A DENTED, LATE-MODEL GMC pickup truck pulled off to the side of the road, just beyond the burned-out husk of the St. George’s Hotel. The driver left the engine running and calmly watched the traffic along Beirut’s seafront corniche.
No one paid any attention to the pickup or noticed that it was sitting low on its springs. The civil war was over, as far as most Lebanese were concerned. The Israeli army, which invaded Lebanon in June 1982 to crush Palestinian guerilla groups operating there, had already withdrawn well south of Beirut and was about to pull back even farther. And the Palestinian guerrillas, who had owned Beirut’s streets since the start of the Lebanese civil war in April 1975, had withdrawn too, to Tripoli in the north and the Biqa’ Valley. The American, British, French, and Italian troops that made up the Multi-National Force now patrolled in their place. Even the Lebanese who detested foreigners and blamed them for the country’s problems took grudging comfort in the French LeClerc armored personnel carriers driving up and down Hamra, Beirut’s central business district. Although they would never admit it, they were also pleased that American marines, with their M-16s and flak vests, guarded the airport. Lebanon wasn’t exactly at peace, but it was closer than it had been in a long time.
You could smell the optimism in the air. The Lebanese who had left during the civil war were coming back, and they had money in their pockets to rebuild what had once been one of the most European and modernized of Arab cities. Only six months after the Israeli invasion, Beirut was one vast, sprawling construction site. Hardly a building wasn’t being painted, patched up, or torn down to put up another one. Cranes, scaffolding, backhoes, and street crews clogged the streets day and night. A beat-up truck sitting low on its springs, idling by the side of the road, wasn’t about to attract anyone’s attention.
At 12:43 P. M. the pickup’s driver spotted the old green Mercedes as it came flying around the corner in front of the ’Ayn Muraysah mosque, darting in and out of traffic and trying to make headway against the usual crush of traffic. As the Mercedes got closer, the pickup driver recognized the two men in the front seat. He had been with them only a few hours before, when they had met for final preparations. The driver waited until the Mercedes flashed its lights three times. That was the prearranged signal that the approach to the target was clear. The driver then slammed his pickup into first gear and pulled into traffic, barely missing a dump truck. He headed along the corniche toward ’Ayn Muraysah, in the direction the Mercedes had just come from. On his right, strollers walked along the esplanade, beside the teal blue, silver-speckled sea. On his left, the upscale apartments of ’Ayn Muraysah seemed to tumble down the hill toward him. The driver, though, stared only at the car in front of him. That was the one thing they hadn’t taken into account: lunchtime traffic.
As he neared the seven-story American embassy, the driver searched for a chance to cut across the oncoming lane. He slowed, nearly to a stop, as the drivers behind him pounded furiously on their horns. When a gap opened between two cars, he abruptly swerved the truck into it, almost colliding with a woman who was driving her two children home from school.
Now the driver pushed the gas pedal against the floor and pointed the truck toward the exit of the embassy’s semicircular covered driveway. By the time it entered the driveway, the truck was moving too fast for the guards to draw their weapons. The guard understood what was about to happen. They’d seen it so many times before in Beirut. All they could do was throw themselves on the ground and pray.
The pickup truck hit an outbuilding but continued forward, ascending the short flight of steps leading to the lobby. Just as it crashed through the lobby’s door—at exactly 1:03 P. M. local time, according to the State Department’s official announcement—it exploded. Even by Beirut standards, it was an enormous blast, shattering windows for miles around. The U.S.S. Guadalcanal, anchored five miles off the coast, shuddered from the tremors. At ground zero, the center of the seven-story embassy lifted up hundreds of feet into the air, remained suspended for what seemed an eternity, and then collapsed in a cloud of dust, people, splintered furniture, and paper. The lobby itself was blasted into powder. The thick Plexiglas window protecting Guard Post 1 imploded at about 27,600 feet per second, disintegrating the young marine on duty. The only part of him found was the melted brass buttons of his tunic.
Sixty-three people, including seventeen Americans, were killed in what was then the deadliest terrorist attack against the U.S. ever, but the CIA was hardest hit. Six officers died, including the chief, his deputy, and the deputy’s wife. The deputy’s wife had started working at the embassy only that morning. Bob Ames, the CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Near East, was killed, too. Bob had stopped by the embassy on a visit to Beirut. His hand was found floating a mile offshore, the wedding ring still on his finger. Never before had the CIA lost so many officers in a single attack. It was a tragedy from which the agency would never recover.
IN THE NEXT twenty-four hours, swarms of CIA and FBI investigators descended on Beirut. The problem was, there wasn’t much left to investigate. The explosion completely consumed the driver. There was no trace of the detonator, either, leading to the hypothesis that the bomb maker had placed a small amount of explosives inside the device to make sure it was destroyed in the explosion. Detonators are signatures—something an expert would not want to leave behind.
The mystery only deepened when the FBI forensic experts were unable to take a swipe from the rubble to determine the composition of the explosive. Semtex? RDX? C-4? They had no idea. Eventually, they found a trace of PETN, but most military explosives contain some PETN. It added little to solving the bombing. One explanation was that half-filled acetylene tanks wrapped around the explosives not only served to enhance the brisance of the charge—the destructive fragmentation effect—but also to ensure the obliteration of the explosives along with the driver and detonator. As for the truck, the FBI finally found a piece of the chassis with a VIN number and traced it to its original buyer in Texas. Someone had bought it used and shipped it to the Gulf, but the trail went cold there. The FBI couldn’t figure out how it got to Beirut, let alone who owned it.
Lebanese intelligence and the CIA fared no better. The Lebanese investigators assumed the driver was a Shi’a Muslim, but only because the Shi’a were more inclined to commit suicide in a terrorist operation than other Muslims. The Lebanese agents fanned out across Beirut’s southern suburbs and the Biqa’ Valley, where most of the radicalized Shi’a lived, but they couldn’t come up with a credible rumor or any leads. The CIA’s sources also came up empty.
Three groups would call in to claim responsibility, but the CIA wasn’t even sure whether they existed. All three calls could have been hoaxes. The Lebanese arrested a half-dozen people, but it looked like a case of rounding up the usual suspects to make it look like they were on top of the investigation.
The bombers left no return address. Whoever they were, they were very, very good.
I WAS IN TUNIS studying Arabic when the news of the bombing hit like a sonic boom. All of us, the students and the instructors, knew someone working in the embassy in Beirut. I’ll never forget Khaldiyah, an older woman who had worked in the Beirut embassy for many years, putting her head on the table and sobbing uncontrollably.
I figured some radical Palestinian group was behind the explosion, and it would be only a matter of weeks before someone was caught and the plot exposed. I turned out to be wrong. I had no idea the bombing would never be officially solved or that it would become for me a lifelong obsession, but the seeds of the latter were already sown. I’d visited Beirut a few months before the bombing and talked to some of our people there, including the chief and his deputy who had died. Even today I can close my eyes and see them and their offices and imagine them crumbling into dust. Between the mystery of who did it and the memory of who died there, I would never be able to leave it alone. (The account of the bombing just given, I should point out, has been assembled from fact, contemporary rumor, bits and pieces of information I’ve gathered over the years, and speculation based on nearly two decades of research.)
Four months after the bombing, I finished up my two-year Arabic course and was assigned to 
, then a small but important outpost in the Middle East. Its reporting was avidly read in Washington. I had an outstanding agent who produced a stream of documents and firsthand intelligence. There were plenty of hard targets, too, and after New Delhi, the local surveillance was a breeze. It felt great to be back on the streets, running agents, and putting my Arabic to use. And, frankly, I needed all the practice I could get. Even after two solid years of training, I was still a long way from any sort of fluency. It would take years before I was comfortable in the language.
Things started off well enough with my new chief, John 
, but it wasn’t long before I realized he wasn’t Wild Bill. A slight man with a nervous tic, John wore a meticulously pressed suit and a pair of brilliantly shined wing tips to the office every day, including weekends. I could have lived with the fact that he dressed like a Foreign Service officer, but not that he had an account-book mentality about spying to match. John refused to take risks. He thought the worst thing that could befall a case officer was to be caught trying to recruit an agent.
Instead of worrying about intelligence, John fretted over meeting headquarters’ paper deadlines. When a request came through from Langley for some inconsequential progress report, John would stop everything to have it in a week early, before any other office in the Middle East. It infuriated him when I handed in my accountings late, even though the office invariably owed me money. It was clear we were headed for a blowup. It came when I tried to bug a terrorist safe house.
During the first year of my Arabic course in Washington, D.C., I’d made friends with a young Palestinian student. He had no idea I worked for the CIA. He helped me with Arabic; I helped him with English. We hit the Georgetown bars together, and he introduced me to Arabic cooking. But what cemented our friendship was when I helped him polish up an essay that won him a grant for graduate school. When it came time for me to leave, he pulled me aside and told me he had a brother living in the city I was headed to. I’ll call the brother Khalid. He gave me Khalid’s address and telephone number, adding cryptically that Khalid could help me with any security problems I might have.
I called Khalid shortly after I arrived, and he immediately agreed to meet. It turned out Khalid was a member of a Palestinian terrorist group. We both knew he would lose his scalp if he was caught with a CIA officer, but Khalid took the risk because his brother had told him to. That was one of my first lessons in how the Middle East works: You don’t recruit an individual; you recruit families, clans, and tribes.
Late one night when we were driving around—by then we’d put our meetings on a clandestine footing—Khalid was oddly quiet, though grinning from ear to ear. At last, unable to contain himself any longer, he dropped the news. He’d just found out about a secret Abu Nidal office, and he thought terrorist operations were planned there.
Khalid was right to be excited. Abu Nidal was at the top of the CIA’s hit parade. A cold-blooded murderer, he had attempted to assassinate the Israeli ambassador to London, provoking Israel to invade Lebanon on June 6, 1982, and very nearly drawing the whole Middle East into war. We knew he would try again, given the opportunity.
As I let Khalid out of the car, he handed me the address of the Abu Nidal office. Without saying a word to John, I checked the address out the next day, walking around the neighborhood. Although it was a three-story apartment building, common in that part of town, a guard with a machine gun stood in the building’s unlit vestibule, barely visible from the street. Since nothing identified the building as a government office, which would have explained the guard, I figured the odds weren’t bad that it was just what Khalid had said.
Two adjoining buildings shared walls with the Abu Nidal office. If you could get access to one of those apartments, it would be only a matter of drilling a hole in the wall with a silenced drill and putting in a microphone. Providing you didn’t drill all the way through to the other side, the operation would be a piece of cake. In a pinch, we probably could have listened straight though the wall with an accelerometer, or contact microphone—a little like putting a glass up to the wall to hear through.
Back in the office, John looked at me wide-eyed as I explained my plan. “There’s absolutely no way State’s going to approve it,” he interrupted.
“What does State have to do with it?” I asked, thinking he might have misunderstood me. “We find an agent to rent an apartment in one of the adjoining buildings, bring in a tech team, drill, stick a mike in the hole, and then keep our fingers crossed that we get some take from it.”
“Bob, you don’t have the slightest idea what political sensitivities involved. This country is important to the United States. No one wants to risk alienating it by undertaking a risky operation. We can’t afford a misstep that would give it an excuse to drop out of the peace process.”
Clearly, John thought I should be able to grasp the political nuances on my own. I was about to let the matter go when he made the mistake of trying to appease me.
“You know, we can do quite well with the softer targets here,” he said. “The Australian national day is coming up. Why don’t you try to finagle an invitation?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. “Who in God’s name do you expect me to meet at an Australian embassy reception?”
John pulled out a rag he kept in his top desk drawer and started buffing his wing tips. When the buffing rag came out, I knew the conversation was over.
IF I HAD REALIZED then that John was a kind of see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, do-no-evil model for the new CIA that was quietly building back in Washington and around the globe, would I have walked away then? I don’t think so. For one thing, the bombing of our embassy in Beirut was starting to really intrigue me.
Officially, the embassy investigation continued. Unofficially, it was dead in the water. After the initial bogus arrests made by the Lebanese, no leads surfaced. The FBI forensic teams sealed and labeled their plastic bags of evidence, boxed what they could find of the pickup truck, and headed home to write their reports. It was left up to State and the CIA to continue the investigation on the ground, but that soon hit a snag when the Lebanese investigators beat a suspect to death during questioning. The rumor started that a CIA officer observed the whole thing and did nothing to stop it. Whether the story was true or not, Washington abruptly cut off all cooperation with the Lebanese.
The Lebanese carried on alone, but like the FBI, they were unable to identify the driver, the owner of the truck, or the type of explosives used. Six months after the bombing, they produced a final report that was a dog’s breakfast of unsupported and politically motivated accusations against enemies of the Lebanese president, Amin Jumayyil: Syria, Iran, Yasir Arafat’s Fatah, and three other Palestinian groups. It even tried to tie in one of Jumayyil’s Christian rivals, all without offering a shred of evidence. No one paid any attention to it.
Besides, the White House and State Department had other things to think about. Neither the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Beirut in August 1982 nor the arrival of the American-led Multi-National Force a few months later—not even the Washington-brokered May 17, 1983, truce between Lebanon and Israel—could get around the fundamental fact that Lebanon had no functioning government. Once the Israelis left and Syria let loose its supporters, the last vestiges of central authority melted away like a snowman in the desert. Disaster was around the corner.
The Multi-National Force troops came under increasing attack. At first it was only ambushes and sniping, but then on October 23, 1983—six months and five days after the American embassy bombing—the United States suffered its worst peacetime military loss ever. A suicide driver drove a truck filled with explosives through the front door of a building the marines had converted into a barracks. Two hundred and forty-one troops were killed. A French barracks was also destroyed by a truck bomb, killing fifty-eight. The Reagan administration was forced to move the marines to ships off Lebanon’s coast and eventually home. By December 1983, the U.S. didn’t even pretend to support the May 17 agreement. The denouement came on February 6, 1984, when the Lebanon’s central government finally collapsed completely and a ragtag coalition of Muslim militias took West Beirut. West Beirut was now Indian country, and all of Beirut—indeed, all of Lebanon—was about to become a very dangerous place.
Back in Washington, the Reagan people quietly conceded that there was no point in asking the Lebanese to reopen the investigation. Nearly a year after the explosion, we still didn’t know any more about who had done it. The bombers had disappeared like a diamond in an inkwell.
FOUR DAYS AFTER THE EXPLOSION at the marines’ barracks, I sat looking out my office window in my new post. At the official level, I knew no more about this bombing than I did about the embassy’s, but the tom-toms beat hard and fast in the intelligence business, and rumors had been flying.
It was a little after one in the afternoon, and the streets were deserted. Everyone was at home, eating or napping, and taking refuge from the unseasonable heat. They wouldn’t come out again until early evening, when it cooled off. The only sign of life was in front of the small mosque up the hill from our offices, where a group of old men in long robes had assembled in front of the arched entrance to the courtyard. A call to prayer came over the mosque’s loudspeaker. I checked my watch. It was too early for a regular prayer. A funeral? A memorial service? There was no way to tell. In the Middle East, life goes on behind high walls, out of view of strangers, especially foreigners.
And it wasn’t just walls made out of mortar and stone. The Middle East is a place wired to obscure the truth. Television and newspapers don’t report news; they report whatever propaganda the government want them to report. Investigative reporters don’t exist. Books on politics and society aren’t worth reading. The only time a scandal spills into the public is when the government decides it should. At the personal level, things are no different. Middle Easterners believe that the less they give up about themselves, the better. They’ll talk about politics only in the most general terms, and they wouldn’t even consider discussing terrorism. In their eyes, terrorism is a state activity; expressing your opinion on it just gets you thrown in jail.
You didn’t have to be stationed in Beirut to know that there was one place in the Middle East more walled off than all the rest—Balabakk, Lebanon. Balabakk had become the Sodom and Gomorrah of terrorism. Every terrorist, radical, and lunatic who thought he could drive the Israelis out of Lebanon had set up shop there. But the real turning point for Balabakk had arrived on November 21, 1982, when Husayn Al-Musawi, the head of a radical Islamic group known as Islamic Amal, and what amounted to his extended family seized the Shaykh Abdallah barracks from the Lebanese gendarmerie. Clearly acting on Tehran’s orders, Musawi immediately turned the barracks over to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or the Pasdaran, as the Iranians themselves call it. The Syrian troops, who had occupied the area since 1976, watched and did nothing. The Lebanese central government couldn’t do anything, or at least wouldn’t. Iran now had a sovereign piece of Lebanese soil. It would decide who could set foot in Balabakk and who couldn’t, and every source we had indicated that the Pasdaran was about to go to war against the West.
In fact, the first act of the war had already occurred. On July 19, 1982, David Dodge, the acting president of the American University of Beirut, was grabbed in Beirut, boxed up and trucked across the Lebanese-Syrian border, and delivered to a waiting IranAir flight at the Damascus airport. The Iranian Pasdaran ran the whole operation out of Balabakk. Dodge would end up spending six months in Tehran before Syria—Iran’s closest ally in the Arab world—pressured Iran to release him.
In June 1983, almost two months before Dodge was released, we picked up a onetime report that Iran intended to kidnap more hostages. The Pasdaran intelligence chief for Lebanon, now comfortably situated in the Shaykh Abdallah barracks, had urgently summoned a Lebanese contact to a meeting. Once he arrived, the Iranian took him outside, out of range of any bugs, and told him that the Pasdaran had screwed up with Dodge. Moving him out of Lebanon allowed the Americans to pinpoint Dodge’s whereabouts. Worse, in holding him in Tehran, Iran directly implicated itself in the kidnapping. Although Tehran had no choice but to release Dodge, it still intended to kidnap foreigners in Lebanon—only now more carefully. It needed plausible denial and wanted Lebanese agents to run the campaign. When the Lebanese agreed to help, the Pasdaran officer instructed him to start setting up a kidnapping apparatus: surveillance teams, secret prisons, nonattributable cars. Iran would foot the bill, identify the victims to be kidnapped, and provide other assistance that could not be directly tied to the abductions.
Even though we leaned hard on all our sources in the area, the CIA was not able to pick up additional information on Iran’s new kidnapping campaign. The closest we came to knowing what was going on in Balabakk was by way of the glossy black-and-white satellite photos that headquarters sent us from time to time. To be sure, they offered a pretty good view of the Shaykh Abdallah barracks. You could pick out trucks and cars parked inside the compound, shadows of people walking around, from time to time even a military formation. Apart from that, they were a waste of quality paper. From ninety miles up, you couldn’t distinguish one uniform from another. In fact, if it weren’t for the local press, we never would have known the Iranian Pasdaran had taken over the barracks.
Neither then nor now, nor ever in the future, can photos tell you what is happening inside buildings or in the heads of the men who occupy them. To do that, you need a human source, and the way I saw it, the only way to find one was to quit speculating about what went on behind all those walls put up to hide the truth. I needed to go to Lebanon, to the Biqa’ Valley. If you want to run with the big dogs, you have to get off the porch.
I STARTLED JOHN when I knocked on his door. Since our flare-up over the Abu Nidal office, relations had gone from bad to worse. It was rare when I talked with him at all, and then only when I’d stepped in something.
“How about my taking a trip to Lebanon, to the Biqa’?” I asked.
Out came the buffing rag. After he had worked up a high gloss on his shoes, John finally said: “It’s not our turf, you know. Beirut won’t like it.”
Maybe, but John and I both knew that the Beirut CIA office didn’t have any turf. It still hadn’t recovered from the bombing. Officers rotated in and out every couple of months and rarely ventured more than a block or two from the new embassy. No one was there long enough to care about whether I was poaching or not.
The more John thought about the idea, the more he grudgingly approved. If I were caught doing something in Lebanon, I’d be expelled, which wouldn’t be his problem. (If I were expelled far enough, it might even solve his problem.) And even he had to admit my nosing around the Biqa’ couldn’t possibly screw up U.S. relations with the Lebanese government—there weren’t any. John finally agreed to a short trip, but only to Shtawrah, a small Biqa’ town on the Beirut-Damascus highway. Although Shtawrah is forty kilometers from Balabakk, I would open the door at least a crack. Who knows, I might even get lucky.
Shtawrah’s commercial center had made it through the years of civil war largely untouched. The Syrian elite shopped there, as did the UN, aid organizations, and diplomats from Beirut and Damascus. Almost everything was available, from American detergent to Swiss chocolate. Cuban cigars went at a fraction of what London Heathrow’s duty-free shops sold them for. You could exchange any currency in the world at Shtawrah’s banks, at rates better than Zurich’s. You also could buy arms, from pistols to rocket launchers, or just about any other contraband you might need. If your tastes ran more toward a kilo of pure coke or heroin, you had only to ask the concierge at the Park Hotel.
Beyond the shops, though, Shtawrah was no different from the rest of the Biqa’. The day I arrived there, I passed by the smoldering ruins of a training camp for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine/General Command (PFLP/GC) on the edge of town. A squad of Israeli F-16s had flattened it the day before. I was curious about the raid and asked Ghazali, whose supermarket was Shtawrah’s main grocery store, if the raid worried him. He shrugged. “We’re in business. What can we do?”
Actually, Ghazali’s answer made perfect sense. There was nothing any of the Lebanese in the Biqa’ could do about a roster of neighbors that included Hizballah, the Japanese Red Army, Baader-Meinhof, Sendero Luminoso, the PFLP, Abu Nidal, ASALA, and half a dozen other suicidal and/or genocidal terrorist groups. As long as the Israeli air force continued to shoot straight, the Lebanese could get on with life and make a little money, especially if they took care of their own safety. Ghazali’s clerks carried 9mm semiautomatics in shoulder holsters; and his assistant, whose office was behind a bulletproof window, kept an AK-47 with a drum magazine on his desk and a clear field of fire down all the aisles.
On that first visit, I walked around Shtawrah for a while, then drove up into the mountains above the town on the Beirut highway and stopped at a restaurant with a sweeping view of the Biqa’, although it was too hazy to see Balabakk. Just as the waiter brought a tray of mezzah, the restaurant shook, rattling the windows and the crockery. The waiter looked away, pretending he hadn’t heard anything. I caught his eye.
“Your New Jersey,” he whispered.
The U.S.S. New Jersey, a refurbished World War II American battleship parked off Lebanon’s coast, would periodically hurl shells the size of Volkswagens into the mountains around Beirut. Washington’s thinking was that if the New Jersey had scared the Japanese in World War II, it might do the same for the Lebanese who still rejected the May 17 agreement with Israel.
After lunch, I decided it was time to start meeting the locals. I drove to Barilyas, a village a few miles beyond Shtawrah, and pulled up beside two policemen standing on the corner. When I announced that I was an American classicist interested in making a tour of the Biqa’s Roman ruins, they looked at me as if I’d just stepped off a spaceship. They directed me to Masna’, the last town before the Syrian border, where the Lebanese Surete Generale kept an office.
The Masna’ Surete building had taken several direct hits in 1982. Its red tile roof had been blown off and all the windows broken. Burned-out car hulks still decorated the parking lot. Sergeant Ali was standing out front, sunning himself and smoking a cigarette. With his two-day beard, open tunic, and AK slung over his shoulder, he matched the scenery. When I approached him he was friendly enough.
I walked up to Ali and started as innocently as I could, asking about ’Anjar, a nearby village that had been the site of an ancient Roman trading post. A few ruins remained, I knew, which made the question not too odd for a Westerner, but ’Anjar was also one of the few villages in the Biqa’ not occupied by terrorist groups hostile to the United States. ASALA, the Armenian terrorist group that had attacked the Turkish Air counter at Paris’s Orly airport in July 1983, kept a camp there, but ASALA had no beef with America. Some of its leaders were even American citizens. This was the Middle East: Balabakk, my real interest, needed to be approached in crablike fashion.
Ali led me into his office and served me a thimble-size glass of tea, which tasted like it was mostly sugar. He wanted to talk about the U.S. He had several cousins living in Michigan and New Jersey, he said. He himself would move there if he could, but he didn’t think he’d be given a visa. I dropped ’Anjar and let Ali take the conversation where he wanted. When I could see he was starting to get antsy, I got up to leave. As we said good-bye, I promised to look him up the next time I was in Masna’. Ali told me the days he was on duty.
When I returned, I brought Ali an application for a U.S. visa and a couple of tourist brochures. I didn’t promise him help with a visa, but the offer was implicit. This time we spent more than an hour talking, about America but also about the Middle East. Ali didn’t say a word about Balabakk or Iran, and neither did I. As I walked out the door Ali handed me a piece of paper. He’d written his full name and home telephone number. Only then did I realize he was related to Husayn Al-Musawi, the Iranian Pasdaran agent who had seized the Shaykh Abdallah barracks.
I continued to see Ali every few weeks. He liked having an American friend, and he was seriously starting to think about making a trip to the U.S. to visit his cousins. He fished around to see if I could help him. I offered to see what I could do.
It wasn’t until January that our conversations produced anything interesting. Just as I sat down and Ali put a glass of tea in front of me, I told him I’d been invited to visit Balabakk the following week to see its famous Roman ruin, the Temple of the Sun. I hadn’t, of course, but it was time to get around to talking about my intended destination. I asked him if it would be safe. Without saying a word, he took me by the elbow and led me out a back door to a lot behind his office. We talked between two mounds of rubble.
“Mr. Bob, you can’t go,” he said gravely.
“Why not?”
“Forget your Roman ruins for now.”
“Why, Ali?”
It was obvious he was having a hard time bringing himself to say more.
“They’re going to kidnap an American in Lebanon,” he finally whispered. “An official.”
I knew there was no point in pressing for details like who, when, and where. Ali’s body language said he had told me all he was going to tell me, but what a mouthful! Or so I thought.
“That’s bullshit,” John said.
“John, he’s a Musawi. He’s from Balabakk. He might have picked up something. We can’t dismiss the information out of hand. We have to write it up in an intelligence report.”
“Look, this dirtbag doesn’t have a POA. He’s not a recruited source. You don’t even know his date of birth. You can’t expect me to send this rubbish in as intel. Go back, get his bio, do the paperwork you hate so much, and then we’ll see.”
There was no point in saying anything. The POA was meaningless here. Ali wasn’t interested in becoming an agent. He might give me a tip from time to time, but he was completely loyal to his clan, the Musawis. None of that meant his information was wrong. I gave Ali’s warning to a friend at the embassy, who sent it to Washington via State Department channels. Consular Affairs picked it up and included it in a classified consular brief. Years later I would come across the brief. It was the very first piece of paper in what would grow to become the CIA’s huge hostage file.
AT 10:38 A.M. on March 16, 1984, I was still at home drinking my third cup of coffee and reading a week-old Herald Tribune when my push-to-talk Motorola radio crackled alive. It was John. “Get into the office as fast as you can.” John always sounded nervous, but now I detected pure panic.
By the time I got to the office, John was a sickly pale yellow. “Buckley’s been kidnapped,” he said as he handed me a cable. That morning Bill Buckley, the CIA chief in Beirut, had been hit over the head on his way out of his apartment building, pushed into a car, and driven away. No one got a plate number or a description of the kidnappers. The Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO), one of the groups to claim responsibility for the embassy bombing, would eventually take credit for Buckley as well, but that didn’t tell us anything. We still didn’t know anything about the IJO.
Buckley wasn’t the first American kidnapped in Lebanon since the 1982 Israeli invasion. In addition to David Dodge, Frank Regier, an American professor of electrical engineering at the American University in Beirut, had been snatched in February 1984. CNN bureau chief Jeremy Levin had been grabbed a month later. But they were civilians. This was a family member loaded with secrets.
“I’ve got to go back to the Biqa’ and see Ali, John.”
John looked at me as if I’d finally lost my mind.
“We can’t just sit on our hands,” I went on before he could interrupt. “I’ve seen with my own eyes how Syria administers the Biqa’. It won’t let anything happen to a foreigner under its authority. Buckley and the rest were kidnapped in Beirut, where Syria doesn’t have any troops. John, you’ve got to let me—”
“Forget it,” John said, cutting me off. “Washington would bring me home in a straitjacket if I even asked.”
I turned around and walked out. There was no point in reminding John about Ali’s warning. And besides, John was right. Headquarters would never allow it. It was closing down operations in Lebanon as fast as it could.
During the next seven months, not a single lead surfaced on Buckley. Not only did we not find out who kidnapped him, we weren’t even sure he was still in Lebanon. The CIA went to every government and private source it had, but no one could tell us anything, not even a plausible rumor. As for myself, I was convinced Balabakk was as good a place as any to start looking, and the more I brooded on the kidnapping, the more certain I became that I could get in and out safely. Eventually, curiosity got the better of me.
The first thing I did was to arrange to meet 
, an adviser to 
. A branch of his family who had settled in the Biqa’ lived peacefully with the Shi’a neighbors, including the Musawis. I felt confident that under 
’s aegis, even the Pasdaran wouldn’t dare touch me. When I told him what I wanted to do, 
called another relative, a Lebanese army captain, and the two of us agreed to meet up in Shtawrah and take the captain’s car to Balabakk. The captain, I should note, didn’t have the slightest idea who I was or why I wanted to visit Balabakk.
The drive to Balabakk was like descending into hell. Just outside of town, lurid, menacing murals were painted on the sides of bombed-out buildings. One was of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock mosque, the third holiest site of Islam, bursting through an American flag. Another was Ayatollah Khomeini leading a demonstration against the American embassy in Tehran; a third, an American flag spattered with blood. In Balabakk itself, banners in Farsi and Arabic proclaimed DEATH TO AMERICA.
The captain suggested lunch at a friend’s house. I agreed. We were already through the front door when he mentioned that it was the house of one of Husayn Al-Musawi’s cousins.
The dozen guests sitting on the floor in the salon eyed me warily when we walked in. I was probably the first Westerner they’d seen in months. After a cup of tea, we were brought a plate of leeks, fava beans, and bread.
Things were going fine until one of the guests took a particular interest in me. With his long, ungroomed beard and armband that read We Crave Martyrdom, he made me nervous. After staring at me a few seconds, he asked, “What brings you to Balabakk?”
Rather than drag out the classicist spiel, I went for the big lie.
“I’m a Belgian. I work for an aid organization,” I said.
I kept my fingers crossed that no one spoke French or, worse, Flemish. I didn’t speak a word of Flemish, and my French was definitely rusty.
“Sir, may I ask your name?” the ungroomed beard persisted.
“Er, Rémy.”
“That’s your family name?”
“No, it’s Martin,” I said before I could stop myself. It wasn’t like Rémy Martin cognac wasn’t sold in Lebanon. Fortunately, he went back to eating.
Afterward the captain took me to the Temple of the Sun. When we knocked on the closed gate to the old Roman section of Balabakk, the gate swung open and there were our two guides—khaki-uniformed Iranian Pasdaran soldiers. They couldn’t have been happier to show us around the site.
We were driving out of town when I casually asked the captain about the compound on the hill, which I knew was the Shaykh Abdallah barracks. He stopped the car by the outside perimeter wall, and I had a chance to take in all of the buildings. It was remarkable how different they looked from the ground than they did from satellite photography.
One building in particular caught my attention. Two Pasdaran soldiers were guarding the front door, and either cardboard or blankets covered the inside of the windows. A wooden sign on the wall identified it as the married officers’ quarters.
It wasn’t until years later that I would learn Bill Buckley was inside, blindfolded and chained to a radiator, along with five other Western hostages. Nor would I know for years that this same building was a key link in my search for the embassy bombers. But, in truth, I wasn’t really surprised by either revelation. Everything in the Middle East is interconnected. Pull on one thread and a dozen more will come out. Sniff up one trail and you’ll come to twenty forks in the road, each of which could be profitably followed.
But you’ve got to have human intelligence to do it—people on the ground, agents, access agents, a network of traitors, and a case officer willing and able to work it. No aerial reconnaissance photo could have put together the covered windows and guarded door at the Shaykh Abdallah barracks. No electronic intercept could have placed a set of human eyes on the ground that day in Balabakk. In the end, intelligence boils down to people. I think the CIA knew that back then—the spirit of our founding fathers still lived in the agency—but it wouldn’t be long before we were running pell-mell in the opposite direction, with disastrous consequences from the Middle East to finally America’s own soil.
I’LL BE FRANK. My visit to Balabakk was a gross fracturing of all the rules. It may have given me a feel for the terrain, a knowledge you couldn’t get from satellite photos or from a book, but it was risky and did nothing to help Buckley or anyone else.
Shortly afterward, I was transferred to Khartoum, Sudan. Even without knowing about my trip to Balabakk—and he never found out—John had had enough of me and my late accountings.