The Genesis of a Secret Alliance
During the height of the Cold War, the official posture of the United States toward the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was defined by public distance and strict diplomatic avoidance. Under a formal commitment made to Israel in 1975 by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, American diplomats were strictly prohibited from negotiating with or recognizing the Palestinian organization. Behind this public firewall, however, lay one of the most sensitive and closely guarded secrets of Middle Eastern intelligence: a clandestine back-channel between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the PLO that operated continuously from 1969 to 1979.
This undercover conduit was conducted by the CIA’s veteran Arabist, Robert Ames, who established direct, secure communications with Ali Hassan Salameh, the chief of the PLO’s elite Force 17 and Yasir Arafat’s trusted intelligence head. While the channel served the immediate tactical purpose of exchanging useful operational intelligence, its broader strategic objective was to bypass formal diplomatic gridlock and influence Yasir Arafat to abandon the “armed struggle” in favor of a negotiated, political compromise.
The Ames-Salameh Partnership: Intelligence as a Lever for Moderation
The operational core of this secret dialogue was the deep personal relationship between Robert Ames and Ali Hassan Salameh. Salameh was a highly influential, young Palestinian commander who, as head of Force 17, served as Arafat’s eyes and ears. Through Ames, the United States gained unprecedented, backdoor access to the top tier of the PLO leadership.
Ames recognized that the relationship could be leveraged to transform the political trajectory of the Palestinian movement. He systematically utilized his meetings with Salameh to nudge the PLO leadership toward accepting a two-state solution. Salameh, influenced by these discussions, actively urged Arafat to rethink the efficacy of violence and explore the path of negotiated peace. This quiet, psychological cultivation occurred in parallel with extreme intelligence sharing; the Mossad and the CIA both maintained close, complex ties in the region, even as their parent governments pursued sharply divergent policies regarding the Palestinian national movement.
The Carter Transition and the Secret Washington Visit
When Jimmy Carter won the presidency in late 1976, he was fully briefed on this highly sensitive CIA asset. The transition period itself illustrated the immense administrative controversy surrounding the channel. The CIA had previously sought permission from the outgoing Gerald Ford administration to bring Salameh and his girlfriend to the United States for a brief, surreptitious visit.
Although Henry Kissinger vehemently vetoed the proposal, outgoing CIA Director George H. W. Bush bypassed Kissinger, approached Secretary of State-designate Cyrus Vance, and persuaded him to sign off on the venture. Consequently, in early 1977, Salameh flew secretly to New York, where he was met by a CIA handler and escorted to Washington, D.C., for direct talks with Agency officials.
Vance subsequently briefed both President Carter and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski on the Ames-Salameh back-channel. Carter enthusiastically approved its continuation, realizing that the very existence of this clandestine link encouraged the PLO to move in the direction of a political compromise. This intelligence track ran in parallel to Carter’s public efforts to reconvene the Geneva peace talks, providing the White House with a critical window into the internal debates of the Palestinian leadership.
The Mossad Intervened: The Assassination of Salameh
The back-channel did not operate without attracting the hostile attention of America’s regional allies. Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, was fully aware of the CIA’s secret conduit to Salameh. While the Americans viewed Salameh as an indispensable bridge to moderate the PLO, the Israeli government under Prime Minister Menachem Begin viewed him as a ruthless operative deeply complicit in the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre.
In the autumn of 1978, Begin authorized the Mossad to target the PLO’s intelligence chief. The Israelis knew that Salameh was the primary back-channel to the CIA and that he was actively urging Arafat to seek a negotiated two-state solution. Despite this, or perhaps because they wished to prevent any U.S. normalization of the PLO, Begin’s cabinet proceeded with the operation. On January 22, 1979, Ali Hassan Salameh was assassinated by a Mossad car bomb in Beirut.
Salameh’s sudden death sent an unequivocal, chilling message to the Palestinians that they could expect no separate deals from Begin’s government. For the CIA, the assassination was a devastating blow, physically severing their most reliable and sophisticated human bridge to Yasir Arafat and severely disrupting the momentum toward political compromise.
The Final Echoes of the Beirut Pipeline
Although the death of Salameh permanently crippled the effectiveness of the Ames-Salameh channel, the structural infrastructure of the Beirut back-channel was briefly resurrected during the foreign policy crises of late 1979. In November 1979, when militant Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took dozens of American diplomats hostage, President Carter authorized the CIA to utilize its Beirut PLO channel to ask Yasir Arafat to intercede with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Arafat, seeking to demonstrate his diplomatic utility and moderate credentials to the West, immediately leveraged his own revolutionary contacts in Tehran. Arafat’s quiet mediation successfully brokered the mid-November release of thirteen female and African-American hostages, earning the PLO substantial, favorable international media coverage.
Ultimately, the CIA’s ten-year back-channel with the PLO stands as a compelling testament to the limits of clandestine diplomacy. While the secret Ames-Salameh channel successfully proved that direct communication could cultivate political moderation within a militant organization, the forces of regional rivalry, bureaucratic secrecy, and targeted violence ultimately shuttered the conduit, leaving the promise of a comprehensive Middle Eastern peace unresolved.