THE DRIVER WAS more than forty minutes late. If the chopper left for Beirut without me, the next one wouldn’t be for another three days. Dead time in Cyprus would be bad enough. Missing my agent turnover meetings in Beirut would be a disaster. Most couldn’t be rescheduled for an entire month. I was waiting in a nearly deserted airport cafeteria, checking my watch on the minute.
I considered calling Nicosia to find out if I’d gotten the time wrong, but my instructions from headquarters were explicit: Don’t talk about helicopter schedules over the telephone. I’d need to take a taxi all the way up to Nicosia—about an hour away—to find out what had happened.
A commercial flight into the Beirut airport was out of the question: Hizballah checked all incoming manifests. I’d be lucky if I even made it out of the terminal before being kidnapped. A boat sailed nightly between Larnaca and Junieh, a fishing port on the Christian side of Beirut, but I couldn’t go over that way, either, because from time to time the Syrians and their Lebanese allies used it for target practice.
Again I calculated the time difference between London and Larnaca. No, I’d gotten that right. I checked my ticket, too—in the top left corner I’d penciled the helicopter’s departure time and the time and place I was to meet the driver. I was where I was supposed to be, when I was supposed to be. This would be hard to live down: Veteran case officer loses his way to Beirut. Dewey and Fred would have a field day when they read the cable notifying the world I’d gone missing.
Just as I was about to get up and take another look around the airport, the driver came running into the cafeteria, clipboard in hand. “Baer?” he asked, out of breath. An accident on the road from Nicosia had snarled traffic.
We hurried to the van he had left running in front of the terminal. Around the back of the airport, a gate guard recognized the van and let us through. The driver threaded his way through a couple of small airplanes, turned a corner, and pulled up between two U.S. Army Black-hawk helicopters. The crews, wearing olive drab jumpsuits, were waiting for me.
“You’re it for Beirut, right?” the loadmaster asked, taking my duffel bag and handing me an inflatable life vest. “It’s a one-hour trip. We’re taking two birds over. If one goes down, the other will pick up the survivors. And I’m here to tell you, these things don’t double as boats. After it hits the water, it’ll be less than a minute before it sinks to the bottom. But don’t jump into the water right away, either. If the blades are still rotating, they’ll chop you into hamburger. It’s all in the timing.” He winked and smiled his best stewardess smile.
“Oh, one other thing. We’re on the ground only twenty seconds, and not a second more. If we take fire, don’t even try to get out. You won’t like flying back to Larnaca hanging from a skid.”
The two helicopters lifted off the tarmac in tandem, turned slowly to face the sea, dipped their noses, and headed off, going from 0 to 220 knots in about two seconds. We flew at a little under twenty-five hundred feet, side by side. It was a clear day. The Mediterranean shimmered below us.
About ten minutes from Beirut, the crew shrugged on inch-and-a-half thick Kevlar flak vests, while the loadmaster shoved open the cargo door, letting in a blast of air. The pilots then took the helicopters down to about twenty feet over the water, an altitude hard to see from land and nearly impossible to shoot at. I’d heard the helicopters were flying even lower than usual these days because they had recently been painted by radar—probably by Syrian surface-to-air missile batteries.
If Lebanon was there, I couldn’t see it. A thick brown haze hugged the coast. We flew right through it, and I found myself directly over the shore and coastal highway. I expected the helicopters to turn south over the highway and fly in a straight line to the embassy. Instead they continued, one after the other now, straight into and up a ravine. We were still only about twenty feet above the ground. People came out on their balconies to look at us.
Just as the ravine tapered off, the helicopters veered right, flew perpendicular to the ground for a second, then leveled off and popped up over a ridge. Immediately on the other side was what remained of the four-story embassy in East Beirut. A suicide car bomber had destroyed it on September 20, 1984, killing fourteen people, just seventeen months after its seven-story predecessor along the waterfront had been blown sky high. The siding that hadn’t been blown off in the explosion was stripped off afterward, leaving a skeleton. A haunted building on haunted ground.
Two gunners on the roof manned belt-fed .30-caliber machine guns. They faced away from the helicopter pad, ready to shoot anyone foolish enough to pop his head up while the helicopters were on the ground. These guys took their jobs seriously. A couple of months before, they had fired on a UN helicopter that strayed too close to the embassy, wounding the pilot.
As I watched, the two Blackhawks diminished to a dot, then disappeared as they skimmed away over the Mediterranean. Even after I’d flown into Beirut more than fifty times, I always felt like I had been abandoned in the bottom circle of hell. The eerie quiet after the beating of the rotors, the shells landing around the port and tracers from a .50-caliber machine gun arcing over the city, the thick pall of black smoke from burning buildings that always seemed to sit over the downtown—anyone who stayed on in Saigon in 1975 and watched the last helicopter taking off from the embassy roof must have felt something similar.
The new Beirut embassy, a two-story villa a hundred yards from the skeleton, was among the most heavily protected properties in the world. The ten acres of land surrounding it were covered with a sea of coiled razor wire, fortified bunkers, watchtowers, machine-gun positions, and sandbagged trenches. Foot-thick steel walls protected the villa from artillery and rockets. Antirocket screens covered the roof. With more than six hundred local guards, the U.S. embassy had the fourth largest standing militia in the country. An armored division would have had a fight to capture it.
But the ring of protection extended only so far. During the previous three years, the CIA had lost two chiefs, another five officers, and plenty of agents. And, of course, Beirut and Lebanon weren’t dangerous just for us. Thirty-seven foreigners had been taken hostage since January 1984. A half dozen of them were executed.
About the time I got to Beirut, the assassinations started creeping into the Christian East, where the embassy was. The French military attaché was shot at point-blank range in the parking lot of the French embassy. The deputy in the French intelligence station was machine-gunned in front of the Lebanese intelligence headquarters, no doubt fingered by one of the Lebanese officers he was supposed to be working with. Three armed French gendarmes were shot one afternoon on their day off. Since American officials were on the same hit list as the French, we took these attacks seriously.
To cope with the violence, the State Department imposed a rule that Beirut embassy officers never set foot outside the embassy compound, except to go home. Even then, they traveled in heavily armored cars, accompanied by a dozen heavily armed guards in lead and chase cars. Embassy residences were protected around the clock by guards and roving patrols carrying automatic Uzis. Just to be extra safe, State Department officers met their contacts in the embassy, screened by metal detectors and protected by marines with M-16s.
As a general rule, only the ambassador ventured out, and then in a twelve-car convoy with sirens and bodyguards shooting in the air to clear traffic. The point vehicle was an armored Suburban crowned by a shooter manning a .50-caliber machine gun, finger on the trigger. He was more serious about his job than the guy who shot up the UN helicopter. Seeing the ambassador move around Beirut was impressive, even for the Lebanese who’d seen it all.
In the CIA, we took a different approach to staying alive. Sure, we carried guns, but in a country where just about everyone from the age of twelve owned a machine gun, small arms weren’t all that useful. Instead, we relied on tradecraft learned from the terrorists: Constantly move around, blend in with the environment, and stay completely unpredictable. We must have had some thirty apartments and twice as many cars. Switch residences and cars often enough and you become a moving target; move fast enough and you’re impossible to hit. I might spend one night in an apartment in Ashrafiyah, an old part of Beirut on the Green Line, and the next at a beach condo twenty miles north of Beirut. Sometimes we used two or three different cars in the same day, generally old rust buckets indistinguishable from any other Lebanese car. From time to time I drove a dented broccoli-green 1964 Mercedes taxi. It fit in beautifully. Lebanese would wave me down from the side of the road for a ride, never suspecting an American was at the wheel.
MAYBE IT SOUNDS WACKY, but I loved working in Beirut. Instead of dealing with the distractions of headquarters, the meetings and paperwork that ate up time, I would move around on the streets, where I had always been more comfortable. Best of all, I was away from Washington politics, maybe the greatest hindrance we had to doing our job.
Jerry, the chief when I arrived this time, was a wiry, cigar-smoking, ex–airborne officer who had once worked as rodeo cowboy. Jerry had a healthy respect for just how dangerous the place was—we kept an outfit belonging to Bill Buckley in a storage locker on the off chance that he would reappear—but once he decided I knew what I was doing, he gave me all the rein I needed. It didn’t matter that I’d be gone from the office for days, meeting agents and working out of safe houses.
Running agents in Beirut was like no other place in the world, but then again, Beirut itself was like no other place. Once we asked for a polygrapher to come to Beirut to box a Palestinian source, and they sent us Bernie, a skinny African-American who wore large-frame plastic glasses and took an instant dislike to Beirut, from the moment he boarded the helicopter in Larnaca.
As soon as we dropped off Bernie’s things at one safe house, we headed across town to another to do the polygraphing. It was a beautiful day. A wind had blown off the haze. People were swimming and walking along the beach. The guns along the Green Line were oddly quiet. Squint a little bit and you could almost pretend to be driving up the Pacific Coast highway from Santa Monica to Malibu. I could see Bernie was starting to feel better about Beirut—not exactly relaxed, but at least he’d stopped threatening to shoot his boss for sending him there.
Before Ashrafiyah, we cut up into the hills to a part of Beirut called Hazmiyah. Several Lebanese army artillery positions hid in the woods, but otherwise it was a quiet residential neighborhood popular with military officers. As Bernie set up the polygraph on the dining room table, I wrote down the questions I wanted him to test the Palestinian on. Because the Palestinian spoke fluent English, Bernie didn’t need me to translate during the exam. My plan was to wait in one of the back bedrooms and catch up on my sleep.
I’d just closed my eyes when a boom shook the building, rattling the windows. A second boom quickly followed.
Bernie flung the bedroom door open. “That’s it,” he said. “We’re finished.”
“It was outgoing. Nothing to worry about, Bernie,” I said, trying to calm him down. It was true, too. I knew from the sound that it was the local artillery position firing into the West. “You’ll be able to tell the difference if it comes back the other way,” I made the mistake of adding.
“No, you don’t fucking get it,” Bernie yelled, apparently convinced the artillery had made me deaf or stupid. “That son of a bitch didn’t react. And I mean there wasn’t a squiggle. Not after the first shot or the second. It was like he’d died. When someone’s got ice water running through his veins, there’s no fucking way I can box him.”
I suppose we all got that way after a while in Beirut, even the foreigners. The fighting always seemed to be going on somewhere else, and during the few times it did get close—like the time a militia in West Beirut hosed the hillside around one of the apartments I was staying in with 107mm rockets—it was always over quickly. A few minutes of a pounding heart, and then life was back to normal. Sort of.