WASHINGTON -- The CIA has been training the security forces of the Palestinian Authority in the arts of espionage, information-gathering, interrogation and other techniques of the trade, U.S. government officials say.
With Israel's knowledge, the CIA's counter-terrorism and covert-operations officers have been instructing senior and mid-level Palestinian security officials in the United States since mid-1996, the officials said. FBI agents who work at the CIA's Counterterrorist Center have also helped train the Palestinians.
The program has two aims, the officials said. The first is to increase the Palestinian security forces' professionalism and improve their ability to identify and arrest suspected terrorists, a task in which the officials said the CIA has succeeded in part. The second is to increase the Israeli government's confidence in the Palestinians, a political goal that has proven more elusive.
The CIA instructs its trainees in nonviolent interrogation techniques; its lessons prohibit torture. But the Palestinian security services have ``commonly tortured'' detainees, killing many of the 14 people who have died in their custody in the past three years, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report.
Cooperation with Shin Bet
The training takes place under a broader program of cooperation among the CIA, the Palestinian security services and the Israeli internal-security force known as Shin Bet. The CIA station chief in Israel has been acting as a go-between and a referee under the agreement, which seeks to combat terrorism by militant Islamic resistance groups like Hamas, and ultimately strengthen the badly frayed peace effort in the region.
CIA Director George Tenet personally helped broker the agreement in 1996 when he was deputy director.
The Palestinian security forces regularly arrest suspected members and sympathizers of Hamas, a group whose suicide bombers have killed scores of people in Israel to undermine efforts at coexistence between the Palestinian Authority and the Jewish state.
The CIA provides training and advice to the intelligence and security services of many nations besides the Palestinian Authority. One of the agency's aims is to teach methods of interrogating suspects without torturing them -- how to extract information without extracting fingernails, so to speak.
A 1963 CIA interrogation manual, recently declassified, discussed the uses of physical torture as a last resort. Twenty years later, the agency was telling foreign intelligence services that physical torture was counterproductive, but it still instructed them in the uses of mental torture and coercion.
Non-violent methods
The agency now teaches only nonviolent methods of interrogation, which can include friendly persuasion, verbal trickery and psychological pressure, in accordance with its own codes of conduct. Those codes were revised in 1985 to exclude ``the use of force, mental torture, threats, insults, or exposure to unpleasant and inhumane treatment of any kind as an aid to interrogation.''
Whether these milder techniques work on suspected terrorists -- or whether the Palestinian security services have learned the CIA's lessons -- is questionable.
Palestinian officials acknowledged in 1996 and 1997 that some members of the Palestinian security apparatus had abused suspects under arrest. It is unclear whether any of those Palestinian security officials had been trained by the CIA. For its part, Israel has acknowledged using what it calls ``moderate physical pressure'' on political suspects; human-rights groups call that pressure torture.
Curt Goering, deputy executive director of Amnesty International USA, said he had seen no improvement in the performance of the Palestinian security forces regarding human rights over the past two years.
``Widespread torture takes place in places like Gaza and Jericho, the torture is systematic, and we haven't noticed any change in the technique or the frequency'' since 1996, he said.
No U.S. official would comment publicly on any aspect of the program, including Palestinian security services' human rights record.
Emissary from Arafat
The CIA's ties to the Palestinian services have a 25-year history.
In 1973, Yasser Arafat sent an emissary to meet secretly with an American envoy, Vernon Walters, then the deputy director of central intelligence, to discuss how to ``prevent radical assaults on the early peace process'' between Arabs and Israelis, according to the memoirs of Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state.
That Palestinian emissary was Ali Hassan Salemeh, the security chief of Al Fatah, who was on the most-wanted list of Israeli intelligence service for masterminding the murder of 11 Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics.
From 1973 through 1978, Salemeh, better known as Abu Hassan, provided the United States and its allies with tips about the assassination plots of radical Palestinian organizations and other Arab terrorist groups.
In those years, the CIA set up a network of contacts within Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization and various guerrilla groups in Lebanon. Its leading Middle East expert, Robert Ames, and its officers in Beirut, reached an understanding with the PLO through contacts with Salemeh, under which the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon, which housed the Beirut station, was protected from harm.
In January 1979, Salemeh was killed by a booby-trapped Volkswagen parked in West Beirut. The Israeli foreign intelligence service, the Mossad, is thought to have set the bomb. In April 1983, Ames and at least six other CIA officers were killed when Islamic militants blew up the U.S. Embassy in Beirut.
These killings damaged the agency's deepest connections with Palestinian organizations during the 1980s. Those connections and the insights they provided were difficult to recreate, retired agency officials said. The training program with the Palestinian security services may help re-establish them, other officials said.
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