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10 The strain was noticeable in the Middle East. In a recent interview with Newsweek, one senior Israeli official said Mitchell often would say one thing about the direction the U.S. was taking with the two sides, only to be contradicted by Dennis Ross, Clinton's special adviser to the region. The official, who did not want to be quoted by name, said it seemed as if Mitchell had abdicated his role completely in recent months. Indeed, Mitchell's frequent visits to Israel and the West Bank slowed to a trickle; his last visit to the region was in December. When he was there, officials on both sides of the conflict had voiced bewilderment at Mitchell's hands-off approach to the complex negotiating process. With a small staff in Israel, he would shuttle between Jerusalem and Ramallah to meet with senior advisers to the leaders of both sides and then leave after just a few days. In an interview with Newsweek last month, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas openly accused Mitchell of not doing his job. "Every visit by Mitchell, we talked to him and gave him some ideas," he said. "At the end we discovered that he didn't convey any of these ideas to the Israelis. What does it mean?" A politically attuned man who was once Senate Majority Leader, Mitchell was aware of the complaints about him. His usual comeback was to point to his success in Northern Ireland, which earned him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. For hundreds of days, he liked to say, he was considered a failure, until the final day, when he actually got it done. Mitchell's resignation letter set off a small panic inside the West Wing earlier in the week. Senior advisers, as well as Obama himself, could sense the increasing difficulty of the job: Administration officials had been unable to convince Israel to halve new settlements in the West Bank, alienating Palestinians, and Israelis were irked in early May when Abbas allied with Hamas, a group that refuses to HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_031843