Evil In The Cross Hairs

No one is suggesting a return to the old days of "plausible deniability," when the CIA would manfully take the blame for blown or bungled intelligence operations. These days, intelligence operatives don't want to be left holding the bag: they demand signed orders that go right to the highest levels. Privately, top spooks still worry that operations that seem bold and fully justified in the current atmosphere of retribution will look tawdry and scandalous to later generations. These officials fear they will wind up in the dock before indignant senators during some future investigation.

A long-term policy of assassination can produce at best mixed results. After the Palestinian terror group Black September slaughtered 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Israeli intelligence set out to find and kill every one of the murderers. The Israelis succeeded. Some of their operations were brilliant, surgical in their execution. In the late'80s an Israeli commando team came from the sea to hit a Black September leader at his beachfront home in Tunisia. The Palestinians knew that the Israelis had carried out the hit--as opposed to a rival Palestinian faction--because the man's wife and child were spared by the assassins. On the other hand, an Israeli hit squad also eliminated an innocent waiter in Norway by mistake.

It's impossible to say that Israel's policy of methodically eliminating terrorists has worked to stop terrorism. Indeed, the Israelis appear to be caught in a vicious cycle of tit-for-tat. But sometimes an embattled nation has no choice: it has to kill or be killed. President Bush and his top advisers will face some exceedingly difficult life-and-death decisions in the months ahead. They may never know if they succeeded in heading off further attacks on America. But they will know if they've failed.

With Melinda Liu, Gregory Beals and Colin Soloway in Afghanistan, Mark Hosenball, Debra Rosenberg and T. Trent Gegax in Washington and Eve Conant in Moscow

© 2001