By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 4, 1998; Page A13

As the Clinton administration looks ahead from a stopgap Middle East accord to the looming May 4 deadline for a final peace agreement, it is also looking back on the last six months to revisit an old question in U.S.-Israeli relations: Does pressure work?

In public formalities, as convention demands, the administration deplores the very term. Assistant Secretary of State Martin Indyk has told Congress and Jewish groups that "pressure is not in our lexicon" when it comes to Israel, and national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger said in an interview that "there was never in my mind an ultimatum."

But in reconstructing the turn of events that revived Israeli-Palestinian talks after 19 months at death's door, officials speaking authoritatively for the White House and State Department point to three separate messages -- one public and two private -- that they describe as ultimatums by Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. As they apportion credit for the Wye River summit and attempt to recast the public portrayal of their role, the officials are making a blunt case that U.S. pressure was essential to dislodging Israel's prime minister from a position of ceaseless maneuvering short of a deal.

Berger, though preferring the term "impetus" to ultimatum, ascribed pivotal importance to the Clinton administration's moment of greatest public confrontation with Netanyahu, when Albright told a London news conference in May that the United States would reconsider its mediating role if Israel did not assent to a U.S. peace proposal. "What happened in May," Berger said, "broke the logjam and created a different dynamic."

That view has implications for the weeks to come, as relief at the freshly struck accord begins to collide with the testy business of making good on it by Israelis and Palestinians. It raises still bigger questions about the way Washington sees its role as Israelis and Palestinians turn to their most basic disputes -- statehood, borders, Jerusalem and refugees. Five years after they reached mutual recognition following talks in Oslo, the parties are due to take up those questions now and are committed in theory to resolving them by May.

On the one hand, the Clinton administration is giving unprecedented assurances to its traditional Israeli ally. In a confidential memorandum from Albright to Clinton last month, portions of which were read to The Washington Post, she said the guarantees President Jimmy Carter made to then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin before the 1979 Camp David negotiations with Egypt "pale in comparison" to those Clinton has given to Netanyahu already.

Four confidential side letters to Israeli Cabinet Secretary Danny Naveh from U.S. Ambassador Edward Walker and special envoy Dennis Ross, first cited in the newspaper Haaretz and since obtained by The Post, describe some of those assurances. Together they bear the implicit promise that Washington will not do again what it did to achieve the Oct. 23 Wye River agreement. Among other things, they promise that the United States will not "adopt any position or express any view" about the size of the next Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank; "opposes and will oppose" a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood; agrees that "only Israel can determine its own security needs"; and will make no attempt to convene a new decision-making summit without "the agreement of both parties."

On the other hand, the Clinton administration continues to portray the Israeli prime minister as a man torn between incompatible goals: to achieve a historic resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and to maintain his political base among national religious voters opposed to territorial compromise. Netanyahu, one senior official put it, is "all tactics, no strategy," playing for time between "his desire to get an agreement" and "his equally strong desire to avoid breaking with one of his core constituencies."

Berger, asked about that view, demurred. "If he hasn't crossed the Rubicon," he said, "he certainly jumped into it."

Netanyahu's fence-straddling, as Washington saw it, gave an opening for U.S. leverage since May, even as it made the use of leverage essential. The threat was simply, as Berger put it this week, "to end this initiative and explain to the public why we were doing that."

Israeli negotiators have ridiculed the ultimatum, with one calling it "trash talk," but U.S. officials said Netanyahu feared it. A public dispute with Washington would boost Netanyahu at home in the short term, U.S. officials acknowledged, but he had to have an ongoing peace process to hold the swing vote that put him into power. "As long as he could announce there would be another meeting, he was fine," one U.S. official said. If Washington declared an impasse, Netanyahu would be left with "no peace, no security and a break in the relationship with the U.S. administration that would not go down well with the bulk of Israeli voters."

Albright did not get the answer she sought in the "days, not weeks" her subordinates specified last May, and neither did she carry through with the threat to walk away. But while her defenders invited mirth with background interviews arguing that months, after all, are comprised of days, the administration eventually did get what it sought. The deal met Albright's public promise not to "water down" the U.S. plan, which is set forth with little substantive change in the Wye River Memorandum signed Oct. 23.

How exactly Netanyahu came to agree is nonetheless a matter of dispute, in part because all parties have scores to settle and images to protect.

By early spring, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had accepted the basic outlines of an American plan exchanging a further 13 percent of the West Bank for a new package of security measures aimed at thwarting political violence against Israel. Netanyahu, in public and private, rejected the U.S. ideas. Albright's ultimatums aimed to hasten what the peace team headed by Ross described as the elusive "second yes."

Israeli negotiators argue that U.S. pressure only delayed the accord, because it obliged Netanyahu to demonstrate that he could best Clinton and Albright on their own turf -- in Congress and in the organized American Jewish community. Netanyahu did exactly that, they maintain, in a muscular display in Washington immediately after the showdown in London, organizing joint appearances with the Republican leadership and a letter signed by 82 senators describing public pressure on Israel as "a serious mistake." Indyk, appearing on stage on May 19 among old friends at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, was booed.

"By Israel actually resisting the ultimatum, and I'd say also because of the broad support given to the Netanyahu government by the American Jewish community, ultimately the U.S. initiative was reworked," said a close adviser to Netanyahu. He said the reworking substituted concrete detail for broad principles of Palestinian security cooperation.

Palestinians and some third-country analysts, along with several senior Israelis, maintain that the dynamic of the conflict itself exerted more pressure on Netanyahu than anything that happened in Washington.

The administration's new account of events in May includes details of a private ultimatum not disclosed before. Late on May 3 in the Churchill Hotel in London, the night before both officials left the city following dueling news conferences, Albright closed her meeting with Netanyahu by telling him she had to know by morning whether he intended to find a way of reaching a 13 percent withdrawal on the West Bank.

"You're a smart guy," Albright said, according to an authoritative account from the U.S. point of view. "I can't believe you can't come up with a way to do this so that it adds up to what it needs to add up to. Otherwise, I'm going to have to tell the president that we need to bring this to a close."

U.S. officials said Netanyahu looked as nervous as they had ever seen him the following day. That morning he dispatched his closest lieutenants -- Naveh and lawyer Yitzhak Molcho -- with a message of conciliation for Ross.

Netanyahu had a term for the difference between his offer of 9 percent and the U.S. demand for a transfer of 13 percent of the West Bank to the Palestinians. For reasons obscure to the Americans, he called it "the epsilon." U.S. officials said -- and Israeli officials denied -- that by the morning of May 4 Naveh and Molcho led Ross to believe they could find some way to finesse the gap.

Even so, Albright delivered a variation on the ultimatum in a news conference that same day. By the end of the month, Netanyahu telephoned Ross, and then Albright, with a more explicit commitment. "He said, 'The epsilon will . . . meet your needs,' " said one American with direct knowledge of the conversations. "We didn't feel we could put it in the bank, but we knew we had an opening that we hadn't had until now."

Albright phoned Arafat on June 3 to say that Netanyahu accepted the 13 percent target but wanted to define part of it as land on which Palestinians could not build. In London the next day, Ross met Arafat's top lieutenants, Ahmed Qureia and Mahmoud Abbas, to float ideas ranging from a chunk of land held "in escrow" by the United States to an Israeli veto on Palestinian zoning decisions.

"I personally refused," Qureia said. "I told him this model has a very bad reputation among the Palestinians."

The talks entered a period of atrophy. Albright and Clinton came under steady pressure to pull the trigger on Albright's ultimatum, from European and Persian Gulf governments and many critics aligned with Netanyahu's Labor Party opposition.

"We made a decision to pursue the second 'yes' beyond a point where people began to question our credibility," one senior official said. "But what was viewed as a disaster in May was not a disaster at all because it produced something very important."

Arafat and his subordinates demanded that Washington make public its peace plan and let the world judge who was to blame for rejecting it. The Americans replied, as one said, "Do you want us to deliver an agreement or a speech?"

Netanyahu, meanwhile, was shifting ground. The summer brought three intelligence reports that gave urgency to the talks. The Shin Bet security service predicted severe violence if the May 4, 1999, deadline came without a framework agreement, according to Zeev Schiff, the senior military correspondent of Haaretz. The army's mobilization review predicted that many reservists would refuse call-ups should violence come as a result of political deadlock. And the Mossad and army intelligence projected that a May 4 breakdown would downgrade Israel's formal diplomatic ties to Egypt and Jordan as well.

By August, Netanyahu authorized Molcho to revive a secret channel to Qureia. Meeting alternately at each other's homes, in Jerusalem and its Arab suburb of Abu Dis, they worked out a handwritten agreement that 3 percent of the 13 percent withdrawal would be a Judean desert nature reserve.

September and October were devoted to Israel's demands for a quid pro quo: concrete assurances, city by city and name by name, of a Palestinian crackdown on Islamic extremists, and a vote by the Palestinian National Council to revoke the anti-Israel provisions of the 1964 Palestinian Covenant.

The Clinton administration believed the covenant demands were "a poison pill," as Berger described them to Israeli Trade Minister Natan Sharansky last summer. But the parties finessed that problem at Wye with Israel's agreement that Arafat could pack the Palestinian National Council with enough extra supporters to revoke the provisions, and Clinton agreed to travel to Gaza for the occasion.

At 2:30 a.m. on Oct. 21, Albright phoned Netanyahu and wished him happy birthday. Then she delivered what officials described as the third and final ultimatum of the year. Washington had extracted as detailed and complete a Palestinian security plan as it thought possible, she said, and Clinton wanted to know whether to return to Wye to finish the accord.

"We want to get your comments by the morning, and if you don't think this does it we don't know what else we can do," Albright told Netanyahu, according to a member of her party.

Administration officials said it was that call that led to Netanyahu's abortive threat to walk out of the summit later that day. But again he pulled back from the brink of open conflict with Washington, and 24 hours later the deal was done.

Some people, Albright said in an interview, believed that "this was an easy wrap. It wasn't. It was a high-risk role. . . . Even though it was risky to do, it was worth doing, and the rest is history."

Staff writer Thomas W. Lippman contributed to this report.