The Book of Honor (41 page)

From the summer of 1983 until the summer of 1986, Matthew Gannon was based in Damascus, Syria, a country long suspected of supporting terrorism. Nowhere in the Mideast could one be sure to avoid the ravages of terrorism. On October 7, 1985, an Italian cruise ship, the
Achille Lauro,
was seized by four Palestinian hijackers and held for forty-four hours.

Among those passengers looking on in horror was a sixty-nine-year-old American named Leon Klinghoffer. Disabled by a stroke, he was confined to a wheelchair. Terrorists put a machine gun to his wife's head and forced her to leave him. A short time later she heard two shots. Klinghoffer's body was dumped into the Mediterranean, along with his wheelchair. The notion that an old man in a wheelchair could be so coldly executed became one of the defining images in the war on terrorism, erasing any lingering illusions about the nature of this new enemy.

Worse yet were the denials that followed Klinghoffer's murder. “News about the death of the crippled American passenger was fabricated by the American media to smear the image of Palestinian fighters,” declared Abu Abbas of the Palestine Liberation Front, to which the terrorists belonged. “This American could have been dead in his cabin out of fear or shock.” The Palestine Liberation Organization groused that the United States was making “an ado” over Klinghoffer's death and refuted suggestions he was murdered. “Where is the evidence?” demanded Farouk Kaddoumi, the PLO's foreign policy spokesman.

The evidence, Klinghoffer's body, washed ashore a week later near the Syrian port of Latakia. Two bullet holes left little doubt as to the cause of death. But still there was the need for someone from the U.S. Embassy in Damascus to claim the body and oversee its preparation for a return to the United States. Such unpleasant tasks as this fall to those assigned to the consular affairs section, which is precisely where Matthew Gannon was working under cover. Despite the misgivings of some within the Agency that his going to claim the body might attract unwanted press attention, he volunteered for the assignment. It was the first time, but not the last, that he would face the casualties of terrorism.

Though a generation apart, Tom Twetten and his son-in-law, Matthew Gannon, shared much in common. Both entered the CIA as young men profoundly committed—some would say obsessed—with work. Both had come into the Agency in troubled times. Twetten joined in 1961, three months after the Bay of Pigs. At an orientation program an Agency officer had declared that the CIA would never fully distance itself from that fiasco. Twetten momentarily wondered why, if that was true, he had bothered to join so mortally wounded an institution. Gannon had joined in 1977 as the Agency was mired in scandal and investigations into the excesses of the past.

In the mid-eighties Twetten and Gannon shared the drive together from their homes to Langley, leaving in Twetten's VW bus at 6:00 A.M. and often not returning until 8:00 P.M. Both men had brilliant futures to look forward to and both would suffer intensely personal losses at the hands of terrorists. That their paths should cross and their families unite was less a matter of serendipity than the realities of the clandestine service, itself a kind of extended family doubly bound by a culture of secrecy and a distrust of outsiders. By the time Susan Twetten took a part-time job at the Agency, it had become the center of their personal and professional lives.

As the years passed, young Matthew Gannon gathered for himself an enviable record and established himself as one of the foremost Arabists within the Agency. His ascent through the ranks seemed foreordained. Tom Twetten's career also thrived. In the summer of 1975 he had been made deputy branch chief of North Africa, overseeing operations in Libya and Egypt. Later he was chief of station in Amman. In 1982 he returned to Washington and was made chief of operations of the Office of Technical Services, the vast support arm of the Agency that provides everything a spy in the field might need—instruments of secret writing, bugging devices, disguises, concealable cameras, and other exotic gear. In 1983 he was made deputy chief of the Near East Division, once again overseeing Libyan operations, among others.

In the ensuing years, hostility and suspicion between the United States and Libya deepened. Each seemed destined to provoke the other.

In March 1986 a daunting thirty-ship U.S. Navy task force conducted exercises in the waters just off Libya, an action seen as taunting Gadhafi. On March 25 U.S. and Libyan forces clashed as Libya fired missiles on U.S. planes and the U.S. responded by attacking Libyan patrol boats and a missile site. The United States did not have to wait long for Libya's response.

On April 14, 1986, a West Berlin discotheque frequented by U.S. servicemen was bombed. Two American soldiers were killed and 229 were wounded. President Reagan, relying on U.S. intelligence reports, announced that there was “irrefutable” evidence that the bombing was the work of Libya. The United States had been waiting for just such a provocation to unleash a retaliatory strike.

The disco bombing gave the White House and CIA license to exact the most punishing attack on Libya, exposing Gadhafi's vulnerabilities, degrading his terrorist training facilities, and perhaps even destabilizing his regime. The army barracks in particular were selected as a target in the hopes that the troops would turn their wrath against Gadhafi.

A key participant in those consultations was Tom Twetten, then deputy chief of the CIA's Near East Division. Twetten and his staff provided intelligence that helped focus American targets in Tripoli, including Gadhafi's living quarters, though it was the air force that selected the sites and the National Security Council that gave ultimate approval.

Nine days after the disco was bombed, the United States launched Operation El Dorado Canyon. Dozens of U.S. Navy A-6 Intruders and A-7 bombers as well as air force F-111s pummeled Libyan airfields, command posts, and training centers in Tripoli and Benghazi. The CIA was banned by law from any direct assassination attempt on a foreign leader, but the bombing of Gadhafi's Tripoli residential compound could be understood as little else but an attempt on his life. Indeed, Twetten would later acknowledge that that was precisely what a senior Pentagon planner had in mind. Reagan himself had declared that Gadhafi was “this mad dog of the Middle East.” And if there was any ambiguity left, a senior U.S. official was quoted as saying, “We all know what you do with a mad dog.”

In the massive U.S. air assault Gadhafi's adopted eighteen-month-old daughter, Hana, was said to have been killed; two of his sons, aged four and three, were injured; and his wife was left shell-shocked. Gadhafi, for all his ruthlessness, was said to be shattered by the loss and more intent than ever to exact revenge upon his tormentor, the United States. “Child-murderer,” Gadhafi branded Reagan, who had authorized the attack. But Gadhafi decided to bide his time before retaliating.

In 1987 Twetten was chief of the Near East Division and taking an active role in all intelligence operations against Libya. During this period he was intent not to take any action that might create the appearance of favoritism or particular interest in his son-in-law's career. Gannon was assigned to the Counterterrorism Center, taking him somewhat outside of Twetten's direct line of authority.

An Arabist by training with nearly a decade's experience in the Mideast, Gannon was a major asset to the center. Those who knew him were amused that Twetten had gone to such ends to avoid meddling in his career. Gannon's self-effacing brand of courage and his chameleon-like ability to adapt to life in the Mideast had long since ensured a meteoric rise within the CIA. For that, he needed no help from his father-in-law or anyone else.

By the summer of 1988 Gadhafi and Libya seemed to slip off the front pages of the news. The focus of the fight against terrorists had moved from Tripoli to Beirut, where American hostages continued to be held. At that point the Agency suspected that support for such terrorism came from Iran.

Tensions with that country ran high in the summer of 1988. On July 3, 1988, officers aboard the U.S. Navy cruiser
Vincennes,
deployed in the Persian Gulf, believed they detected an incoming Iranian F-14 and fired a surface-to-air missile to intercept the aircraft. The target proved to be not a fighter, but a civilian Iranian airliner, an Airbus A300. Flight 655 was blown apart by the missile and disintegrated midair. Two hundred and ninety passengers and crew members were killed. Once again Iran railed against the United States as “the Great Satan,” and once again there was a feeling of waiting for the second shoe to drop—for Iran to take its revenge.

Five months after the downing of Iran's flight 655, the CIA's Counterterrorism Center needed an Arabic-speaking case officer to send to Beirut on temporary duty. A CTC officer informed Twetten that his son-in-law had been selected for the assignment.

“I am not a part of that decision,” Twetten responded. “He's your officer.” In his mind he knew he had no other choice. “It's all a sham if I intervene and say, ‘No, you can't send Matthew to Beirut,' ” he told himself. But there was no one in the Agency who understood better the perils of Beirut. Terry Anderson, a correspondent for the Associated Press, had by then been a hostage for more than three years, along with other Americans, including agronomist Thomas Sutherland and university administrator David Jacobsen. And they could be counted among the lucky ones.

The CIA's Beirut station chief, William F. Buckley, was not so fortunate. He had been seized by gunmen four years earlier, on March 16, 1984. A man who had quietly supported war orphans in Vietnam, Laos, and Beirut, Buckley had been widely admired by senior Agency officers and was a favorite of CIA head Bill Casey. For fifteen months Buckley was tortured and interrogated. He is believed to have died in captivity on June 3, 1985. Six more years would pass before his remains would be recovered.

At Langley and at the Oval Office, the hostage issue had long been an obsession. The murder of Buckley had convinced the Agency that the other hostages were likewise in imminent peril. Frustrations grew. So, too, did comparisons with the Iran hostage crisis that came to define the Carter administration as weak and ineffective. Reagan's victory had in part been in revulsion to the humiliating spectacle of American hostages paraded about day after day. But in Lebanon, despite its best efforts, not even the location of the hostages was known to the CIA.

It was precisely such frustrations that led the administration and several within the CIA to appeal to Iran, which was believed to have sway over the captors. The plan that was concocted called for a trade of arms for hostages. Specifically the United States secretly sent TOW missiles to Iran in the hope of securing the hostages' release. The plan had a second aspect: proceeds from such sales would be diverted to fund the Contras in Nicaragua in their fight against the Sandinista regime, despite a congressional ban on such support. In November 1986 the scheme erupted into a public scandal known as Iran-Contra.

It would nearly bring down the Reagan administration and once again fix in the public mind the idea that the CIA was out of control and contemptuous of congressional oversight. Fending off congressional investigators and reporters would consume massive amounts of CIA Director William Casey's time and flagging energy. On May 5, 1987, just as the congressional Iran-Contra hearings were getting under way, the once-indefatigable William Casey died of a brain tumor. His successor as Director Central Intelligence was William H. Webster, a former federal judge and director of the FBI. Selected for his reputation for probity and candor, it was hoped that he might restore credibility to the Agency and hold a firmer reign over Langley. In the wake of Iran-Contra he fired two CIA employees, demoted another, and sent out letters of reprimand to four more. By then it had become a recurrent and all-too-familiar pattern at Agency headquarters, wherein men of action—a Dulles, a Helms, a Casey—are eventually followed by more disciplined administrators—a McCone, a Turner, a Webster—who are expected to pick up the pieces and restore credibility.

But the American hostages in Lebanon would long remain in captivity, some of them chained for upwards of a thousand days. It was their plight and the threat of even more terrorism that drew Matt Gannon to Beirut. In late November 1988 Gannon set off, traveling via Cyprus. For the next three weeks he worked relentlessly to reestablish contact with agents who provided him with critical intelligence on terrorist organizations in and around Beirut. But as Christmas drew near, Gannon thought of his family in suburban Maryland, of the burdens his wife faced without him, of his two daughters, Julia and Maggie.

He had been scheduled to fly out on December 23, but as exhausted as he was, he asked the Beirut chief of station if he might leave a day early. His request was granted and Gannon arranged to fly to Frankfurt and then on to London and New York. He booked his flight on Pan Am 103. Some weeks before the flight the United States had received what it considered to be credible threats that there would be an attack on a civilian airliner and the warning was posted to State Department personnel, though not to travelers at large. Even if Matt Gannon had been made aware of such a warning, it is doubtful he would have given it much notice. Such a risk would have paled in comparison to those he faced daily in Beirut.

The plane, named
Clipper Maid of the Seas,
was twenty-five minutes late in taking off from Heathrow, not unusual given the volume of travel at the Christmas holidays. Seven and a half hours later Matthew Gannon could look forward to landing at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport. Pillows were puffed up and in the galley flight attendants prepared to serve dinner. Sitting in business class, Matthew had room enough to stretch out.

Then, at precisely 7:03 P.M. GMT, the plane simply disappeared from the air controllers' screen at Prestwick, southwest of Glasgow. At 31,000 feet above the Scottish countryside it had blown apart. Moments later debris and body parts rained down on the village of Lockerbie. Matthew Gannon was one of 259 passengers and crew members who died. It was later speculated that many of the passengers did not die in the blast but rode their seats down in a terrifying six-mile descent. Eleven residents of Lockerbie also lost their lives.