In April this year Quartet Books published Kill Khalid: The Failed Assassination of Khalid Mishal and the Rise of Hamas. It was written by an Australian war correspondent, Paul McGeough, an expert on the Middle East.

The book had come out in the United States to ecstatic reviews. I had heard of McGeough and although I did not know him, when asked to provide a quote for the book's dust-jacket, I read the manuscript and was happy to do so.

I found it a rare and most exciting book - a serious political history that the author had made into a fast-paced thriller. At its core is the story of how, in 1997, the Israeli intelligence service Mossad tried to assassinate the Hamas leader, Khalid Mishal, in broad daylight on the streets of Amman, Jordan. Under the cover of opening a can of Coca Cola, the assassins sprayed a deadly poison into his ear.

Israel handed over the antidote when Jordan threatened to hang their agents. But the Mossad agents bungled their escape, Khalid's bodyguards managed to capture two of them and the others had to hide in the Israeli embassy. As Khalid slipped into a coma, Jordanian troops surrounded the Israeli embassy and after a complaint from a furious King Hussein of Jordan, Bill Clinton pressured the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to try to right matters.

At first Netanyahu pleaded that it was too late to reverse the effects of the poison. But when Hussein added the threat that if Khalid died, the Mossad agents who were being held by Jordan would all be hanged, the antidote was quickly produced. Khalid survived, just, and the stage was set for his phenomenal political ascendancy.