's relationship with Arafat was also complicated, McCoy explained. He'd once been fired by Arafat, and they'd had numerous behind-the-scenes run-ins. The difference with Dahlan was that Rajoub wasn't so open in public about his interest in succeeding Arafat. But his relationship with the Islamic radical groups was probably just as tenuous as Dahlan's because at times he'd fought against them to keep them from gaining too much power, while at other times he'd made common cause with Hamas and Islamic Jihad to strengthen his political base.
On May 27, 1998, for example, Rajoub told an Al Jazeera television reporter that, "We view Hamas as part of the national and Islamic liberation movement… At the top of my list [to defeat] is the occupation and not Hamas. We are not interested in arrests."
Time after time, Rajoub had been quoted supporting an armed campaign of terror against the Israelis. Once, during a lecture at Bethlehem University, Rajoub told a crowd of students, "We sanctify the weapons found in the possession of the national factions which are directed against the occupation… If there are those who oppose the agreement with Israel, the gates are open to them to intensify the armed struggle." Another time, he told a reporter that the only way for Palestinian terrorism to go away was for the Israeli prime minister "to remove all the settlers from the West Bank and Gaza and transfer them to hell," and then warned that he and his forces would "distribute weapons to the Palestinian residents and return to the armed struggle."
"If someone contacted this guy and asked him to stand down his forces for the sake of peace, would he listen?" the president asked. "Would he do it?"
"Not likely," McCoy said bluntly. "He's got too much invested to go down without a fight. And there's no way he's going to let Mohammed Dahlan climb to the top of the greasy pole and rule in Arafat's place. He thinks Dahlan is a playboy, not a serious player. There's no way he's going to bow down to and kiss Dahlan's ring — and there's no way he's going to kiss yours either, Mr. President."
The president bombarded McCoy with questions.
Bennett was impressed with her command of information. So were Ziegler and the rest of the NSC. As far as Bennett could tell, neither Mohammed Dahlan nor Jibril Rajoub sounded like men with whom the U.S. could work, Neither sounded like men inclined to establish the kind of peace treaty for which he'd been sent to achieve. But if there was any hope of salvaging the peace process at all, they had to find somebody they could work with. And then what? Would the U.S. really be in a position to take sides? To influence who seized control and who didn't? To choose the next Palestinian leader in the midst of a civil war? The whole thing seemed preposterous. But some-thing inside the president drove him to keep looking, and for this Bennett was grateful.
McCoy moved to the next name on the list.
Marwan Bin Khatib Barghouti was another "son" of Arafat fighting vi ciously for control, another Fatah member long imprisoned by the Israelis, and then, almost inexplicably, released to cause more death and destruction, Born in 1959, Barghouti grew up initially under Jordanian occupation, and was only eight years old when the Israelis won the Six Day War and seized control of the West Bank and Gaza.
Barghouti was a natural leader at an early age. At Bir Zeit University, a hotbed of Palestinian radicalism, he quickly emerged as student council pres ident, became active in Arafat's youth militia and helped organize terrorist attacks against Israel during the first intifada, from 1987 through 1992. Then he, too, was arrested, tried, and convicted, and spent seven years behind bars in an Israeli prison before being deported. There he also learned Hebrew, and developed the reputation among young Palestinian militants as the leader of a new and rising generation.