A Spymaster and Political Fixer.(Omar Suleiman)

Yasir Arafat has always liked dealing with spies or, better yet, spymasters, even when their governments were supposed to be his enemies. In the shadowy world of Middle Eastern politics, where formal statements and official contacts frequently have little to do with the facts on the ground, envoys deeply schooled in secrecy often are considered more trustworthy than politicians or diplomats. CIA contacts with the Palestine Liberation Organization continued, for instance, throughout the 1970s and 1980s when official Washington refused to talk to Arafat or his cronies.

But lately spymasters have moved directly into the spotlight of the Middle East peace process. First, there was U.S. Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet brokering Palestinian-Israeli ceasefires in the 1990s. Now it's the head of Egypt's intelligence service, Omar Suleiman, who's been knocking heads in Arafat's compound, getting a new Palestinian government in place as the first step toward adoption of Washington's Roadmap for peace.

Suleiman is more than just a friendly intelligence chief in an unfriendly neighborhood. He's long dealt with his counterparts in the Israeli Mossad and the CIA. For more than a decade he's played a vital role in America's covert war against Al Qaeda. More recently he's also come to be seen as the second most powerful figure in the Egyptian government after President Hosni Mubarak. (There has been no vice president in Egypt since Mubarak came to power in 1981.) He's now Egypt's Mr. Fixit, tackling problems in Yemen, Libya and Sudan that ...