That was just Matt Gannon's way and it endeared him to his friends and family, who felt a certain responsibility to keep an eye on him, lest things got out of hand.
Only rarely did his inattention to personal detail spill over to his work. One such instance occurred in July 1980 as he landed in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. It was not until the next morning when Gannon flew to Jidda that he discovered he had left his passport at the airport in Dhahran. He managed to convince a security officer in Jidda to issue him a tourist passport so he could return to Dhahran and pick up his diplomatic passportâwhich established his cover identity as a State Department employee. His superior was none too happy with the mishap.
As a young officer, Gannon was virtually oblivious to material needs. His first year at the Agency his room in suburban Virginia was furnished with only a desk and a sofa purchased at a yard sale. When he ate or studied, he simply pulled the sofa up to the desk. At night the sofa was his bed. There was something of the Inspector Clouseau about Matt Gannon. Those who worked with him took it in stride. Gannon himself had long ago come to accept such contretemps as a minor though noisome character flawâone that he was readily able to accept in himself.
From Yemen, Gannon was assigned to Jordan. It was a move that would profoundly affect the course of his life and that of one of the CIA's most venerated and senior case officers, Tom Twetten, then chief of station in Amman. It was the summer of 1981. The Agency had notified Twetten that, barring objection, it would be posting Gannon to his station. Twetten was a twenty-year veteran of the Agency, a courteous man with a scholarly bent, a love of old books and maps, and a manner that suggested he might be well suited to the university. It took no leap of faith to picture him lecturing on the early Ottoman Empire.
Twetten had been raised in Spencer, Iowa. His family was in the furniture business and he had studied psychology at Iowa State. After a graduate degree from Columbia University and a hitch in the military, Twetten joined the CIA in 1961. He had been a part of that most remarkable class of junior-officers-in-training. His classmates included Mike Deuel and Dick Holm.
One of Twetten's early memories of the Agency was when he and his fellow JOTs were taken to meet Director Allen Dulles, an august figure only recently humbled by the Bay of Pigs. Dulles asked who among the junior officers was named Mike Deuel and commented that his father, Wallace Deuel, was a stalwart of the Agency. Decades later Twetten could still remember the pang of envy that his peer was so well wired in with the Agency brass. Already there were hints that Twetten, brilliantly invisible, had his ambitions.
The arc of Tom Twetten's career began in Africa. One of his earliest postings, from 1966 to 1967, was in the north of Libya, where he was under cover as a consular officer in Benghazi. There Twetten kept an eye on the Russians and East Europeans in town, one of myriad such sideshows in the global Cold War. In the same town was a young and ambitious lieutenant in the Libyan military. His name was Muammar Gadhafi. The two men, Twetten and Gadhafi, never met face-to-face, though in the years ahead their paths would cross in deadly ways. Libya would long remain a focal point of Twetten's career.
On June 7, 1967, the Arab-Israeli War erupted, and Egyptian President Gamal Nasser called for a pan-Arab uprising. Twetten and those in the U.S. consulate knew they were in for trouble. Seventeen U.S. embassies across the Mideast were attacked. The first to come under assault was Benghazi, where Twetten was stationed. On the way into town Twetten heard the news on the radio and went straight to the consulate, knowing that a mob would soon form. A dozen Americans worked in the embassy, including three Agency employeesâTwetten, the lone case officer, a secretary, and a communicator. A week earlier Twetten had begun shredding sensitive CIA documents, convinced that either Nasser would attack Israel or vice versa.
No sooner had Twetten ordered the doors of the consulate barred than the assault began. The first wave came over the roof of an adjacent building. A signal corps officer standing watch on the roof announced he would shoot anyone who attempted to bring down the U.S. flag. Twetten relieved him of his .45 and put it in the safe. Then Twetten removed the embassy's remaining classified materials and stuffed them into self-destruction barrels containing a kind of nitrate charge to incinerate the papers. The barrels were placed on the second-floor balcony, where they were to be ignited if the mob attacked.
Then Twetten doled out the embassy's six gas masks to the secretaries and gathered together the consulate's tear gas grenades. As the perimeter of the embassy was breached and the mob came in, Twetten and the others lobbed the grenades down the stairwells and retreated into the vault, sealing it off and stuffing wet rags beneath the vault door. There Twetten and eleven other consular employees hid while the mob torched the curtains, destroyed furniture, and attempted to set the walls on fire. Within minutes the rioters withdrew, unable to withstand the tear gas. For six hours Twetten and the others remained hidden in the vault.
When they emerged, the consulate was a shambles. There was fire in the streets as the mob torched cars. Twetten stood at the window and watched as someone put a wick into the gas tank of his year-old MG Sprite and blew it up. As he and others ignited the barrels containing classified documents, black smoke enveloped the consulate. A cheer went up from the crowd below, mistakenly believing the consulate itself was on fire. It was an unintended deception that may have saved Twetten's and the others' lives.
A year later Twetten left Libya, never to return again. But Libya remained on Twetten's priority list. On September 1, 1969, Gadhafi and others mounted a successful coup and overthrew Libya's King Idris. At the time, Twetten was the Libya desk officer at CIA headquarters in Langley. Any cables from the field or operations against a Libyan passed through Twetten's hands. Above him was a branch chief and a division chief.
At the time of the coup, there was no immediate announcement of who the new leader was. That was learned about a week later. Initially Gadhafi was viewed by U.S. Ambassador Joe Palmer as someone the United States could readily work with. But soon enough it became clear that Gadhafi had other plans. He shut down Wheelus Air Force Base and prepared to nationalize the oil industry. The days of wishful thinking were over.
About a year and a half after Gadhafi came to power Twetten was summoned to the seventh-floor office of the deputy director of operations, the man who oversaw all covert activities worldwide. His name was Desmond FitzGerald. He was a figure like Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner and Dick Helms, of Olympian stature in the eyes of the Agency's clandestine rank and file. “It was like a phone call from God,” remembers Twetten. “I went up to his office with a good deal of trepidation, having never before even seen the man let alone been in his office.” FitzGerald invited Twetten to take a seat.
“What do you know about the Black Prince?” FitzGerald asked.
The Black Prince, so called because of the darkness of his skin, was a relative of King Idris. Twetten knew a good deal about him, none of it flattering. Twetten told him that the prince allegedly had been known to import Greek prostitutes for entertainment on the weekends, that he supposedly frequented the American PX and bought up numerous watches pledging to pay for them at a later date, and that he shamelessly exploited his royal connections.
“Well,” asked FitzGerald, “what do you think of him leading a coup against Gadhafi?”
“I can't think of anybody who could be worse,” answered Twetten.
“Thank you very much,” said FitzGerald, accepting the fact that the Black Prince was, in Twetten's words, “the wrong horse.”
And that was the end of it. The CIA would not again weigh mounting a coup to dislodge Gadhafi. A year later Twetten learned that it was the Israelis who had proposed arming the prince and organizing the tribes in the south into a Bedouin march to overthrow the Libyan leader. It was, said Twetten, “a harebrained scheme.”
But as it turned out, the Agency might have been overjoyed to have the Black Prince in power, or for that matter, just about anyone else but Gadhafi. Those within the CIA who were fighting terrorism would come to regard him as the devil incarnate. And in the end, none would have better reason to do so than Tom Twetten himself.
As chief of station, Twetten had the authority to block Matt Gannon's move to Amman, but there was no cause to do so and nothing on the face of Gannon's file to suggest that he was anything other than a standout. When the two of them finally met in Amman in August 1981, Twetten saw in the callow young case officer great promise. If there was any reservation about Gannon, it was a tiny one and left unspoken. Twetten wondered to himself if perhaps this well-heeled lad of gentle demeanor might not be a tad too nice, maybe a little soft in the center, indecisive. Would he, Twetten wondered, have the stuff to make the tough decisions called for in the Mideast?
Gannon for his part must have felt a twinge of awe for this station chief who had already garnered for himself a reputation for extreme coolness under fire and exceptional tradecraft as a spy.
It was not long after twenty-eight-year-old Gannon arrived in Amman that he found himself distracted by a pretty twenty-year-old who frequented the embassy. She had brown eyes, auburn hair, and pale skin. Her name was Susan, as in Susan Twetten, daughter of his boss, the CIA's chief of station. In the Agency, as elsewhere, it was not a good idea to court the boss's daughter, particularly given the personal and security complications such a relationship could entail.
Besides, Gannon was already involved with a woman named Susie who was then planning to visit him in Amman. “The past week has been tough . . . Have landed myself in a real spot,” Gannon wrote his brother Dick on November 6, 1981. “Have begun to see Susan Twetten the daughter of the Embassy Political Officer [Gannon referred to Twetten by his cover position]. She teaches at a kindergarten here having arrived in early October. Am trying to sort myself out, taking a step back . . . at the same time, I decided to tell Susie NOT to come out as we had planned in early December, just four weeks away . . . The fact that I am drawing myself into seeing someone else doesn't help in the least . . . in the meantime, I feel like burying myself in my work . . . not seeing anyone, but I have made a commitment here and have to work that out some way . . . Why I bring this on myself, I don't know. I'll keep in touch on how all works out, or doesn't work . . .”
Dick Gannon did not have long to wait to hear how things worked out. Three months later, at a February 11, 1982, embassy party hosted by the Twettens, it was announced that Matthew and Susan were engaged. In a letter to Dick Gannon written eight days after the party, Matt Gannon wrote: “I have joined Susan in the catechism classes! I know you are shaking your head as I have been deemed a âlost cause' for quite some time.” And in a vain effort to muzzle his brother from telling his bride too many of his foibles too early, Matt wrote: “I want you to promise that you will tell only a certain number of stories about me to Susan, preferably only ones dealing with the parking tickets! We can leave passports and finances for another visit!”
Less than four months later, on June 3, 1982, Matthew Gannon and Susan Twetten were married at Holy Trinity Church in Washington, D.C.
As a parent Tom Twetten could not have been more pleased with his daughter's choice for a husband. But as CIA chief of station, Twetten regarded the union between his daughter and Matthew Gannon as potentially nettlesome. After that, Twetten would sometimes go to absurd lengths to avoid even the appearance of furthering his son-in-law's career. As Twetten rose through the Agency's senior-most ranks, Gannon's own innate talents distinguished him as a rising star in his own right. Inside Langley, there was inevitably the sense that Matthew Gannon had been anointed for great things, be it by pure merit, by blood, or by a combination of the two.
Early on, Gannon's obsessive devotion to Agency work and the travel that went with it put a strain on the new marriage. “Matthew has been very busy at work, staying at the Embassy for long hours and then doing work-related activities in the evenings,” Susan wrote three months before the wedding. “He has a very bad cold now, which is probably due to a lack of sleep and good meals. He is also a bit stubborn in this area. (There, I've told!)”
Marriage did not alter his work habits. Less than two weeks after the wedding, Susan, then twenty-two, wrote Dick Gannon from Amman: “We have settled into as much of a routine as one can settle into when living with Matthew . . . He's off to Paris next month. I will stay here with the cat and plants.”
Matthew Gannon, like many case officers, seemed wedded first to his work and second to his family. “Came down with a mild case of typhoid fever on 6 September,” he wrote. “Basically two weeks out of the office. Susan tried to keep me in bed, but work here has been a bit heavy lately, and I couldn't afford to drop it altogether.” But he, too, fretted about the impact of his work on his marriage.
Four months after the wedding, he wrote his brother Dick, then stationed in Beirut: “I worry that I don't see her enough during the work week . . . Not the best way to start off.” Like all case officers, he had to contend with the nocturnal life of running agents while during the day he had to fulfill his responsibilities as an economics officer, his cover in Amman. Sometimes the pressure of the two jobs was more than even he could take, fraying nerves and patience. “The embassy here appears sometimes like the monkey cage at the San Diego Zoo,” he wrote, “everyone running in different directions, and no control of the show. Susan told me I had better start running again BEFORE I come home from work to get out all the frustrations. She has a point.”
The letter, dated October 7, 1982, closed, “Hope all is well, Dick, and Beirut is not proving too dangerous.” Gannon was by all accounts an excellent intelligence officer, but it was something more than intelligence that troubled him about Beirut. Call it a premonition. “The tension is in the air,” he wrote, “and Palestinians are rightfully angry at our support for Israel . . . Amman though is not a high risk place for Americans; but Beirut, what worries me is the unexpected event, the sniper, car bomb, mine. You are the best Sy [security] has to offer,” he wrote his brother, “and I am pleased, in a sense that you are in Beirut, but the unexpected incident, despite all planning, is really unsettling. We're praying for you.” Six months later the Beirut embassy toppled and Dick Gannon narrowly escaped with his life.