The CIA has emerged from the shadows of diplomacy to play a unique, highly visible role in the Middle East peace process, mediating disputes between Israeli and Palestinian security forces and participating in negotiations over an elusive security agreement critical to completion of a final peace accord.

President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright made no mention of the CIA as they met this week at the White House with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and promised to sponsor intensive talks in Washington next month aimed at getting the peace process back on track.

But senior U.S. officials turned to the CIA two years ago to bring Israeli and Palestinian security forces back to the negotiating table when the peace process nearly collapsed, and both sides now want to keep the CIA playing the role of mediator as the talks move forward.

CIA Director George J. Tenet has met one-on-one with Arafat four times in the last 2 1/2 years, officials said. The agency’s station in Tel Aviv has hosted numerous meetings with Israeli and Palestinian security officials, and the CIA’s station chief in Tel Aviv — who once served as the agency’s lobbyist on Capitol Hill — came close to hammering out a security agreement between the parties nine months ago.

“If it had not been for the CIA, you would have had a virtual collapse in the security cooperation after the Netanyahu government” came into power in June 1996, said Anthony H. Cordesman, a former defense official and co-director of Middle East Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“There was simply no alternative,” Cordesman said. “There was no other service the Israelis would trust at all, and there was no other service with a record of dealing with the Palestinians.”

With Albright and U.S. Middle East envoy Dennis Ross headed back to the Middle East next week for further talks, a State Department official said the CIA’s ongoing involvement mediating disputes between Israeli and Palestinian security forces provides “a way that the United States can certify that an action is going on or not going on” when the parties might not accept each other’s word. Arafat met alone with Clinton at the White House again yesterday and told reporters afterward that “peace is a Palestinian need, an Israeli need, an Arab need, an international need.”

An Israeli source added that the CIA’s ongoing counterterrorism efforts in the region make it uniquely situated to judge Israeli and Palestinian claims regarding their arrest, imprisonment and release of suspected terrorists. “They are involved — because they are experts,” the source said.

CIA officials, clearly uncomfortable with the agency’s high-profile role, will say nothing about the agency’s involvement in the peace process, even though its role has become an open secret in the Israeli and Arabic press.

Newspapers and magazines in Israel and the West Bank routinely report on the comings and goings of security officials from meetings with the CIA station chief. Earlier this month, Israeli Army radio reported that the CIA would be opening branches at Palestinian military bases throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Two years ago, an Arabic news magazine based in Paris, Al-Watan Al-Arabi, first disclosed that the CIA was training Palestinian security forces in the United States.

Intelligence analysts and former CIA officials said the agency’s high-profile involvement in what are probably the most closely watched negotiations in the world is unprecedented. But there is sharp disagreement in intelligence circles about the wisdom of such open involvement in policy matters that go way beyond traditional intelligence gathering and analysis.

“Obviously, this is a much more public mode than any secret intelligence agency is accustomed to,” said Yossi Alpher, a former Israeli intelligence official who now heads the American Jewish Committee’s office in Jerusalem. “It’s good for the process in the sense that this is an ailing process. What the U.S. can do is limited — it can try to keep this process alive.”

But Robert B. Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Studies, disagreed. “It dilutes the mission, it seems to me, when the intelligence agencies are responsible essentially for political judgments about one side or the other’s commitment to security,” Satloff said.

Melvin A. Goodman, a former CIA senior analyst and who now teaches International Security at the National War College, said that “the agency should not be so publicly involved in policy, particularly in such a prominent arena.”

Following its earlier involvement training Palestinian security forces at a counterintelligence center in Jericho and in the United States, the CIA took on a greater role in the peace process in early 1996, after the Gassem military wing of Hamas carried out four suicide bombings in Israel, killing 61 people.

Tenet, then the agency’s deputy director, and other CIA officials met with Arafat at the Erez border crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip in March 1996 and urged him to arrest five Islamic militants believed to have been behind the bombings.

When Clinton left several days later to attend a U.S.-sponsored, anti-terrorism summit in Sharm el Sheik, Egypt, aimed at bolstering the flagging Middle East peace process, he took then-CIA Director John M. Deutch with him.

But it was not until fall 1996, when Netanyahu opened a tunnel near the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, setting off violent confrontations between Palestinian police and Israeli soldiers, and plunging the peace process into turmoil, that the CIA first started playing a mediating role between the Palestinians and the Israelis, according to Alpher and Satloff.

“At that moment of despair,” Satloff said, “the American intelligence organization became the communications link between the two sides.”

By August 1997, senior American officials had publicly announced that the United States would participate directly in all future security discussions, with the CIA station chief and other intelligence officials mediating disputes and offering advice. The announcement, according to one intelligence official, caused considerable anguish at CIA headquarters.

But the agency’s loathing of public attention didn’t stop its station chief in Tel Aviv from producing a draft security agreement in December that was initialed by top Israeli and Palestinian security officials, although Netanyahu ultimately rejected it.

Among others things, the 16-paragraph document called for the CIA to arbitrate disputes between the two sides, and it established a three-member committee to oversee its implementation to include Israeli, Palestinian and CIA representatives.

When Arafat returned to Washington in January for more talks aimed at restarting the peace process, CIA Director Tenet slipped into the ANA Hotel’s secure ninth floor for a one-on-one meeting with the Palestinian leader.

The agency’s direct involvement in the process may not have produced a breakthrough. But the CIA’s mere presence was having an effect in the region. Beyond provoking condemnation by Iran radio and numerous other media outlets throughout the Arabic world, the CIA’s involvement with Israeli and Palestinian leaders earned a backhanded tribute from Ibrahim Ghawshah, Hamas’s spokesman.

In an interview in March, Ghawshah told Amman al-Sabil, an Arabic newspaper that circulates on the West Bank and in Gaza Strip, that “military operations” against Israel have “become difficult” because of security cooperation between Arafat’s Palestinian Authority and Israel “especially after the CIA joined in this coordination… the CIA is working day and night.”

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