Ghost (16 page)

“Ahmed. What do you know about the American hostages?” I get right in his face now. My nose is inches from his. Our knees are touching. We’re trained to do this, as it makes the detainee uncomfortable.

He averts his eyes. “Which ones?”

Good answer. This means he knows something.

“Which ones?” I say. “The ones you know about.”

He doesn’t reply. He’s shaking now. He looks pathetic and lost. It is funny how mean he looked in his photos we’ve got on file when he hefted an AK across his chest. Now, with his curly black hair parted down the middle, his skinny body and starched jeans, he looks lost and helpless. I don’t want to feel sorry for him, not after what he’s done, but a part of me can’t feel anything else. A small part.

“I know of hostages,” he says softly. I study him hard and wonder if he’s near tears.

“Which ones, Ahmed?” I ask. I’m close enough to him to smell him. Dial soap can only do so much. I try not to breathe.

“The ones off the plane,” he confesses.

When TWA Flight 847 was hijacked, it was on a scheduled run from Athens to Rome. The terrorists, who called themselves the Organization for the Oppressed on Earth (a rather laughable front name for Hezbollah), ordered the pilot to go to Beirut. After landing at Beirut International, about twenty passengers were released in exchange for fuel. The plane then flew to Algiers, where another twenty passengers were let go. After a short stay, the plane flew back to Beirut where they executed the navy Seabee diver, a Maryland kid named Robert Stethem, and dumped him on the runway.

Beirut International Airport sits in the middle of a Shiite neighborhood and lacks even basic security amenities, such as an outer perimeter fence. Anyone could come and go onto the tarmac, which proved a major advantage to the terrorists. They began pulling passengers off the plane and stashing them around Beirut. Seven Americans, all with Jewish-sounding names, were the first ones to disappear into the Shiite slums. Then the hijackers forced the pilots to fly the plane back to Algiers. All this ping-ponging back and forth between Lebanon and Algeria served to whip the media up into a feeding frenzy. It turned into a full-scale international news drama played out on scores of networks 24/7. Hezbollah loved it. They’re media whores.

Finally, the plane returned to Beirut. The terrorists removed the remaining passengers and locked them up in various parts of the city. Altogether, by this point in the drama, they still held forty hostages from the flight. Nabih Berri, a local warlord who controlled the Amal militia, ended up with the passengers, and it was his men who guarded them in safe houses scattered around Beirut. At the time, Berri also served as Lebanon’s minister for justice.

Why did Hezbollah hijack Flight 847? Retaliation and leverage were their two main motivations. In their list of demands, the terrorists insisted that the international community condemn the March 8, 1985, attempted assassination of Sheikh Fadlallah. The hijacking was Hezbollah’s immediate response to it. At the same time, the terrorists demanded that Israel release seven hundred Shiite prisoners taken in southern Lebanon.

For most of June, the hostage drama continued. In the end, the Israelis released their prisoners. In return, Hezbollah trucked the Flight 847 passengers north and turned them over to the Syrians. Mission accomplished.

The axiom that we do not negotiate with terrorists is a huge myth. Every nation has made its own deals with these devils. All too often, terror is a blunt but effective political weapon. As long as it works, terrorism will never be stamped out.

I look at Ahmed, one of Barri’s foot soldiers in this game. Is he Hezbollah, too? We’ll need to find out.

“You saw the passengers off Flight 847 then, right?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see any other hostages besides them?” What if this wretched man was one of the thugs who tortured Father Jenco and David Jacobsen? Reap the coming whirlwind, my friend. There will be no mercy for you.

“No, nobody else.” Ahmed maintains eye contact with me as he says this. He doesn’t squirm or fidget. He looks like he’s telling the truth. I feel a little let down.

I change the subject. “Okay. What about threats against the U.S. Embassy in Beirut?”

“What?”

“Are you aware of any plans to hit the embassy?”

“No. None.”

“What about attacks against Americans in Beirut?”

“I hear nothing.”

Time to change course again. “Do you know anyone in Hezbollah?”

He laughs bitterly. “Of course I know Hezbollah. They are all over the place.”

“Do you know the Fox? Imad Mugniyah?”

Silence. He won’t look me in the eye now. The question makes him fearful.

“Do you know Hasan Izz-Al-Din?”

His eyes drop to the floor. He won’t answer.

“You know Hasan Izz-Al-Din?”

More silence. He looks terrified now, but not of me. Of them. Hasan is Mugniyah’s right-hand man. He helped plan and execute the Flight 847 operation. He and Mugniyah are Hezbollah’s most dangerous men. Ahmed clearly knows that. He’s probably been warned that talking about either man will get his family killed.

I try a few more approaches, but he won’t talk about Mugniyah, though it is obvious he’s tied into both Hezbollah and the Amal militia.

MICE: money, ideology, compromise, ego. Our interrogation classes taught us that everyone has a motivation. Everyone has a price. It is our job to discover those two things.

Ahmed is a poor Lebanese male. He was born into nothing and has accomplished nothing with his short life. He came to the United States hoping for a fresh start. That tells me something about his commitment to Amal and Hezbollah’s ideology. It also gives me insight into his motivation. He came here to make money.

Okay, let’s stroke that. “You say you know Hezbollah.”

“Yes. Anyone who lives in Lebanon knows Hezbollah.”

“We could use somebody like you to talk to Hezbollah for us. To find out things.”

He guffaws and looks away.

“You could get paid.”

His eyes lock on mine. I see a flare of hope in them, along with a touch of eagerness. He knows I’m offering him a way out.

“How much?”

I ignore the question and add, “If you get in trouble, we’ll pull you out.”

“How much?”

We have him.

The rest of the day we negotiate a deal. Ahmed will become an informant for us. He’ll go back to Lebanon and burrow deep into Hezbollah. Will we trust what he sends back to us? Of course not. No informant, especially one motivated by money, can be considered trustworthy at first. We’ll spend months cross-checking and vetting the information he provides before we decide what sort of value he has as a mole. But he’ll know that if he wants to get paid, he’s got to bring us useful nuggets. We’ll dole the cash out like heroin to an addict. If he stops delivering the goods, his cash flow gets choked off.

We need human assets on the ground. We’re desperately short of that in the Middle East. Nothing beats a reliable set of eyes and ears in important places. We have precious little inside information on Hezbollah, and Ahmed will be the first step toward building a network that can give us advance warning on what Mugniyah is planning next. We may even get intel on his location, or Hasan Izz-Al-Din’s. This is our first step in turning the tables on our enemies and fighting back.

By day’s end, Ahmed is ready to betray his fellow terrorists. We own him, but it is far less satisfying than I thought. We’ve trapped Ahmed, and now we’re using him. True, he’s allowing us to use him thanks to his inherent greed. If he didn’t take this deal, he’d spend the rest of his life in a federal prison. Or worse. We could send him back to Lebanon and tell the locals that a suspected terrorist is on board. The Lebanese authorities would not interrogate him gently.

He knows this. This was not a choice. This was a form of coercion designed to get him to sell out his own people. And he’ll do it because we control the game. This is a dirty business. It is also necessary.

A week later, we launch our freshly minted double agent back at Hezbollah. The game has entered a new phase.

seventeen

THREAT MATRIX

Summer 1987
Foggy Bottom

HUMINT is a precious asset, the gold nuggets of our profession. We’re finally making progress in the Middle East, but we need more assets, more penetration into the inner workings of our enemies. This is why we cannot help but be delighted when a Libyan diplomat walks into one of our overseas embassies and asks for political asylum.

What a break. Libyan defectors are few and far between. After the initial vetting, he doesn’t appear to be a double agent or a throwaway. He seems to be one of the rarest of the rare: a legitimate defector motivated by ideology. He came to us wanting a new life. America’s global moral authority pays off again. It will take months of checking and rechecking to confirm this, but right now, it looks like a promising source just fell into our laps.

I want to talk to him. I have a lot of questions that can be answered only by an insider within the Qaddafi regime. We’ll start with who pulled off the Calkins and Pollick hits and move on to La Belle. Maybe this guy even has knowledge of future attacks, and his intel will finally help us get in front of the terrorists. If he’s carrying that sort of information, I hope WITSEC—the Witness Security program—sets him up with a mansion in Beverly Hills. He’ll have saved lives.

Not surprisingly, we soon get word from our Dark World sources that the Libyan intelligence service is doing their best to find our defector and kill him. Once we get him to the United States, we move him from safe house to safe house every few days. Those transitions are the most dangerous times—a good hit team will be hard-pressed to penetrate a safe house, but on the street moving from one location to another our defector is a much easier target. We take extra precautions. He rides in one of our new black 1987 Chevy Suburbans. With its smoke-out windows and huge size, the Chevy looks like the mutant offspring of a farm pickup truck and a family station wagon. It is beefy and powerful and can hold six Uzi-and shotgun-armed agents and the protectee. The Suburban will make a hard target for any hit squad.

We hopscotch the Libyan around D.C., a coterie of DSS and FBI agents protecting him. Every agency wants to debrief him, yet we’re not sure how much he knows. We have confirmed that he was part of the Libyan diplomatic corps. Given how much the Libyan embassies support terror operations, I can’t wait to talk to this guy and see what he can tell us.

After several days in D.C., we convoy our defector to a small motel room in Winchester, Virginia. He looks jumpy and ill at ease. I would be, too, given what he’s going through.

This isn’t an interrogation, so I don’t sit knee to knee with our defector. Instead, I take a seat across the table from him as he half-rises to shake my hand. After a brief introduction, I waste no time getting down to business.

“Last spring, we have reason to believe your country’s intelligence service tried to kill two of our diplomats. One in Sudan, one in Yemen. What can you tell me about those two operations?”

He thinks for a minute before answering in almost flawless English, “I have not heard anything about that.”

He looks earnest, like he wants to help.

“What about the nightclub bombing in West Berlin in April? Can you tell me who orchestrated the attack?”

“No. I do not know.” He pauses again for a minute then adds, “You have to understand, I was not involved in intelligence operations. Haiat amn al Jamahiriya is very secretive. Our offices don’t talk to each other.”

“Do you mean compartmentalized?”

“Yes. I believe you refer to Jamhirya as the ESO, right?”

“Correct.” The External Security Organization is Libyan intelligence.

“It has two branches. Internal Security and Foreign Security. The foreign liaison office conducts operations and works with other organizations.”

He’s obviously very intelligent and well educated. I think he’s telling the truth. “What sort of organizations?”

“You would call them terrorists. Abu Nidal’s group. The PLO. Italy’s Red Brigade.”

“Hezbollah?”

He stares at me. “I don’t know.”

I change course. “Are you aware of any plans against U.S. targets?”

He shakes his head. “No. There have been many, especially after your country almost started a war between Libya and Egypt four years ago.”

That’s something that I had just learned about during a fishing expedition in the dead bodies cabinets. In February 1983, Egypt was poised to strike at Libya after it looked like Qaddafi would invade Sudan. The Reagan administration promised air support for the Egyptians if war came. We redeployed several aerial refueling tankers and AWACS early warning radar planes in anticipation of the fighting. Nothing ever came of the situation, and the administration later announced that the deployment of air and naval assets thwarted the Libyan attack. The American planes were withdrawn a month later.

“What can you tell us about Qaddafi?”

“It is a regime run by fear. What else can I say?”

The conversation continues for an hour. An insider’s view of the Libyan regime provides an interesting perspective. There is no initiative; everything originates from the top down. Libyan operations are highly compartmentalized and secrecy is taken very seriously. It isn’t surprising that we’ve never penetrated the ESO. They’re vigilant, ruthless, and paranoid.

Interesting perspectives on the regime aside, our defector has little valuable information for me and the cases I’m working. I leave Winchester disappointed and frustrated. I had hoped we’d have a real catch with this guy. No joy. He was another dry hole. We still have almost no HUMINT on what the Libyans are working on these days.

God, I wish there was some way to close these gaps. In 1984, the Act to Combat International Terrorism included a provision that established the Rewards for Justice program. Basically, it is a global tip operation where we pay handsomely for information leading to the capture of key terrorists. Millions of dollars are sitting in the program’s fund, and we’ve advertised it all over the world. The DSS manages the program, but for the past year and a half I’ve been around, we seem to spend more time in meetings trying to fend off the FBI than anything else. The Bureau wants the program badly, but we’re not going to give it up.

Rewards for Justice has brought many tips to our ears. We get phone calls and walk-ins every day. Most of the time, the tips come from individuals looking for a quick buck, and their intel is suspect. However, the program has yielded some valuable pieces of information.

A few days after the fruitless meeting with the Libyan defector, I get a call from the security desk upstairs. A guard there tells me an Iranian-American just came in through the front door. He says he’s got crucial information for us. I grab my notebook and head upstairs.

We get two or three walk-ins a week, and they usually are serious time wasters. Some of them are wannabes looking for attention. Others are delusional or mentally imbalanced. Most just want a chunk of change but have nothing of value to offer in return. Some of these folks have become regulars. They show up at different agencies and different locations, always looking for money. Fortunately, we now document every walk-in and get a full workup on their backgrounds. We share that information with the FBI and CIA; that way we expose the charlatans and nut jobs. When we identify one of these types, we send a burn notice out to all agencies, warning them that this person is only going to waste their time.

But every now and then a nugget walks through the door. This is why we suffer the other fools. It is the 1 percent rule. We have to cut through the other 99 percent to find the one with a key bit of intelligence that will help save lives.

I reach the front security desk and find a sharply dressed Iranian waiting for me. He shakes my hand, and I lead him down a hallway to a secure debriefing room. When we sit down, I offer him a drink of water.

“No, thank you,” he says in broken English. He’s got just a hint of a southern accent. It sounds strange, sort of like Ayatollah Khomeini channeling Rhett Butler.

“What would you like to talk about?” I ask.

“I have information that can save President Reagan’s life.”

He has my attention now. “Is somebody going to kill him?”

“Yes. There is a plot to assassinate the president.”

“How do you know about it?”

“I have friends,” he tells me cryptically.

“When is this going to happen?”

He ignores the question. “Iranian agents are assisting.”

“You mean Iran is helping plan an assassination attempt on the president of the United States?”

“Yes, exactly.”

“Tell me about the plan.”

“I have heard about your Rewards for Justice program,” the Iranian says as he fidgets with his tie.

Here it comes. “Yes,” I say in a noncommittal tone.

“How much would you pay for this sort of information?”

He wants money. Still, we must vet the threat. Perhaps he’s in the 1 percent. I pull out my pen and start a full workup of my new Iranian friend. It turns out he’s a businessman from Florida with contacts all over the Iranian-American immigrant community. At first glance, his vitals look good. He may be telling the truth. If he is, he may end up with a payday after all.

Over the next few weeks, Gleason has me run down what little the Iranian has given us. We check our own sources. I meet with the FBI and CIA. He’s not one of the repeat nuts or wannabes. FOGHORN unearths no criminal history. I bring the Secret Service into the loop. They start their own investigation and want to meet with our Iranian informant. He refuses. He says he trusts only me.

I finally convince him to meet with myself and a Secret Service agent, whom I introduce as a fellow DSS investigator. Throughout the meeting, the Iranian seems sincere and the threat sounds plausible. He drops a hint that there’s a connection between the plotters and Iranian intelligence in Vienna.

The Secret Service puts the Iranian under surveillance. At the same time, we vet his information and check out his Vienna lead. We come up dry. Is he on the level? I can’t tell, but we have to take the threat seriously, no matter how much time this sucks out of our schedules.

I meet with the Iranian two more times. Each time, he drops another hint, another tidbit for me to follow up. When I ask him to take a polygraph, he initially balks at the idea. Later, he changes his mind. He comes in, we hook him up, and then we fire questions at him.

The results are inconclusive. In the Dark World, everything exists in shades of ambiguity, especially the information that goes into our threat matrix. We ignore these tips at our peril.

We take other precautions, and security around the president is tightened. Nevertheless, after several weeks of dancing with our Iranian informant, the Secret Service comes back with sensitive information. The threat is not credible. I look over what they uncovered and am forced to agree. Iranian intelligence is not trying to kill President Reagan. At least, not yet.

Such cases come and go. We vet so many that they blur together in my mind after a while. I hear everything from the bizarre to the outlandish. Aliens are controlling the secretary of defense. The Russians want to steal the Statue of Liberty. Qaddafi is secretly plotting to take over the United Nations. There’s an unending chorus of delusional baloney flowing from the streets to our front desk. All of it must be listened to because of that 1 percent. We cannot miss that one valid warning that could save lives and prevent catastrophe.

Toward fall, a call comes in at the end of another long day. It is a tipster, warning us that the U.S. ambassador to Colombia is about to be hit. The drug cartel has it in for him. The cocaine lords play a particularly ruthless game, so we take the threat seriously. I miss Mullen’s expertise on the subject. He’s gone now, and I’m helping to cover South America until we can develop one of our new agents into the regional expert.

During our vetting process, our informant mentions that a Colombian enforcer named Victor may have additional details for us. I run down this lead and discover Victor is now in federal custody. The U.S. Marshals Service has him stashed away in WITSEC.

I contact an acquaintance in the U.S. Marshals office and ask if I can meet with Victor. I might have well asked for a face-to-face with Pope John Paul. The Marshals Service takes witness protection extremely seriously, and they trust no one until proven otherwise. In my case, I’d already worked with several U.S. Marshals during the UN General Assembly meeting back at the beginning of the year. The DSS generally has a good relationship with the Marshals Service, and we worked well together in New York. Nevertheless, before they will let me sit down with Victor, they will thoroughly check my own background.

When it comes to the cartels, you never know who is on the payroll.

Just before 8
A.M
. a few days later, the phone rings at my desk.

“Agent Burton,” I say into my receiver.

“Agent Burton, this is Bob.”

A pause. I try to think of the Bobs I know, but I don’t recognize the voice.

“What can I do for you, Bob?”

“I understand you want to meet with Victor.”

I try to conceal my excitement. “Yes.”

“Okay, ten hundred this morning.” Bob gives me a D.C. address, then issues gives me final instructions. “Come alone. Go to the fourth floor and wait. No backup surveillance. No partner. Just you. Clear?”

“Very. See you at ten hundred.” But I’m talking to a dead line. Bob’s already hung up.

An hour after the call, after briefing Gleason, I leave the office and head for the street, where I catch a cab. I give the cabbie an address several blocks from the rendezvous point. He drops me off and I begin to stair-step toward my final destination. Running an SDR is not limited to vehicles. You can do it on foot as well. At each intersection, I make sure to take a casual glance over my shoulder, the one I’ve practiced so many times while running with Tyler Beauregard. A few times, I stop and watch the foot traffic pass my location. I double back twice, then find another observation point and people-watch again.