See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (9 page)

I stayed in the car as Singh talked with the men. Every now and again they’d look over at the jeep, and I’d get terrified that they were going to ask for the paperwork. I was starting to suspect the jeep was hot, liberated from the Indian army. If that was the case, both Singh and I would be hauled off to jail. Happily it was too dark for them to see that I wasn’t an Indian or that the jeep had civilian plates on it. Singh was wearing his uniform, and no doubt they thought we were both army.

Singh finally handed the peacock to one of the men and walked back to the jeep, grinning sheepishly.

‘That was Mrs. Gandhi’s estate,’ he said as we pulled away.

Not only had Singh trespassed on Indira Gandhi’s estate, he’d killed an Indian national bird, which was also illegal. Close calls like that weren’t part of the course at the Farm.

The more I saw of Singh, the more it looked like he was ready to be separated from the flock. One weekend I brought Wild Bill on a hunting trip. It never hurt to have a second opinion. Bill and Singh hit it off. Afterward Bill agreed with me that it was time to pop the question. In fact, I invited Bill to be there for the show.

Singh knew something was up as soon as he walked in the room and saw Bill. He kept smiling, though. We were all friends. I brought Singh a beer.

I started about as steadily as when I had pitched Sami, rambling about our long friendship.

‘Major,’ Bill cut me off. ‘Let’s don’t horse around. Bob and I work for the CIA.’

Now that that grenade was thrown, I took back over. I asked Singh if he wanted to work for the CIA as an agent. He went pale. It looked for a moment as if he was going to get up and leave. He thought better of it, though, probably remembering he’d broken the rules by not reporting his contact with me and accepting the shotgun. He’d already compromised himself. When I finished, he hesitated and then said he would think about it.

Major Singh eventually turned down the pitch, but making it did wonders for my confidence. We remained friends for years. Soon recruiting agents became as natural as ordering a pizza over the telephone. It’s all a matter of listening to what people are really saying. Money problems, an awful boss, secret desires or allegiances can all be windows into small compromises that grow into larger and larger ones. It took me a while, but I finally learned how to read the dark forest of other people’s minds and then walk them into espionage small step by small step. Toward the end of my career, I never had a pitch rejected.

For most of my tour in New Delhi, I was extremely lucky to fall under the IB’s radar. It put only sporadic surveillance on me. The lax coverage mattered, too, because in addition to the double I had been handed and my efforts to recruit Singh, I’d picked up five other agents. I was meeting an agent every two or three nights - a lot in a hostile environment like India.

My luck almost changed for the worse one night in August. A week of monsoon had left half of Delhi’s roads flooded and impassable, bad conditions for meeting agents, but since Madras, I had learned to avoid the low areas. Besides, I expected the meeting to be brief. Pass the agent some cash, I figured, and kick him out the door in the first dark alley.

As soon as I turned the corner, I could see he was carrying a bulky duffel bag. He was also breathing heavily, as if he had run to the meeting.

‘T-72 manuals,’ he said, pointing at the bag as he climbed in the car. ‘What?’ I asked, almost certain I’d heard him wrong. Grinning from ear to ear, he repeated himself.

The T-72 tank manuals were the Holy Grail we’d been after for years, the keys to the kingdom of knowledge. My heart started racing, especially when the agent said he had to have them back in two hours. The sergeant who had borrowed the manuals needed to return them to the safe before he went off duty. There wasn’t enough time to go to the office, copy them, and run a good counter surveillance route. Worse, at that hour New Delhi would be crawling with IB, but I could take them that night or maybe never.

The choice seemed obvious. I slammed on the brakes, pushed the agent out of the car, and yelled at him to meet me in two hours behind guest house number three at Delhi’s Gymkhana Club. The agent looked at me, confused. I reiterated,’ You’re either in the goddamn bushes behind number three or you don’t get your manuals back. ‘I sprayed him with gravel as I spun the car around.

As soon as I got into the office, I called the officer who did our technical operations, or the tech as we called him, to come help. He worked the document copier, and I the lone Xerox. Inevitably, the paper jammed not long before the machine ran out of toner. The toner was locked in a closet, which neither of us had the key to. The tech had to drill the lock. By the time we finished, I had exactly seventeen minutes to get to the Gymkhana Club.

As I passed through the first circular intersection, I saw a parked car turn on its lights and pull out after me. A second fell in behind it. I checked my watch. I now had six minutes to get to the handoff with the agent. Ordinarily, I would have driven around until I’d flushed out the two cars, but there was no time,

I continued along the main road, which was bumper-to-bumper with cars. With all the swimming lights in my rearview mirror, I couldn’t tell whether the two cars were still behind me or not.

About half a mile away from the Gymkhana, I cut down a back street, a shortcut I’d taken hundreds of times and one I knew would be empty of traffic at that time of night. As soon as I turned the corner, I slammed down on the gas pedal. I must have been doing fifty by the time I was halfway down the block. No one drove that fast on Delhi’s side streets, and anyone trying to keep up with me would have to show himself. I kept my eyes fixed on the rearview mirror.

I don’t know if it was because of a premonition or not, but when I looked back at the road, an enormous cow was spanning it. I knew in that split second that if I hit the brake, I would skid and hit the cow, dead center. That left me the option of going around it. The problem was that India’s sacred cows are completely unpredictable. When they panic, they’re as likely to bolt forward as to turn and bolt the other way. Flipping a mental coin, I headed for the cow’s rear end and cleared it by a good two inches. The right side of the car had dipped into a mud-filled sinkhole on the side of the road - I could hear the axle scraping along the edge - but my momentum carried me through. It was a miracle I didn’t flip. As soon as the car stopped fishtailing, I looked in my rearview mirror. The cow was gone, but in its place there were now at least three pairs of lights. They had to be IB. Worse, they were gaining on me.

I knew I had broken all the rules. The last thing you want to do when you’re under surveillance is to tweak the adversary’s interest. It only makes him more determined. But I had no choice. I could either hand back the manuals - I had three minutes now - or abort, and the agent had made it clear that if the sergeant didn’t return them that night, he would be caught and arrested, bringing the whole house of cards tumbling down.

By the time I pulled through the Gymkhana’s gates, the three pairs of lights had grown to five. In my rearview mirror I watched them file through the gates one by one. The closest car was maybe ten feet from my rear bumper. There wasn’t any more road, but I kept going - right down a gravel walking path between two tennis courts. I figured they wouldn’t follow me. I was right. All five cars stopped in front of the club’s main building and started deploying on foot. I hit the brakes, stuffed the duffel bag with the manuals in it into a tennis bag, and ducked between two tamarind trees. Footsteps echoed behind me as I followed a path bordered by tall myrtle until I came to a protected section of the hedge that fronted guest house number three. I could see the agent’s shadow through the foliage, right where I had told him to be. Without stopping, I pulled the duffel bag out of the tennis bag and tossed it through the hedge in one quick motion. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the agent pick it up and walk away.

I continued along the path and entered the Gymkhana’s bar through the back door. The place was empty except for a distinguished Indian gentleman in a three-piece suit, sitting alone and reading a newspaper. I walked over and sat next to him. Without saying a word, I summoned a waiter and ordered two double Scotches, straight up and no ice, for both of us. It wasn’t until I struck up a conversation as if we were old friends that he looked like he might run for it.

I glanced at the back door and saw two of my surveillants. They were looking alternately at my tennis bag, the Indian gentleman, and me. I could tell that their interest was quickly narrowing down to the Indian gentleman, trying to figure out why I’d been in such a hurry to come see him. By the time they got around to questioning him, the agent would have long cleared the area and returned the manuals to the sergeant.

Nothing like beating the odds. I ordered another round for my new friend and me.

After these years in India, I was like a carpenter finishing up an apprenticeship. I had all the tools and skills to go out on my own. The only thing I needed now was a specialty. I asked to study Chinese, but before the East Asian Division could answer, the Near East Division came in with an offer to put me through its two-year Arabic course. I knew next to nothing about the Middle East, but I accepted without a second thought. I’d been hanging around in the frying pan. It was time to jump into the fire.

A dented, late-model GMC pickup truck pulled off to the side of the road, just beyond the burned-out husk of the St. George’s Hotel. The driver left the engine running and calmly watched the traffic along Beirut’s seafront corniche.

No one paid any attention to the pickup or noticed that it was sitting low on its springs. The civil war was over, as far as most Lebanese were I concerned. The Israeli army, which invaded Lebanon in June 1982 to I crush Palestinian guerilla groups operating there, had already withdrawn well south of Beirut and was about to pull back even farther. And the Palestinian guerrillas, who had owned Beirut’s streets since the start of the Lebanese civil war in April 1975, had withdrawn too, to Tripoli in the north and the Biqa Valley. The American, British, French, and i Italian troops that made up the Multi-National Force now patrolled in their place. Even the Lebanese who detested foreigners and blamed them for the country’s problems took grudging comfort in the French Le Clerc armored personnel carriers driving up and down Hamra, Beirut’s central business district. Although they would never admit it, they were also pleased that American marines, with their M-16s and flak vests, guarded the airport. Lebanon wasn’t exactly at peace, but it was closer than it had been in a long time.

You could smell the optimism in the air. The Lebanese who had left during the civil war were coming back, and they had money in their pockets to rebuild what had once been one of the most European and modernized of Arab cities. Only six months after the Israeli invasion, Beirut was one vast, sprawling construction site. Hardly a building wasn’t being painted, patched up, or torn down to put up another one. Cranes, scaffolding, backhoes, and street crews clogged the streets day and night. A beat-up truck sitting low on its springs, idling by the side of the road, wasn’t about to attract anyone’s attention.

At 12:43 PM. the pickup’s driver spotted the old green Mercedes as it came flying around the corner in front of the Ayn Muraysah mosque, darting in and out of traffic and trying to make headway against the usual crush of traffic. As the Mercedes got closer, the pickup driver recognized the two men in the front seat. He had been with them only a few hours before, when they had met for final preparations. The driver waited until the Mercedes flashed its lights three times. That was the prearranged signal that the approach to the target was clear. The driver then slammed his pickup into first gear and pulled into traffic, barely missing a dump truck. He headed along the corniche toward Ayn Muraysah, in the direction the Mercedes had just come from. On his right, strollers walked along the esplanade, beside the teal blue, silver-speckled sea. On his left, the upscale apartments of Ayn Muraysah seemed to tumble down the hill toward him. The driver, though, stared only at the car in front of him. That was the one thing they hadn’t taken into account-. lunchtime traffic.

As he neared the seven-story American embassy, the driver searched for a chance to cut across the oncoming lane. He slowed, nearly to a stop, as the drivers behind him pounded furiously on their horns. When a gap opened between two cars, he abruptly swerved the truck into it, almost colliding with a woman who was driving her two children home from school.

Now the driver pushed the gas pedal against the floor and pointed the truck toward the exit of the embassy’s semicircular covered driveway. By the time it entered the driveway, the truck was moving too fast for the guards to draw their weapons. The guard understood what was about to happen. They’d seen it so many times before in Beirut. All they could do was throw themselves on the ground and pray.

The pickup truck hit an outbuilding but continued forward, ascending the short flight of steps leading to the lobby. Just as it crashed through the lobby’s door - at exactly 1:03 PM. local time, according to the State Department’s official announcement - it exploded. Even by Beirut standards, it was an enormous blast, shattering windows for miles around. The US S. Guadalcanal, anchored five miles off the coast, shuddered from the tremors. At ground zero, the center of the seven-story embassy lifted up hundreds of feet into the air, remained suspended for what seemed an eternity, and then collapsed in a cloud of dust, people, splintered furniture, and paper. The lobby itself was blasted into powder. The thick Plexiglas window protecting Guard Post 1 imploded at about 27, 600 feet per second, disintegrating the young marine on duty. The only part of him found was the melted brass buttons of his tunic.

Sixty-three people, including seventeen Americans, were killed in what was then the deadliest terrorist attack against the US ever, but the CIA was hardest hit. Six officers died, including the chief, his deputy and the deputy’s wife. The deputy’s wife had started working at the embassy only that morning. Bob Ames, the CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Near East, was killed, too. Bob had stopped by the embassy on a visit to Beirut. His hand was found floating a mile offshore, the wedding ring still on his finger. Never before had the CIA lost so many officers in a single attack. It was a tragedy from which the agency would never recover.

In the next twenty-four hours, swarms of CIA and FBI investigators descended on Beirut. The problem was, there wasn’t much left to investigate. The explosion completely consumed the driver. There was no trace of the detonator either, leading to the hypothesis that the bomb maker had placed a small amount of explosives inside the device to make sure it was destroyed in the explosion. Detonators are signatures - something an expert would not want to leave behind.

The mystery only deepened when the FBI forensic experts were unable to take a swipe from the rubble to determine the composition of the explosive. Semtex? RDX? C-4? They had no idea. Eventually, they found a trace of PETN, but most military explosives contain some PETN. It added little to solving the bombing. One explanation was that half-filled acetylene tanks wrapped around the explosives not only served to enhance the brisance of the charge - the destructive fragmentation effect - but also to ensure the obliteration of the explosives along with the driver and detonator. As for the truck, the FBI finally found a piece of the chassis with a VIN number and traced it to its original buyer in Texas. Someone had bought it used and shipped it to the Gulf, but the trail went cold there. The FBI couldn’t figure out how it got to Beirut, let alone who owned it.

Lebanese intelligence and the CIA fared no better. The Lebanese investigators assumed the driver was a Shi’a Muslim, but only because the Shi’a were more inclined to commit suicide in a terrorist operation than other Muslims. The Lebanese agents fanned out across Beirut’s southern suburbs and the Biqa Valley, where most of the radicalized Shi’a lived, but they couldn’t come up with a credible rumor or any leads. The CIA’s sources also came up empty.

Three groups would call in to claim responsibility, but the CIA wasn’t even sure whether they existed. All three calls could have been hoaxes. The Lebanese arrested a half-dozen people, but it looked like a case of rounding up the usual suspects to make it look like they were on top of the investigation.

The bombers left no return address. Whoever they were, they were very, very good.

I was in Tunis studying Arabic when the news of the bombing hit like a sonic boom. All of us, the students and the instructors, knew someone working in the embassy in Beirut. I’ll never forget Khaldiyah, an older woman who had worked in the Beirut embassy for many years, putting her head on the table and sobbing uncontrollably.

I figured some radical Palestinian group was behind the explosion, and it would be only a matter of weeks before someone was caught and the plot exposed. I turned out to be wrong. I had no idea the bombing would never be officially solved or that it would become for me a lifelong obsession, but the seeds of the latter were already sown. I’d visited Beirut a few months before the bombing and talked to some of our people there, including the chief and his deputy who had died. Even today I can close my eyes and see them and their offices and imagine them crumbling into dust. Between the mystery of who did it and the memory of who died there, I would never be able to leave it alone. (The account of the bombing just given, I should point out, has been assembled from fact, contemporary rumor, bits and pieces of information I’ve gathered over the years, and speculation based on nearly two decades of research.)

Four months after the bombing, I finished up my two-year Arabic course and was assigned to XXXXXXX then a small but important outpost in the Middle East. Its reporting was avidly read in Washington. I had an outstanding agent who produced a stream of documents and firsthand intelligence. There were plenty of hard targets, too, and after New Delhi, the local surveillance was a breeze. It felt great to be back on the streets, running agents, and putting my Arabic to use. And, frankly, I needed all the practice I could get. Even after two solid years of training, I was still a long way from any sort of fluency. It would take years before I was comfortable in the language.

Things started off well enough with my new chief, John XXXXXX but it wasn’t long before I realized he wasn’t Wild Bill. A slight man with a nervous tic, John wore a meticulously pressed suit and a pair of brilliantly shined wing tips to the office every day, including weekends. I could have lived with the fact that he dressed like a Foreign Service officer, but not that he had an account-book mentality about spying to match. John refused to take risks. He thought the worst thing that could befall a case officer was to be caught trying to recruit an agent.

Instead of worrying about intelligence, John fretted over meeting headquarters’ paper deadlines. When a request came through from Langley for some inconsequential progress report, John would stop everything to have it in a week early, before any other office in the Middle East. It infuriated him when I handed in my accountings late, even though the office invariably owed me money. It was clear we were headed for a blowup. It came when I tried to bug a terrorist safe house.

During the first year of my Arabic course in Washington, D. C. , I’d made friends with a young Palestinian student. He had no idea I worked for the CIA. He helped me with Arabic; I helped him with English. We hit the Georgetown bars together, and he introduced me to Arabic cooking. But what cemented our friendship was when I helped him polish up an essay that won him a grant for graduate school. When it came time for me to leave, he pulled me aside and told me he had a brother living in the city I was headed to. I’ll call the brother Khalid. He gave me Khalid’s address and telephone number, adding cryptically that Khalid could help me with any security problems I might have.

I called Khalid shortly after I arrived, and he immediately agreed to meet. It turned out Khalid was a member of a Palestinian terrorist group. We both knew he would lose his scalp if he was caught with a CIA officer, but Khalid took the risk because his brother had told him to. That was one of my first lessons in how the Middle East works: You don’t recruit an individual; you recruit families, clans, and tribes.

Late one night when we were driving around - by then we’d put our meetings on a clandestine footing - Khalid was oddly quiet, though grinning from ear to ear. At last, unable to contain himself any longer, he dropped the news. He’d just found out about a secret Abu Nidal office, and he thought terrorist operations were planned there.

Khalid was right to be excited. Abu Nidal was at the top of the CIA’s hit parade. A cold-blooded murderer, he had attempted to assassinate the Israeli ambassador to London, provoking Israel to invade Lebanon on June 6, 1982, and very nearly drawing the whole Middle East into war. We knew he would try again, given the opportunity.

As I let Khalid out of the car, he handed me the address of the Abu Nidal office. Without saying a word to John, I checked the address out the next day, walking around the neighborhood. Although it was a three-story apartment building, common in that part of town, a guard with a machine gun stood in the building’s unlit vestibule, barely visible from the street. Since nothing identified the building as a government office, which would have explained the guard, I figured the odds weren’t bad that it was just what Khalid had said.

Two adjoining buildings shared walls with the Abu Nidal office. If you could get access to one of those apartments, it would be only a matter of drilling a hole in the wall with a silenced drill and putting in a microphone. Providing you didn’t drill all the way through to the other side, the operation would be a piece of cake. In a pinch, we probably could have listened straight though the wall with an accelerometer, or contact microphone - a little like putting a glass up to the wall to hear through.

Back in the office, John looked at me wide-eyed as I explained my plan. ‘There’s absolutely no way State’s going to approve it,’ he interrupted.

‘What does State have to do with it?’ I asked, thinking he might have misunderstood me. ‘We find an agent to rent an apartment in one of the adjoining buildings, bring in a tech team, drill, stick a mike in the hole, and then keep our fingers crossed that we get some take from it.’

‘Bob, you don’t have the slightest idea what political sensitivities involved. This country is important to the United States. No one wants to risk alienating it by undertaking a risky operation. We can’t afford a misstep that would give it an excuse to drop out of the peace process.’

Clearly, John thought I should be able to grasp the political nuances on my own. I was about to let the matter go when he made the mistake of trying to appease me.

‘You know, we can do quite well with the softer targets here,’ he said. ‘The Australian national day is coming up. Why don’t you try to finagle an invitation?’

‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ I said. ‘Who in God’s name do you expect me to meet at an Australian embassy reception?’

John pulled out a rag he kept in his top desk drawer and started buffing his wing tips. When the buffing rag came out, I knew the conversation was over.