How Jimmy Carter Used the CIA and NSA to Forge Middle East Peace
In Walter Mondale’s posthumous eulogy for Jimmy Carter, published yesterday by The New York Times, he summed up the record of their administration: “We told the truth, we obeyed the law, and we kept the peace.”
It sounds so simple. But how they kept the peace—or more precisely, forged peace between Israel and Egypt—required actions more morally nebulous than simple truth-telling and law-obeying.
Rarely emphasized in the history of the Camp David Accords is Carter’s use of the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency to perform clandestine surveillance on Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in advance of their historic three-way summit.
I’ll share more of that story. But first, here’s what else the Washington Monthly is offering in remembrance of Jimmy Carter:
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Jimmy Carter’s Very Best (1924-2024): Contributing Editor Jonathan Alter shares what it was like to be Carter’s biographer. Click here for the full story.
The Jimmy Carter Way: Contributing Writer Chris Matthews makes the case that Carter’s “finest achievement” was how he won the presidency. Click here for the full story.
The Surprising Greatness of Jimmy Carter: From our 2021 archives, an in-depth conversation about Carter’s legacy with his biographers Alter and Kai Bird, moderated by Contributing Editor Tim Noah. Click here for the full story.
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The role played by the CIA and NSA in the preparations for the Camp David summit was not known until November 2013, when the federal government declassified a trove of related memos. Also, the Carter Center hosted an event to discuss the newly released information featuring Carter himself and a panel of intelligence operatives and historians.
From the releases and the public discussion, we learned that soon after the Carter administration announced on August 8, 1978 plans for a Camp David summit beginning on September 5, Carter visited a group of intelligence agents at the CIA.
According to a declassified article published by the in-house CIA academic journal, Studies in Intelligence, written by psychiatrist and CIA analyst Jerrold Post, Carter told them he wanted to be “steeped in the personalities of Begin and Sadat.”
The former president elaborated at the Carter Center event that he asked for “a personal profile, a complete analysis, of the character of Begin and Sadat,” including “what were their attitudes toward me, and what were they toward the United States when they spoke in private … and what were their attitudes toward each other both publicly and privately.”
In describing the research conducted, Post only alluded to spying, noting there was “continued monitoring of the target leaders,” but otherwise referred to “open literature” and “debriefings” of people who had direct dealings with Begin and Sadat. (Initial analyses on the two were previously completed in 1977.)
The former 30-year CIA intelligence officer Martha Neff Kessler was more precise, revealing at the Carter Center that, “My recollection is that a great deal of it was clandestinely collected information … in a lot of the interchange on the Palestinian issue, some it was intercepted traffic … Somewhere between 10 to 15 percent of what I was reading every day was CIA-collected information. The rest was a variety—NSA [and] open source … It didn’t constitute the majority of what we were reading, [but] it was the most critical.”
Post wrote that a “senior official advanced the notion that the personality differences were so profound that the two leaders [Begin and Sadat] should never be brought together in the same room,” an insight that would be the crux of the Camp David negotiating strategy. (For example, “Sadat’s abhorrence of detail contrasted with Begin’s predilection for precision and legalism.”)
Carter shared additional details at the Carter Center event: “[Begin] didn’t really trust any of his cabinet members completely. He trusted his attorney general [Aharon] Barak, [while Sadat] trusted Osama el-Baz … his private political adviser. And those were about the only ones within their own delegations of almost 50 people that they really trusted. And that turned out to be crucial during the final days of the negotiations.” Instead of Begin and Sadat meeting face-to-face, it was Barak and el-Baz who helped seal the deal.
I first explored the role of spying at Camp David when also writing, for Politico, about its use at the 1945 San Francisco Conference that birthed the United Nations. I dug deeper into the U.N. episode, and the critical role of the unsung Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, for a podcast and for the Washington Monthly.
Spying is often treated as intrinsically nefarious and only used in service of evil objectives. But Carter and Stettinius used spying, successfully, to prevent needless bloodshed.
Telling the truth and obeying the law are great. But to forge peace, sometimes you have to get creative.
Happy new year,
Bill
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