See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (11 page)

When I returned, I brought Ali an application for a US visa and a couple of tourist brochures. I didn’t promise him help with a visa, but the offer was implicit. This time we spent more than an hour talking, about America but also about the Middle East. Ali didn’t say a word about Balabakk or Iran, and neither did I. As I walked out the door Ali handed me a piece of paper. He’d written his full name and home telephone number. Only then did I realize he was related to Husayn Al-Musawi, the Iranian Pasdaran agent who had seized the Shaykh Abdallah barracks.

I continued to see Ali every few weeks. He liked having an American friend, and he was seriously starting to think about making a trip to the US to visit his cousins. He fished around to see if I could help him. I offered to see what I could do.

It wasn’t until January that our conversations produced anything interesting. Just as I sat down and AH put a glass of tea in front of me, I told him I’d been invited to visit Balabakk the following week to see its famous Roman ruin, the Temple of the Sun. I hadn’t, of course, but it was time to get around to talking about my intended destination. I asked him if it would be safe. Without saying a word, he took me by the elbow and led me out a back door to a lot behind his office. We talked between two mounds of rubble.

‘Mr. Bob, you can’t go,’ he said gravely.

‘Why not?’

‘Forget your Roman ruins for now.’

‘Why, Ali?’

It was obvious he was having a hard time bringing himself to say more.

‘They’re going to kidnap an American in Lebanon,’ he finally whispered. ‘An official.’

I knew there was no point in pressing for details like who, when, and where. Ali’s body language said he had told me all he was going to tell me, but what a mouthful! Or so I thought.

‘That’s bullshit,’ John said.

‘John, he’s a Musawi. He’s from Balabakk. He might have picked up something. We can’t dismiss the information out of hand. We have to write it up in an intelligence report.’

‘Look, this dirtbag doesn’t have a POA. He’s not a recruited source. You don’t even know his date of birth. You can’t expect me to send this rubbish in as intel. Go back, get his bio, do the paperwork you hate so much, and then we’ll see.’

There was no point in saying anything. The POA was meaningless here. Ali wasn’t interested in becoming an agent. He might give me a tip from time to time, but he was completely loyal to his clan, the Musawis. None of that meant his information was wrong. I gave Ali’s warning to a friend at the embassy, who sent it to Washington via State Department channels. Consular Affairs picked it up and included it in a classified consular brief. Years later I would come across the brief. It was the very first piece of paper in what would grow to become the CIA’s huge hostage file.

AT 10:38 AM. on March 16, 1984, I was still at home drinking my third cup of coffee and reading a week-old Herald Tribune when my push-to-talk Motorola radio crackled alive. It was John. ‘Get into the office as fast as you can.’ John always sounded nervous, but now I detected pure panic.

By the time I got to the office, John was a sickly pale yellow. ‘Buckley’s been kidnapped,’ he said as he handed me a cable. That morning Bill Buckley, the CIA chief in Beirut, had been hit over the head on his way out of his apartment building, pushed into a car, and driven away. No one got a plate number or a description of the kidnappers. The Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO), one of the groups to claim responsibility for the embassy bombing, would eventually take credit for Buckley as well, but that didn’t tell us anything. We still didn’t know anything about the I JO.

Buckley wasn’t the first American kidnapped in Lebanon since the 1982 Israeli invasion. In addition to David Dodge, Frank Regier, an American professor of electrical engineering at the American University in Beirut, had been snatched in February 1984. CNN bureau chief Jeremy Levin had been grabbed a month later. But they were civilians. This was a family member loaded with secrets.

‘I’ve got to go back to the Biqa and see Ali, John.’ John looked at me as if I’d finally lost my mind. ‘We can’t just sit on our hands,’ I went on before he could interrupt. ‘I’ve seen with my own eyes how Syria administers the Biqa. It won’t let anything happen to a foreigner under its authority. Buckley and the rest were kidnapped in Beirut, where Syria doesn’t have any troops. John, you’ve got to let me-’

‘Forget it,’ John said, cutting me off. ‘Washington would bring me home in a strait jacket if I even asked.’

I turned around and walked out. There was no point in reminding John about Ali’s warning. And besides, John was right. Headquarters would never allow it. It was closing down operations in Lebanon as fast as it could.

During the next seven months, not a single lead surfaced on Buckley. Not only did we not find out who kidnapped him, we weren’t even sure he was still in Lebanon. The CIA went to every government and private source it had, but no one could tell us anything, not even a plausible rumor. As for myself, I was convinced Balabakk was as good a place as any to start looking, and the more I brooded on the kidnapping, the more certain I became that I could get in and out safely. Eventually, curiosity got the better of me.

The first thing I did was to arrange to meet XXXXXXX, an adviser to XXXXXXXXX. A branch of his family who had settled in the Biqa lived peacefully with the Shi’a neighbors, including the Musawis. I felt confident that under XXXXXXXX aegis, even the Pasdaran wouldn’t dare touch me. When I told him what I wanted to do, XXXXXXX called another relative, a Lebanese army captain, and the two of us agreed to meet up in Shtawrah and take the captain’s car to Balabakk. The captain, I should note, didn’t have the slightest idea who I was or why I wanted to visit Balabakk.

The drive to Balabakk was like descending into hell. Just outside of town, lurid, menacing murals were painted on the sides of bombed-out buildings. One was of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock mosque, the third holiest site of Islam, bursting through an American flag. Another was Ayatollah Khomeini leading a demonstration against the American embassy in Tehran; a third, an American flag spattered with blood. In Balabakk itself, banners in Farsi and Arabic proclaimed DEATH TO AMERICA.

The captain suggested lunch at a friend’s house. I agreed. We were already through the front door when he mentioned that it was the house of one of Husayn Al-Musawi’s cousins.

The dozen guests sitting on the floor in the salon eyed me warily when we walked in. I was probably the first Westerner they’d seen in months. After a cup of tea, we were brought a plate of leeks, fava beans, and bread.

Things were going fine until one of the guests took a particular interest in me. With his long, ungroomed beard and armband that read We Crave Martyrdom, he made me nervous. After staring at me a few seconds, he asked,’ What brings you to Balabakk?’

Rather than drag out the classicist spiel, I went for the big lie.

‘I’m a Belgian. I work for an aid organization,’ I said.

I kept my fingers crossed that no one spoke French or, worse, Flemish. I didn’t speak a word of Flemish, and my French was definitely rusty.

‘Sir, may I ask your name?’ the ungroomed beard persisted.

‘Er, Remy.’

‘That’s your family name?’

‘No, it’s Martin,’ I said before I could stop myself. It wasn’t like Remy Martin cognac wasn’t sold in Lebanon. Fortunately, he went back to eating.

Afterward the captain took me to the Temple of the Sun. When we knocked on the closed gate to the old Roman section of Balabakk, the gate swung open and there were our two guides - khaki-uniformed Iranian Pasdaran soldiers. They couldn’t have been happier to show us around the site.

We were driving out of town when I casually asked the captain about the compound on the hill, which I knew was the Shaykh Abdallah barracks. He stopped the car by the outside perimeter wall, and I had a chance to take in all of the buildings. It was remarkable how different they looked from the ground than they did from satellite photography.

One building in particular caught my attention. Two Pasdaran soldiers were guarding the front door, and either cardboard or blankets covered the inside of the windows. A wooden sign on the wall identified it as the married officers’ quarters.

It wasn’t until years later that I would learn Bill Buckley was inside, blindfolded and chained to a radiator, along with five other Western hostages. Nor would I know for years that this same building was a key link in my search for the embassy bombers. But, in truth, I wasn’t really surprised by either revelation. Everything in the Middle East is interconnected. Pull on one thread and a dozen more will come out. Sniff up one trail and you’ll come to twenty forks in the road, each of which could be profitably followed.

But you’ve got to have human intelligence to do it - people on the ground, agents, access agents, a network of traitors, and a case officer willing and able to work it. No aerial reconnaissance photo could have put together the covered windows and guarded door at the Shaykh Abdallah barracks. No electronic intercept could have placed a set of human eyes on the ground that day in Balabakk. In the end, intelligence boils down to people. I think the CIA knew that back then - the spirit of our founding fathers still lived in the agency - but it wouldn’t be long before we were running pell-mell in the opposite direction, with disastrous consequences from the Middle East to finally America’s own soil.

I’ll be frank. My visit to Balabakk was a gross fracturing of all the rules. It may have given me a feel for the terrain, a knowledge you couldn’t get from satellite photos or from a book, but it was risky and did nothing to help Buckley or anyone else.

Shortly afterward, I was transferred to Khartoum, Sudan. Even without knowing about my trip to Balabakk - and he never found out - John had had enough of me and my late accountings.

The G corridor on the sixth floor looked like a construction site. Boxes, furniture, coils of telephone wire, and trash were piled up everywhere. The offices on either side of the hall were swarming with electricians and painters. Construction crews were ripping up floors, tearing down partitions, and putting up new ones. No one had any idea where the new counterterrorism chief’s office was. I had to go from room to room to find it. When I did, though, there was no mistaking its singularity.

For starters, cigar smoke hung in the air like a low-lying cloud, thick enough to close down most airports. Unlike most everyone else in the CIA, Duane Dewey Clarridge didn’t believe in desks. Instead, he had a round table with half a dozen chairs in the middle of his small office. He figured an informal atmosphere encouraged younger officers to wander in and talk. The best ideas percolated up rather than down.

Dewey perhaps didn’t need to worry about the trappings of office; unlike most CIA officers, he was plugged into the White House. As head of the Latin American Division, he had cut every corner necessary to help Ronald Reagan’s beloved Contras. For good measure, in November 1985 he had also expedited the first shipment of arms to Iran. Dewey was the White House’s kind of spy. It didn’t surprise anyone that after Abu Nidal’s Christmas 1985 attacks on the Vienna and Rome airports, the White House tapped Dewey to head a new CIA counterterrorism unit, one with teeth.

As soon as he saw me standing in his door, Dewey motioned me to come over and sit down next to him at the round table. I’d heard enough about him to know there was no point in beating around the bush.

‘I want to work in terrorism, Mr. Clarridge. I’d be happy to take any job.’

The truth was that I was not only interested in terrorism, I was bored. After the Libyans started targeting me for assassination after they found out I was meeting with the Libyan opposition, headquarters pulled me out of Khartoum after only four months and gave me a deadly dull desk job in Africa Division. I also told Dewey about my unsuccessful search for Bill Buckley and how I’d ended up pissing John off.

‘That asshole’s still on the streets?’ was Dewey’s only comment. Before I could answer, he asked,’ How good’s your Arabic?’

After nearly three years in the Middle East, it was a lot better than when I got out of Arabic school.

‘You’ll travel anywhere, anytime?’

‘I’d get on a plane today if you want me to.’

That’s all Dewey needed to know. He didn’t even ask to see my file. I asked him if I should tell anyone, like the Near Eastern Division, to which I still technically belonged.

‘Don’t do anything,’ he said as he motioned me out of the office with his cigar. ‘Go back to your desk and sit by the telephone.’

Two weeks later I was drafted into Dewey’s new organization: the Counterterrorism Center, or CTC.

The first few months serving as a foot soldier in Dewey’s war against terrorism were about as exhilarating as the spy business gets. I’d seen the face of evil in the Biqa Valley and was both fascinated and appalled by it. I also wanted to get back to my private quest to find out who was behind the embassy bombing. CTC looked like the ideal place for both. Also, Dewey had a new presidential finding - authority to do pretty much anything he wanted against the terrorists. He had all the money he wanted. The CIA director, Bill Casey, promised him carte blanche; he could cannibalize the DO and the DI to stock CTC. He even recruited a handful of Los Angeles cops. He was planning to deploy them around the world and start hauling in terrorists in handcuffs.

By the time I started, CTC’s new offices were miraculously up and running. It was pure frenetic energy. Everyone worked in one huge, open bay. With the telephones ringing nonstop, printers clattering, files stacked all over the place, CNN playing on TV monitors bolted to the ceiling, hundreds of people in motion and at their computers, it gave the impression of a war room. I kept thinking of those World War II propaganda films of Churchill’s underground bunker during the Battle of Britain.

Expectations were high. Everyone had heard about Dewey’s successful counterterrorist operation as head of the European Division. One of his offices helped run an agent in a lethal Palestinian terrorist group known as the May 15 Organization, which specialized in airplane bombs. The agent was a gold mine, providing information that stopped a couple of terrorist attacks, and Dewey had no intention of losing him. When the agent’s May 15 boss ordered him to attack an American target, Dewey crafted an operation in which the CIA exploded a car inside an American embassy compound in such a way that the agent could take credit. No one was killed, but the agent’s boss was convinced the agent had tried, and he continued as a fantastic reporter for us.

All of us new recruits expected operations like that to be the norm in CTC, but it wasn’t long before the politics of intelligence undermined everything Dewey tried to do. Although CTC looked like a high-tech command center, the truth was that Dewey had no one to command in the field. In spite of Bill Casey’s promises, the CIA’s offices abroad still answered to their geographic division chiefs back at headquarters, and as the chiefs made absolutely clear, not one of them was interested in fighting Dewey’s war. It was too risky. A botched - or even successful - operation would piss off a friendly foreign government. Someone might be thrown out of his cushy post, and sent home. Someone might even get killed. No matter how much Dewey waved around his finding with President Reagan’s signature on the bottom, the division chiefs weren’t going to have some ex-LA coppers runnin’ ‘n’ gunnin’ in their backyards.

We’d ask the Paris office to put together a surveillance team to watch the apartment of a suspected terrorist, and Paris would come back and tell us it couldn’t because the local intelligence service would find out. We’d ask Bonn to recruit a few Arabs and Iranians to track the Middle East emigre community in West Germany, and it would respond it didn’t have enough officers. Once we asked Beirut to meet a certain agent traveling to Lebanon, and it refused because of some security problem.

Security was never not a problem in Beirut, for God’s sake. Instead of fighting terrorists, we were fighting bureaucratic inertia, an implacable enemy.

Dewey couldn’t even recruit the staff that he had been promised. After six months, he could put his hands on only two Arabic speakers, one of whom was me. But since the other officer managed a branch, that left just me to travel and meet agents. That wasn’t a lot, since about 80 percent of CTC’s targets spoke Arabic. There were no Persian, Pashtun, or Turkish speakers at all.

I was assigned to a branch tasked with finding the hostages in Lebanon, but I was the only one there with any experience in the Middle East. The branch chief had never set foot in the Middle East, let alone Lebanon. At one point he was conned into an operation to buy maps of the sewers of Beirut’s southern suburbs: He had no idea the southern suburbs were illegally constructed and didn’t have sewers. Other branches were worse off. Analysts were in charge, which was insane. People who’d never met an agent in their lives, didn’t know what a dead drop was, and rarely traveled out of the Washington metropolitan area were directing field offices abroad on how to run their cases. It was like assigning a hospital administrator to head the surgical team.

My first shot of reality came early, about a month after I joined CTC.

Bonn cabled that a leader of Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood who was living in Germany wanted a meeting with the CIA. Bonn, of course, refused to meet him for fear of irritating the Germans, but it grudgingly agreed to let someone from CTC fly out to see what he wanted.

I took the cable to Dewey. ‘What’s in it for us?’ he asked.

Good question. The Muslim Brotherhood was an amorphous, dangerous, unpredictable movement that shook every government in the Middle East to its bones. Founded by an Egyptian, Hasan Al-Banna, in 1929, it was dedicated to bringing the Kingdom of God to earth. The Egyptian Muslim Brothers had unsuccessfully tried to kill Egyptian President Abdul Nasser. The Syrian branch had tried to kill Syrian President Hafiz Al-Asad a couple of times. In 1982 its followers seized Hama, a historic city in central Syria, provoking Asad into shelling them and Hama into the next life.

The Muslim Brothers are also distant cousins of the Wahabis of Saudi Arabia, the most puritanical sect of Islam. Underwritten by the Saudi royal family, the Wahabis spawned Osama bin Laden. They also served as the inspiration for the Taliban in Afghanistan and other radical Sunni movements. Many Muslims consider the Wahabis dangerous because they adopted the beliefs of Ibn Taymiyah, a fourteenth-century Islamic scholar who condoned political assassination. Al-Jihad, the Egyptian fundamentalists who murdered Egyptian President Anwar Sadat relied on Ibn Taymiyah as justification for what they did.

I’d had some experience with the Muslim Brothers during my abbreviated tour in Khartoum. One of my jobs there was to XXXXXX XXXXX against Mu’ammar Qaddafi’s. One evening soon after I got to Khartoum, I invited two of the Libyan dissidents, a political boss and a military commander, over to my apartment for tea. As usual, there was a sandstorm and the electricity was off. We sat in the dark, sweating and talking about the normal things you use to warm up a conversation with Arabs - marriage, children, the price of bread. My apartment was near the airport, and every so often we heard the roar of a plane taking off.

The military commander finally came around to talking politics. He mentioned in passing that hed been able to quickly rebuild the group’s military cadres in Libya after its failed May 1984 attack on Qaddafi’s residence, even though most of the attackers had been killed.

I asked the military commander why he thought he could take Qaddafi in a place so well defended.

‘God told us to do it.’

‘God?’

‘Yes.’ He then added without the slightest hint of irony ‘He told us the day and hour.’

That set off bells, at least in my head. These Libyan dissidents hadn’t been billed in Washington as Muslim Brothers, but when people told you God was calling the shots, there was a good chance the Brothers were nearby.

I was curious now, and I had a way to check on my suspicions. When I was studying Arabic in Washington, I had met a Sudanese graduate student who worked nights at the front desk of my apartment building. Just as I had with the Palestinian student earlier, I would sit with my Sudanese friend for hours, practicing Arabic. In return, I helped him with his English. One night in a heart-to-heart talk, he confessed he was a Muslim Brother. He explained to me the group’s ideology - its commitment to changing any Muslim leader who had fallen away from Islam. He agreed the Egyptian Jihad, an offshoot of the Muslim Brothers, was legally justified in murdering Anwar Sadat. Sadat was an apostate, he said, and the Koran, Islam’s Holy Book, mandates that apostates must die. My friend returned to Sudan about the same time I arrived there, and we renewed our friendship. When I asked him about the Libyan dissidents, he confirmed they were Muslim Brothers, noting that his own organization backed them to the hilt.

I brought my preliminary findings to Milt Bearden, Khartoum’s burly chief XXXXXX. This was the same Bearden who defined a close and continuing relationship as keeping a pair of slippers under your friend’s bed. Bearden was a popular boss. His case officers called him Uncle Milty.

As soon as I finished telling him about my suspicions about the Libyans, he said,’ So?’

I fell back on the standard line that while Qaddafi might be as crazy as a tree full of owls, the Muslim Brothers in power in Tripoli would be a lot worse. With Libya sharing borders with Algeria and Egypt, they could destabilize those two countries.

‘Do you know how they refer to Qaddafi in the White House?’ Bearden asked.

I didn’t.

‘They call him the Mad Dog of the Middle East. Look, Baer, if Genghis Khan were to crawl out of his grave and declare his intention to get rid of Qaddafi, this administration would support him. So forget about it.’

Bearden had a good nose for politics, so I accepted his word for it. Besides, the Sudan was imploding. The country was nearly bankrupt, and President Jafaar Numeiri was mentally unstable and incapable of dealing with the crisis. Demonstrators of uncertain ideology had shut down the government. As the office’s only Arabic speaker, I volunteered to go out in the crowds to find out whether they were anti-American or not. I passed myself off as a Lebanese journalist. When demonstrators moved close to the embassy or the American residences, I would call in a warning with a concealed radio.

The two Libyans dropped out of sight during the upheaval, but a couple of nights after the Numeiri regime collapsed, they unexpectedly reappeared. Apparently they had heard that Qaddafi’s henchmen had shown up in Khartoum, looking for revenge, and they were hoping I’d smuggle them out of the country. Too bad I wasn’t home when they came calling. In their excitement, the Libyan dissidents mistook my neighbor’s door for mine. An elderly administrative officer at the embassy, my neighbor was on her first tour overseas. Already nervous about the coup, she panicked when she looked through the peephole to see two bearded, wild-eyed fanatics with AK-47s. When they started banging on her door with the butts of their rifles, she lost whatever remained of her sangfroid and ran out her back door, down the fire escape, and across Khartoum to her boss’s house. She was still in her nightgown. The next day the embassy sent her to Germany for a rest.

I knew, in short, that dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood was playing with fire. These guys were programmed for trouble. But if the Reagan administration really was determined to fight it out with our enemies in Syria and Lebanon, we couldn’t have found better surrogates. The only question was what they were prepared to do for us, and to find that out, we had to talk to them.

Dewey agreed that I should meet with them, and I was on an airplane to Frankfurt the next day.

Not bothering to check in with Bonn, I took the train directly to Dortmund. The plan was for me to wait by a designated kiosk in the Dortmund railway station until I was signaled by a Brotherhood cutout - not the best of arrangements, but since I knew Bonn wasn’t going to help, I didn’t have a choice.