Ghost (7 page)

“We were out in Rescue 18, the old GMC squad truck. I was driving,” Fred begins.

I cut in, “Fred needed the hours behind the wheel. I was the truck trainer. We were just driving around late one Friday night.”

“Funny how that worked out, isn’t it?” Fred asks.

“Makes me want to believe in fate.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

“So we’re up on Wilson Lane, just driving and shooting the bull,” Fred continues, “when we get the call.”

“The call?”

I chime in, “Dispatch tells us there’s been an accident with one pinned near River Road and Wilson Lane.”

“We were only a few blocks away,” Fred says.

The lawyer looks puzzled. “What’s ‘one pinned’ mean?”

“Somebody’s stuck in the car.”

“Anyway”—I’m talking now—“I radio in and say, ‘Rescue 18 copy and en route.’ Flip on the sirens and we start using the air horn to clear cars out of our way.”

“God, I’d forgotten that thing,” Fred interjects as he polishes off the last drops in his longneck. “Pull a cable and it rocked your world. That air horn was something else.”

I cut in. “We get to the scene in minutes. Both of us jump out of the truck….”

“Creepy vibe.” Fred’s now really animated. One hand sweeps across his chest as he says, “Fog hugging the ground. Dark. Looked like a
Twilight Zone
episode.”

“Yeah, and dead quiet, too.”

“One minute, we’re blazing away with lights, sirens, and the air horn. The next minute—nothing. Total silence.”

“Creepy, all right.”

The lawyer is rigid. We have him hooked.

Fred plays to our one-man audience, building the drama. “We look around and find this little Honda sedan upside down in a gully off the right side of the road.”

I explain. “The driver had hit a pole and slid off the embankment. Flipped over. Landed at the bottom of the gully on its back. Wheels still turning, broken glass everywhere.”

“Antifreeze was pouring out of the radiator. And we saw smoke.”

“I ran back to the truck and called HQ, ‘Rescue 18 on the scene with a rollover.’”

“I followed Fred back to the truck. Suddenly, we hear something that breaks the silence.”

Fred pauses for effect. The lawyer comes out of his seat. “What? What?”

We both smile and simultaneously say, “‘Stairway to Heaven.’”

“What?”

“‘Stairway to Heaven.’ You know,” Fred says, “that old Zeppelin song.”

“You’re kidding?”

“No,” I say, “it was coming from the car’s radio. Only sound we could hear. Fred and I just stared at each other, chills running up and down our spines.”

“You got that right, brother.”

“We couldn’t even move for a second or two, the music was so surreal. Then, in the distance, we heard more sirens coming to us.”

“We both climb down into the gully to see what we can do. Car’s beat to hell. Smashed—totaled. Inside, there’s the driver. He’s totaled, too. He was just a kid—our age at the time.”

“About nineteen,” I interject.

“Yeah, nineteen. Drunk driver. Threw his life away,” Fred says with a bitter smile. “Dead on the scene. Nothing we could do for him. Blood everywhere inside the car. Even on the radio, but it still worked.”

“It sure did.”

“And there we stood at the bottom of this gully, dead kid, smell of booze and blood in the air, listening to ‘Stairway to Heaven.’”

“Totally surreal,” I manage. Hearing Fred tell the story again brings me right back there to the fog. That was a horrible scene. In our old life with the rescue squad, we saw a lot of ugly things. I didn’t used to think it got to me, but now I think maybe it affected me a lot deep down. I never got jaded enough to get used to such sights. Perhaps this is why I am so moved by the files in the dead bodies cabinets. I can relate, and I don’t need a vivid imagination to envision the horrors that befell those innocent victims in Beirut.

The evening rolls on unfettered by stilted small talk. The gates are open, and the stories pour out. The
Twilight Zone
night was the foundation for our relationship at a time when we were brothers coming of age together in this unique and terrifying world.

I relax for the first time in months. I slump deep into my chair, put my feet up, and try to soak up every bit of this moment. It seems like old times as Fred and I regale each other with tales of the macabre. Cop stories. Rescue stories. They spill out one after another, but we never discuss the DSS. That’s off-limits. Before I know it, three hours have gone by and I’ve got to get home.

With Mullen and Gleason, life is all business. Here, on this porch with Fred, it is all about old friends. Though we never even mentioned Libya or Qaddafi or terror attacks, I feel refreshed. Gleason was right: Sometimes you just have to get away, lest the Dark World eat your soul.

Brandt Place is my defense against that.

“Hey, Burton,” Fred calls as I walk through his yard toward the street. I stop and turn.

“Don’t be a stranger, okay?”

“Don’t worry about that.”

Later that night, the phone rings me out of the first sound sleep I’ve had in weeks.

six

NO SPACE BETWEEN BLACK AND WHITE

April 4, 1986

The bodies fell out of the sky and plummeted into a shepherd’s field. A Greek peasant, minding his flock of sheep, discovered them battered and smashed almost beyond recognition. Before this horrible day, the trio had been a family: one grandmother, one daughter, one infant granddaughter. These were terror’s latest targets.

A fourth body was later found in some bushes, still strapped into seat 10F of TWA Flight 840.

I sit at my desk behind the big blue door and stare at the photos. They fell from eleven thousand feet. How long did it take? Probably long enough to know the awful fate that had consumed their lives. Did they have time to make their peace with God? Did they shriek and cry until the impact came? My imagination roams. I know that I won’t be able to sleep tonight. The images play in my mind like I was there. The infant is the worst. Nine months old. She died in her mother’s arms. I want to cry.

I turn next to a small folder of photos that have just come into the office. They show the damage to Flight 840, which was a Boeing 727. A ragged hole, roughly the size of a wheelbarrow, scars the starboard side of the fuselage just forward of the wing. Tattered aluminum strips flower out from the hole, making it clear that the explosion that befell this jetliner came from inside the cabin.

Flight 840 was en route to Athens from Rome when the bomb went off. The pilot had already started the descent for Athens and was counting on about fifteen more minutes before touching down. A blast, then chaos. People watched as their fellow passengers got sucked out of the cabin by explosive decompression. According to the press accounts of the attack, the cabin filled with smoke and swirling debris, which the slipstream whipped around the surviving passengers with such force that several received gashes and cuts. A stewardess handed out linen napkins to the wounded, who used them to stanch the bleeding while the captain told everyone to remain calm. He promised to have the plane down in ten minutes. It took thirteen, and he executed a perfect emergency landing.

Who pulled this off? The truth is we don’t know, and that’s a real issue right now. The administration wants a smoking gun that points to Libya. If this is retaliation for the Gulf of Sidra, Reagan will strike back hard. But the evidence needs to be overwhelming. So far, we have a few clues, but nothing that implicates the Libyans. In fact, Qaddafi denounced the attack, calling it “an act of terrorism against a civilian target, and I’m totally against it.”

It was hard not to laugh when we heard that one.

On the day of the attack, the press in Beirut reported they’d been given a handwritten statement from a group called the Ezzedine Kassam Unit of the Arab Revolutionary Cells. Kassam was a Palestinian cleric who led a revolt against the British in 1935 and subsequently died in the fighting.

The Arab Revolutionary Cells is a front name used by Abu Nidal’s organization. A few days before this attack, it took credit for kidnapping two academics in West Beirut. Leigh Douglas, a British professor of political science, and Philip Padfield, the director of the language center at American University of Beirut.

The communiqué, if we could get the original, might reveal some further details. The handwriting and verbiage can be analyzed, and we might be able to connect Flight 840 more directly to Abu Nidal. In this case, however, trying to pry loose the original from the media outlet in Beirut may just prove impossible. The press is not fond of us over there.

We are forced to rely on the Greeks, who do not have a very robust intelligence service. Nor do they have a first-rate counterterror group that can investigate Flight 840 as well as we can. We offered to assist. They froze us out. The Greeks don’t like us much, and they’ve stonewalled our efforts to assist in the investigation. It is terribly frustrating, but the root of this ill will goes back eleven years to the 1975 assassination of the CIA’s Athens station chief, Richard Welch. A radical Greek group called 17 November executed the hit, and the subsequent investigation led to very bad blood between the U.S. and Greek authorities. A Colt .45 pistol was used in that assassination, and in the years to come, the same weapon was used in numerous assassinations and assaults.

Earlier today, the Greeks did provide us with some details of what they’ve found in the Flight 840 investigation, but there’s little more there than what’s already been reported in the news. Seat 10F had been occupied earlier by a woman named May Mansur, sometimes known as Elias May Mansur. She’s a Lebanese radical with ties to various terror groups. She’s been associated with Abu Nidal in the past, as well as the Palestinian terror group 15 May. She boarded the plane on the morning of April 2 in Cairo. The 727 flew on to Athens, where Mansur exited the plane. According to the Greeks, she waited in the international lounge for seven hours before taking a flight to Beirut. Meanwhile, the 727 flew to Rome, where it became Flight 840, then headed back for Athens. It was supposed to terminate in Cairo, but of course it never made it back there.

Our own intelligence sources show that Mansur flew from Beirut to Cairo a few days before the attack. She arrived late at the airport and the Egyptians actually drove her out to the plane in a car so she wouldn’t miss the flight. The Egyptians are adamant that she went through a thorough screening. Somehow, I doubt it was thorough enough.

Her own movements that day are circumstantial evidence to her involvement. Yet, according to the media, she has denied all responsibility for the attack.

I wish we could get a team in there to dissect what happened. What kind of bomb was it? How did it get past security? What security changes can we implement to ensure this never happens again?

We don’t know any of this. The truth is, we’re lucky to even have these photographs spread out on my desk. The one sop the Greeks threw to us was to ask for the Federal Aviation Administration’s assistance. The FAA sent one of their best investigators to Athens, and he snapped these images of the 727.

Gleason asked me to open a CT file on the attack. It is a woefully thin folder right now. I pick up the regional security officer’s report from Athens. It contains the names of the victims. Alberto Ospino, age thirty-nine, had taken 10F, a window seat, in Rome. How did fate pick this average Colombian-American for this cruel end? Given the FAA’s photographs, the bomb must have exploded directly beneath him, probably at his feet. As the blast tore the fuselage open, the sudden decompression sucked him out of the cabin along with Demetra Stylianopoulu, age fifty-eight. She was the grandmother. As she spun out into the void beneath the starboard wing, her daughter Maria Klug, clutching her infant, Demetra, followed her. Falling. Falling.

I’ve come full circle and cannot escape the image of how these innocents met death. The guilty must pay for this crime. Justice must be served. But if history is any judge, the forces of terror will likely escape their punishment. It is remarkably difficult to catch any of these killers. They have too many safe havens—too many places to hide and too many countries that protect them.

In the meantime, a few miles up the road in Annapolis, Warren Klug, a grieving husband, father, and son-in-law, awaits the return of his shattered family.

I cannot bring back the dead. I cannot balm the grief of those who survive such attacks. But here at Foggy Bottom, I swear that I will do everything in my power to see that these killers pay. Vengeance and justice are one and the same in this case. With terrorism, there is never any gray. The visions I have of the Klug family’s fate will always remind me of that.

Falling. Falling.
Falling.
There will be no sleep tonight.

seven

THE MAD DOG OF THE MIDDLE EAST

April 5, 1986

The Libyans are running us ragged, and thanks to their plots every nerve in the intel world is lighting up with warnings. They’re coming in from every conceivable corner of the globe, from informants in dozens of countries. Police agencies, foreign intel services—they’re all adding to the chatter. It’s like being in a crowded dance hall with everyone talking at once, and our job is to find the one person we need to listen to. We don’t know who that is, so we’ve got to listen to everything. The trouble is, we’re being buried by all the incoming information.

Historically, this happens all the time. After an event like Pearl Harbor, Beirut I, or the marine barracks bombing, it is easy to sift through all the traffic and find the smoking gun that warned us of the impending disaster. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, and knowing what to look for separates the chaff right away. In real time, though, we don’t have that luxury, we don’t have that vision. All we see are mountains of cables and thousands of clues, all of which must be checked out lest the one valid warning go unheeded.

On top of all this, word has spread throughout the DSS network that a true CT office is now up and running. Agents have been sending us all sorts of stuff beyond the usual intel. Shell casings, bomb fragments, plastic explosives, timing devices, and photographs have been piling up, sent from embassies all over the world. The office behind the big blue door is starting to look like an evidence locker. We shuttle this stuff over to the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) labs for analysis, and riding herd on it all is taking more and more of our day.

The phone rings. I pick it up.

“Burton,” I answer.

“Yeah, this is Wyatt at FOGHORN,” comes the response. I reach for my code card. Turns out I don’t need it.

“We’ve had an attack in Berlin.”

“I’m on my way.”

I grab my car keys and rush out to my Jetta. Ten minutes later, I’m hurrying through the hallways at Foggy Bottom, my stomach in knots. Something bad has happened again. What did we miss?

We missed a big one. At 0149 this morning, a bomb blew up a German disco in West Berlin. Casualties are catastrophic. The situation is chaotic. The Bundeskriminalamt—the German federal police, otherwise known as the BKA—is already sifting through the rubble. Gleason tells me to get over to the German Embassy and find out what they know. Before I leave, I open a counterterror case, CT03–0486–235–0011. CT, of course, means Counterterror, 03 denotes a bombing. The second series of numbers gives us the month and year. The next set is the country code where the incident took place. And the last set of numbers is the total number of bombing investigations opened so far this year. It has been a busy four months.

The West Germans are all over this, and the decision’s been made to let them take the lead in the investigation. The BKA is the German equivalent of the FBI. These federal cops have an outstanding reputation and rank as one of the world’s best law-enforcement agencies. The investigation is in good hands. When I reach the embassy, I’m ushered into the office of the staff ’s BKA liaison agent. He proves to be exceptionally helpful.

The attack hit a popular nightclub called La Belle Discotheque in the Schoenburg district of West Berlin. It is a well-known hangout for American GIs assigned to the Berlin Brigade who, in their off-duty hours, want to enjoy a little of Berlin’s celebrated nightlife. The BKA agent tells me there were at least five hundred people inside when the bomb exploded.

The blast buckled walls and caused part of the ceiling to collapse. Chaos and panic ensued; wounded by the dozen staggered out. A Turkish woman and her GI date were killed. Another American soldier is in critical condition.

“Right now, we are being told that there are two hundred injured,” the BKA agent tells me.

Two hundred?
I wonder how many of them are American soldiers. My mind flashes back to the barracks bombing in Beirut. Two hundred and forty-one marines dead. Could this be as bad?

“The American wounded are being transported to military hospitals at Landstuhl and Wiesbaden.”

As the agent talks, I scribble notes in my pocket-sized spiral-ringed notebook. The German tells me they already suspect the Libyans. Their agents had detected an uptick of Libyan activity in West Berlin the previous week, which included the sightings of several Libyan diplomatic-types who have been suspected of being involved in past terror operations. Shortly before the bomb detonated a Libyan agent left East Germany, bound for Tripoli on an airliner.

That was our needle in this pile of needles we’ve been searching through.

We wrap things up, and I drive down to Langley to coordinate with the Agency. By the time I get there, more developments have taken place. First, it turns out we had received a warning last night of an impending attack. The Libyan People’s Bureau in East Berlin had sent a message to Tripoli announcing an operation was now under way against U.S. soldiers in Berlin. That piece of intel was routed immediately to the U.S. Army, and they were in the process of getting the word out on the street when the bomb exploded. We were fifteen minutes too late to head off the attack.

In those fifteen minutes at least two lives hung in the balance. We have got to do better next time.

By late afternoon, the picture comes into focus. Two hundred and twenty-nine people suffered injuries from the bomb blast or falling debris inside the club. The bomb itself had been planted near the DJ’s booth. It was a simple device, composed of only a small amount of plastic explosives with a timing device to detonate it. More than fifty American soldiers are among the victims. Many have ruptured eardrums and shrapnel wounds. Sergeant Ken Ford, a twenty-one-year-old noncommissioned officer, was killed in the blast. His girlfriend, twenty-nine-year-old Nermin Hannay, was the second victim. Another American GI, Staff Sergeant James Goins, a North Carolinian, is in critical condition. The docs aren’t sure if he will make it.

Back at Foggy Bottom, I report back to Gleason and tell him what I’ve learned. He says there’s been a lot of traffic between the Libyan Embassy in East Berlin and Tripoli. One message, shortly after the attack, bragged that the operation was a success. Tripoli responded with a “job well done” communiqué.

We still aren’t certain who was behind Flight 840. This one, on the other hand, looks cut and dried. The Libyans did it.

“Okay, Fred, we know enough of what happened to get the word out. Push out the MO to our agents in the field so they can help review off-post security.”

“I’m on it.” I hit the old IBM typewriter and start hunting and pecking away. Maybe we can prevent a rerun of this disaster.

The day and evening pass quickly. A quick run home Saturday night, and I’m back in the office Sunday morning. President Reagan just got back into town after spending the week in Santa Barbara for Easter. He’s furious, and the administration wants confirmation that the Libyans were behind La Belle. A response must be in the works.

We spend the next week chasing down leads and getting further details on the bombing. Gleason has me monitor the status of the wounded at Landstuhl and Wiesbaden. Our intel agencies work overtime, putting together a case against Colonel Qaddafi. It is as airtight as a Dark World case can get. We’re all convinced the Libyans pulled this one off. There is some evidence to show there were Palestinian and Syrian agents involved, but the genesis behind the attack clearly originated in Tripoli.

In the meantime, more threats pour in. Mullen and I deal with a report that a sedan with Libyan tags tailed a busload of American schoolkids in South America. Our embassy in Beirut comes under attack again. This time, rockets are fired at it. Two more bombings, one in Bangkok, the other in Stockholm, take place against American targets. We get word that the Libyans are planning to hit our consulate in Munich, kidnap an American ambassador somewhere in Africa, and bomb more embassies. Another report comes in warning that Tripoli has ordered attacks on American airliners.

No wonder President Reagan recently denounced Qaddafi as “the Mad Dog of the Middle East.”

Washington starts leaking like a sieve. Press reports hint that we’ve been able to break Libya’s diplomatic code. The Libyans read that and change their ciphers. Such reporting is flagrantly irresponsible, but our news agencies seem to care less about their national responsibilities than about getting a scoop.

Other reports show up in
The Wall Street Journal
and
Washington Times
claiming we’re about to attack Libya. One media outlet even names a potential target, Bab Al Azizyah, a sprawling compound near Tripoli that’s part terrorist training base, part headquarters for Qaddafi’s regime. He even uses it from time to time as his personal residence. The story doesn’t escape Qaddafi, who mentions it in an interview with reporter Marie Colvin.

The international press, including American TV reporters, flock to Tripoli. Flights into the potential war zone are suddenly booked solid. More hints and innuendo flow from “highly placed sources within the administration.” The American ambassador to West Germany, Richard Burt, is interviewed on the
Today
show and says, “There are clear indications that there was Libyan involvement” in the La Belle attack.

Later in the week, an Italian bishop and four Franciscans are kidnapped in Tripoli. Qaddafi, knowing something is afoot, starts rounding up foreign workers and placing them under guard at high-value military targets. He’s using them as human shields.

On Monday morning, we all know something is about to happen. Senator Richard Luger tipped off the media yesterday that President Reagan has called for a meeting with congressional leaders at four o’clock today. The press took that as a sign that military retaliation is imminent.

Behind the big blue door, Gleason is quieter than usual. He chain-smokes and takes a few phone calls, but otherwise he’s focused on other things. Later in the day, he gets called away to a meeting of liaison agents from multiple agencies. He returns in the afternoon and huddles with Mullen and me.

“Okay, we’re about to hit the Libyans. The attack will take place tonight. We need to be prepared for any sort of retaliation. When the attack begins, I want you two to warn our troops. Send out word to every RSO. We’re in for a long night.”

In an effort to move into the modern age, we’ve now got a small TV in the office, tuned to CNN. The congressional leadership gets briefed as scheduled at 4:00
P.M.
This is 11:00
P.M.
Libyan time. Our air force planes are airborne, heading for their targets. The clock ticks by. The minutes drag. The wait slows time to a crawl.

Then Senator Robert Byrd and Senator Claiborne Pell show up on TV, telling the world that the president plans to address the nation at 9:00
P.M.
eastern standard time. We shake our heads in frustration. This is another tip to the enemy. Will our planes be flying into a hornet’s nest?

Somewhere over the Mediterranean, brave flight crews are getting ready to make their final runs into their target areas. This is our opportunity to hammer a foe who has caused the deaths of countless innocents. This is our chance to avenge not just La Belle, but every attack the Libyan diplomatic service has initiated against us these past years. La Belle just gave us the smoking gun that Reagan needed to pull the trigger.

At 12:30
A.M.
local time, our carriers in the Med launch their strike packages. The pilots and crews are worried. The press has been reporting their every move. The element of surprise seems to be lost. Simultaneously, a wing of F-111 Aardvark fighter-bombers has flown from England, down the Bay of Biscay, around Spain and Portugal, and has entered the Med over the Strait of Gibraltar. The attack will be a one-two punch. The navy planes will suppress the Libyan air defenses, while the F-111s hit their targets.

At Foggy Bottom, we of the Counterterror office head over to FOGHORN to rally our troops. The moment the last bomb falls, our job begins in earnest. It’ll be up to us to help deflect the counterattack Qaddafi’s intel service is sure to launch.