The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (28 page)

Hostage taking was a time-honored tradition in the Levant, with every party engaging in it. And in the 1980s, taking Westerners became the fad for Iran’s surrogates. The arrest of the Dawa Party members in Kuwait and hundreds of Shia held in Israeli prisons launched a wave of hostage taking to serve as barters for their release. In 1984, two Americans and a French citizen were snatched off the streets. This included a professor at American University and CNN bureau chief Jeremy Levin. Over the course of the next few years, the hostage-taking frenzy snatched nearly a hundred foreigners off the Lebanese streets, chiefly persons from America (twenty-five in all) and Europe.

Iran’s biggest prize occurred on March 16, 1984. CIA station chief William Buckley had been personally sent to Beirut by William Casey to rebuild the agency’s operations following the April 1983 embassy bombing. But he failed to heed those who wisely cautioned him about varying his daily routine for his own safety. As he left home at his regular time, a group led by Imad Mugniyah overpowered him and stuffed him in the trunk of an old Renault. A marine operating a signal collection station in the embassy tracked Buckley’s abductors as they drugged and spirited him out of Beirut in a coffin. In Buckley’s pocket, his abductors discovered a sheet of paper listing every CIA officer in the country, and the exposure of all its operatives led to yet another neutering of American intelligence in Lebanon.

Where Mugniyah took Buckley remains unknown. At the time, some in U.S. intelligence believed he had been flown to Iran for interrogation. CIA operative Bob Baer wrote that he and many other hostages had been taken to a building at Sheik Abdullah Barracks identified by a wooden sign as “married officers’ quarters.” Unlike the other hostages, Buckley was savagely beaten
by his captors. They forced him to write a lengthy manuscript about his spy activities. To the Iranians’ great annoyance, his Lebanese captors allowed him to die of pneumonia in June or July 1985. When news of his death reached one senior guard commander, Ali Saleh Shamkhani, he reportedly flew into a rage, screaming at his subordinates at a meeting in Tehran of the senseless death of such a valuable hostage. He apparently ordered a doctor sent to Lebanon to look after the well-being of other sick hostages.
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The kidnappings were not very organized. Once started, the craze took on a life of its own, as anyone who knew of an American could gather some friends and snatch him. After Buckley’s death, Imad Mugniyah played a key role in trying to get all the hostages under one central control. One of the hostage takers, a man named Farouk, owned several car dealerships. While traveling south to Sidon to beat up a dealer who had not paid him his money, Mugniyah intercepted his car, and the two men got out on the side to talk. Mugniyah ordered Farouk to turn his two hostages over, much to Farouk’s annoyance.

Mugniyah also played a major role in Hezbollah’s infamous hijacking of a TWA Boeing 727 en route from Athens to Rome, which had been intended to secure the release of the Dawa members in Kuwait. During two tense weeks in June 1985, the drama unfolded in Beirut. The two hijackers, Mohammed Ali Hamadi and Hasan Izz al-Din, brutally beat a U.S. Navy diver, Robert Stethem, who happened to be on the flight and traveling with his military ID card. They then shot him and dumped his body on the Beirut airport tarmac.

Sayeed Ali did not know about the hijacking in advance, but when he heard of the TWA jet in Beirut, he joined other Hezbollah members in guarding the plane and passengers in case of a U.S. rescue mission. Amal leader Nabih Berri interceded and took control of the passengers and crew, demanding for their exchange Lebanese prisoners being held in Israel, some of whom were also being held as bargaining chips.
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The speaker of the Iranian parliament, Hashemi Rafsanjani, was flying back from Libya and stopped in Damascus to meet with al-Assad. Rafsanjani had been critical of taking the jetliner. In a meeting that included Iran’s ever present ambassador Mohtashemi, they struck the deal to release the remaining TWA hostages in exchange for prisoners held in Israel. By the end of June, Israel released 766 Lebanese prisoners, and all the 150-odd hostages on the plane came home—all except Seaman Stethem.

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n January 1985, Casey had asked Charles Allen to be the national intelligence officer for counterterrorism. Tall and thin, with a terse, businesslike persona, the self-described workaholic had been running a still sensitive program at the Pentagon. While there, he had witnessed firsthand the growing strength of Hezbollah. What impressed him was the sheer number of weapons flowing to Hezbollah fighters from Tehran via the Damascus airport. Weekly scheduled flights of large Russian-made Il-76s arrived in the Syrian capital, where they were unloaded and moved via truck to the Bekaa Valley. “It was a very different organization than any other terrorist organization the U.S. faced,” Allen said.

The fate of the Western hostages weighed heavily on Reagan. “He was an extraordinarily kind man,” Allen observed. “The plight of the hostages and their families appealed to him emotionally. He became obsessed with releasing the Lebanese hostages, to the point that it distorted his aperture by concern for their welfare.”
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Allen focused on both penetrating Hezbollah and developing intelligence to support a military rescue mission. West Beirut was effectively a denied area for the CIA, and though they tried to get some sources into it, they were never able to really penetrate Hezbollah, settling instead for sources with secondhand access. After a meeting at the White House, Reagan signed a presidential finding to create a Lebanese counterterrorist team run by the army’s intelligence organization. Robert Oakley, then the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, and the CIA’s head of the directorate of operations, Clair George, supported the idea as a means of countering the Shia militants who had attacked the marines and the embassy. “We wanted to be sure that the Lebanese team was properly trained and disciplined; we certainly did not want another ‘loose cannon’ roaming the streets of Beirut,” Oakley later said. The agency’s paramilitary special activities branch headed the effort, but found the group wanting, and it never materialized into a useful agent for the CIA.
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In 1986, Casey and his deputy, Robert Gates, asked Allen to head up the agency’s hostage-location task force, which he did for the next fourteen months. Allen sent officers and agents and other collection means across the Green Line into West Beirut trying to find the hostages. Working with Carl Stiner and Delta, they developed a support network within Lebanon and
Cyprus to undertake a rescue mission. But the military wanted its own guys to have eyes on the target and did not trust the tactical judgment of either a CIA officer or one of the agency’s Lebanese agents. However, the likelihood of getting a military officer covertly near Sheik Abdullah Barracks or West Beirut was nearly zero, severely limiting any chances of undertaking a rescue. Stiner’s men assembled a few times in Cyprus on an intelligence tip about the whereabouts of one of the hostages, but the information never seemed firm and a frustrated group of special forces and SEALs never got a chance to ply their craft and exact some revenge.

At various points either the CIA or the Israeli Mossad tried to even the score. One of their prime targets was Imad Mugniyah. On one occasion, the CIA suspected him to be in Paris. Casey proposed kidnapping him off the streets without telling the French. Robert Oakley heard about the CIA’s idea from an FBI associate. He immediately went to see Shultz in his seventh-floor office to raise his objection. How could the United States criticize others for kidnapping and engage in the same conduct? This unilateral action would destroy our cooperation with the French on other terrorism or sensitive issues, Oakley told the secretary.
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As Oakley made his case, Bud McFarlane called Shultz. “The president has approved Director of Central Intelligence Casey’s recommendation to kidnap Mugniyah off the streets of Paris,” McFarlane said. That started a three-day running battle in the White House Situation Room, with Justice, FBI, and Oakley objecting, but McFarlane and the CIA concurring. The debate ended when the report turned out to be spurious.

Two weeks later, another Mugniyah sighting placed him again in Paris. The United States reported this to the French. Casey dispatched Duane “Dewey” Clarridge—heading the CIA’s European Division—to coordinate with Paris on apprehending him. French police raided a hotel room in which the CIA believed he was staying. Instead of a twenty-five-year-old Lebanese terrorist, they found a fifty-year-old Spanish tourist. However, a French intelligence officer passed to Clarridge a photo of the wanted man taken in the airport on his way back to Beirut.
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CIA Director Casey placed Sheik Fadlallah in his crosshairs. Accounts differ on how Casey decided to remove the Lebanese. But Christian Phalange members trained and equipped by the United States parked a car packed full of explosives near Sheik Fadlallah’s home and the mosque where he preached. On March 5, 1985, it exploded just as Friday services let out. Eighty people
died and more than two hundred were injured, but the attack missed its target, and Fadlallah was not injured.
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After the failed attempt on his life, the Iranians approached Fadlallah again with great esteem, hoping to patch up their differences. “Anyone who irritated the Americans so much that they would try and kill him was okay with Tehran,” Fadlallah’s close adviser Hani Addallah recalled with some amusement.

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n Sunday morning, May 13, 1984, the Kuwaiti oil tanker
Umm Casbah
, heading south out of the Persian Gulf. Lumbered low in the water, her holds were filled with a load of refined petroleum for the United Kingdom. An Iranian reconnaissance plane relayed the tanker’s location back to an air base near Bushehr. An hour later, an Iranian F-4E painted in a desert-camouflaged scheme of light and dark brown swaths took off with its characteristic deafening roar and trail of black smoke. It took less than fifteen minutes for the two-seat jet to cover the distance across the Gulf. The Iranian electronic warfare officer looked into a small video screen and put the crosshairs squarely on the eighty-thousand-ton tanker; he launched two small Maverick missiles, which had been designed to destroy tanks, not supertankers. The missiles hit the tanker squarely amidships, starting a small fire that the crew quickly extinguished. The next day, Iranian aircraft struck again with another missile, this time inflicting real damage, blowing a five-meter hole in the side of another Kuwaiti tanker,
Bahrah
. Two days later, Iran added Saudi Arabia to its target list. Iranian missiles hit the Saudi tanker
Yanbu Pride
while she sat anchored at the oil loading facility of Ras Tannurah. The Iranian pilot then swooped in low, strafing the hapless tanker with its
machine gun.
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Over the next seven months, Iran struck fifteen more Gulf Arab ships.

These attacks marked a major escalation in the Iran-Iraq War. The ensuing tanker war, as it became known, threatened to consume the entire Persian Gulf and curtail the flow of precious oil from the Middle East. Over the next four years, Iran and Iraq attacked more than five hundred ships, with the tonnage lost or damaged equally half that lost in the Atlantic during the Second World War.
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For the United States, the tanker war turned the simmering tensions between Tehran and Washington into a very real shooting war.

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addam Hussein started the tanker war. Shortly after the outbreak of war, both sides declared war exclusion zones in which neutral shipping would risk attack. Iran issued a “Notice to Mariners” declaring a wartime exclusion zone running from twelve to sixty nautical miles from the Iranian coastline. Ships not bound for Iranian ports were ordered by Tehran to remain outside this zone. Iran’s stated purpose was to ensure the safety of neutral shipping, but its true motive was to allow Iranian naval and air forces free rein through half the Persian Gulf, providing it the ability to attack shipping bound for Iraq or its supporters. But in effect it provided Iraq with a “free fire zone,” for only ships bound for an Iranian port would sail in the Iranian exclusion zone.
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Any ship in Iran’s exclusion zone was fair game, and Iraqi pilots took full advantage of it. With the land war bogged down in the trenches outside Basra, in February 1984 Iraqi aircraft escalated their attacks against Iranian oil exports, pounding Iranian shipping in the free fire zone near Kharg Island and Bushehr.
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