See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (14 page)

By the time I finished rifling through headquarters files and absorbing everything I could find on the IJO and Mughniyah, it was time to leave for Beirut. I knew now with a fair degree of certainty that at least at one point the Iranian Pasdaran had controlled the hostages, that Mughniyah had hijacked TWA-847 and was still closely tied to Arafat and Fatah, and that a Fatah network was more than likely responsible for the Beirut embassy bombing. It was time to get on the ground and start connecting the dots.

The driver was more than forty minutes late. If the chopper left for Beirut without me, the next one wouldn’t be for another three days. Dead time in Cyprus would be bad enough. Missing my agent turnover meetings in Beirut would be a disaster. Most couldn’t be rescheduled for an entire month. I was waiting in a nearly deserted airport cafeteria, checking my watch on the minute.

I considered calling Nicosia to find out if I’d gotten the time wrong, but my instructions from headquarters were explicit: Don’t talk about helicopter schedules over the telephone. I’d need to take a taxi all the way up to Nicosia - about an hour away - to find out what had happened.

A commercial flight into the Beirut airport was out of the question: Hezbollah checked all incoming manifests. I’d be lucky if I even made it out of the terminal before being kidnapped. A boat sailed nightly between Larnaca and Junieh, a fishing port on the Christian side of Beirut, but I couldn’t go over that way, either, because from time to time the Syrians and their Lebanese allies used it for target practice.

Again I calculated the time difference between London and Larnaca. No, I’d gotten that right. I checked my ticket, too - in the top left corner I’d penciled the helicopter’s departure time and the time and place I was to meet the driver. I was where I was supposed to be, when I was supposed to be. This would be hard to live down: Veteran case officer loses his way to Beirut. Dewey and Fred would have a field day when they read the cable notifying the world I’d gone missing.

Just as I was about to get up and take another look around the airport, the driver came running into the cafeteria, clipboard in hand.

‘Baer?’ he asked, out of breath. An accident on the road from Nicosia had snarled traffic.

We hurried to the van he had left running in front of the terminal. Around the back of the airport, a gate guard recognized the van and let us through. The driver threaded his way through a couple of small airplanes, turned a corner, and pulled up between two US Army Black-hawk helicopters. The crews, wearing olive drab jumpsuits, were waiting for me.

‘You’re it for Beirut, right?’ the loadmaster asked, taking my duffel bag and handing me an inflatable life vest. ‘It’s a one-hour trip. We’re taking two birds over. If one goes down, the other will pick up the survivors. And I’m here to tell you, these things don’t double as boats. After it hits the water, it’ll be less than a minute before it sinks to the bottom. But don’t jump into the water right away, either. If the blades are still rotating, they’ll chop you into hamburger. It’s all in the timing.’ He winked and smiled his best stewardess smile.

‘Oh, one other thing. We’re on the ground only twenty seconds, and not a second more. If we take fire, don’t even try to get out. You won’t like flying back to Larnaca hanging from a skid.’

The two helicopters lifted off the tarmac in tandem, turned slowly to face the sea, dipped their noses, and headed off, going from 0 to 220 knots in about two seconds. We flew at a little under twenty-five hundred feet, side by side. It was a clear day. The Mediterranean shimmered below us.

About ten minutes from Beirut, the crew shrugged on inch-and-a-half thick Kevlar flak vests, while the loadmaster shoved open the cargo door, letting in a blast of air. The pilots then took the helicopters down to about twenty feet over the water, an altitude hard to see from land and nearly impossible to shoot at. I’d heard the helicopters were flying even lower than usual these days because they had recently been painted by radar - probably by Syrian surface-to-air missile batteries.

If Lebanon was there, I couldn’t see it. A thick brown haze hugged the coast. We flew right through it, and I found myself directly over the shore and coastal highway. I expected the helicopters to turn south over the highway and fly in a straight line to the embassy. Instead they continued, one after the other now, straight into and up a ravine. We were still only about twenty feet above the ground. People came out on their balconies to look at us.

Just as the ravine tapered off, the helicopters veered right, flew perpendicular to the ground for a second, then leveled off and popped up over a ridge. Immediately on the other side was what remained of the four-story embassy in East Beirut. A suicide car bomber had destroyed it on September 20, 1984, killing fourteen people, just seventeen months after its seven-story predecessor along the waterfront had been blown sky high. The siding that hadn’t been blown off in the explosion was stripped off afterward, leaving a skeleton. A haunted building on haunted ground.

Two gunners on the roof manned belt-fed .30-caliber machine guns. They faced away from the helicopter pad, ready to shoot anyone foolish enough to pop his head up while the helicopters were on the ground. These guys took their jobs seriously. A couple of months before, they had fired on a UN helicopter that strayed too close to the embassy, wounding the pilot.

As I watched, the two Blackhawks diminished to a dot, then disappeared as they skimmed away over the Mediterranean. Even after I’d flown into Beirut more than fifty times, I always felt like I had been abandoned in the bottom circle of hell. The eerie quiet after the beating of the rotors, the shells landing around the port and tracers from a .50-caliber machine gun arcing over the city, the thick pall of black smoke from burning buildings that always seemed to sit over the downtown - anyone who stayed on in Saigon in 1975 and watched the last helicopter taking off from the embassy roof must have felt something similar.

The new Beirut embassy, a two-story villa a hundred yards from the skeleton, was among the most heavily protected properties in the world. The ten acres of land surrounding it were covered with a sea of coiled razor wire, fortified bunkers, watchtowers, machine-gun positions, and sandbagged trenches. Foot-thick steel walls protected the villa from artillery and rockets. Anti-rocket screens covered the roof. With more than six hundred local guards, the US embassy had the fourth largest standing militia in the country. An armored division would have had a fight to capture it.

But the ring of protection extended only so far. During the previous three years, the CIA had lost two chiefs, another five officers, and plenty of agents. And, of course, Beirut and Lebanon weren’t dangerous just for us. Thirty-seven foreigners had been taken hostage since January 1984. A half dozen of them were executed.

About the time I got to Beirut, the assassinations started creeping into the Christian East, where the embassy was. The French military attaché was shot at point-blank range in the parking lot of the French embassy. The deputy in the French intelligence station was machine-gunned in front of the Lebanese intelligence headquarters, no doubt fingered by one of the Lebanese officers he was supposed to be working with. Three armed French gendarmes were shot one afternoon on their day off. Since American officials were on the same hit list as the French, we took these attacks seriously.

To cope with the violence, the State Department imposed a rule that Beirut embassy officers never set foot outside the embassy compound, except to go home. Even then, they traveled in heavily armored cars, accompanied by a dozen heavily armed guards in lead and chase cars. Embassy residences were protected around the clock by guards and roving patrols carrying automatic Uzis. Just to be extra safe, State Department officers met their contacts in the embassy, screened by metal detectors and protected by marines with M-16s.

As a general rule, only the ambassador ventured out, and then in a twelve-car convoy with sirens and bodyguards shooting in the air to clear traffic. The point vehicle was an armored Suburban crowned by a shooter manning a .50-caliber machine gun, finger on the trigger. He was more serious about his job than the guy who shot up the UN helicopter. Seeing the ambassador move around Beirut was impressive, even for the Lebanese who’d seen it all.

In the CIA, we took a different approach to staying alive. Sure, we carried guns, but in a country where just about everyone from the age of twelve owned a machine gun, small arms weren’t all that useful. Instead, we relied on tradecraft learned from the terrorists: Constantly move around, blend in with the environment, and stay completely unpredictable. We must have had some thirty apartments and twice as many cars. Switch residences and cars often enough and you become a moving target; move fast enough and you’re impossible to hit. I might spend one night in an apartment in Ashrafiyah, an old part of Beirut on the Green Line, and the next at a beach condo twenty miles north of Beirut.

Sometimes we used two or three different cars in the same day, generally old rust buckets indistinguishable from any other Lebanese car. From time to time I drove a dented broccoli-green 1964 Mercedes taxi. It fit in beautifully. Lebanese would wave me down from the side of the road for a ride, never suspecting an American was at the wheel.

Maybe it sounds wacky, but I loved working in Beirut. Instead of dealing with the distractions of headquarters, the meetings and paperwork that ate up time, I would move around on the streets, where I had always been more comfortable. Best of all, I was away from Washington politics, maybe the greatest hindrance we had to doing our job.

Jerry, the chief when I arrived this time, was a wiry, cigar-smoking, ex-airborne officer who had once worked as rodeo cowboy. Jerry had a healthy respect for just how dangerous the place was - we kept an outfit belonging to Bill Buckley in a storage locker on the off chance that he would reappear - but once he decided I knew what I was doing, he gave me all the rein I needed. It didn’t matter that I’d be gone from the office for days, meeting agents and working out of safe houses.

Running agents in Beirut was like no other place in the world, but then again, Beirut itself was like no other place. Once we asked for a polygrapher to come to Beirut to box a Palestinian source, and they sent us Bernie, a skinny African-American who wore large-frame plastic glasses and took an instant dislike to Beirut, from the moment he boarded the helicopter in Larnaca.

As soon as we dropped off Bernie’s things at one safe house, we headed across town to another to do the polygraphing. It was a beautiful day. A wind had blown off the haze. People were swimming and walking along the beach. The guns along the Green Line were oddly quiet. Squint a little bit and you could almost pretend to be driving up the Pacific Coast highway from Santa Monica to Malibu. I could see Bernie was starting to feel better about Beirut - not exactly relaxed, but at least he’d stopped threatening to shoot his boss for sending him there.

Before Ashrafiyah, we cut up into the hills to a part of Beirut called Hazmiyah. Several Lebanese army artillery positions hid in the woods, but otherwise it was a quiet residential neighborhood popular with military officers. As Bernie set up the polygraph on the dining room table,

I wrote down the questions I wanted him to test the Palestinian on. Because the Palestinian spoke fluent English, Bernie didn’t need me to translate during the exam. My plan was to wait in one of the back bedrooms and catch up on my sleep.

I’d just closed my eyes when a boom shook the building, rattling the windows. A second boom quickly followed.

Bernie flung the bedroom door open. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘We’re finished.’

‘It was outgoing. Nothing to worry about, Bernie,’ I said, trying to calm him down. It was true, too. I knew from the sound that it was the local artillery position firing into the West. ‘You’ll be able to tell the difference if it comes back the other way,’ I made the mistake of adding.

‘No, you don’t fucking get it,’ Bernie yelled, apparently convinced the artillery had made me deaf or stupid. ‘That son of a bitch didn’t react. And I mean there wasn’t a squiggle. Not after the first shot or the second. It was like he’d died. When someone’s got ice water running through his veins, there’s no fucking way I can box him.’

I suppose we all got that way after a while in Beirut, even the foreigners. The fighting always seemed to be going on somewhere else, and during the few times it did get close - like the time a militia in West Beirut hosed the hillside around one of the apartments I was staying in with 107mm rockets - it was always over quickly. A few minutes of a pounding heart, and then life was back to normal. Sort of.

Picking up the trail of the embassy bombing was like putting together a Roman mosaic scattered in an earthquake and scorched by fire. You had no idea what was a lead and what wasn’t.

Actually, it was worse. Sitting in Christian East Beirut meant we were working in the dark. We couldn’t cross into West Beirut, where most of our best remaining agents were. On top of that, none of our agents was in a position to infiltrate Hezbollah or any other radical Shi’a Islamic group, and no one could even get close to Imad Mughniyah or the IJO. That left us making do with what the CIA calls access agents - those who don’t know secrets themselves but can access people who do.

One of my best access agents was a freelance journalist I’ll call Farid. Although he was a Christian, Farid’s job allowed him to travel back and forth across the Green Line. A slight, balding man with a winning smile, Farid could pass unnoticed almost anywhere in the world. He had friends and contacts all over Lebanon and could talk to pretty much whomever he liked, with the exception of Mughniyah or Hezbollah. The limitation was okay with me: Sidling up to the really toxic guys would only draw attention to Farid. Moreover, Hezbollah was in a particularly foul mood in those days. The year before, on March 8, 1985, a car bomb had detonated in front of the apartment building of a Shi’a spiritual leader, Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, killing eighty people. Hezbollah immediately accused the CIA of training the bombers. It was absurd - no one could teach the Lebanese anything about car bombs - but logic didn’t matter, since anyone who fell under Hezbollah’s suspicion was summarily executed.

The first thing I asked Farid to do was to collect public records on people we suspected of being close to the IJO. To ease the burden on him, I rented a safe house in Sinn Al-Fill, a poor Christian neighborhood near the Green Line. I would always get to the meeting first so I could watch Farid maneuvering with his scuffed leather briefcase between the cars parked on the sidewalk and the vendors.

Once he was inside, I’d get him a soft drink and he would dump the contents of the briefcase onto the sofa between us - stacks of civil registration documents, political membership lists, old newspaper articles, and news photos from Hezbollah demonstrations. Most of it was junk, but I never discouraged him from bringing it. It was up to me to pick through for that one gem I could use. I always paid Farid a bonus if he brought something good. Money was never a problem for the CIA in Beirut.

I had Farid collect the Lebanese civil registration documents for Muhammad Hammadah, one of the TWA-847 hijackers whom we suspected of being an active member of Mughniyah’s group. It took him about four weeks to put his hands on them, and then he couldn’t contain himself when he came to the meeting. He gleefully told me how he had finally found the right civil registration office, waltzed in, plunked down the equivalent of a nickel, and watched the clerk copy the page for the Hammadah family. No one asked any questions.

I picked it up as if it were a rare manuscript. There, in front of me, was the entire family, from Muhammad’s father, here Ali Hasan Hammadah, born in 1929 in Al-Sawanah, to his mother, Fatmah Abd-al-Hasan Dabbuk, born in 1931 in Khirbat Silm. All of his living siblings were listed, including Muhammad’s older brother Abd-al-Hadi Hammadah, a dangerous leader in Hezbollah.

Someone who doesn’t make a living in counterterrorism might scratch his head and wonder why I’d risk an agent’s life for information like this, but in fact it represented the kind of detail that could break open a case. The records gave us addresses, telephone numbers, marriage ties. It helped us check the bona fides of other agents. Eventually, I or another case officer was sure to run into an agent who claimed to know Muhammad Hammadah. Now we could start vetting the agent by asking about the facts we already knew. The Hammadah civil registry, for instance, told us that Muhammad’s sister Samira had been born on February 13, 1969, and was still unmarried and living at the Hammadah home in Burj Al-Barajnah. If the contact didn’t know about her, something was wrong. Maybe he wasn’t as close to Muhammad as he claimed. Maybe he had been sent to draw us into an ambush. Knowledge was power, and self-preservation. Muhammad Hammadah eventually would be arrested on January 13, 1987, at Frankfurt Airport trying to smuggle through customs a bottle of methyl nitrate, a highly explosive, unstable liquid. It was probably intended to be used in terrorist attacks in France.

Farid even helped solve a terrorist case. On December 25, 1986, four Lebanese hijacked an Iraqi flight from Baghdad only to have it crash over Saudi Arabia, killing the hijackers along with most of the crew and passengers. The Iraqis told us one of the hijackers was Ri’bal Khalil Jallul, a young Shi’ a from the southern suburbs. To confirm the story, Farid searched for and found a Jallul family registered as Burj Al-Barajanah, registration #117. Listed among the children of Khalil Jallul was a Ri’bal Khalil Jallul, born February 10, 1967. One of Farid’s sub-sources then found a Hezbollah poster pasted on a mosque wall, a picture of a young martyr whom the caption identified as Ri’bal Jallul Finally, Farid managed to dig up a copy of the passport Ri’bal had used. The name was an alias, but the passport photo matched the Hizballah poster. We’d come full circle, and one more piece of the mosaic was in place.

Where Farid left off, telephone taps picked up.

In Beirut, everyone’s phone was tapped. You could walk down almost any street and see jerry-rigged telephone wires draped across the street. Part of it was just practical business. If you were to move into an apartment in, say, Hamra - Beirut’s old central business district - and find that there was no telephone line, you couldn’t ask the telephone company to come out and install a new line. The telephone company no longer existed, along with anything else that approached everyday infrastructure. What you did was find a working line and tie into it, legally or illegally. You might steal a line from one of Hamra’s mostly abandoned hotels. Since the hotel never got a bill, it wouldn’t know. Or you might just go down into the basement and hook up to your neighbor’s line in the telephone distribution box. With all this freelance telephone wiring going on, installing a tap was a cinch, which meant they were everywhere.

I went back through tap transcripts looking for a reference to a Ri’bal Jallul I found a call between Abd-al-Hadi Hammadah, the brother of the TWA hijacker, and a Jihad Jallul Since the Jalluls are a big family, I couldn’t be sure Ri’bal was related to Jihad. But in checking the Jallul registration records, I found a Jihad Khalil Jallul, undoubtedly Ri’bal’s older brother. I came across another interesting tap transcript from April 16, 1986: A Hizballah mole in the Lebanese police named Muhammad Murad had called what we suspected was an I JO office. He first asked for Mughniyah and was told he wasn’t there: he then asked in succession for Abd-al-Hadi Hammadah, Jihad Jallul and Zuhayr Jallul (Zuhayr was another brother of Ri’bal, according to the civil registration documents.) I now had Mughniyah tied, circumstantially at least, to the Iraq Air hijacking. For his part, Murad later helped kidnap four American professors at Beirut University College.

I didn’t stop there. I found out from another agent that the Jalluls lived in Mughniyah’s neighborhood, Ayn Al-Dilbah. I even got a sketch of the outside of their apartment, above a candy store and only a few blocks from Mughniyah’s house. We found out a lot of other things about Jihad - his car’s license-plate number, his telephone number, even the make of the pistol he carried. We got into his family history as well. His father was an alcoholic. Jihad had accidentally killed his mother while cleaning a gun in the kitchen.

I had five other agents doing the same thing as Farid. Piece by piece. I put together a picture of Mughniyah’s group. I would spend hours poring over the take, making connections between people, eliminating false leads, adding to my matrices. My makeshift charts started to look like the wiring diagram for a Boeing-747 cockpit. The mounting details made it easy to see how Mughniyah had been able to keep his group so secret. Everyone was either related by blood, had fought together in Fatah, or hailed from the Ayn Al-Dilbah neighborhood. We started calling them the AynAl-Dilbah gang, but it was those same bonds that made the IJO such a hard target to crack.

One name that kept popping up alongside Mughniyah’s was Husayn Khalil, but it wasn’t until Khalil’s involvement in the kidnapping of former ABC correspondent Charles Glass that he became worth zeroing in on.

Glass had come to Lebanon in June 1987 to do research for a book. Born to a Lebanese mother, he knew the country better than most American reporters and even earned a brief measure of celebrity by interviewing on camera the captain of TWA-847 through an open cockpit window in the middle of the hijacking. But apparently Glass didn’t know Lebanon well enough to avoid the fatal error of advertising his travel itinerary. As soon as the Iranians got wind of Glass’s plans to visit Sidon, a Pasdaran officer, drove to Husayn Khalil’s house in the southern suburbs and ordered him to kidnap Glass. Although we knew when and where the kidnapping was going down - we even had the license number of one of the cars to be used - we had no way to get in touch with Glass. We watched helplessly as he was grabbed near the airport.

Although the horse was out of the barn, I had Farid run down everything he could on Khalil. It took him less than a week to come up with the family’s civil registration records. Khalil’s full name was Husayn Ali Husayn Jawad Khalil, born to Ali and Samira Khalil. He was married to the sister of Ali Ammar, a senior member of Hezbollah who one day would be elected to the Lebanese parliament. Another agent brought me a handful of photos of Khalil.

The background data was all well and good, but it was only when I ran Khalil’s name by a former Fatah agent that his story became really interesting. Samir, as I’ll call the agent here, was a Lebanese military officer, but in 1975 Fatah had recruited him to stay out of the fighting for Beirut’s hotel district. After Arafat evacuated Beirut in 1982, Samir stopped working for Fatah, but he still kept in touch with some secret members left behind.

Samir and I met in his former mistress’s apartment in Ashrafiyah, on the Christian East side of Beirut. He always brought along one or two soldiers - as a Muslim, he could never be certain some Christian thugs might not try to grab him. I got used to the soldiers, but it was unnerving to see a pair with rocket-propelled grenades barring entry to the apartment.

About halfway through our first meeting after the Glass kidnapping, I handed Samir three pictures without saying a word. Two were of Palestinians who belonged to a left-wing group; I didn’t care about either of them. The third was of Khalil praying in a mosque, along with a large group of other worshipers.

Samir immediately handed me back the picture of Khalil. ‘That one there is Husayn Khalil,’ he said, putting his index finger on Khalil’s face. ‘He was with Fatah in the seventies. I think he joined in 1971. We worked together for a couple of years.’

‘And now?’

‘In 1982 Khalil left Beirut just ahead of the Israelis. He signed up with Husayn Al-Musawi as chief of security. I heard he led the takeover of the Shaykh Abdallah barracks. I don’t know what’s happened to him since, but I’ll check.’

That afternoon I sent a cable to headquarters, asking for a complete trace on Khalil. What came back was stunning. Tucked away in a five-page cable was a tap transcript that placed Khalil as the Lebanese in charge of the married-officers’ quarters at the Shaykh Abdallah barracks in early 1985 - at the same time the IJO hostages were held there. The authenticity of the information could not be challenged.

At our next meeting, Samir started droning on about the Shi’a fighting each other in the West. Finally, unable to contain myself, I interrupted: ‘Anything on Khalil?’

‘Oh yeah, I almost forgot. I ran into one of his old colleagues from Tyre.’

‘Khalil was in Tyre?’

‘Yes, for a couple of years. After a stint in a Fatah student cell in Beirut, Khalil was recruited by Force 17 and transferred to Tyre. He worked for a guy I’m sure you’ve never heard of.’

‘Try me.’

‘Azmi Sughayr.’

I almost got up and kissed Samir. Sughayr was not a common name. It had to be the same Sughayr who recruited Jada to work in the embassy. If I was right, it was like hitting a grand slam to win the World Series. I had finally tied someone other than Jada to the bombing. Better by far, I had, for the first time, one person connected to both the hostages and the bombing. Khalil was all of a sudden a lot more important than Mughniyah.

I went back to headquarters and asked for everything on Sughayr. There was a lot. My predecessors in Beirut had done their jobs well. According to headquarters records, Sughayr had been born in Palestine in 1944 and joined Fatah’s elite security organization, which would become Force 17, in 1969. He fought for Yasir Arafat against the Jordanian army in 1970 and then in 1971 he joined Black September, a fictional organization used by Fatah to conduct terrorist operations. In 1973 Abu Iyad appointed him head of the Security Office for Foreign Operations. He was probably involved in almost every major Black September terrorist operation, including the massacre at the Munich Olympics. After putting in several years in Libya, he was appointed Fatah commander for Tyre in 1979. Shortly afterward Husayn Khalil had gone to work for him. In 1982, during the Israeli invasion, Fatah put out the false news that Sughayr had been killed. In fact, he stayed in Beirut to run resistance operations against Israel. Khalil apparently had studied at the feet of a master terrorist.

There was one piece of missing evidence that bothered me: What happened to Jada after he was released? It was a long shot, but I asked headquarters once again. Two days later I got my answer, and it was a lot more than I had hoped for. Jada had gone to Dubai, where he was taken in by a man named Anis Abdallah Hassan (Abu Ali), the head of a Fatah sleeper cell in the Gulf. The next day I went through our telephone tap records looking for an Abu AH. I was about to give up when I found three calls from an IJO office to an Abu Ali in Dubai. Not only that, according to the taps, Abu Ali worked directly for Abd-Al-Latif Salah - Mughniyah’s associate and Yasir Arafat’s representative to the IJO.