Baldwin had known him as “a man of great bravery.” The Lewis he encountered now was subject to more introspection. “He felt he had failed himself and failed the Agency.” But Baldwin and his Agency colleagues knew better. Many of them had been trained in the art of interrogation, learning how to prey upon a man's worst fears, to exploit his anxieties and feelings of vulnerability. They knew that no man, not even the steely James Lewis, could long withstand a concerted effort by skilled interrogators. Colleagues went to great lengths to reassure him that he had not been weak, but merely human.
The Agency provided Lewis with psychological counseling and a period to “decompress.” In 1976 and 1977 it paid for him to attend George Washington University, where he got his bachelor's degree in French language and literature. When he had completed his academic course and the Agency's “rehabilitation” program, he was ready to be reassigned. But rather than simply throw him back into an international post, they sought something less stressful and more familiar: Chicago.
It was an unconventional assignment and politically sensitive. In 1977 Lewis moved to Des Plaines, a suburb northwest of Chicago. At that very time, the Senate and House were conducting hearings into CIA abuses and instances of domestic spying. Now here was James Lewis, a covert CIA operative, setting up shop in America's heartland, still assigned to the Agency's Operations Directorate, East Asia Division. On his résumé, years later, he would write that he spent those two years with the State Department in Washington.
In Des Plaines he married Monique, a soft-spoken Vietnamese woman whom Lewis had met in North Carolina during one of many returns to Fort Bragg. Monique, then thirty, had been educated in Switzerland and France, spoke fluent French, and had a degree in pharmacology. She was a woman of considerable beauty and intelligence but asked few questions of her husband and his work.
The only hint of what Jim Lewis was doing in Chicago comes from his sister, Susan, who found herself momentarily a player in CIA intrigue. For years she had kidded her brother that she was fully capable of doing the kind of shadowy espionage work that he did, never imagining that he would take her up on it. Then one night Jim Lewis called and asked if she wanted to play a small but key role in one such mission. “Of course,” said Susan. Not long after, she was asked to fill out some government forms and to provide her brother with a photograph. To assist in the scheme, she would need some marginal clearance.
The full details of the mission were never revealed to her, but this much her brother shared with her: He had persuaded an “Arab student” in Chicago to routinely monitor and report on some activities, presumably within the Arab community or among other Arab students. In exchange for the intelligence the student provided, the Agency was paying him a $1,000 monthly retainer. Lewis had told the student that he lived in California with his girlfriend. That was the role Susan was to play. Lewis asked her to give him the name of a girl, the first one that came to mind. “Janet,” she blurted out. Fine, Janet it would be.
Susan was to purchase a telephone with an unlisted number and keep it out of sight. This she did, hiding it in a desk drawer. No one was to have the number except for Jim and the student informer. When the student called, she was to answer the phone as “Janet” and say that Jim was not at home but that she would take a message and have him return the call. A few days later Lewis called to test the system. “Susan?” he said. “The phone is working.”
“No,” said his sister. “This is not Susan.”
“Susan?” Lewis repeated with growing impatience.
“No,” she repeated. “This is Janet.”
A miffed Lewis had to admit his sister was even more savvy at this business than he had expected. But several months passed and not once did the caller from Chicago telephone. The phone was eventually removed and the subject was never spoken of again.
Meanwhile Lewis continued to live with his wife, Monique, in a huge Victorian house on River Street in Des Plaines. There he had dinner parties for his Washington contacts and would routinely retrieve vintage bottles of wine from his ample wine cellar. In his spare time, he played an active role in the army reserve, completing a course in psychological operations, advancing to the rank of major, and winning a Certificate of Achievement from Headquarters Company, 12th Special Forces Group, in Arlington Heights, Illinois. The certificate was in recognition of his efforts in recruiting “intelligence analysts and target area language experts for the 5th Psychological Operations Group.” No matter how many years he was with the CIA, Jim Lewis would always see himself as a soldier.
In late 1979 he began to prepare himself to return to a covert post in the Mideast. First he would need to undergo rigorous Arabic-language training. After completing an intensive course at the Foreign Language Institute in suburban Virginia he was assigned to Tunis to complete his language training. But in the summer of 1982, as events in Lebanon heated up, the Agency cast about for an experienced case officer with solid nerves and a knowledge of Arabic to gather intelligence on the deteriorating situation in that country.
Already it had a reputation as a hazardous post. Five years earlier, on June 16, 1976, U.S. Ambassador Francis E. Meloy, U.S. economic counselor Robert O. Waring, and the ambassador's bodyguard and chauffeur, Zohair Moghrabi, had been assassinated. Their bullet-riddled bodies were later found at a construction site. In September 1981 the French ambassador had been murdered. In December of that year a bomb had killed sixty-four people at the Iraqi Embassy, including the ambassador. In May 1982 twelve people were killed and twenty-seven injured at the French Embassy. It was no secret that Beirut was a place of peril. But if that was where the Agency needed Lewis, that was where he would go.
On August 13, 1982, Lewis arrived in war-ravaged Beirut. His intelligence-gathering mission was linked to the arrival seven days later of eight hundred U.S. marines, part of a multinational force to supervise the withdrawal of Palestinians from the city.
It began as a temporary assignment. Beirut was a volatile place, and spouses of Agency officers were not yet permitted to accompany them. Still Lewis was bent on setting his mother's mind at ease. Four months after arriving in Beirut he wrote: “Everything is fine here. The war (in the Beirut area) is over and I have survived as usual (not even a scratch).”
The temporary assignment became a full tour of duty, and the prohibition on spouses was lifted. Lewis and Monique found a temporary apartment in a commercial area of the city, an easy ten minutes to the embassy. Monique had not yet started working. She spent the days at home studying Arabic and preparing meals. “Just a note to let you know that we are fine here in Beirut,” Lewis wrote his mother and father. “Guess that you have been seeing the worst on T.V. and have the impression that things are worse than they really are. There has been no anti-American action at all here. There are incidents taking place in the surrounding mountains and in the City itself from time to time. However, we feel safe and are at ease . . . Our maid, a Tunisian girl, has arrived and as usual is really making life easy for us. Monique says that she doesn't think that she can remember how to iron a shirt anymore.”
It was a few minutes after one on the afternoon of April 18, 1983, when a truck with a tarp over it was observed making its way purposefully toward the U.S. Embassy, along the Corniche, the main thoroughfare that runs along the Mediterranean in Beirut. One pedestrian would later note that it was so laden down with cargo that the tires bulged beneath the weight.
At the very time the truck came in sight of the embassy, personnel were finishing lunch in the cafeteria. Thirty-seven-year-old Richard Gannon, the State Department's regional security officer, or RSO, was at his desk reviewing security procedures. Gannon was a tall and gangly figure with gentle eyes and a coal-black mustache. Across from him sat his superior, Dave Roberts, the regional director of security who had flown in from Casablanca.
Gannon's job, making sure the embassy was secure, was an impossible task. The embassy was housed in an aging eight-story structure, originally a hotel, that was built up against the Corniche. It provided a spellbinding view and a deadly vulnerability. Gannon had been fretting about the exposure of the embassy ever since arriving in country eight months earlier.
Tensions had been running high for months. The Israelis had invaded Lebanon on June 6, 1982, and there was an uneasy standoff between their occupying forces and various Palestinian and Syrian forces. On September 15, 1982, the Israelis had entered Beirut. The next day, at the camps of Shattila and Sabra, some six hundred Palestinians, most of them women and children, had been massacred by Phalangist militia who, it was suspected, had been given the green light by the Israelis.
To many in the strife-torn country who saw Israel as merely a U.S. proxy, the ultimate blame for the invasion, the massacre, and the subsequent strife rested with America. In a part of the world where revenge is axiomatic, it was only a matter of time. Already, American David Dodge, acting president of American University Beirut, had been kidnapped.
It was the job of the CIA station in Beirut to try and make some sense of the bewildering intrigue and animosities that periodically erupted. Almost daily, CIA Station Chief Ken Haas briefed Ambassador Robert S. Dillon on what the Agency had learned. An energetic and assertive figure, Dillon would listen carefully but quietly hunger for more definitive information. Haas adopted a secretive mien even with the ambassador, perhaps because there was sometimes little of substance to pass along. The country was in fragments, and many of the traditional tools of Agency tradecraft had proved peculiarly ineffective.
The CIA in Beirut had many objectives: find out what had become of the hostage David Dodge, gather intelligence on the growing threat of Shiites, the role of Syria, Iran, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Maronites. There was trouble brewing in the Bekáa Valley, but penetrating the tight ethnic and familial units there had proved nearly impossible. The Agency had woefully few “assets” in the area. In addition, Haas and Lewis were continually getting requests from Washington to chase down Israeli intelligence reports, many of which proved to be bogus or self-serving. “Your friends are just as unreliable as your enemies,” Ambassador Dillon would conclude.
For months security officer Gannon had made no secret of his concerns for the embassy's safety. On October 1, 1982, he had sent a telegram out under Ambassador Dillon's name, the subject of which was “Public Access Controls.” Gannon had met with some resistance. There were concerns of cost. To the uninitiated, the embassy might have appeared well fortified. Stern-faced marine sentinels stood watch, and heavy masonry walls appeared impervious to attack. In case of trouble, inside there were steel doors with armor rings that could be closed to seal off the building, as on a ship. In the entryway concealed holes could be used to flood the area with tear gas. The windows were covered with Mylar, a plasticlike material designed to prevent the glass from becoming a hail of deadly projectiles.
But so grave was the concern for security that in February Washington had sent out a team of experts to examine the building. The embassy had asked for sweeping security improvements. The team made numerous sketches detailing what would later be made obviousâthat the embassy, for all its precautions, was virtually indefensible, pressed as it was against the Corniche without any buffer to protect it from attack.
But the team from Washington faced financial constraints. No sooner had they left when the embassy sent off a telegram to the State Department pleading its cause. “We thought we had a special case,” recalls Robert Pugh, then deputy chief of mission. The essence of the cable was “we need it all and we need it now.”
But by mid-April, after the Israelis had pulled back and a multinational force had come on the scene, there was a kind of lull in the violence that raised hopes. Spring itself seemed to promise a relaxation of tensions.
All such buoyancy of spirit would soon come to an abrupt halt. As the explosives-laden truck turned into the embassy driveway and gunned the accelerator, Ambassador Dillon was in his eighth-floor office, one hand holding the phone, the other awkwardly putting on a thick red marine T-shirt in expectation of his afternoon jog. Three floors below him, virtually the entire CIA station was assembled for a staff meetingâJames Lewis, his wife, Monique, Phyliss Faraci, Frank Johnston, Bob Ames, William Sheil, and Deborah Hixon were all there.
Dick Gannon's back was to the sea, a roll-down metal shutter raised to let in the afternoon light. In Gannon's in-box was a handwritten memo, what he called a note to himself, laying out the vulnerabilities of the Beirut embassy. It read in part: “Post has increasing concerns with deteriorating security situation in Beirut . . . Ability of LAF [Lebanese armed forces] or local law enforce. to prevent such attacks is non-existent. May only be a matter of time before U.S. is includ in list of opportune targets. With avail explosives, suffic. motive and in absence of any deterrent (effective law enforcement) U.S. interests could be target w/ minimal risk . . . What might we face . . . 1.) Car bomb/package bomb at Chancery.” Like Cassandra, Dick Gannon's prophetic warnings went largely unheeded, lost in the welter of bureaucratic concerns and budgetary restraints.
At precisely 1:06 P.M. his worst fears were realized. The truck carrying the bomb drove into the building and simultaneously detonated a ton of high explosives. Cars were tossed into the air, a blinding fireball rose up, and a murderous shock wave scaled the front of the building, bringing down its midsection as if it were no more than a house of cards. Some of those in the adjacent cafeteria closest to the explosion were blown through the wall. Support pillars disintegrated. Black smoke engulfed the entire building, air conditioners were blown inside of rooms, walls collapsed, and safes flew open. Canisters of riot control gas erupted, mingling with the black smoke and dense debris, making breathing even more difficult. Flying metal cut a tree in half, and heat from the blast melted nearby traffic lights. So great was the force of the blast that it was said the helicopter carrier
Guadalcanal,
several miles offshore, felt a shudder.