On successive days last week, George Shultz's senior Middle East aides gathered in a small private room that abuts the Secretary's spacious office on the seventh floor of the U.S. State Department. On Tuesday executive assistant Charles Hill, Under Secretary Michael Armacost, Assistant Secretary for Middle East Affairs Richard Murphy and counsellor Max Kampelman clustered around a TV set to watch Yasser Arafat's United Nations speech in Geneva. By the time Shultz walked in near the end of the speech, the glum group had already prepared a single-page memo. "There was no dispute; there were no differences," says a participant. "Arafat's presentation was unacceptable."
The same aides gathered again early the next afternoon, this time to listen to a tape recording of Arafat's press conference, relayed by a U.S. diplomat in Geneva. Once again the group's verdict on Arafat's performance was unanimous, but this time the judgment was reversed. At 4:01 p.m. Shultz telephoned National Security Adviser Colin Powell. "We're agreed that he did it," the Secretary declared. After 13 years of stalemate and more than a month of intense back-channel negotiations, the U.S. would at last talk to the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Who blinked, Shultz or Arafat? In the State Department's view, the stubborn, strong-willed Shultz had played hardball diplomacy with Arafat until he got what he wanted. Even Shultz's unpopular decision to deny Arafat a visa to speak at the U.N. in New York City was portrayed as a deliberate tactic to push the P.L.O. chairman into uttering the magic words that had never before passed his lips: that the P.L.O. renounced terrorism and "recognized Israel's right to exist within secure borders." Insisted Shultz: "I didn't change my mind . . . Now we have acceptance of our conditions."
That tidy explanation smacks of comforting hindsight. The decisive events were far more complex: both Shultz and Arafat finally acted only under tremendous pressure from other nations. "He was sweating blood," said a Swedish diplomat who dealt with Arafat as the delicate backstage minuet was played out. The P.L.O. leader had the recalcitrant radicals in his organization pulling him back from the edge. Pushing him forward were Egypt and Jordan, as well as the Soviet Union, which "landed on Arafat like a ton of bricks," according to a Washington source. Reversing past policy, the Kremlin urged Arafat to seek talks with the U.S. and acknowledge Israel.
What turned Shultz around? "He has a visceral hatred of Arafat," explained a senior U.S. diplomat. "But finally reality gained the upper hand, helped by a weight of pressure that he had probably not experienced before." The Secretary also felt gentle but firm nudges from George Bush to move the U.S. beyond its isolated stance of just saying no to every overture from the Palestinians.
Even so, the final outcome remained uncertain as the two principal players repeatedly thought they had an agreement, only to find that the other had failed to deliver what had been expected. In the end, it was the persistent middleman efforts by Swedish diplomats that helped close the deal.