Authors: Fred Burton
Steve’s friend won’t tell me who his relative is or even what the connection is between them.
“What about money?” he asks again. “I want a hundred and fifty thousand.”
“Okay, look, it is premature to be talking money at this point,” I reply. He looks disappointed and even more edgy. I tell him to walk me through his story again. This time, I pull out a notebook and start scribbling.
Two hours later, he’s told me everything he’s willing to give up. He says nothing about specific hostages—no mention of Buckley. He rambles on about his family, his association with Hezbollah, and Beirut. In the process, he actually tells me very little. His family lives in West Beirut. Somehow, this relative of his saw hostages in the southern part of the city. No information on how many hostages or who they were. No more specifics, no more details. I press him, but he doesn’t divulge anything else and makes it clear he won’t until he has been paid off.
“I’ll report this to Steve and he’ll get in touch with you.” The informant looks disappointed. I think he expected me to shovel bags of cash at him.
I let myself out. He remains on the bed, smoking with a still-shaky hand. That’s the last I see of him. I head down the stairs and hit the street again, hooker and junkie eyes following my every move. I feel like a goldfish with a pack of cats peering into my bowl. The night is even colder now. Steam billows up from the manhole covers. The scene is bathed in darkness.
I walk through this moribund neighborhood, keenly aware of everything around me. The addicts remain on their steps. The transient is still passed out in the doorway. The prostitutes on the corner shiver and rub their arms. A drunk staggers past, swathed in a corona of foul odors. I take this all in, eyes alert for any potential threat.
At the same time, my mind stays fixed on the case at hand. The cop in me wants to dismiss Steve’s friend as little more than a sleazy huckster looking for a big score. His information is secondhand. I don’t think he has much more than what he’s already told me.
On the other hand, he must have been on the level to some degree, otherwise Gleason never would have sent me out here. Some basic check into the informant probably confirmed he’d just returned from Lebanon. To be thorough, I’ll check out his story and cross-check as much of it as possible. If it does look like he is legit, maybe some money will come his way.
All in all, my gut tells me this was a waste of time. We’re not going to find Buckley or the others through this guy. The thought depresses me. The CIA’s Beirut station chief in Iranian hands. Perhaps I was hoping for the break that would bring him home. That was naïve of me. Thousands of tips come in every day. Most are like this guy: a dry hole.
Then again, it only takes one.
four
THE DARK WORLD’S REDHEADED STEPCHILDREN
March 24, 1986
The search for William Buckley will never stop—not until he’s found—but right now, we’ve got trouble brewing with the Libyans. Serious trouble.
For reasons that are above my pay grade, Muammar al-Qaddafi has been provoking us for years. Using their diplomatic missions (they call their embassies “People’s Bureaus”) as bases of operations, the Libyans have attacked American and British targets all over the world. They are not shy about their targets, either. They once sniped at a crowd of anti-Qaddafi protesters from their consulate in London, killing a British policewoman in the fusillade. In the dead bodies cabinets the other day, I discovered a file on a 1980 assassination plot against President Ronald Reagan. Nobody is out of bounds.
In January, a couple of navy F-14s shot down two Libyan MiGs during a dustup over the Gulf of Sidra. Qaddafi considers the gulf Libyan territory. The rest of the world considers the gulf international waters. The U.S. Navy is the only force capable of challenging Qaddafi on this point of law. President Reagan has sent three carrier battle groups into the Mediterranean Sea to drive home to Qaddafi the seriousness of our objections. The Libyan dictator has proclaimed a “line of death” across the northern boundary of the Gulf of Sidra. Cross it, he says, and he will strike.
He did, too. Yesterday, March 23, we crossed the line of death. The Libyans launched missiles at our aircraft. We blew up several of their radar installations in response. After that, the Libyans sent out several patrol boats to attack a three-ship surface task force we’d pushed into the gulf. A combination of A-7 Corsair IIs and A-6E Intruders blasted two patrol boats out of the water and crippled a third.
Today, Qaddafi called on Arabs to form suicide squads, turn themselves into human bombs, and go blow Americans up wherever they can be found. “Make everything American a military target!” he exhorted during his speech.
Behind the scenes, in the Dark World, much worse is going on. Our intelligence reports are full of bad news. Orders went out from Tripoli to thirty of their diplomatic missions to initiate attacks on American targets.
We’re going to get hit. It is not a matter of if, but how hard, where, and when. The DSS is on high alert. We’ve sent messages to every embassy to be extra vigilant and to tighten security. Our diplomats and DSS agents overseas are hunkering down, waiting for what is sure to come.
Behind the big blue door, Gleason, Mullen, and I spend the day trying to read the tea leaves coming into FOGHORN. We don’t want to absorb this attack. We want to stop it. My worst nightmare is to disregard a threat or misread a signal, then watch as an attack unfolds and people die. I would be responsible for their deaths. My judgment has to be perfect. This is the fear I live with every day; it both motivates me and keeps me awake at night.
As the day progresses, Mullen looks increasingly haggard. I steal occasional glances at him and can tell he’s feeling the same pressure I do. Call it a hazard of the job.
All the incoming news is bad and getting worse. One intel report shows that the Libyans have an operational plan calling for ten simultaneous attacks on targets all over the world. This could be a bloodbath.
Our embassies in Europe and South America report suspicious sightings of Libyans. Some are seen eyeballing our diplomatic missions. Others are seen lurking near overseas military bases. As we sift through all this raw intel, we try to separate overreactive paranoia from legitimate threats. It is plodding work, made more difficult by our means of communicating with our agents in the field. In order to send messages back up through FOGHORN, we must type them on a special coded typewriter. We use an IBM Selectric with an optical character recognition (OCR) element. It takes me forever to hunt and peck the messages together. Of course, if I make a mistake, I have to start over—we can’t use Wite-Out. As we try to get follow-up questions answered, the lag time grows longer and longer. What if by the time we get our answer, it is too late?
Sooner or later, we must streamline this process.
For now, this crisis gives me a crystal-clear view of exactly who and what we are as an organization. Federal law mandates that the State Department takes the lead role in any investigation into an international terrorist attack against American citizens. Within the Department of State, it falls to the Diplomatic Security Service to get into the field and figure out what happened. Sometimes we step back and let the FBI or CIA or a foreign agency take point, but even when that happens, we stay very involved in the process. Every American embassy has a small cadre of DSS agents. We’re the only law-enforcement force that’s in every country on the planet. Yet, hardly anyone outside the Beltway has ever heard of us.
We like it that way.
The DSS got its start in 1916 when it was formed to serve as a counterintelligence and counterespionage section of the State Department. Known then as the Office of the Special Agent, we predated the FBI, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and the CIA. As an organization, the DSS’s spying days ended after World War II with the establishment of the CIA. In the war’s aftermath, we got a new name—Office of Security, or SY for short—and a host of new roles. We protected our ambassadors and our embassy staffers. We covered the secretary of state like the Secret Service does the president. We also guarded foreign heads of state and visiting dignitaries when they came to the United States. And, of course, we investigated crimes against Americans overseas, passport fraud, visa fraud, and other issues involving foreign nations, such as illegal arms sales. We still do most of these things today, though the Secret Service now handles protection for heads of state. We still protect foreign diplomats and dignitaries, including Prince Charles and Princess Diana whenever they come to the United States.
Over the years, the FBI and CIA have become the heavyweights. This means we do a lot of liaisoning with our counterparts at the two agencies. This can either be a bureaucratic chore, or it can go smoothly, depending on who we deal with in each office. Like any other profession, cultivating contacts where it counts helps get the job done. So far, I’ve experienced the extremes. There are times nobody at the FBI wants to see me. Our evidence-analysis requests tend to get lost in the shuffle. Lab time is at a premium at the FBI, and every organization has high-priority issues that need to be addressed. The DSS sometimes ranks low on their list of agencies to please.
The CIA is a different matter. It is like our younger cousin who’s grown up into the six-foot-six star football player we never were. My first visit to Langley will never leave my memory. I stood in the entrance, my CIA badge around my neck. I stuck it into a slot next to a turnstile and was granted access into the inner sanctum of America’s intelligence nerve center. To the right of the doors stands a statue of Nathan Hale, the Revolutionary War spy who went to a British hangman’s noose with the immortal words “Give me liberty or give me death” on his lips.
Along the walls in the lobby are gold stars. Each one represents a fallen agent, killed in the line of duty. Not one star has a name attached. The stars ensure their sacrifices will never be forgotten, but their names and deeds will remain anonymous.
Carved into the granite wall next to the stars are the biblical words “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”
Beyond the lobby, the CIA looks and functions much like any other government agency. Mazes of cubicles, stacks of paper, and rows of cramped offices with people running back and forth compose the everyday scene. On those first few trips, I learned that the bureaucracy there is much like every other. They’re protective of their turf, don’t like it when they feel infringed on, and the only way to keep a smooth line of communication flowing between them and us is to focus on building personal relationships. It is a touchy situation, partly because of the CIA’s inherent internalizing of information. Sharing does not come naturally to the CIA. They’re protective of their assets and their information, which is understandable in this line of work. There is also some friction between the DSS and the Agency because we overlap in places overseas, especially during counterterror investigations. We have the same goals—usually—but our methods and motives are different. The CIA wants to find the
who
and
why
in every attack. We want to find out the
how
so we can prevent it from happening again. For the most part, I’ve found that the Agency does play well in the Sandbox with us; we just need to manage that relationship carefully.
After Beirut I and II, the Inman Commission set the stage for another major reorganization. The Office of Security became the Diplomatic Security Service. Our numbers swelled, and our focus on counterterror increased. Back in the day, the old DSS agents were offensive-minded. They’d root out spies and networks in the United States and take them down. Today, the FBI does that. Overseas, it is the CIA that carries the fight to the enemy. Today, in 1986, the DSS is the most defensive-minded of America’s agencies. Our job is protection, keeping people alive. To do that, we have our own network of informants, our own sources of intelligence, and our own means to thwart attacks or apprehend terrorists. After all, the best defense is frequently a good offense. More often than not, though, we work hand in hand with the other agencies to make those things happen. The FBI, CIA, and National Security Agency (NSA) all have more people and more resources than we do.
In many ways, we’re America’s Dark World redheaded stepchild. We maneuver in the cracks and crevices between the other agencies. It is a tough place to operate.
Here in the counterterrorism (CT) office, behind the big blue door, we are supposed to see the overall picture. All the overseas threats and the reports from our embassies and field agents flow into our little corner of the Harry S Truman Building. That intel merges with information disseminated from the FBI, NSA, CIA, foreign intelligence agencies, local police departments, and the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol), among other places. We face a mind-numbing mountain of paper every day, but here in D.C., we’re supposed to have perspective, which is no easy task when we’re inundated with so much raw information.
The agents overseas are focused on their immediate surroundings and host country. They see the trees. We see the forest. At least we’re supposed to see it. And it is our job to figure out which sections of the forest are ripe for attack.
Over the past month, I’ve seen all sorts of threat indicators and sent those back out into the field. A tip from Bangkok comes in via FOGHORN. The source there says an embassy in the Middle East is going to be hit with a car bomb. We route that to our regional security officers (RSOs)—the senior agents in charge at our embassies—with a flash warning to pay particular attention to vehicular traffic and unattended automobiles.
Behind the big blue door, we are the trip wire. The threats come in. We figure out the best way to handle them and send out warnings. In a sense, this makes Mullen, Gleason, and I managers and filters for all the incoming chaos. At the same time, while keeping our eye on the big picture, we must also delve into the field.
Already, I’ve had to investigate several terror attacks on American interests overseas, including the bombing of our embassy in Lisbon, Portugal. A radical group planted a bomb on a marine’s personal vehicle. Somehow, it escaped notice when the car was searched by the embassy security force manning the front gate. The bomb went off a short time later. Fortunately, nobody was killed.
The gate guards were local nationals. Was it an inside job? Gleason gave the case to me. It turned out they had just missed the bomb during the search; there was no conspiracy. We put together a revised set of security procedures for the guards so that such an attack could not happen again.
Hopefully not, anyway.
If we can’t stop an attack before it happens, before the smoke clears over the target we open a CT investigation. Once a counterterror investigation is opened, our office has one major objective: Find out what went wrong. Again, it is a defensive role; we want to study the attack—break it down into its individual components to see how the terrorists carried it out. Once we figure out how they succeeded, our security flaws become evident. This knowledge will save lives in the future, as we can devise new security tactics that fill the gaps the attack exploited in the first place. Frankly, we’re way behind the ball right now, struggling to catch up to our enemies. That is what makes us vulnerable.
That’s also why our trip-wire efforts are so important. If we can divine the target of the next attack, we can warn our men in the field. They can counter the threat and hopefully deter the terrorists. One month into my job and this much is obvious: If we miss the warning signs, it’ll be too late. Once the truck bomber starts his mission, the chances of it succeeding are almost 100 percent. The only sure way to prevent an attack is to stop it before he gets behind the wheel. There are two ways to do that: Find and bring down his network, or change tactics and security around the target in such a way that the terror cell aborts the attack.
All day long, Gleason, Mullen, and I work feverishly to find those little nuggets, those genuine threat indicators we can pass along to our agents overseas. Dinner is forgotten. The cafeteria closes at six, and I didn’t have time to get up there anyway. I eat a granola bar at my desk and plow through more incoming cables.
Close to midnight, I’m exhausted and need a break. I finally work my way to the parking garage and find my Jetta. A short drive home, and I fall facedown into my waiting pillow.
I sleep with a portable phone next to my ear and a code card on my nightstand. In the event of flash cable traffic, FOGHORN will call me with the news. Flash is the highest-priority cable we can receive. They demand immediate attention, even at four in the morning. Other times, we get NIACT cables. These are flagged “Night Action,” and are also cause for a call in the dead of night. Over the past month, I’ve not gone more than one night a week without being woken up by FOGHORN’s night-duty officer, telling me in cryptic phrases that something bad has happened again.