The Palestinian Terrorist and Me

[groovedaddy]

THE FEDERAL AGENT, a black-haired, middle-aged Virginian, stared at me for a while before asking, “Have you ever considered becoming an informant for the F.B.I.?”

We were in a large conference room on the second floor of the old U.S. Mission in Berlin. He sat at the end of a long, blond-wood conference table, scribbling on a legal pad and sipping coffee from a plastic foam cup. To his left was his partner, a taciturn man in his early 30s. Windows partly concealed by blue drapes looked out over Clayallee, a wide boulevard running through the Western part of the city.

“No,” I said. “I haven’t.”

“We can make it worth your while,” said the second man.

“You’d be serving your country,” added the Virginian.

“No, thanks,” I said.

The F.B.I.’s offer came in October of last year, at the end of a three-hour conversation — a private debrief — in the nearly deserted building that had been a center of intrigue in cold war Berlin. (Most U.S. Foreign Service staff members had moved across town to the newly opened embassy near the Brandenburg Gate.) Now the building was the location for another intrigue, involving the murder of a U.S. citizen in Bethlehem and a boastful confession that one of his killers made to me in 2002, when I was Newsweek’s Jerusalem bureau chief. That man was Jihad Jaara, a former Bethlehem commander of the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, the armed group linked to the political party Fatah. Jaara called himself a freedom fighter battling the enemies of the Palestinian people. Israel considered him a prolific killer, responsible for the murders of Israeli settlers, soldiers and accused Palestinian collaborators.

Under ordinary circumstances, Jaara would have been a prime target for assassination or arrest by the Israel Defense Forces. But Jaara has been living in exile for seven years, guarded by police, in a secret location on the outskirts of Dublin, protected by a multilateral agreement made to end the 39-day siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in the spring of 2002. For several years, U.S. investigators pursued legal avenues to get Jaara, gathering evidence against him around the world. They first approached me in 2005, and now they were reaching out again.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/magazine/21Terrorist-t.html?th&emc=th