See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (10 page)

If I had realized then that John was a kind of see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, do-no-evil model for the new CIA that was quietly building back in Washington and around the globe, would I have walked away then? I don’t think so. For one thing, the bombing of our embassy in Beirut was starting to really intrigue me.

Officially, the embassy investigation continued. Unofficially, it was dead in the water. After the initial bogus arrests made by the Lebanese, no leads surfaced. The FBI forensic teams sealed and labeled their plastic bags of evidence, boxed what they could find of the pickup truck, and headed home to write their reports. It was left up to State and the CIA to continue the investigation on the ground, but that soon hit a snag when the Lebanese investigators beat a suspect to death during questioning. The rumor started that a CIA officer observed the whole thing and did nothing to stop it. Whether the story was true or not, Washington abruptly cut off all cooperation with the Lebanese.

The Lebanese carried on alone, but like the FBI, they were unable to identify the driver, the owner of the truck, or the type of explosives used. Six months after the bombing, they produced a final report that was a dog’s breakfast of unsupported and politically motivated accusations against enemies of the Lebanese president, Amin Jumayyil: Syria, Iran,

Yasir Arafat’s Fatah, and three other Palestinian groups. It even tried to tie in one of Jumayyil’s Christian rivals, all without offering a shred of evidence. No one paid any attention to it.

Besides, the White House and State Department had other things to think about. Neither the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Beirut in August 1982 nor the arrival of the American-led Multi-National Force a few months later - not even the Washington-brokered May 17, 1983, truce between Lebanon and Israel - could get around the fundamental fact that Lebanon had no functioning government. Once the Israelis left and Syria let loose its supporters, the last vestiges of central authority melted away like a snowman in the desert. Disaster was around the corner.

The Multi-National Force troops came under increasing attack. At first it was only ambushes and sniping, but then on October 23, 1983 - six months and five days after the American embassy bombing - the United States suffered its worst peacetime military loss ever. A suicide driver drove a truck filled with explosives through the front door of a building the marines had converted into a barracks. Two hundred and forty-one troops were killed. A French barracks was also destroyed by a truck bomb, killing fifty-eight. The Reagan administration was forced to move the marines to ships off Lebanon’s coast and eventually home. By December 1983, the US didn’t even pretend to support the May 17 agreement. The denouement came on February 6, 1984, when the Lebanon’s central government finally collapsed completely and a ragtag coalition of Muslim militias took West Beirut. West Beirut was now Indian country, and all of Beirut - indeed, all of Lebanon - was about to become a very dangerous place.

Back in Washington, the Reagan people quietly conceded that there was no point in asking the Lebanese to reopen the investigation. Nearly a year after the explosion, we still didn’t know any more about who had done it. The bombers had disappeared like a diamond in an inkwell.

Four days after the explosion at the marines’ barracks, I sat looking out my office window in my new post. At the official level, I knew no more about this bombing than I did about the embassy’s, but the tom-toms beat hard and fast in the intelligence business, and rumors had been flying.

It was a little after one in the afternoon, and the streets were deserted. Everyone was at home, eating or napping, and taking refuge from the unseasonable heat. They wouldn’t come out again until early evening, when it cooled off. The only sign of life was in front of the small mosque up the hill from our offices, where a group of old men in long robes had assembled in front of the arched entrance to the courtyard. A call to prayer came over the mosque’s loudspeaker. I checked my watch. It was too early for a regular prayer. A funeral? A memorial service? There was no way to tell. In the Middle East, life goes on behind high walls, out of view of strangers, especially foreigners.

And it wasn’t just walls made out of mortar and stone. The Middle East is a place wired to obscure the truth. Television and newspapers don’t report news; they report whatever propaganda the government want them to report. Investigative reporters don’t exist. Books on politics and society aren’t worth reading. The only time a scandal spills into the public is when the government decides it should. At the personal level, things are no different. Middle Easterners believe that the less they give up about themselves, the better. They’ll talk about politics only in the most general terms, and they wouldn’t even consider discussing terrorism. In their eyes, terrorism is a state activity; expressing your opinion on it just gets you thrown in jail.

You didn’t have to be stationed in Beirut to know that there was one place in the Middle East more walled off than all the rest - Balabakk, Lebanon. Balabakk had become the Sodom and Gomorrah of terrorism. Every terrorist, radical, and lunatic who thought he could drive the Israelis out of Lebanon had set up shop there. But the real turning point for Balabakk had arrived on November 21, 1982, when Husayn Al-Musawi, the head of a radical Islamic group known as Islamic Amal, and what amounted to his extended family seized the Shaykh Abdallah barracks from the Lebanese gendarmerie. Clearly acting on Tehran’s orders, Musawi immediately turned the barracks over to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or the Pasdaran, as the Iranians themselves call it. The Syrian troops, who had occupied the area since 1976, watched and did nothing. The Lebanese central government couldn’t do anything, or at least wouldn’t. Iran now had a sovereign piece of Lebanese soil. It would decide who could set foot in Balabakk and who couldn’t, and every source we had indicated that the Pasdaran was about to go to war against the West.

In fact, the first act of the war had already occurred. On July 19, 1982, David Dodge, the acting president of the American University of Beirut, was grabbed in Beirut, boxed up and trucked across the Lebanese-Syrian border, and delivered to a waiting Iran Air flight at the Damascus airport. The Iranian Pasdaran ran the whole operation out of Balabakk. Dodge would end up spending six months in Tehran before Syria - Iran’s closest ally in the Arab world - pressured Iran to release him.

In June 1983, almost two months before Dodge was released, we picked up a onetime report that Iran intended to kidnap more hostages. The Pasdaran intelligence chief for Lebanon, now comfortably situated in the Shaykh Abdallah barracks, had urgently summoned a Lebanese contact to a meeting. Once he arrived, the Iranian took him outside, out of range of any bugs, and told him that the Pasdaran had screwed up with Dodge. Moving him out of Lebanon allowed the Americans to pinpoint Dodge’s whereabouts. Worse, in holding him in Tehran, Iran directly implicated itself in the kidnapping. Although Tehran had no choice but to release Dodge, it still intended to kidnap foreigners in Lebanon - only now more carefully. It needed plausible denial and wanted Lebanese agents to run the campaign. When the Lebanese agreed to help, the Pasdaran officer instructed him to start setting up a kidnapping apparatus: surveillance teams, secret prisons, non-attributable cars. Iran would foot the bill, identify the victims to be kidnapped, and provide other assistance that could not be directly tied to the abductions.

Even though we leaned hard on all our sources in the area, the CIA was not able to pick up additional information on Iran’s new kidnapping campaign. The closest we came to knowing what was going on in Balabakk was by way of the glossy black-and-white satellite photos that headquarters sent us from time to time. To be sure, they offered a pretty good view of the Shaykh Abdallah barracks. You could pick out trucks and cars parked inside the compound, shadows of people walking around, from time to time even a military formation. Apart from that, they were a waste of quality paper. From ninety miles up, you couldn’t distinguish one uniform from another. In fact, if it weren’t for the local press, we never would have known the Iranian Pasdaran had taken over the barracks.

Neither then nor now, nor ever in the future, can photos tell you what is happening inside buildings or in the heads of the men who occupy them. To do that, you need a human source, and the way I saw it, the only way to find one was to quit speculating about what went on behind all those walls put up to hide the truth. I needed to go to Lebanon, to the Biqa Valley. If you want to run with the big dogs, you have to get off the porch.

I startled John when I knocked on his door. Since our flare-up over the Abu Nidal office, relations had gone from bad to worse. It was rare when I talked with him at all, and then only when I’d stepped in something.

‘How about my taking a trip to Lebanon, to the Biqa?’ I asked.

Out came the buffing rag. After he had worked up a high gloss on his shoes, John finally said ‘It’s not our turf, you know. Beirut won’t like it.’

Maybe, but John and I both knew that the Beirut CIA office didn’t have any turf. It still hadn’t recovered from the bombing. Officers rotated in and out every couple of months and rarely ventured more than a block or two from the new embassy. No one was there long enough to care about whether I was poaching or not.

The more John thought about the idea, the more he grudgingly approved. If I were caught doing something in Lebanon, I’d be expelled, which wouldn’t be his problem. (If I were expelled far enough, it might even solve his problem.) And even he had to admit my nosing around the Biqa couldn’t possibly screw up US relations with the Lebanese government - there weren’t any. John finally agreed to a short trip, but only to Shtawrah, a small Biqa town on the Beirut-Damascus highway. Although Shtawrah is forty kilometers from Balabakk, I would open the door at least a crack. Who knows, I might even get lucky.

Shtawrah’s commercial center had made it through the years of civil war largely untouched. The Syrian elite shopped there, as did the UN, aid organizations, and diplomats from Beirut and Damascus. Almost everything was available, from American detergent to Swiss chocolate. Cuban cigars went at a fraction of what London Heathrow’s duty-free shops sold them for. You could exchange any currency in the world at Shtawrah’s banks, at rates better than Zurich’s. You also could buy arms, from pistols to rocket launchers, or just about any other contraband you might need. If your tastes ran more toward a kilo of pure coke or heroin, you had only to ask the concierge at the Park Hotel.

Beyond the shops, though, Shtawrah was no different from the rest of the Biqa. The day I arrived there, I passed by the smoldering ruins of a training camp for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine/ General Command (PFLP/GC) on the edge of town. A squad of Israeli F-16s had flattened it the day before. I was curious about the raid and asked Ghazali, whose supermarket was Shtawrah’s main grocery store, if the raid worried him. He shrugged.’ We’re in business. What can we do ?’

Actually, Ghazali’s answer made perfect sense. There was nothing any of the Lebanese in the Biqa could do about a roster of neighbors that included Hezbollah, the Japanese Red Army, Baader-Meinhof, Sendero Luminoso, the PFLP, Abu Nidal, ASALA, and half a dozen other suicidal and/or genocidal terrorist groups. As long as the Israeli air force continued to shoot straight, the Lebanese could get on with life and make a little money, especially if they took care of their own safety. Ghazali’s clerks carried 9mm semi automatics in shoulder holsters; and his assistant, whose office was behind a bulletproof window, kept an AK-47 with a drum magazine on his desk and a clear field of fire down all the aisles.

On that first visit, I walked around Shtawrah for a while, then drove up into the mountains above the town on the Beirut highway and stopped at a restaurant with a sweeping view of the Biqa, although it was too hazy to see Balabakk. Just as the waiter brought a tray of mezzah, the restaurant shook, rattling the windows and the crockery. The waiter looked away, pretending he hadn’t heard anything. I caught his eye.

‘Your New Jersey,’ he whispered.

The USS New Jersey, a refurbished World War II American battleship parked off Lebanon’s coast, would periodically hurl shells the size of Volkswagens into the mountains around Beirut. Washington’s thinking was that if the New Jersey had scared the Japanese in World War II, it might do the same for the Lebanese who still rejected the May 17 agreement with Israel.

After lunch, I decided it was time to start meeting the locals. I drove to Barilyas, a village a few miles beyond Shtawrah, and pulled up beside two policemen standing on the corner. When I announced that I was an American classicist interested in making a tour of the Biqa’s Roman ruins, they looked at me as if I’d just stepped off a spaceship. They directed me to Masna’, the last town before the Syrian border, where the Lebanese Surete Generale kept an office.

The Masna’ Surete building had taken several direct hits in 1982. Its red tile roof had been blown off and all the windows broken. Burned-out car hulks still decorated the parking lot. Sergeant Ali was standing out front, sunning himself and smoking a cigarette. With his two-day beard, open tunic, and AK slung over his shoulder, he matched the scenery. When I approached him he was friendly enough.

I walked up to Ali and started as innocently as I could, asking about Anjar, a nearby village that had been the site of an ancient Roman trading post. A few ruins remained, I knew, which made the question not too odd for a Westerner, but Anjar was also one of the few villages in the Biqa not occupied by terrorist groups hostile to the United States. ASALA, the Armenian terrorist group that had attacked the Turkish Air counter at Paris’s Orly airport in July 1983, kept a camp there, but ASALA had no beef with America. Some of its leaders were even American citizens. This was the Middle East: Balabakk, my real interest, needed to be approached in crablike fashion.

Ali led me into his office and served me a thimble-size glass of tea, which tasted like it was mostly sugar. He wanted to talk about the US He had several cousins living in Michigan and New Jersey, he said. He himself would move there if he could, but he didn’t think he’d be given a visa. I dropped Anjar and let Ali take the conversation where he wanted. When I could see he was starting to get antsy, I got up to leave. As we said good-bye, I promised to look him up the next time I was in Masna’. Ali told me the days he was on duty.