See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (13 page)

I didn’t bother reading past the burn notice. Once you’ve established a fabricator, you never deal with him again. I put Ghorbanifar’s file on top of a stack of other files I would never read.

Dewey was back a couple of weeks later. ‘Well, did you read it?’

When I admitted I hadn’t, he took back the file, and not long afterward, I was plucked off the counterterrorism team and sent to Beirut. There was nothing Dewey could do about it. The Near East Division couldn’t find anyone else to go. Not only was it dangerous, it was considered a bad career move. I didn’t care; though I knew the only place to learn about terrorism was on the ground.

George Cave did take up Dewey‘s offer of a ‘vacation ‘to Tehran and came close to being indicted once the Iran-contra scandal broke. Dewey didn’t escape quite so cleanly: He was indicted but eventually pardoned. If I had read Ghorbanifar’s file as instructed, chances are I would have wound up being sent to Tehran and almost certainly indicted as an Iran-contra coconspirator. This was one time I could pat myself on the back for not following orders.

I’ve often thought about how the Reagan people got sucked into Iran-contra. It’s clear now that the Iranians were playing the White House for suckers. As soon as Iran received its first planeload of arms in exchange for a hostage, it went into the hostage business full-time, kidnapping dozens more. But it was more than that. When the White House employed Ghorbanifar, a known swindler, to handle one of the most sensitive diplomatic channels in American history, it ensured the channel would fail. It was sort of like using the local paperboy to do your investing in the stock market. No, it was a lot worse.

I think there were two things at play. First of all, after the 1983 bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut, the option of a military rescue operation was off the table. There was no way the Pentagon was going to commit troops short of a full-scale invasion. It wouldn’t even agree to send a Delta Force team, the army’s elite counterterrorism unit, unless a Delta member had ‘eyes on’ the hostages at least twenty-four hours in advance - a condition that could never be met.

That left diplomacy. The only problem was that no one in the national security establishment had a good back channel to Iran. The State Department worked through Switzerland, but the hostages were too sensitive a subject for the Swiss and the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to deal with. The CIA itself didn’t have a channel to Tehran. During the Shah’s rule, the White House had been formal in its instructions to the CIA: Stay away from the Iranian opposition lest the Shah be offended. Even when Ayatollah Khomeini was in exile outside of Paris, the CIA avoided him and his entourage. So when the Iranian revolution went down in 1979, the CIA was blind and deaf in Iran - all thanks to Washington politics.

With diplomatic and military solutions taken off the table, the White House was bound to accept Ghorbanifar as a channel when Israel dished him up. For me the surprising thing was when the White House figured they’d been had by this swindler, they turned to the American-Iranian middleman Albert Hakim, who set up the second ‘channel’ to Iran. Like Ghorbanifar, Hakim was in it for the money. Unlike Ghorbanifar, Hakim could cut out all the other middlemen and go directly to the hostage outlet - the Iranian Pasdaran. The main point of contact was Ali Hashemi Bahramani, an officer in the Pasdaran and the nephew of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the Iranian Speaker of Parliament.

Before I was sent to Beirut, I had time to give myself a crash course in terrorism. There wasn’t a better place to do that than in the CTC. I had complete access to all of the CIA’s files and databases on terrorism. I was like a kid in a candy store.

The first thing I turned to, inevitably I suppose, was the embassy bombing. By now the mystery had grown roots in me. One look at the thin, tattered, apple-green file, and I could tell the case was stone cold. The most recent piece of information was nearly two years old. There were a couple of reasons: The embassy bombing decimated the CIA ranks in Lebanon, and then later, when the embassy moved to East Beirut, the CIA lost most of its best Muslim agents. Few of them could travel across the Green Line that separated the Christian and Muslim halves of the city. The Green Line got its name from the grass that grew up in the abandoned streets that formed the demarcation line.

Not that reopening the case would be easy, or maybe even possible. Lebanese president Amin Jumayyil had quietly released all of the suspects in the bombing. We suspected he’d been bribed, but whatever the cause, with the only suspects in the bombing scattered across the Middle East, we were back at ground zero. All we had to go by were the three claims called in to the press on the day of the bombing. The only difference was that one of those groups, the MO, now had a name to go along with it - Imad Mughniyah. He was as good a place as any to start.

Imad Mughniyah was an enigma. According, to his passport application, he had been born in 1962 in Tayr Dibba, a dirt-poor village in southern Lebanon, but even that was uncertain. Often poor Shi’a Lebanese recorded the family village as a birthplace to conceal an illegal residence, more often than not in Beirut’s southern suburbs. Mughniyah, we knew, had grown up in a makeshift cinder-block house with no running water, in ‘Ayn Al-Dilbah, one of the poorest parts of the southern suburbs. Located at the edge of Beirut’s airport - planes passed only a few hundred feet overhead - the house was the best that Mughniyah’s vegetable-seller father could afford. During the civil war, the suburb was a main axis on the Green Line. As a teenager, Mughniyah would have woken frequently to the sound of artillery and gunfire. From time to time stray bullets and shrapnel hit his house.

All of this we were able to piece together from agents, but no CIA officer of any complexion or ethnic origin could go into Ayn Al-Dilbah to verify it. Ayn Al-Dilbah was a fortress as secure as any in the world. Everyone there knew everyone else. If a stranger couldn’t explain himself, he would be lucky to be escorted out the way he came in. Even Lebanese authorities couldn’t enter Ayn Al-Dilbah.

Mughniyah, we had confirmed, joined Yasir Arafat’s Force 17 (Arafat’s elite personal security organization) at an early age, maybe fourteen or fifteen, but was always a low-level bang man, one of dozens who spent their days and nights sniping at Christians across the Green Line. He reportedly spent a year at the American University of Beirut. If he had, though, someone lifted his records. One of Mughniyah’s distant relatives was an Islamic scholar, but other than that, he had no apparent grounding in Islam.

That’s what we knew, but it still didn’t add up. How did a poor boy from Ayn Al-Dilbah rise out of the ashes of the 1982 Israeli invasion and in less than a year put together the most lethal and well-funded terrorist organization in the world? Was this the man who kidnapped and held dozens of foreign hostages? Was this the man who blew up the American embassy in April 1983 and covered his tracks so well that there wasn’t a single lead tying him to it? The more I got into the files, the more convinced I was that the Algerians were wrong about Mughniyah operating independently.

I spent two months searching through CTC and anyplace else I could burrow into for stray pieces of information that hadn’t made it into the files. I would often show up before six AM on my bicycle at the CIA’s front gates on Route 123. Sometimes I’d have to knock on the guard’s glass booth to get him to look at my badge. Around seven or eight in the evening, I’d finally notice that most everyone in CTC had left, but I would read another hour or two more. The mountain of files and paper on my desk and surrounding floor grew into a standing joke.

Still, I didn’t have enough information to come to any final conclusion about Mughniyah’s role in the Beirut embassy bombing. But as I sorted through the parade of hostages who had been seized in the Middle East, I became increasingly convinced that if Mughniyah was largely responsible, he was getting a heck of a lot of help from Pasdaran and, behind it, the sovereign government of Iran.

We knew with absolute certainty, for example, that the Pasdaran had kidnapped David Dodge. We knew, too, that in June 1983 a Pasdaran officer in the Biqa had outlined a plan to kidnap foreigners. Wasn’t it as likely that the current spate of kidnappings traced back to that plan, as least as much as it could be laid at Mughniyah’s feet? Finally, there were the circumstances surrounding Bill Buckley’s death. He probably died in July 1985. Although we could never fix a date, we did find out with near certainty that the Pasdaran commander Ali Saleh Shamkhani, who is, at this writing, the defense minister of Iran, went into a rage, screaming at his subordinates at a Tehran meeting that it was senseless to let the hostages in Lebanon die out of pure neglect. Shamkhani, we had been told, had ordered that the Pasdaran unit stationed in the Shaykh Abdallah barracks immediately arrange for a doctor to take care of any other sick hostages. Subsequent to this report, a Lebanese Jewish pediatrician, Elie Hallak, already a Hezbollah prisoner, was brought in to examine Michel Seurat, a French researcher kidnapped by the IJO. Hallak ultimately couldn’t do anything for Seurat, who would die the following year, probably of cancer. Nor could Hallak do anything for himself: He was executed as soon as the IJO found a cooperative doctor to tend to its captives.

Finally, there was the curious case of CNN’s Jeremy Levin. The IJO had grabbed Levin in Beirut on March 7, 1984. Nothing was heard about him until nearly a year later, when on Valentine’s Day, 1985, he walked up to a Syrian army checkpoint near Balabakk. Levin explained that when he awoke that morning and found his chains loose, he tied two blankets together, lowered himself from a window of the apartment building serving as his prison, and took off. It was easy - so easy, in fact, that Levin would wonder whether he’d been allowed to flee. Based on Levin’s description, it seemed likely that he, too, had been at the Shaykh Abdallah barracks. If that was true, then it was the Iranian Pasdaran who had held him, even though the IJO had snatched him.

All this was sloshing around in my head early one morning when the CTC’s deputy chief, Fred Turco, called me into his office. ‘Jenco’s out,’ he said. Fred sounded exhausted, as if he’d been up all night. ‘He’s on his way to Wiesbaden. Get home, pack, and go out to talk to him.’

Father Lawrence Martin Jenco, the American priest, had been kidnapped in Beirut on January 8, 1985. As with Levin, there was no trace of him until his release on July 26, 1986. Another hostage, Reverend Benjamin Weir, had been released earlier, but Weir had refused to talk to either the FBI or the CIA. We hoped Jenco would be able to fill the gap between Levin’s escape and now.

There wasn’t time to ride my bicycle home and make it over to Andrews Air Force Base. Fred had one of CTC’s war wagons - an armored Chevy Suburban 2500 - take me home to get some clothes and then drop me off at Andrews, where I joined up with a debriefing team of some twenty people. We were almost ready to board the C-141 to Wiesbaden when an air force major trotted out to tell Ambassador Bob Oakley, the State Department’s counterterrorism chief, that our departure would be delayed. Two storm fronts were converging over the Atlantic, and the FAA was giving strict priority to inbound flights, some of which were already backed up two hours and running low on fuel. The FAA didn’t care how urgent our mission was - we would have to wait.

Undeterred, Oakley asked around for a quarter to call Ollie North at the White House. A couple minutes later he came back smiling. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. Only when we were taxiing down the runway did Oakley explain. North had called the head of the FAA and, speaking in the president’s name, ordered him to give us immediate clearance for takeoff. I filed that fact away: A staffer at the NSC carries a big stick in Washington - someone you wouldn’t want to unnecessarily piss off.

Jenco didn’t turn out to be the gold mine we’d hoped for. Although he had a remarkable memory, he had been chained to a wall and blindfolded for most of his captivity. The few conversations he’d had with his guards revealed nothing. Jenco didn’t recognize pictures of Mughniyah or anyone else.

I was beginning to think it was a wasted trip until Jenco got around to talking about Jeremy Levin. When the guards learned Levin was gone, they reacted with a genuine mixture of surprise, anger, and panic, and hurriedly dispersed the hostages to private homes around the Biqa and eventually to Beirut’s southern suburbs, out of the reach of the Syrians. That told us that Levin had in fact escaped; and it also said that his captors wanted to avoid a confrontation with Syria.

When we showed Jenco the satellite photos of the Shaykh Abdallah barracks, he presented us with yet another bright, shining nugget of information. His captors apparently had made a grave error in not completely blocking the view from the bathroom Jenco used. Through a tiny crack, he had on several occasions seen khaki-uniformed Iranian Pasdaran soldiers delivering food from what appeared to be a military mess to the apartment building he and the other hostages were held in. Jenco was able to identify the building from the photos: the main mess of the Shaykh Abdallah barracks. Best of all, he was able to pick out the married officers’ quarters as the building he’d been held in - the same one I had seen protected by Pasdaran guards during my October 1984 visit to the Biqa.

Like many things in the Middle East, the Mughniyah story was becoming more complicated under further scrutiny, but what I came across next made absolutely no sense at first.

On September 30, 1985, a group calling itself the Islamic Liberation Organization kidnapped four Soviet diplomats in Beirut, wounding one of them so severely that he would die in captivity. No one had ever heard of the group, but its demand that the Syrians stop their offensive against fundamentalists in Tripoli convinced us it was a cover name for the Syrian Muslim Brothers, who at the time were holed up in Tripoli. A little later, an unknown Palestinian by the name of Khudur Salamah was arrested, confessed to the kidnapping, and was traded for the three surviving Soviet diplomats. (Salamah’s confession might not have been entirely voluntary: There was a rumor that his interrogators cut off his testicles to loosen up his tongue.)

We didn’t know what to believe - the Salamah story had the earmarks of what passes for an urban legend in Beirut - but when the truth came out, it was stranger than fiction. It was Imad Mughniyah who had arranged the Soviets’ release, flying to Tunis to negotiate with none other than Yasir Arafat, who by then was serving as the Soviets’ intermediary to the hostage takers. Mughniyah, we learned, sought and received Arafat’s assurance that the Soviets would not take revenge against the kidnappers. As a sweetener, Arafat had Abu lyad, the head of security for the Palestinian Liberation Organization, transfer $200, 000 to Mughniyah’s account. The Soviets lived up to their part of the bargain; they never went after Mughniyah or the Islamic Liberation Organization. Whatever the ILO was, it would never kidnap anyone again.

This showed Mughniyah in a completely new light. Yes, he had apparently once been a member of Arafat’s Force 17, but the Algerians also seemed to have been wrong about his having cut his ties with Arafat. At the very least, we now knew he was feeding at the Palestinian’s trough.

The story became even more intriguing when we found out who Khudur Salamah was. His real name was Ali Dib. A Lebanese Shi’a born in 1957, he joined Arafat’s Fatah at an early age and was eventually moved into intelligence. In 1975, at the beginning of the civil war, he had been appointed sector commander in Ayn Al-Dilbah, which meant he was Mughniyah’s boss. After the Israeli invasion, Dib apparently became involved in international terrorism. His name was found in the address book of a Hezbollah terrorist who was arrested in Ladispoli, Italy, in 1984.

Dib led us to another Fatah operative - Abd-Al-Latif Salah, born in Jordan in 1950. After graduating from the American University of Beirut, he married the daughter of a prominent Shi’a politician. About the same time, he joined Fatah intelligence. In 1982, after Fatah pulled out of Beirut, Salah joined a stay-behind cell to fight the Israelis. He wouldn’t resurface, for us at least, until the arrest of Ali Dib (aka Khudur Salamah), when he served as a point of contact with Mughniyah. And then, on December 17, 1985, he and a subordinate were arrested in Cyprus in possession of a gun concealed in a bottle. (The glass was meant to defeat an airport X-ray scanner - the same technique theTWA-847 hijackers used to smuggle their weapons on board.) All through this, Salah remained on Arafat’s payroll. Moreover, we learned later that Arafat regularly sent subsidies to Mughniyah and Hezbollah through Salah.

The Arafat angle sent me back to the embassy bombing. I remembered that one of the suspects arrested after the bombing was a Fatah member named Muhammad Na’if Jada. He was the only prisoner who had told a credible story. In fact, it would prove crucial in unraveling the embassy bombing.

Jada, a Palestinian, had been hired by the embassy as a guard a few months before it went up. Afterward he immediately confessed to his participation in the plot, telling his interrogators that he was an active lieutenant in Fatah. In the fall of 1982, his Fatah boss, Azmi Sughayr, had instructed him to wangle his way into a job with the embassy. Without asking why, Jada set up a concession stand on the corniche directly facing the embassy, made friends with a couple of marines who worked there, and was hired to work in the marine house. From there he moved over to the embassy guard force. A few weeks before the bombing, two of Sughayr’s lieutenants asked him to keep track of the movements of Ambassador John Habib, who was traveling in and out of Beirut, helping to negotiate the May 17 agreement. Again without asking any questions, he agreed; but a couple of days before the bombing, Sughayr’s lieutenants called on Jada again, this time asking his help in an operation to ‘scare’ Habib. As soon as Habib was inside the embassy and the driveway was clear, the plan went, they asked Jada to signal a car that would be passing back and forth in front of the embassy. On the morning of April 18, 1983, a guard mistakenly told Jada that Habib was in the embassy. Seeing the driveway clear, Jada walked out to the street and signaled the green Mercedes. The last thing he remembered, he told his interrogators, was a flash and a wall of flying debris coming at him. In fact, it was a miracle Jada lived, and almost certainly not the bombers’ intent. The CIA polygraphed Jada after his arrest. He passed on all questions. But after the incident in which the Lebanese tortured a suspect to death and the CIA dropped out of the investigation, no one from the CIA would ever talk to Jada again. By 1986 we had no idea where he was.