Paul McGeough

In 1997, the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad poisoned Hamas leader Khalid Mishal in broad daylight on the streets of Amman, Jordan. Kill Khalid is the page-turning history of this attempted assassination. Acclaimed reporter Paul McGeough reconstructs the history of Hamas through exclusive interviews with key players across the Middle East and in Washington, including unprecedented access to Mishal himself, who remains to this day one of the most powerful and enigmatic figures in the region.

The 1997 attempted assassination of Hamas leader Khalid Mishal by Mossad gained little public attention despite setting into motion a flurry of international diplomacy, culminating in the direct intervention of the US and then President Clinton. In a headlong narrative, with high-speed car chases, prisoner exchanges and international scandal that threatened the entire region, McGeough uses unprecedented interviews with Mishal and key players in Amman, Jerusalem and Washington to expose the rise of Hamas.

In the second Quarterly Essay of 2004, Paul McGeough offers a dramatic account of why Iraq remains in chaos despite desperate American efforts to create a model democracy in the Middle East. According to McGeough, Iraq to this day remains a tribal society. It cannot be governed without the cooperation of the true powers in the land, the tribal and religious sheikhs. Those who have ruled Iraq in the past, including Saddam Hussein and the British before him, understood this fact. The Americans, by contrast, seem to have missed the point. In Mission Impossible, Paul McGeough enters the world of key Iraqi tribal and religious leaders. There are vivid portraits of the sheikhs' role in the fall and capture of Saddam, as well as their part in the growing insurgency. There are glimpses, too, of a history that once involved Lawrence of Arabia and Gertrude Bell, and which pre-dates Islam, stretching back thousands of years. Combining reportage and analysis in brilliant fashion, this groundbreaking essay is well timed to coincide with the next major phase in Iraq's troubled history.'Throughout the history of their region, the sheikhs have been the powerbrokers, deciding who would reign between the great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates.' - Paul McGeough, Mission Impossible

On September 11th, foreign corresondent Paul McGeough was on the streets of downtown Manhattan. Only a month earlier he had been in Afghanistan, reporting on the humanitarian crisis in the country under Taliban rule. This is an eyewitness account of the first year of the 21st century's first war.