Ghost (10 page)

“Look those over,” Gleason tells me. “Figure out what questions to ask, what we need to know.”

“What are we looking for?” I ask.

“Everything. Find out how he was taken, who took him, where they took him. Get details of every place he was held. Pick up anything that might be useful to Delta Force and the special operations teams at Fort Bragg. Maybe if we can get enough, we can launch a rescue operation for the rest. Okay?”

“Roger. Am I doing this alone?”

“I’ll be there for a while. There’ll also be one agent from the FBI and one from the CIA asking questions with you. You’ll be lead on these debriefs for us after this one.”

I start plowing through the files. I scribble notes and use my own knowledge as a cop. If I were leading a rescue operation, what sort of intel would I want?

Guards: Number and armament? What sort of training? Professionals or thugs? How did they hold their weapons? That alone can telegraph how alert, disciplined, and prepared they are. When did they change guards? Were they on a regular schedule? How many were there? Are they paid lackeys or committed jihadists?

Location: Where do they lock the hostages up? Rural farms, urban basements? How many windows in the rooms or cells? How do the doors swing, into the room or out? Where are the hallways? Dimensions? Did they move the hostage around? If so, how did they transport him? Day or night?

How about sounds and smells? We must dig up anything and everything that might help our analysts find Hezbollah’s makeshift prison cells holding our people.

Two hours into the flight and I’m shivering in my Barbour Beaufort. The freezing mid-Atlantic air is turning the passenger bay into a refrigerator. Leaning across the empty seat between us, Gleason says, “Look, Fred, we’ve got to confirm if Buckley is still alive or not. You know Islamic Jihad announced they executed him.”

I nod. Last October they tipped the media and sent along a few fuzzy photos of a corpse to prove it. The jury is still out on his fate.

“He’s one of us. He’s a legend in the business. Company commander in Korea. Silver Star. Soldier’s Medal. Two Purple Hearts. Military Assistance Command in Vietnam. He was William Casey’s fair-haired boy. Had lots of latitude. Made some enemies. The Agency wants him back at all costs, okay?”

“And if he’s dead?”

“Then we find out who did it, and who interrogated him.”

I make a note to check with the hostage—provided he isn’t Buckley—and find out if there were Caucasians working with the Hezbollah cell who kept him. If so, that means there’s probably KGB involvement. If the KGB got to Buckley, it would be a disaster far worse than if the Iranians had squeezed him. Buckley’s been with the Agency since before Vietnam. He worked with the CIA’s assassination program during the war, then later served in Cambodia, Egypt, and Pakistan. The stuff he knows could fill volumes.

“Look, Fred,” Gleason’s voice drops an octave and takes on a tenor I hadn’t heard before. “I’ve been doing this for two and a half years without any help. I’m getting out soon. You and Mullen will be the institutional memory around here. I know I’ve left you in the dark a lot. I’m sorry for that, but there is a reason. I’ve been through a leak investigation. You don’t want to go through that. The one thing that will help you survive is a reputation for tight lips, okay? Not everyone is with us.”

His words flash me back a few weeks. We’d been trying to get some information out of a bureaucrat upstairs, but the guy had been stonewalling us. Gleason sent me up to tell him if he didn’t shake loose the stuff we needed, Gleason would file charges against him for withholding evidence. These little moments made me realize the essential truth of Steve Gleason: He will get the job done at all costs. If somebody becomes an obstacle to his objective, he will go around him or through him. Or arrest him. Whatever it takes.

I’ve felt lost these past months, struggling to learn on the fly all the thousand things I need to know in order to do my job. In a way, my own game of catch-up mirrors our counterterror effort. Now, as I’ve progressed along the learning curve, Gleason’s starting to put his trust in me. He’s given me this assignment to get me ready. This is my step forward from rookie agent to veteran counterterror investigator. He’ll hold my hand for part of the time, then he’ll cut me loose to sink or swim in front of the FBI and Agency guys.

Gleason leans back in his seat, “It’s been a long two years, Fred.”

“I don’t know how you did this by yourself.”

He ignores my comment. “We’re going to get more help before I leave. You and Mullen won’t have to hold the fort down alone, okay?”

He stands and heads up the aisle to talk with one of the other spooks. I’m left alone, wondering if I’m ready to fly solo. This is what I wanted when I first decided to join the DSS. I wanted to do something more with my life than breaking up high school keggers and getting in the middle of domestic fights. I wanted a bigger role, and federal service seemed to offer it. This trip is my final exam as far as Steve’s concerned. Pass it, and my apprenticeship will be over.

I bury myself in the files again. Hours pass, and my notes pile up.

Gleason returns, and says, “After the debrief, each agent will file a report. We’ll send it flash precedence.”

“Roger, sir.”

“Bring your A-game, Fred. Your report will go directly to the NSC and to the White House. The president is very interested.”

My report will be read by the president? Back when I was a cop, I was lucky if our watch commander read anything I wrote. I will be under a microscope, with all the pressure that entails.

“I’ll oversee things and run air cover for you with D.C. and the DOD, okay? That way you guys can focus on your job.”

“Thanks.”

“How do you feel?”

“I’m ready.”

“Good. Get some sleep. We’ll be landing in a few hours.”

Gleason slumps into his seat and I turn to the window. There’s nothing but black beyond the glass. The Atlantic in the dead of night is the darkest place on the planet.

I find myself thinking about my father. He’d been in the army during World War II, serving as a military policeman in Western Europe. He saw the concentration camps, saw the worst of what humanity could do. He smelled the bodies, saw them stacked like cordwood. When the war ended, his MP unit guarded the Nazi leaders whom the Allies subsequently tried at Nuremberg. He stood in the courtroom, guarding the prisoners as the Allied prosecutors revealed all the barbarity and cruelty of Hitler’s Germany. Day after day, the testimony revealed just how far the descent into madness had gone. The sallow-faced bureaucrats sitting in the dock were among history’s greatest mass murderers. Nobody shed a tear when they were hung.

Years later, my dad’s stories of his time in Germany filled me with indignation. His sense of right and wrong became my own. I learned through him that there is no space between black and white, there is only right and wrong. Take that first step down the wrong path, and it can lead only to evil. For me, my path through life has been a narrow one, defined by that sense of right and wrong. But in my world now, the justice my father witnessed at Nuremberg seems such a distant hope. Today there are only victims with faint hope of seeing justice served on their tormenters. The two Libyan hits taught me that. Prevention is the best form of justice in this line of work. But how do you prevent such random, brutal acts?

Maybe the Atlantic isn’t the darkest place on earth after all. Maybe that distinction goes to the human heart.

ten

ONE MORE GOLD STAR

July 27, 1986
Wiesbaden, Germany
U.S. Air Force Hospital

Staring out the hospital window at this ex-Luftwaffe base in Wiesbaden, our released hostage, Father Martin Jenco, answers our most pressing question.

“Buckley? William Buckley is dead.”

I don’t want to believe those words. From the look on the FBI and CIA agents’ faces, neither do they. Father Jenco sees the shock register on all of us and offers, “He died of natural causes.”

More surprises. “What?” all three of us ask.

Puzzled, he replies, “I assumed you knew.”

Nobody answers. We just stare.

“I can’t tell you much,” Jenco explains. “It happened right after they moved me. I’d been chained to a radiator for six months by myself. For some reason, they decided to put me with the other Americans in early June of ’85.”

Father Jenco’s voice is steady, but he looks weak from his ordeal. His eyes are ringed, his face is pallid, and his white, General Ambrose Burnside–style beard is bushy and untamed. He came out of Syria on July 26 and was flown straight to us in Wiesbaden. He hasn’t even had a chance to see his family yet. I understand about a dozen of his relatives have just flown in from the States, eager to welcome him back to civilization.

“I heard him calling out. He was hallucinating, ordering breakfast from the bathroom. I think he said, ‘I’ll have blueberry pancakes.’ He coughed all the time, and that got worse as he got weaker. David Jacobsen and I pleaded with the guards to get him medical assistance.”

He pauses. His eyes are dry, but I can see he’s in tremendous pain. He adjusts his wide, goggle-style glasses before continuing. “One night, they dragged him past me. They told me he was going to the hospital, but I knew he was dead.”

And there it is.

“Father,” I ask, “was he tortured?”

“Not to my knowledge. But I was only with him for a short time.”

All I can think of are the stars on the wall at Langley. Buckley’s will be another anonymous addition. The man was a hero, a patriot. He fought in two wars and countless skirmishes in the Dark World. He should not have died this way.
We
should not have let this happen.

We’re only ten minutes into our debriefing with Father Jenco and already the pages of questions related to Buckley have been made irrelevant by the news. I set them aside and rethink how to proceed.

“After he died, they brought in a Jewish doctor to examine us. They later killed him.” Father Jenco’s voice trails off. The hospital room we’re in is suddenly deathly silent.

The FBI agent asks, “On the videotape you brought out, Jacobsen says Buckley was executed.”

I haven’t seen it yet, but Hezbollah gave Father Jenco a seven-minute-long tape of Jacobsen. He apparently read from a script and asked President Reagan to do more for their release.

“I don’t know about that,” Jenco replies.

Nods all around. This wouldn’t be the first time Hezbollah claimed to have executed somebody who died of natural causes in their hands. With Buckley, though, we need to learn more. What had happened to him?

“Do you know what they did with William Buckley’s body?” the Agency man asks.

“No, I’m sorry. I don’t know. I was almost always blindfolded. I was in chains. I never saw much.”

We need to start at the beginning. I shuffle my notes. What do I need to learn from Father Jenco to help keep others alive? First off, we need to know how he was abducted. If we can dissect Hezbollah’s snatch-and-grab tactics, maybe we can construct some counters to them that will dissuade further attempts on Americans in Beirut.

“Father Jenco, please…let’s start from the point you were abducted. How did they do it?”

The priest takes a deep breath and begins the story of his ordeal. As his words tumble out, the angst on his face grows. He looks frail and even wearier than ever. It does not take long to understand why.

Five hundred and sixty-four days ago, Father Jenco climbed into his car and sped off to work. He served as the head of a Catholic relief operation in Beirut. Because he was well known around the city and because he helped everyone equally—Muslims, Christians, Jews—he did not fear abduction. What would they want with a priest, anyway?

Well, they wanted him. An eight-man team stopped his car not far from his office. The men, all armed with automatic weapons, dragged him out of the car, bundled him up, and threw him into the trunk of their getaway vehicle. At first, they kept asking him if he was Joseph Curtin and seemed confused that he was not. Curtin had been Father Jenco’s predecessor at the Catholic Relief Service in Beirut. They had abducted the wrong priest.

But they held on to him anyway. In the first days of Father Jenco’s ordeal, the Hezbollah guards wrapped him in packing tape until he resembled a mummy. Stuffing a rag into his mouth, they carried him to a truck and crammed him into the spare-tire well under the frame. They drove him into southern Beirut, leaving him limp from the exhaust fumes and claustrophobic conditions. This was the first of several times they moved him in this fashion.

The weeks that followed were a blur of degradation, humiliation, and torture. They kept him blindfolded and chained by the ankle. They threw his paltry meals on the floor, forcing him to eat with his hands. Cheese and water sufficed for breakfast. Sometimes they gave him rice and beans for lunch. Dinner was little more than bread and jam. The guards varied from polite and respectful to barbaric and sadistic. One thug stuck a pistol to Father Jenco’s head and told him he was about to die. When he pulled the trigger, the hammer fell on an empty chamber.

Other times they beat him, stood on his head, kicked him, and punched him. One guard got a kick out of kneeling on Father Jenco and putting all his weight on the priest’s pancreas.

And for what? Why had they taken this man of the cloth? Their stated demands have not varied. They wanted the Dawa 17 released. This was a group of terrorists who had bombed the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait in 1983. They are murderers and fanatics whom the Kuwaitis will never let out of prison. They are far too dangerous. However, Hezbollah’s éminence grise, Imad Mugniyah, has a personal stake in the fate of these terrorists. His brother-in-law and cousin, Mustafa Youssef Badreddin, is one of the Dawa 17. Mugniyah is a shadowy figure who is either Hezbollah’s security chief or the operations specialist, we’re not sure which. He’s also the group’s main link to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). Mugniyah planned Beirut I and II, orchestrated the marine barracks bombing, and was the mastermind behind the hijacking of TWA Flight 847. No other terrorist leader has soaked his hands in so much American blood. Now, he uses our citizens as nothing more than bargaining chips.

Hezbollah—meaning Mugniyah—has never wavered in their demand for the release of the Dawa 17, which makes me wonder why Father Jenco was set free. Is there a deeper motive for these abductions?

For six months, Hezbollah kept Father Jenco locked up alone in a filthy cell somewhere in southern Beirut. In June 1985, they again mummified him in packing tape, threw him into the spare-tire well of another truck, and united him with the other American hostages.

“You mean you were all kept in the same location?” I ask him. The news surprises all of us. If they’re in one place, we might be able to rescue them. If they were scattered all over the city and the Bekáa Valley, there’s no way we’d be able to get them simultaneously. And any rescue attempt would surely bring severe repercussions to whomever we left behind.

Father Jenco confirms this. “Yes. We were kept together in stalls, makeshift cells. We were still chained and blindfolded. I developed an eye infection from the blindfolds.”

We get Father Jenco a glass of water. He takes a sip and continues. “Several times they told me to dress in nice clothes they had given me. I was to be released. Then they’d laugh and say they were just kidding.”

The torment continued. Once, when one of the guards suspected the priest had caught a glimpse of his face, he was pinned against a door and brutally beaten. Such treatment demoralized each hostage. They could hear it when their fellow Americans endured a beating. All they could do was wonder when it would be their turn again.

It wore away at their spirits. It wore away at their ability to hope. At Christmastime, Father Jenco tried to sing a Christmas carol. He managed only a few words before he broke down in tears.

Another time, in February 1986, his captors gave him a letter from home. It was the first time he’d received one, and he opened it eagerly. But as he read every precious word over and over, he heard Thomas Sutherland weeping in the cell next to his.

“Thomas had not been given any mail,” Father Jenco explains. “It was so cruel to do that to him.”

The other hostages angrily gave their letters back to the guards to protest what they had done to Sutherland. Later that day, their captors relented and gave each hostage three letters from home. This sort of minor victory gave them strength. It sustained them.

There were a few moments of humor. Once, when one of the guards asked if Father Jenco needed anything, the priest replied, “Yes, a taxicab.” That elicited a few weary laughs. For the most part, each day became a struggle to survive, both psychologically and physically. For Father Jenco, his faith was his anchor in the storm. He fashioned a set of rosary beads from the loose strings of a potato sack. At times, he focused on Philippians 4:5–6 and said those words of comfort over and over to himself.

The Lord is near. Dismiss all anxiety from your mind.

The moves were the worst. Being bound up in packing tape and crammed into the spare-tire wells of those well-worn trucks left him in cold terror. His heart, already weak from cardiovascular disease, was strained to the limit by each of these ordeals. At first, he held fast to a button of Jesus Christ his captors let him keep. Unable to move inside the well, he prayed over the button as it lay in his tightly balled fist. It was his talisman and through the choking carbon monoxide fumes, he would recite prayers and try to block out what his tormentors were doing to him. Later, he threw the button away. He and God had a conversation, and Father Jenco realized he didn’t need any physical proof of his faith. He’d already lost almost everything else, including a cross given to him on his twenty-fifth anniversary of joining the priesthood. In the end, he discovered none of those small artifacts mattered. All he needed was faith itself.

We turn the interview toward the guards. Father Jenco tells us that most of them were young Lebanese males, often barely out of their teens. All had been inundated with propaganda ever since they were kids.

“What sort of propaganda?” I ask.

“Messages of hate, Agent Burton. Messages of hate. I listened to some of it on a tape. It was terrible.”

Some of the guards were hired help, unable to find jobs in the chaos of Beirut. One of them had been an air-conditioner repairman and just needed a way to pay the bills. He was one of the few kind ones and would occasionally bring Father Jenco things his wife had baked. Others seemed fanatical, or mentally ill. Maybe both. None of them had much formal education, which Father Jenco seized on. He told them he would like to bring them to America—not to punish them, but to educate them. He was not vindictive. He wanted these young men to do something meaningful and productive with their lives. They ignored him.

Once, the guards tied a bundle of plastic explosives to him. Father Jenco tried to find peace in what he thought would be the last minute of his life. When nothing happened, his captors said the bomb was a dud. Another time, a guard stuck his finger in Father Jenco’s mouth. As he peered at the priest’s teeth, he saw his fillings. He thought the fillings were transmitters and accused him of being a CIA agent.

It is clear that the hostages are not guarded by the first team. These guys are scrubs—nutcases and wannabes whom Hezbollah hires or trusts to do little but babysit their human booty. Delta would slaughter them. If only we could find out where they are.

That remains the problem. Fearing a rescue mission by the United States or Syria, the captors moved the hostages from location to location. Sometimes, they were moved from one place to another in southern Beirut. Sometimes they were taken elsewhere, probably the Bekáa Valley.

Several times, Father Jenco nearly lost all hope of freedom. At one point, the guards told him he would be free soon. He started to believe again. Then they replaced the door on his cell. After they left, he peeked at it from under his blindfold and saw it was a rugged, heavy door. Right then, he knew they were psychologically tormenting him again. A door like that could only mean he’d remain in his cell.

He broke down and began to cry.

Several nights ago, things changed. The guards came in and wrapped him up in packing tape again—a sure sign of another move. This time, though, they drove out into the Lebanese night, pulled him from the vehicle, and cut off all the packing tape. One of the guards stuffed some money in his hand. When Father Jenco asked what it was for, the guard replied, “A taxicab.”

He wandered through the darkness until a Syrian army patrol discovered him. Within hours, he’d been whisked to Damascus and was put on a flight to Germany.

I glance at my watch. We’ve been debriefing Father Jenco for hours, and the poor man just needs to rest. Tomorrow, we’ll start teasing through the details, gleaning those little nuggets that we can use to do our jobs. In the meantime, I have to ask this brave and decent man one final question for the day.

“Father, how did you endure? You must have felt like Paul.”

Martin Jenco sadly shakes his head. In a self-effacing voice he says, “Paul survived so much more than I, Agent Burton. And I was weak at times. I learned hate, which I had to overcome with forgiveness.”

The Agency man growls, “How can you forgive these men after what they did to you?”

“It is the only way. Violence achieves nothing. Rage, hate—they destroy the soul. What else is there but forgiveness?”