In the age of WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden's NSA revelations, declassified secret documents don't create the excitement they once did — even when they deal with the work of intelligence agencies. But it's still interesting to get even a sanitized glimpse of what the CIA was up to as it helped prepare for one of the triumphs of US Middle East diplomacy in the 20th century.

The information the agency put together for President Jimmy Carter on the eve of the Camp David summit in September 1978 includes some fascinating nuggets amidst a mass of banal and routine material. Its "briefing book" includes perceptive and quotable personality profiles of the protagonists - Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president.

Looking at the Israeli leader the CIA observed "growing oppositional properties in Begin's personality." It pointed too to his "facility for statements of a provocative nature, often precipitated by reporters' questions." Sadat's profile described him as taking "pride in his peasant origins and his reputation for being sensitive to his people's needs." Just months after his sensational visit to Jerusalem in November 1977, Sadat was reported as "having virtually given up hope that Begin will show the imagination and flexibility needed for peace talks to move forward."

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security adviser, told the president before the summit at the Maryland retreat:



Sadat cannot afford a failure and he knows it; both Sadat and Begin think that you cannot afford failure; but Begin probably believes that a failure at Camp David will hurt you and Sadat, but not him. He may even want to see Sadat discredited and you weakened, thus leaving him with the tolerable status quo instead of pressures to change his life-long beliefs concerning Judea and Samaria. (the biblical Hebrew names for the West Bank.)

Predictably but annoyingly, the CIA has refused to reveal whether their profiles involved bugging the subjects, though one document does say they required "significant background research as well as continuing monitoring of the target leaders."

Carter's mediation efforts over 18 days paved the way for the March 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, which shrunk the circle of hostility in the Middle East. The US relationship with Egypt, battered in recent times first by Barack Obama's reluctance to let go of Hosni Mubarak and then by his support for Mohamed Morsi in the face of mounting popular opposition, still has that treaty at its heart.

The declassified records offer few clues about the part of the Camp David agreement that failed completely — the plan for Palestinian autonomy in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement - the heart of the PLO- publicly made clear its "absolute rejection" of the accords. It called on Palestinians to reject the idea of a self-governing authority in the occupied territories and to boycott any elections to establish such a body. Fatah warned that anyone who becomes involved will "pay the price for his betrayal."

The CIA's assessment, however, was that this was not the whole story:



We believe Arafat and his moderate colleagues are engaging in a certain amount of posturing for the benefit of Palestinian extremists and their radical Arab allies. He may also hope to discourage non-PLO supporters in the occupied territories from openly backing the agreements reached at Camp David.

And there were some discreet signs of a readiness to engage with Washington: Arafat, according to the head of Egyptian military intelligence, "does not trust President Sadat and would prefer to deal directly with the United States on the matter of of peace in the Middle East and the role of the PLO." There was, at that time, no US contact with what was still seen officially as a terrorist organization. Israel maintained that position until the Oslo agreement in 1993.

It will be interesting to see, at some point in the future, the declassified intelligence records of another important Camp David summit devoted to the Arab Israeli conflict. For it was in the same log cabins, in July 2000 in the final months of Bill Clintons' presidency, that Israelis and Palestinians - represented this by time by Arafat - edged towards but ultimately failed to reach an historic peace agreement. The catastrophic result, two months later, was the outbreak of the second, armed, Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories — and the bleak, volatile status quo that persists to this day.