THE G CORRIDOR on the sixth floor looked like a construction site. Boxes, furniture, coils of telephone wire, and trash were piled up everywhere. The offices on either side of the hall were swarming with electricians and painters. Construction crews were ripping up floors, tearing down partitions, and putting up new ones. No one had any idea where the new counterterrorism chief’s office was. I had to go from room to room to find it. When I did, though, there was no mistaking its singularity.
For starters, cigar smoke hung in the air like a low-lying cloud, thick enough to close down most airports. Unlike most everyone else in the CIA, Duane “Dewey” Clarridge didn’t believe in desks. Instead, he had a round table with half a dozen chairs in the middle of his small office. He figured an informal atmosphere encouraged younger officers to wander in and talk. The best ideas percolated up rather than down.
Dewey perhaps didn’t need to worry about the trappings of office; unlike most CIA officers, he was plugged into the White House. As head of the Latin American Division, he had cut every corner necessary to help Ronald Reagan’s beloved Contras. For good measure, in November 1985 he had also expedited the first shipment of arms to Iran. Dewey was the White House’s kind of spy. It didn’t surprise anyone that after Abu Nidal’s Christmas 1985 attacks on the Vienna and Rome airports, the White House tapped Dewey to head a new CIA counterterrorism unit, one with teeth.
As soon as he saw me standing in his door, Dewey motioned me to come over and sit down next to him at the round table. I’d heard enough about him to know there was no point in beating around the bush.
“I want to work in terrorism, Mr. Clarridge. I’d be happy to take any job.”
The truth was that I was not only interested in terrorism, I was bored. After the Libyans started targeting me for assassination after they found out I was meeting with the Libyan opposition, headquarters pulled me out of Khartoum after only four months and gave me a deadly dull desk job in Africa Division. I also told Dewey about my unsuccessful search for Bill Buckley and how I’d ended up pissing John off.
“That asshole’s still on the streets?” was Dewey’s only comment. Before I could answer, he asked, “How good’s your Arabic?”
After nearly three years in the Middle East, it was a lot better than when I got out of Arabic school.
“You’ll travel anywhere, anytime?”
“I’d get on a plane today if you want me to.”
That’s all Dewey needed to know. He didn’t even ask to see my file. I asked him if I should tell anyone, like the Near Eastern Division, to which I still technically belonged.
“Don’t do anything,” he said as he motioned me out of the office with his cigar. “Go back to your desk and sit by the telephone.”
Two weeks later I was drafted into Dewey’s new organization: the Counterterrorism Center, or CTC.
THE FIRST FEW MONTHS serving as a foot soldier in Dewey’s war against terrorism were about as exhilarating as the spy business gets. I’d seen the face of evil in the Biqa’ Valley and was both fascinated and appalled by it. I also wanted to get back to my private quest to find out who was behind the embassy bombing. CTC looked like the ideal place for both. Also, Dewey had a new presidential finding—authority to do pretty much anything he wanted against the terrorists. He had all the money he wanted. The CIA director, Bill Casey, promised him carte blanche; he could cannibalize the DO and the DI to stock CTC. He even recruited a handful of Los Angeles cops. He was planning to deploy them around the world and start hauling in terrorists in handcuffs.
By the time I started, CTC’s new offices were miraculously up and running. It was pure frenetic energy. Everyone worked in one huge, open bay. With the telephones ringing nonstop, printers clattering, files stacked all over the place, CNN playing on TV monitors bolted to the ceiling, hundreds of people in motion and at their computers, it gave the impression of a war room. I kept thinking of those World War II propaganda films of Churchill’s underground bunker during the Battle of Britain.
Expectations were high. Everyone had heard about Dewey’s successful counterterrorist operation as head of the European Division. One of his offices helped run an agent in a lethal Palestinian terrorist group known as the May 15 Organization, which specialized in airplane bombs. The agent was a gold mine, providing information that stopped a couple of terrorist attacks, and Dewey had no intention of losing him. When the agent’s May 15 boss ordered him to attack an American target, Dewey crafted an operation in which the CIA exploded a car inside an American embassy compound in such a way that the agent could take credit. No one was killed, but the agent’s boss was convinced the agent had tried, and he continued as a fantastic reporter for us.
All of us new recruits expected operations like that to be the norm in CTC, but it wasn’t long before the politics of intelligence undermined everything Dewey tried to do. Although CTC looked like a high-tech command center, the truth was that Dewey had no one to command in the field. In spite of Bill Casey’s promises, the CIA’s offices abroad still answered to their geographic division chiefs back at headquarters, and as the chiefs made absolutely clear, not one of them was interested in fighting Dewey’s war. It was too risky. A botched—or even successful—operation would piss off a friendly foreign government. Someone might be thrown out of his cushy post, and sent home. Someone might even get killed. No matter how much Dewey waved around his finding with President Reagan’s signature on the bottom, the division chiefs weren’t going to have some ex–L. A. coppers runnin’ ‘n’ gunnin’ in their backyards.
We’d ask the Paris office to put together a surveillance team to watch the apartment of a suspected terrorist, and Paris would come back and tell us it couldn’t because the local intelligence service would find out. We’d ask Bonn to recruit a few Arabs and Iranians to track the Middle East émigré community in West Germany, and it would respond it didn’t have enough officers. Once we asked Beirut to meet a certain agent traveling to Lebanon, and it refused because of some security problem. Security was never not a problem in Beirut, for God’s sake. Instead of fighting terrorists, we were fighting bureaucratic inertia, an implacable enemy.
Dewey couldn’t even recruit the staff that he had been promised. After six months, he could put his hands on only two Arabic speakers, one of whom was me. But since the other officer managed a branch, that left just me to travel and meet agents. That wasn’t a lot, since about 80 percent of CTC’s targets spoke Arabic. There were no Persian, Pashtun, or Turkish speakers at all.
I was assigned to a branch tasked with finding the hostages in Lebanon, but I was the only one there with any experience in the Middle East. The branch chief had never set foot in the Middle East, let alone Lebanon. At one point he was conned into an operation to buy maps of the sewers of Beirut’s southern suburbs: He had no idea the southern suburbs were illegally constructed and didn’t have sewers. Other branches were worse off. Analysts were in charge, which was insane. People who’d never met an agent in their lives, didn’t know what a dead drop was, and rarely traveled out of the Washington metropolitan area were directing field offices abroad on how to run their cases. It was like assigning a hospital administrator to head the surgical team.
MY FIRST SHOT of reality came early, about a month after I joined CTC.
Bonn cabled that a leader of Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood who was living in Germany wanted a meeting with the CIA. Bonn, of course, refused to meet him for fear of irritating the Germans, but it grudgingly agreed to let someone from CTC fly out to see what he wanted.
I took the cable to Dewey. “What’s in it for us?” he asked.
Good question. The Muslim Brotherhood was an amorphous, dangerous, unpredictable movement that shook every government in the Middle East to its bones. Founded by an Egyptian, Hasan Al-Banna, in 1929, it was dedicated to bringing the Kingdom of God to earth. The Egyptian Muslim Brothers had unsuccessfully tried to kill Egyptian President Abdul Nasser. The Syrian branch had tried to kill Syrian President Hafiz Al-Asad a couple of times. In 1982 its followers seized Hama, a historic city in central Syria, provoking Asad into shelling them and Hama into the next life.
The Muslim Brothers are also distant cousins of the Wahabis of Saudi Arabia, the most puritanical sect of Islam. Underwritten by the Saudi royal family, the Wahibis spawned Osama bin Laden. They also served as the inspiration for the Taliban in Afghanistan and other radical Sunni movements. Many Muslims consider the Wahabis dangerous because they adopted the beliefs of Ibn Taymiyah, a fourteenth-century Islamic scholar who condoned political assassination. Al-Jihad, the Egyptian fundamentalists who murdered Egyptian President Anwar Sadat relied on Ibn Taymiyah as justification for what they did.
I’d had some experience with the Muslim Brothers during my abbreviated tour in Khartoum. One of my jobs there was to 
against Mu’ammar Qaddafi’s. One evening soon after I got to Khartoum, I invited two of the Libyan dissidents, a political boss and a military commander, over to my apartment for tea. As usual, there was a sandstorm and the electricity was off. We sat in the dark, sweating and talking about the normal things you use to warm up a conversation with Arabs—marriage, children, the price of bread. My apartment was near the airport, and every so often we heard the roar of a plane taking off.
The military commander finally came around to talking politics. He mentioned in passing that he’d been able to quickly rebuild the group’s military cadres in Libya after its failed May 1984 attack on Qaddafi’s residence, even though most of the attackers had been killed.
I asked the military commander why he thought he could take Qaddafi in a place so well defended.
“God told us to do it.”
“God?”
“Yes.” He then added without the slightest hint of irony, “He told us the day and hour.”
That set off bells, at least in my head. These Libyan dissidents hadn’t been billed in Washington as Muslim Brothers, but when people told you God was calling the shots, there was a good chance the Brothers were nearby.
I was curious now, and I had a way to check on my suspicions. When I was studying Arabic in Washington, I had met a Sudanese graduate student who worked nights at the front desk of my apartment building. Just as I had with the Palestinian student earlier, I would sit with my Sudanese friend for hours, practicing Arabic. In return, I helped him with his English. One night in a heart-to-heart talk, he confessed he was a Muslim Brother. He explained to me the group’s ideology—its commitment to changing any Muslim leader who had fallen away from Islam. He agreed the Egyptian Jihad, an offshoot of the Muslim Brothers, was legally justified in murdering Anwar Sadat. Sadat was an apostate, he said, and the Koran, Islam’s Holy Book, mandates that apostates must die. My friend returned to Sudan about the same time I arrived there, and we renewed our friendship. When I asked him about the Libyan dissidents, he confirmed they were Muslim Brothers, noting that his own organization backed them to the hilt.
I brought my preliminary findings to Milt Bearden, Khartoum’s burly chief 
. This was the same Bearden who defined a close and continuing relationship as keeping a pair of slippers under your friend’s bed. Bearden was a popular boss. His case officers called him Uncle Milty.
As soon as I finished telling him about my suspicions about the Libyans, he said, “So?”
I fell back on the standard line that while Qaddafi might be as crazy as a tree full of owls, the Muslim Brothers in power in Tripoli would be a lot worse. With Libya sharing borders with Algeria and Egypt, they could destabilize those two countries.
“Do you know how they refer to Qaddafi in the White House?” Bearden asked.
I didn’t.
“They call him the Mad Dog of the Middle East. Look, Baer, if Genghis Khan were to crawl out of his grave and declare his intention to get rid of Qaddafi, this administration would support him. So forget about it.”
Bearden had a good nose for politics, so I accepted his word for it. Besides, the Sudan was imploding. The country was nearly bankrupt, and President Jafaar Numeiri was mentally unstable and incapable of dealing with the crisis. Demonstrators of uncertain ideology had shut down the government. As the office’s only Arabic speaker, I volunteered to go out in the crowds to find out whether they were anti-American or not. I passed myself off as a Lebanese journalist. When demonstrators moved close to the embassy or the American residences, I would call in a warning with a concealed radio.
The two Libyans dropped out of sight during the upheaval, but a couple of nights after the Numeiri regime collapsed, they unexpectedly reappeared. Apparently they had heard that Qaddafi’s henchmen had shown up in Khartoum, looking for revenge, and they were hoping I’d smuggle them out of the country. Too bad I wasn’t home when they came calling. In their excitement, the Libyan dissidents mistook my neighbor’s door for mine. An elderly administrative officer at the embassy, my neighbor was on her first tour overseas. Already nervous about the coup, she panicked when she looked through the peephole to see two bearded, wild-eyed fanatics with AK-47s. When they started banging on her door with the butts of their rifles, she lost whatever remained of her sangfroid and ran out her back door, down the fire escape, and across Khartoum to her boss’s house. She was still in her nightgown. The next day the embassy sent her to Germany for a rest.
I knew, in short, that dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood was playing with fire. These guys were programmed for trouble. But if the Reagan administration really was determined to fight it out with our enemies in Syria and Lebanon, we couldn’t have found better surrogates. The only question was what they were prepared to do for us, and to find that out, we had to talk to them.
Dewey agreed that I should meet with them, and I was on an airplane to Frankfurt the next day.
Not bothering to check in with Bonn, I took the train directly to Dortmund. The plan was for me to wait by a designated kiosk in the Dortmund railway station until I was signaled by a Brotherhood cutout—not the best of arrangements, but since I knew Bonn wasn’t going to help, I didn’t have a choice.
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 Mercedeses with smoked windows. We got in the backseat of the first one.
After a short warm-up through Dortmund, the two Mercedeses 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 days 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, anything,” Dewey said.
“We hit Mughniyah where it hurts—his family,” I 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, Hizballah. 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 Hizballah 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 communiqué claiming the attacks in the name of Hizballah, and an angry Asad would come down on Hizballah 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 Hizballah.
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: 
/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.
I didn’t bother reading past the burn notice. Once you’ve established a fabricator, you never deal with him again. I put Ghorbanifar’s file on top of a stack of other files I would never read.
Dewey was back a couple of weeks later. “Well, did you read it?”
When I admitted I hadn’t, he took back the file, and not long afterward, I was plucked off the counterterrorism team and sent to Beirut. There was nothing Dewey could do about it. The Near East Division couldn’t find anyone else to go. Not only was it dangerous, it was considered a bad career move. I didn’t care, though I knew the only place to learn about terrorism was on the ground.
George Cave did take up Dewey’s offer of a “vacation” to Tehran and came close to being indicted once the Iran-contra scandal broke. Dewey didn’t escape quite so cleanly: He was indicted but eventually pardoned. If I had read Ghorbanifar’s file as instructed, chances are I would have wound up being sent to Tehran and almost certainly indicted as an Iran-contra coconspirator. This was one time I could pat myself on the back for not following orders.
I’VE OFTEN THOUGHT about how the Reagan people got sucked into Iran-contra. It’s clear now that the Iranians were playing the White House for suckers. As soon as Iran received its first planeload of arms in exchange for a hostage, it went into the hostage business full-time, kidnapping dozens more. But it was more than that. When the White House employed Ghorbanifar, a known swindler, to handle one of the most sensitive diplomatic channels in American history, it ensured the channel would fail. It was sort of like using the local paperboy to do your investing in the stock market. No, it was a lot worse.
I think there were two things at play. First of all, after the 1983 bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut, the option of a military rescue operation was off the table. There was no way the Pentagon was going to commit troops short of a full-scale invasion. It wouldn’t even agree to send a Delta Force team, the army’s elite counterterrorism unit, unless a Delta member had “eyes on” the hostages at least twenty-four hours in advance—a condition that could never be met.
That left diplomacy. The only problem was that no one in the national security establishment had a good back channel to Iran. The State Department worked through Switzerland, but the hostages were too sensitive a subject for the Swiss and the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to deal with. The CIA itself didn’t have a channel to Tehran. During the Shah’s rule, the White House had been formal in its instructions to the CIA: Stay away from the Iranian opposition lest the Shah be offended. Even when Ayatollah Khomeini was in exile outside of Paris, the CIA avoided him and his entourage. So when the Iranian revolution went down in 1979, the CIA was blind and deaf in Iran—all thanks to Washington politics.
With diplomatic and military solutions taken off the table, the White House was bound to accept Ghorbanifar as a channel when Israel dished him up. For me the surprising thing was when the White House figured they’d been had by this swindler, they turned to the American-Iranian middleman Albert Hakim, who set up the second “channel” to Iran. Like Ghorbanifar, Hakim was in it for the money. Unlike Ghorbanifar, Hakim could cut out all the other middlemen and go directly to the hostage outlet—the Iranian Pasdaran. The main point of contact was Ali Hashemi Bahramani, an officer in the Pasdaran and the nephew of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the Iranian Speaker of Parliament.