See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (15 page)

This was all rock-solid evidence, and it was all consistent. You’ll have to take my word for it: Evidence doesn’t get much better in the intelligence business. Just as important, for all the twists and turns the story had taken - and I realize the reader has just been through quite a number of them - the intelligence had been gathered the way it has to be: at the ground level, through human sources, by wire taps, and by correlation with untold hours of similar research by predecessors who still cared about doing the job right.

The only conclusion a reasonable person could make was that a Fatah cell - with or without Yasir Arafat’s knowledge - blew up the American embassy in Beirut on April 18, 1983. Mughniyah and Khalil were almost definitely involved. There was only one significant question: Who gave the orders?

To get to the next step, a lot of details needed filling in, like who actually drove the truck through the front door. If we could find that out, it might well lead us to the bombers.

The break came in October 1987. I was at my desk late in the afternoon when the embassy security officer came to say that a Mr. Walker wanted to see me. Mr. Walker was the code for a walk-in who wanted to see a CIA officer. It wouldn’t win any originality prizes, but I got the message.

As with any potential agent, I had to begin with the assumption that I would run him as an agent. That required protecting him from the very beginning, and it meant isolating him from the local guards, who could be working secretly for anyone. Bather than have Mr. Walker pass through the embassy check-in system, I went to the outer perimeter to meet him.

The man waiting for me was probably about thirty-five, although he could have passed for much older, and scarred all over, including a crater in the top of his head. Slight and gaunt, he wore a faded and patched shirt. His sandals flagged him as a Muslim. (Lebanese Christians usually opted for stylish European shoes.)

After he passed through the metal detector, I led him along the embassy’s metal labyrinthine sandbagged trenches, down a hill, and out a back exit, where I had pre-positioned a car.

As soon as we turned onto the coastal highway, I asked Mr. Walker for his national identity card. When he pulled it from his shirt pocket and showed it to me, I almost drove off the road. He had the same family name as a member of Mughniyah’s group. I held my breath when I asked Mr. Walker - I’ll call him Hasan - if he was related to the terrorist of the same name. ‘He’s a first cousin,’ he told me.

My objective became putting our relationship on a clandestine footing as quickly as possible. As the first cousin of a notorious IJO terrorist, Hasan had a half-life in Christian East Beirut of about five seconds. I needed to find a secure place to let him off and another secure spot to pick him up for the next meeting. The less terrain he had to cross in East Beirut to meet me, the better. I headed to Sinn Al-Fill, the same neighborhood where I met Parid.

We talked on the way. I wanted to know everything about him: where he lived, whether he was married, how many children he had. I also needed to learn whom he was close to in Hezbollah and the IJO. He wasn’t a member of either, he told me, but even as he spoke, I was contemplating how to insert him into one of those assemblies of worthies.

We also talked about how he could justify coming across the Green Line to the east if challenged. It wasn’t as if you could pop over to Sinn Al-Fill to buy a pizza: No one crossed without a very good reason. We agreed that he would say he was buying Islamic books for a German scholar of Islam who lived in the east. Since the fictional German couldn’t go into the west, Hasan, if challenged, would explain that he did his buying for him. It wasn’t the most ingenious cover, but it was all I could come up with on short notice. I gave Hasan a sterile telephone number - one not associated with the office.

Finally, as I was about to drop Hasan off, I asked him why he had decided to meet with the CIA.

‘I can’t stand the murder of innocent people. What Hezbollah does is wrong.’

‘But it’s risky’ I said. ‘You have children. If you’re caught, you’ll be tortured to death.’

‘I know. But God protects me.’

I waited for Hasan to explain. I thought I knew where the conversation was going. I was wrong.

‘I play Russian roulette,’ Hasan said sheepishly.

I’d heard the rumor that fanatic Muslims had taken up the sport to test divine determination. A round in the chamber was God’s way of letting you know your time was up. But I never took the rumor seriously at least until now. Before I let Hasan out, I made him promise to stop playing Russian roulette. Just meeting me, I told him, was all the fate he wanted to tempt.

Hasan joined Hezbollah, found a job in one of its offices, and turned into a fantastic agent, the CIA’s first in the group.

The analysts back home sent me reams of questions about what shaykh so-and-so thought about shaykh so-and-so, how much Hezbollah was spending on its social welfare programs, or when it was going to enter mainstream Lebanese politics. But what interested me were Imad Mughniyah and the IJO.

Since you had to be recruited to the IJO, I asked Hasan to work the problem on the edges. Not surprisingly, my first order of business was the April 18, 1983, bombing. Hasan and I talked it over at length. I knew he was politically savvy, so I simply confessed that the US government had no idea who blew up the embassy. The canned Middle East response was that it was inconceivable the CIA didn’t have a clue about a terrorist attack that killed seventeen Americans. Hasan didn’t go for it. ‘For lack of a better lead,’ he said,’ why not let’s start with Imad?’ At that moment, I knew Hasan had as good a chance as any agent to come up with some of the answers I was after.

Hasan started praying at a mosque whose imam was close to Mughniyah. Hasan went every Friday and soon joined a religious study group. A good writer, he started crafting tracts for the imam. Because the imam knew Hasan was related to an IJO terrorist, he accepted him as one of the faithful.

One day when Hasan was alone with the imam, he decided the time was right to bring up the bombing. As we’d agreed, Hasan started with a ploy. Instead of charging ahead and asking who the suicide bomber was, he mentioned the name of a young man who had been in the imam’s congregation for many years but had disappeared. Lowering his voice conspiratorially, Hasan said he’d heard the young man was the suicide driver who blew up the US embassy in April 1983.

‘Where did you hear that?’ the imam asked.

Hasan responded vaguely that he’d heard it from his IJO cousin. He knew the imam would never check back with his cousin.

‘No,’ the imam answered. ‘No, he was not the blessed martyr who destroyed the American spy nest.’

Hasan insisted he was right.

‘No, you’re wrong.’ The imam didn’t appreciate having his authority challenged. ‘It was Brother Hassuna. I know very well.’

‘Who?’

‘Muhammad Hassuna.’

This was the first time we’d ever had a name for the suicide bomber, but the story still needed to be nailed down. I invited Bernie back to Beirut to polygraph Hasan. Two days later he was scrambling out of the door of a Blackhawk.

It was another flawless day. Bernie was calmer than on his first visit; the fighting along the Green Line had died down. If everything went smoothly, Hasan would be in and out of the polygraph before lunch.

Things were going fine until we turned down the main street into Sinn Al-Fill. We were about three blocks from the pickup site when a blast from a . 50-caliber machine gun hit a neon sign hanging over the road, spraying glass over the car. Just above our roof, wires sparked and sizzled. I looked at Bernie. The expression on his face seemed to say,’ Do I shoot him for putting my life in danger, then run? Or do I just run?’

A second burst from the .50 thudded into the wall of a building farther down the street.

Bernie pointed at my foot. ‘That’s your foot. And right under it is the gas pedal. Now apply one to the other - and let’s get the fuck out of here!’

We found a quiet street out of the line of fire, and Bernie waited in the car, glumly resigned to spending the rest of the day with a lunatic, while I went looking for Hasan.

Eventually, he came walking down the main street of Sinn Al-Fill, looking like he was taking a stroll along the corniche. Although the shooting had stopped, the street was completely deserted. Maybe the Russian roulette paid off after all.

Hasan passed the polygraph with flying colors, including whether the imam had told him Hassuna was the suicide bomber.

The polygraph was a start, but I couldn’t rely on it. Perhaps the imam had lied to Hasan, or maybe he didn’t really know the identity of the suicide bomber and was simply covering up his ignorance. Since I couldn’t polygraph the imam, it was time to go back to the matrices.

Hassuna was not a common name in Lebanon. That helped. I had all of my agents look into the Hassuna family. Samir knew a Major Hassuna, and promised to check with him to see if any members of the family were missing. A week later he dropped the bombshell on me - one of Major Hassuna’s brothers, Muhammad, had died on the Iraq front in Iran.

‘Iran?’ I asked incredulously. ‘How’s that possible? Lebanese don’t simply pull up stakes and go fight for Iran.’

Samir shrugged. ‘I’ll find out.’

At the next meeting, Samir said that Major Hassuna had told him his family was non-practicing Muslims. They rarely went to the mosque or read the Koran, but Muhammad was different. Their father was alcoholic and abusive, and Muhammad took it particularly badly. In his search for a deeper faith, he had embraced Shi’a Islam, and in early 1983 he had unexpectedly informed his family that he was going to Iran to fight in the war with Iraq. That was the last they heard of him until they received a letter from the Iranian embassy that Muhammad had died in a battle on the front. There were few remains, the letter said, and he was buried in a military cemetery in Iran. Included in the letter was a Polaroid of Muhammad’s gravestone. The major didn’t know anything more about his brother’s death.

I had Farid dig up the official records on Muhammad Hassuna. Although Hassuna had a passport, there was no record that he had ever traveled out of the country. According to the family civil registration records in Sidon, the Hassuna family’s residence was Awza’i, a neighborhood near the airport controlled by Hezbollah.

Although I was a long way from producing evidence that would hold up in court, I was getting closer every day. I wrote up what I knew about Hassuna in a long, detailed intelligence report - the first in a series I would do on the bombing.

A few days later, headquarters advised that the report would not be disseminated. ‘While the information is compelling,’ they wrote,’ it is only of historical interest.’ In plain English, the national security community no longer gave a damn who had bombed our embassy in Beirut.

In a way, I could almost understand Washington’s not caring. The CIA was falling into the hands of people who had never put their lives on the line to learn about terrorism in places like Beirut. The embassy bombing for them wasn’t just ancient history; it was a distraction from their career ambitions. Why mess up a spotless record by bearing news of one of the agency’s darkest hours? I saw my job differently. If we didn’t know who we were up against, we wouldn’t know what they were capable of, and might not learn until they showed up on our shores, armed to the teeth.

Besides, there was still an outstanding arrest warrant for Mughniyah. All I needed was someone with the balls to exercise it.

I’ll call the man I found Jean. Jean was about thirty-two and, like Mughniyah, had spent his life fighting on the Green Line. The only difference was, he killed and kidnapped Muslims rather than the other way around. Jean had made a name for himself when he flattened a foreign embassy to improve his field of fire.

Jean was waiting for me at a nightclub called Dominos.

‘I always knew one day the CIA would come knocking at my door when it had some work too dirty to do itself,’ Jean said, shaking my hand.

I kept quiet while I looked around. Although it was already past eleven at night, Dominos was only now starting to fill up. Arms dealers, Colombian narcotics traffickers, Christian Gucci warlords - an entire demimonde did its business there. Aside from the inset lighting over the bar, Dominos was pitch black, and the music was just loud enough to mask a conversation but not drown it out.

I turned back to Jean. ‘I need a network in the west, people who are not going to waste my time.’

‘I don’t do intelligence. Go talk to the Lebanese Forces if you want information.’

The Lebanese Forces were the main Christian militia. We both knew its intelligence wasn’t very good.

‘It’s not information I’m after. I need to do an operation.’

Jean grinned. ‘So Syria has finally crossed the line.’

‘No, I want to get someone in the southern suburbs.’

‘A hit?’

‘No. I need the guy alive.’

‘Who is it?’

‘You find me the people and we’ll talk.’

Jean wrote down the name of a video store in Zuq, an out-of-the-way neighborhood in East Beirut. ‘Tomorrow morning at ten.’

He was sitting in his Range Rover in front of the video store when I arrived. He got out and motioned me to follow him, and we walked through the store, out the back door, and into an apartment building through its alley entrance. The electricity was off. We climbed five flights of stairs.

A Lebanese army captain opened the door. A second officer was sitting behind him on the sofa. On the dining room table sat a cutoff M-16 with a suppressor and a laser sight: not exactly your standard-issue weapon for the Lebanese army.

The captain’s left hand looked like a webbed duck foot. My guess was that it had been mangled by an explosive charge. When he went into a corner of the room to talk with Jean, I noticed that one of his legs was shorter than the other as well.

‘The captain is ready to hear you out,’ Jean said when he turned back to me.

As soon as I started talking about needing a network in the west, the captain grinned just as Jean had.