See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (12 page)

At the stroke of two, a dark bearded man with a paunch, about forty-five years old, walked up to me and, without saying a word, motioned me to follow him. We were heading toward a side exit when he pulled me by the arm into the baggage claim room. The baggage handler, who also looked like an Arab, nodded at my escort as we set off between a long row of baggage racks and out a back door to a rear loading dock. Waiting there were two identical charcoal-gray Mercedes with smoked windows. We got in the backseat of the first one.

After a short warm-up through Dortmund, the two Mercedes turned onto the autobahn and opened up their throttles. We never got out of the fast lane, which in Germany is reserved for drivers who think 120 miles an hour is a prudent speed. Every time a car got in our way, our driver madly flashed his lights until it moved. The second Mercedes drafted right behind us.

About twenty miles later, just as I was getting used to the German version of NASCAR, the driver swerved abruptly right, cutting diagonally across the two slow lanes without ever easing up on the gas pedal and dropping down an off-ramp I hadn’t even seen. The second Mercedes followed, but I noticed it starting to hold back, blocking anyone who might try to follow us. These guys are serious, I thought.

The Mercedes took what looked to be an aimless route through a new, modest, scrubbed German suburb. By now it was early afternoon. Almost no one was on the street when the driver turned into the driveway of a house identical to all the rest and pulled into a bottom-floor garage. As soon as we were inside, the door closed behind us. I never would have been able to find the place again.

Waiting in a small office adjoining the garage was a frail, elegant man with a neatly trimmed beard. He was in his late fifties, I guessed, wearing a soft gray flannel suit and a starched white shirt with a straight collar. He struck me as particularly calm and collected. The concept doesn’t exist in Islam, but the word that came to mind was ‘beatific.’ He motioned for the others to leave us alone and closed the door.

For the next hour the Muslim Brotherhood leader vilified the regime in Damascus. He described Hafiz Al-Asad as a heathen, the incarnation of evil, and in other terms you didn’t hear even in Washington, where Asad was never particularly popular. He pulled out a loose-leaf notebook full of pictures of Hama after the bombardment - people burned, crushed, and buried under the rubble. Whole families had been put up against the wall and shot.

Finally I interrupted to ask what could be done.

The man smiled. ‘We are ready to go hand in hand with the United States and remove this cancerous sore from God’s sight.’

‘How?’ I asked, suspecting the worst.

‘We have buried in Ghuta, near the Damascus airport, an SA-7 missile,’ he said matter-of-factly as if telling me he’d planted a bed of petunias in his garden back home.’ What we need is for you to inform us when Asad’s airplane is ready to take off and he is on it.’

My first thought, as a case officer, was Damn, this is hot information. The sourcing couldn’t be better - this man was a boss in the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, and he was talking about capping Hafiz Al-Asad, the biggest hurdle to a Middle East peace. Since our new friend was proposing an assassination, in violation of Executive Order 12333, I’d have to report it to Dewey but I still hoped that we could keep meeting this man and maybe redirect his energies to a common goal. Even if we couldn’t, I didn’t see any harm in keeping our lines of communication open. Who could tell when we might need the Muslim Brotherhood?

Back in Washington, Dewey listened carefully as I told him about the meeting, from the moment I was picked up at the Dortmund rail station until I had told the Muslim Brotherhood leader I’d have to consult with my bosses.

‘Go write it up,’ Dewey said.

‘Wait,’ he added as I was heading out the door. ‘Nothing on a computer. Use a typewriter instead. Destroy the ribbon afterward. And don’t make a copy. I want to keep this between Ollie, you, and me.’

Ollie was Oliver North, the NSC staffer who would take the fall in the complicated interplay of missiles, hostages, and funding for Nicaraguan rebels that became known as the Iran-contra affair. Although the Muslim Brothers had nothing to do with Iran-contra, dealing with them was right up North’s alley.

As instructed, I gave Dewey the only copy of my contact report - the last I was ever to hear about it.

Bonn was unimpressed with the cable I sent about the meeting (minus the part about the SA-7). Bonn was sticking to its original position: It did not want to meet anyone from the Muslim Brotherhood. I didn’t have the time to go back, and the CIA wouldn’t meet the Syrian Muslim Brothers again. But the Muslim Brother I met in that innocuous suburban house in Dortmund would pop into my life again, in the flays after September 11, 2001, when the FBI came calling to tell me that one of the Syrian’s associates was a suspect in the global network that had supported the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The really bad guys - the ones capable of doing great harm for or against our side, depending on which way God is talking to them that day - don’t just go away. It was better, I always figured, to have a line into them, even if it meant keeping our hands a little dirty in the process. There is, of course, no guarantee even if we had kept communications open that the Syrian I met in 1986 would have led us to Muhammad Atta or any of the German cells of Osama bin Laden ‘s Al Qaeda network that may have played a role in the September 11 attacks. But closing down the channel assured that the Syrian wouldn’t lead us to anyone. For Bonn and the CIA, it remains an unforgivable error.

The White House was still on Dewey’s back to do something about the hostages, and as was his style, he was still looking for an answer to bubble up through the ranks of his counterterrorism troops.

I’d been back from Germany for about a week when Dewey hailed me into his office one morning. ‘You have good instincts,’ he began. ‘What’s the craziest idea you can come up with to free the hostages?’

For a lot of reasons, there was no obvious answer to that question. As late as 1986, the intelligence community was divided over who even controlled the hostages. The CIA’s corporate position was that the IJO - it still knew next to nothing about it - held them and that it operated largely independent of any state control. Although the CIA conceded that the group had lines to Iran and Syria, it didn’t think either country had any real influence. Other analysts around Washington, especially in the Pentagon, disagreed. They were convinced the IJO was no more than a puppet of the Iranian Pasdaran.

The CIA’s position wasn’t based on rock-hard evidence, but the hypothesis had become so ingrained it was getting hard to ignore. For a year after Buckley’s kidnapping, the CIA had absolutely no idea who had taken either him or the other IJO hostages. A break wouldn’t come until Algeria stepped forward to inform us that a young Shi’a Muslim from southern Lebanon named Imad Fa’iz Mughniyah had kidnapped Buckley, as well as CNN’s Jeremy Levin and the clerics Benjamin Weir and Laurence Martin Jenco. Before 1982 Mughniyah worked for PLO chairman Yasir Arafat, the Algerians told us; now he operated on his own. According to this source, Mughniyah was looking to trade his foreigners for seventeen prisoners being held in a Kuwaiti jail on charges of bombing the French and American embassies there on December 12, 1983. One of the seventeen was Mughniyah’s brother-in-law Mustafa Badr-al-Din.

Mughniyah had dropped mostly out of sight until June 14, 1985, when TWA Flight 847 was hijacked out of Athens and flown to Beirut. Three days later the hijackers shot a young navy diver and threw his body out onto the runway. The hostages were eventually handed over to Amal, a Lebanese Shi’a militia, and they were scattered around Beirut’s southern suburbs, but four remained with the IJO. A well-placed agent identified Mughniyah as the mastermind of the hijacking, which fit nicely with the Algerian portrait of Mughniyah as a lone operator. The agent’s information was good enough for the Department of Justice to indict Mughniyah and three accomplices for the hijacking.

All of that was on my mind as I stood in Dewey’s door.

‘No limits?’ I finally asked.

‘Yeah, any thing,’ Dewey said.

‘We hit Mughniyah where it hurts - his family’! said.

Dewey didn’t see what I was getting at.

‘Look, Dewey’ I said. ‘Let’s assume three things are true: Mughniyah really controls the hostages, Mughniyah is devoted to his family - as most people in the Middle East are - and finally, this administration would consider anything to get the hostages back. If all of these are in fact true, then we might consider grabbing some of Mughniyah’s family to trade for the hostages.’

The idea, of course, was over the top, but back then the CIA was expected to operate on the edge, do things no other government agency would consider. One of the instructors at the Farm had told us a story of how, after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the agency’s skunk works had come up with the idea of filling a captured Soviet transport plane - Soviet markings and all - with live pigs and dropping them over Mecca, Islam’s most holy city. The idea was to light the Middle East’s fuse and direct the blast toward the Soviet Union, whose influence had been growing in the area. Compared to that, what I was suggesting to Dewey sounded almost sane.

‘Fine, go find me Imad’s family,’ he told me.

I knew better than to actually get started; Dewey would still have to run it by Ollie North or someone else at the NSC. When I never heard anything back, I forgot about it. Only when the Iran-contra story broke did I learn that North had circulated my idea around the White House via one of his infamous messages on PROF, an internal White House e-mail system.

Dewey was to come to me one final time about the hostages, and the next time I had a bit more confidence in the outcome.

During my trip to Balabakk in October 1984, I had seen with my own eyes that Syria was not entirely comfortable with having the Iranian Pasdaran camped in its backyard. It bothered Syria that the Pasdaran supported just about every Islamic terrorist group in the Middle East except the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. Hafiz Al-Asad, a committed secularist, couldn’t be sure when Iranian-backed fundamentalism would slosh back over the Syrian border. My idea was to make Asad believe Iran had decided to destabilize his regime. If it worked, Syria, I hoped, would act without thinking and crack down on the Pasdaran and its agent, Hezbollah. Even if it turned out the IJO was an independent organization, eliminating its ideological allies couldn’t hurt.

The plan I came up with was unconventional but certain to attract Asad’s attention. The objective was to scare Syrian diplomats in Europe and make them believe they were the targets of Hezbollah terrorist attacks. It was supposed to work like this: One night a half-dozen clandestine CIA tech teams would hook up low-order explosives to the ignitions of the Syrian diplomats’ cars. The next morning, when the diplomats started their cars, there would be a pop and a fizz. (Low-order explosives burn rather than explode, but the chemical composition is nearly identical to a real explosive.) The police, I figured, would assume the terrorists had simply been sold a bad batch of plastique. Afterward we’d put out a fake communique claiming the attacks in the name of Hezbollah, and an angry Asad would come down on Hezbollah as he had on the Muslim Brothers during the Hama insurrection. Or at least that was my plan. I wrote it up in a cable to all our offices in Europe.

‘Ollie is going to go nuts,’ Dewey said as soon as he finished reading it. He ran out the door to show it to Clair George, the director of operations.

It wasn’t five minutes before Dewey was back, standing beside my carrel with the cable in his hand.

‘Clair said forget it. No, I’ll tell you the truth - Clair screamed at the top of his lungs to forget it. He said it would be over his dead body that the CIA would set off bombs in Western Europe. Think of something else - minus the plastique.’

Eventually we did get an operation through the bureaucracy. The CIA has asked me not to describe it. I can say, though, that while it managed to irritate Hafiz Al-Asad - sort of like a twenty-four-hour diaper rash - it wasn’t enough for him to shut down Hezbollah.

I don’t know if Dewey ever told the White House about this last operation, but if he had, I doubt it would have been impressed. The White House wasn’t interested in palliatives. It wanted the hostages free. But again not until Iran-contra broke would I understand how desperate the administration had been or how close I came to being sucked into its scheme.

One morning in April 1986 I turned around to find Dewey standing behind me in the office. The weather had turned warm, and Dewey was wearing a double-breasted linen suit with an enormous carnation in his lapel. He had an unlit half-smoked stogie in one hand and an agent’s file in the other.

‘Read this,’ he said as he dropped the file on my desk.’ You and Cave are going on vacation.’

George Cave was the CIA’s legendary Iran expert. Fluent in Persian and good in Arabic, Cave was probably the most experienced Middle East hand in the CIA - so valuable that he had been brought back from retirement because the ranks of Middle East experts in the CIA were thinning out so fast and there was no program to train new ones.

When Dewey went away, I noticed the cryptonym, or the agent’s code name, on the file jacket: XXXXXXX/1. -The first two letters indicated the agent was either an Iranian or reported on Iran. I looked at the first document with the agent’s true name - Manucher Ghorbanifar. It meant nothing to me, but on the left side of the file I noticed what we in the DO called a ‘burn notice,’ or a directive to stay away from an agent. These things were sent to every CIA office around the world after the DO had a wrenching experience with any agent, like fabricating information that badly embarrassed the CIA in the press or with the White House. Ghorbanifar had reported on March 17, 1984, that an Iranian radical, Mehdi Karrubbi, was plotting to assassinate President Reagan. The following day Ghorbanifar was polygraphed and confessed he’d invented the whole story to make some money, but not before the Secret Service had been put on red alert.