"Not Exactly, Mr. President": Speaking Truth, Sort of, to Power

Abstract

In 1979 and 1980 I worked as a full time analyst in the Near East and South Asia section of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research in the Department of State. As a Council on Foreign Relations Fellow I was paid from outside the government, with funds provided by the Council and by the National Endowment for the Humanities, but worked and was treated as a full-time State Department employee. Key Middle East related events during this period included the autonomy negotiations between Israel, Egypt, and the United States over the future of the Israeli occupied territories, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the Iran hostage crisis. I was assigned special responsibilities for monitoring, interpreting, and analyzing Israeli-Palestinian relations and internal Israeli and Palestinian politics. This was unusually appropriate. I had written my dissertation on Jewish-Arab relations in Israel and had been intensely interested in the West Bank issue for more than a decade. My special expertise pertained to land expropriation, water rights, and military, legal, administrative, and political aspects of Israeli settlement activities. For much of my tenure at the State Department I was seconded to the negotiating team engaged in the post-Camp David effort to achieve an agreement between Israel and Egypt for a workable autonomy agreement for the Palestinians. With Menachem Begin serving as Prime Minister of an annexationist government in Israel, I thought that an impossible task, but one the United States government, and President Jimmy Carter, believed was worth attempting. Because of the sensitivity of the topics I was responsible for, their policy immediacy, and the senior levels to which I was required to report, I was granted special top secret and other security clearances. This dispensation was crucial because of the pecking order produced by the distribution of different kinds of security clearances. Without the proper clearances an analyst has difficulty being taken seriously. There are restrictions on contacts and conversations. Even entry into the offices of one's colleagues may be denied. Since my return to academia in the fall of 1980 I have continued a consulting relationship with the State Department and other branches of the United States Government with responsibilities for foreign affairs. Without tailoring my research to conform with agendas or tasks emanating from Washington, I have regularly been willing to reformulate and cull from ongoing research projects findings, techniques, and perspectives that have been of interest to policy-makers. Certainly the most memorable of my activities in this area was a meeting in which I was invited to participate in March 1989. The meeting (with ten people present) was held in the Oval Office of the White House. It was organized by the staff of the National Security