CHUCK MCKEE WALKED me out to the helicopter pad to see me off on my last ride out of Beirut. I’d been reassigned to Paris and wouldn’t be coming back to Beirut again.
Although it would be difficult to imagine two more different people, Chuck and I were close friends. We had sat in the same office for two years, backed each other up on the street, and gone out drinking together whenever we had some downtime. I enjoyed ribbing Chuck, who was a huge, gentle bear of a man. When he’d had enough of it, Chuck would come over to my desk, lift me up, turn me upside down, and hold me by my feet away from his body. I’m no midget: Very few men I’ve met have been strong enough to do that.
As I turned around to look at Beirut—a fire was burning near the port—I knew I’d left too much undone. I’d just picked up a picture of Hassuna, the presumed suicide bomber who drove the truck into our embassy. It still needed to be checked. But it really was time to go. I’d gotten too close to my work. I was starting to think like the people I was after. Another case officer needed to take up where I left off. If he was interested enough, he could run down the leads I’d unearthed on the embassy bombing. And then maybe, one day, the CIA could finally solve the embassy bombing, close the file, and send it to the National Archives.
I didn’t tell Chuck any of this because he was staying another year. He couldn’t afford to look at the place with the same detachment. As we watched the two Blackhawks approaching low over the sea, we shook hands and promised to keep in touch. I offered him a couch to camp on if he ever passed through Paris.
I have no idea why, but for some reason I said jokingly, “If you don’t leave here soon, Chuck, you dumb son of a bitch, the terrorists are going to get you.”
Chuck laughed as he reached down and patted the Walther PKK—James Bond’s preferred sidearm—that he kept taped to his ankle. “They’ll have a fight.”
Six months later, on December 21, 1988, Chuck went down when Pan Am 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland.
FEW THINGS HAVE LEFT ME feeling more frustrated than the Pan Am investigation. All the early signs suggested that the bombing was the work of a group based in Lebanon, acting on Iran’s behalf. If I had still been in Beirut, I would have had my agents all over the case, running down leads, checking facts, looking for new sources. But I was in an office overlooking the Place de la Concorde, and while Paris had a few Arab agents, they were on the periphery of terrorism at best.
The theory that Iran was behind Pan Am 103 was based on a piece of information that surfaced in early July 1988.A few days after the U.S.S. Vincennes accidentally shot down an Iranian Airbus in the Gulf, a Pasdaran intelligence officer flew to Lebanon to meet two officials of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine/General Command, Muhammad Hafiz Dalqamuni and someone we knew only as Nabil. The meeting took place at the Damur refugee camp in southern Lebanon. The Iranian’s instructions to Dalqamuni and Nabil were crystal clear: Blow up an American airplane—in the air, in order to kill as many people as possible. Iran had decided to take revenge for the Airbus.
The Iranian hypothesis fit in with what we knew about the regime in Tehran. The Iranian hardliners, who controlled the government, never accepted that the Airbus was shot down accidentally. Revenge, for them, was a simple act of justice: an eye for an eye. And Iran’s turning to the General Command for help made sense, too. Iran had developed a taste for letting surrogates do its dirty work, and the General Command was one of the best terrorist groups in the world when it came to blowing things up. Its expertise was in sophisticated mechanisms like barometric switches. The General Command made its air debut on February 21, 1970, when it blew up an Austrian Swissair flight. Two years later, on August 16, 1972, the Front exploded a bomb in an El Al plane, injuring four. In the years since, it had only gotten better.
Dalqamuni, too, was the ideal emissary for Iran’s interests. As late as the mid-1980s, he had been living in Europe, where he would sit for long stretches in the local McDonald’s, depressed that his fellow Palestinians were dying in the intifadah. Then one day he turned to Islam, joining a small group of Islamic fundamentalists in the General Command who looked to Iran for inspiration. Iran vetted Dalqamuni and determined he was a true believer who could be counted on to keep his mouth shut if caught. Still, he needed testing. At Iran’s direction, Dalqamuni organized two separate attacks on U.S. military trains in West Germany, one on August 31, 1987, and the other on April 26, 1988. No one was killed, but Dalqamuni had shown he was prepared to take risks and follow orders.
Dalqumuni appeared to have an airtight alibi for Pan Am 103. He had been arrested along with most of his German cell on October 26, 1988, and was still in custody when the plane exploded two months later, killing all 259 aboard and eleven more on the ground. But that didn’t exclude the possibility that the operation had been handed off to one of the cell members who got away, and as the weeks went on, an avalanche of information began to point in that direction.
On December 23, two days after the bombing, an $11 million transfer showed up in a General Command bank account in Lausanne, Switzerland. It moved from there to another General Command account at the Banque Nationale de Paris, and then to yet another at the Hungarian Trade Development Bank. The Paris account number was found in Dalqamuni’s possession upon arrest. What’s more, Muhammad Abu Talib, one of Dalqamuni’s associates suspected of having a role in the bombing, received a payment of $500,000 on April 25, 1989. Did that and the other payments originate in Iran? Were they success fees for Pan Am 103? Certainly, none of those are illogical conclusions.
Abu Talib appeared to have visited Malta on October 3 through 18 and again from October 19 to 26, 1988—a significant tidbit, since clothes bought in Malta were found amid the wreckage in the suitcase the explosive device was hidden in. Did Abu Talib buy the clothes, or did one of the two Libyans who were eventually tried in Zeist, the Netherlands, for the bombing? We also knew that Abu Talib was traveling in and out of Libya. Was he coordinating with the Libyans for Dalqamuni? Again, the logic seemed to fit.
FOR OUR PART, the CIA was able to identify with a fair amount of certainty that the mysterious Nabil who attended the Biqa’ meeting in July 1988 was a General Command official named Nabil Makhzumi (Abu ’Abid), who at the time was serving as Dalqamuni’s assistant. Perhaps because he spoke Farsi, Makhzumi was the GC’s main contact to the Pasdaran. His Iranian case officer, we knew, was a senior Pasdaran official named Feridoun Mehdi-Nezhad. Had Makhzumi traveled to Germany? Was he the one who took the handoff from Dalqamuni? The Germans had no idea. We also found out Mehdi-Nezhad had visited Frankfurt in July 1988. But the Germans again had no idea what he had done there or whom he might have met. Mehdi-Nezhad had visited Libya in early 1988. If he had met with Dalqamuni a few months later, it would have provided further evidence that the Pan Am bombing resulted from a broad conspiracy by Iran, Libya, and the General Command. No one could dismiss the possibility, although the Germans seemed to come close.
In truth, the German investigation was a joke almost from the start. In one instance, the Germans failed to disarm one of Dalqamuni’s bombs, and it exploded in a German lockup, killing a forensic scientist. The released Dalqamuni cell members were madly traveling around Germany just before Pan Am 103 blew up, yet the Germans couldn’t determine what they were doing. Nor were they able to track down another Dalqamuni bomb to see if its timer matched the mechanism that had been found on the ground in Scotland.
The German investigation was further complicated by the fact that its government was secretly courting Iran. In 1979, when the Shah fell and the U.S. was booted out, Iran became a tempting prize for the Europeans. The Germans particularly wanted a reliable source of oil, which many other European countries already had. They also looked upon Iran as a promising market for the Mercedes and other exports. To help woo Iran, Germany started training its intelligence service, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security. The relationship quickly evolved into a full-fledged liaison, with the Germans even providing surveillance training to the Iranians.
The French were no different. The way they looked at it, they had their interests and we had ours. And there was no way France was going to carry America’s water, and the French were increasingly focusing intelligence resources on North Africa. In 1991 a military government in Algeria deposed a democratically elected Islamic government, kicking off a nasty civil war. France was concerned that civil war there would spill over into France’s large immigrant Algerian population.
BUT ALL THE BLAME couldn’t be put on the Europeans. The fact was, the CIA was in the process of closing up shop overseas. It was clear to me that we were disposing of agents faster than we were recruiting them. Bonn didn’t have a single Middle Eastern agent to run down leads—neither an Arab nor an Iranian. For that matter, it didn’t have a single Muslim agent in all of Germany’s enormous Islamic community, a failing that would become painfully obvious in the wake of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks when trail after trail began to trace back across the ocean to Hamburg and elsewhere. In the case of Pan Am 103, Bonn didn’t have a single source at the Frankfurt airport to say whether anything suspicious had occurred before 103’s feeder flight departed. The CIA couldn’t even obtain airline manifests on its own: It had to rely on the Germans. This, mind you, was at the absolute crossroads of European air traffic.
Almost as bad as the absence of new agents was the superannuation of old ones. The agents already on our books had lost their access, and no one seemed to care. It was like a permanent work slowdown sanctioned by Washington. And if Washington didn’t care, why should the case officers care? Trying to recruit an agent was likely to get you evicted from your cushy post where the government paid the rent and utilities, and sent back to Washington, where no one could afford the skyrocketing property prices on a CIA salary. And what was the thinking in D.C.? I would have to wait to be reassigned there to find out, but the anecdotal evidence was not cheering.
In early 1989 I took over an agent from a young woman I’ll call Becky. Deciding she wasn’t suited for the spy business, Becky had resigned and was heading back to San Francisco, where she had been hired. The turnover meeting was held in a motel outside Paris, in one of those hideous bastard Bauhaus concrete-and-glass suburbs. The motel room carpet smelled of puke and cheap wine. Becky ordered a pot of coffee and tea from room service, and we waited for “Jacques” to make an appearance.
An arms dealer by trade, Jacques had been an outstanding agent, but his production had fallen off sharply in recent months. As he pushed his way into the hotel room, I could see that he had once been athletic, but he’d let his body go to seed. His belly hung out of his shirt, which was missing a couple of buttons. Jacques mumbled something about taking a girl to the hospital for a postabortion checkup. Becky ignored him.
Jacques looked at the coffee and then at Becky. “I need a goddamn drink. Do you think there’s a bottle of cognac to be found in this filthy bordello?”
After Jacques got his cognac, we settled down and began sorting through a packet of documents he had brought with him. It was good stuff. Nothing about Jacques’s deals, but he’d managed to filch information about his competitors’ business. One Swiss-British merchant of death living in Zug was selling boatloads of Iglas, advanced Soviet surface-to-air missiles, to Iran. Jacques had the prices, letters of credit, end users’ certificates—everything. I couldn’t figure out why Becky hadn’t reported information like this in the past, but I didn’t say anything. Technically, Jacques was still Becky’s agent. He’d be mine from the next meeting on.
When it was time for Jacques to leave, Becky coldly shook his hand, then rolled her eyes once he was out the door. It wasn’t your normal farewell between a case officer and an agent. Usually a turnover meeting is a bit more tearful.
I’d arranged to have the following meeting in a small town away from Paris. My plan was to take the train to Geneva, rent a car, and drive back into France through one of the dozen small border crossings used by French money launderers. Jacques and I met in the town’s only first-class restaurant, in one of those small curtained rooms off the main dining room that the French use to entertain their mistresses. I don’t know what the maître d’ made of Jacques and me, but I didn’t want the nosy Direction de la surveillance du territoire (DST), the French version of the FBI, tripping over our meeting.
We started with Kir royales and quickly moved to a white Burgundy from a terroir I knew. By the second bottle, Jacques had decided I was okay.
“Do you believe in God?” he asked.
He was serious. My first thought was that he had some fatal illness and was looking for solace.
“Er, no, not exactly.”
“That’s good.” He smiled. “That’s very good.”
“That was a strange question, Jacques. It’s the first time an agent ever asked me that one.”
“Tell me it’s strange. Do you know what Becky has been doing the last year?”
He was reassured when I said no.
“She has been trying to convert me, lead me back to Christianity to join her church. That’s all she talked about for a whole year. She refused to talk about business—all the documents I brought her.”
As soon as I got back, I told the story to Chuck Cogan, the Paris chief. Chuck was old CIA—prep school, Harvard, polo, native French. He spent his free time riding in the Bois de Bologne with his French aristocratic friends. He winced as I went on and then confessed that he had no idea what to do with a proselytizing case officer.
Three or four other people in the Paris office had converted to Becky’s New Age church. One was an administrative officer who now spent his days handing out church leaflets in Montparnasse. Chuck informally checked with headquarters only to be told that he couldn’t do anything that might violate anyone’s First Amendment rights. If case officers wanted to pump for God on the CIA’s time, so be it.
WEIRD AS IT MIGHT SOUND, the Jacques and Becky story was symptomatic of where the CIA was heading. When we weren’t choking on political correctness, we were hamstrung by our own new laissez-faire, anything-goes attitude.
In Paris, we once came across fragmentary evidence of a secret Iranian intelligence station located off the Avenue de la Grande Armee. I proposed going after it, but Paris’s young case officers, many of whom had never run a serious operation, just laughed. There was no conclusive proof the station really existed, they said; hence, we shouldn’t bother. I was stunned. Two years earlier, Iranian operatives had been setting off bombs all over Paris and killing our diplomats and agents. It was worth the candle.
Undeterred (okay, pissed off), I found a French government telephone technician who agreed to install a tap on the suspected Iranian station’s telephone. A couple months of eavesdropping, I figured, and we could tell whether we needed a full-court press. The PTT tech failed his polygraph, but who cared, I argued. If it turned out the tech was working for the French, we would simply say that since they hadn’t been doing their job policing Iranian terrorists, we had to do it on our own. The European Division was aghast. I was ordered to jettison the PTT tech immediately and forget the clandestine Iranian station.
Another, better opportunity soon came along. In November 1990, we discovered that France was secretly hosting three Abu Nidal students in Besancon. The French government paid for everything—tuition, food, lodging, apparently on the theory that it was better to have Abu Nidal inside the tent pissing out than the other way around. When I proposed going after them, or at the very least tapping their telephone, I was looked at as if I were deranged. “State will never let it happen” was the response.
To be sure, Paris went through the motions of spying, but it was only for appearances’ sake. Case officers met their agents and wrote reports, but the information was poorly sourced, irrelevant, and often already public. A few case officers trolled receptions, but the only thing they really wanted to do was meet official contacts. No one was going to throw you out of a country for cooperating with a friendly government, and you were home by dinner.
Paris case officers spent most of their time fighting over housing, attending training seminars and rambling meetings in the secure “bubble,” writing long-term perspectives, and whatever else occupies a government bureaucracy in midage. On Saturday morning most everyone in Paris drove up to the U.S. base in Mons, Belgium, to shop at the PX.
And then there was the language problem. The older officers spoke good French; the younger ones didn’t. French agents, like their country-men, hate slowing down for someone who can’t bother to learn the language properly. French snobbery was another barrier: Hush Puppies, Brooks Brothers trench coats, and neon fanny packs offended the host sensibilities. Paris’s case officers were frozen out of French society. All they could do at night was watch videos.
Something else I noticed: As the DO went into decline, satellites, not agents, became the touchstone of truth in Washington. Few things are more satisfying for a policymaker than to hold in his hand a clean, glossy black-and-white satellite photo, examine it with his very own 3D viewer, and decide for himself what it means. Not only could he do without analysts, he could do without agents, too. And thank goodness. Agents were messy. They sometimes got things wrong, even occasionally lied. And they definitely had the potential to cause ugly diplomatic incidents.
As a fatal malaise settled over the CIA, case officers began resigning in droves, and some of the best left first. In Paris—beautiful, bewitching Paris—the attrition rate was running about 30 percent. Convinced by all the outward signs that spying was no longer a serious profession for serious people, they went home to find a job in investment banking or any other profession America took seriously.
If I had stayed in Paris much longer, I would have ended up resigning, too. I needed to go someplace the CIA still operated like it used to.