by Ted Gup
From the North Carolina crash site, Special Forces officers had followed the trail of blood deep into the cornfields. There, buried beneath a heap of cornhusks was a man, broken and twisted. His name was Alexander MacPherson, and he was swiftly medevaced by helicopter first to an army hospital and later to Cape Fear Hospital in Fayetteville. For five days MacPherson lay in a coma. When he came to, he found himself lying naked on a hospital bed, a large light overhead, and two massive tubes, each as big as a garden hose, coming out of his chest. The ribs on the right side of his chest had been smashed, the broken bones driven back out through his lungs. His legs were scarred and bruised, his skull fractured. His arms were laid out flat, his hands sandbagged on either side to prevent the slightest movement.
He had no idea where he was or what had happened to him. From the tubes that went in and out of him he surmised that he had been shot. “Oh my God,” he thought to himself, “you mean I’ve got to go back to that place again?” “That place.” What place was that? he wondered, through a mind-numbing fog of sedatives. He felt little pain. That would come later.
This man lying in the bed was an enigma for the hospital staff. It was not clear what was keeping him alive. And whenever he spoke, he spoke in flawless German. The hospital brought in a German nurse to tend to him.
MacPherson would remain a mystery patient. At five feet eight and 180 pounds, he was in remarkably robust physical condition for a man of forty-eight—the product of a lifetime of mountain-climbing and an unwavering daily regimen of swimming and hiking. But then, the doctors and nurses had no idea what sort of man they were dealing with—the ultimate CIA paramilitary officer.
Within a few short months MacPherson—or Mac, as he was known—would be back in an airplane parachuting again, many high-risk missions still ahead of him.
There are few major hot spots where MacPherson had not been. To a long succession of CIA heads, among them Dick Helms, William Colby, Bill Casey, and Stansfield Turner, he had been viewed as one of the Agency’s most reliable operatives. Paratrooper and rigger, anti-Communist and counterterrorist, he had worked behind enemy lines on at least three continents over the course of as many decades. In his North Carolina home are photos, plaques, and medals from a career spent under cover. Not the least of these is a citation, with accompanying gold medallion, that reads:
“The United States of America, To All Who Shall See These Presents, Greeting. This is to certify that the President of the United States of America authorized by Act of Congress has awarded the Airmen’s Medal to Alexander MacPherson United States Air Force For Heroism Republic of Panama on 20 of August 1964. Given under my hand in the city of Washington this 29th day of April, 1965.”
MacPherson smiles coyly when asked what mission won for him this distinction. There is nothing in the newspapers or the history books to suggest that anything of consequence happened on that day in Panama— which is exactly as MacPherson wants it. “Don’t bother trying to find out anything,” he says. “You’ll just be spinning your wheels. You’ll never find out.”
Eight years later, in 1973, the CIA presented him with the prestigious Donovan Award—the reason for that recognition also remains a secret. And he may be the only CIA person to have twice received the Exceptional Service Medal from the Agency. What do they mean to him? “That I was there and forgot to duck,” he says, laughing. Among his memorabilia is a photo of him with President Ronald Reagan. Everywhere are clues, but none of them add up to anything that would shed light on his clandestine career.
And even after he formally retired from the Agency in 1986, he went on for another eight years to serve in a variety of sensitive positions, particularly in the Mideast gathering intelligence on terrorist organizations. Like the movie character Zelig, his presence is barely discernible in the background of many historical frames. Among the places he is known to have served are Jordan, Sudan, and Ethiopia.
Tom Twetten, former head of the CIA’s clandestine service, remembers him well. “He’s a crazy guy,” he says. “Crazy,” as in daring beyond words. “He did some extraordinary work from time to time and in between times he was a royal pain in the ass.” Twetten encountered MacPherson in India in the late seventies, where he apparently left some Indians with the impression he was a four-star general. Later, Twetten recalls, he was instrumental in somehow stopping Palestinians from coming over the border from Syria and firing rockets into Israel. Toward the end of the Cold War he worked behind the Iron Curtain on a mission involving the cooperation of half a dozen governments. That operation is still deemed so sensitive that Twetten will not even hint at its purpose.
But even as MacPherson’s career winds down, he will not acknowledge that he is or ever was with the CIA.
Little is known of his background. He was born in Chicago in 1930 or 1931 and was educated in Scotland and Germany, where he studied electrical engineering. He lived in Europe for sixteen years. Given his thick Scottish brogue, he could easily be mistaken for a native of that country. But he also speaks Spanish, French, German, and Russian, and is known to be conversant in an Eastern European tongue or two as well as Arabic. During the 1950s he served as an Air Commando with the U.S. Air Force, a precursor to the elite Special Forces. In the course of his career he has been shot at by Katyusha rockets, AK-47s, a variety of small arms, and even SA-7 missiles.
He has routinely parachuted from altitudes of thirty thousand feet and higher where sixty-below temperatures can freeze a man’s eyeballs, where the slightest gap in the filling of a tooth can reduce a man to desperate agony, and where, if the joints are not scrupulously purged of gases, the jumper will exhibit symptoms associated with diver’s bends.
In his world—as well as Berl King’s and Denny Gabriel’s—expertise and survival were never more than a hairbreadth apart. And still there was a place for luck. The crash in North Carolina was not the first such downed aircraft MacPherson is known to have crawled away from.
MacPherson knew both King and Gabriel. He had flown with them many times in the days of Air America. But in an odd way he knew very little of either man. That was how he wanted it. “I have purposefully cut myself off from these kinds of things, much as I thought these guys were really great. Even when I worked with them I really didn’t try to know them too well. It would have made it tougher to do the job we were trying to do. I have made it a point of not getting to know the people I work with. It is one of the cardinal rules I have followed. When engaged in work, I operate on a need-to-know basis, not just nice-to-know.”
Today MacPherson wonders at the young stock of Agency officers coming through the ranks and worries for them. One young man, intent upon a career as a paramilitary officer, saw in MacPherson a kind of mentor and expressed an interest in accompanying him on an assignment.
“Do you think you could live in a foreign country?” MacPherson asked the young man.
“Yes,” he said boldly.
“Smile,” responded MacPherson. The young man smiled a toothy smile. “No,” persisted MacPherson, “open your mouth.” Inside, MacPherson was looking at some $20,000 worth of American orthodontic work. “Every time you open your mouth,” he said, “you will be telling people where you come from. You can still make the trip but we will have to knock out a few teeth and things like that,” he said half jokingly. “Living in a foreign country, you have to have absolutely impeccable credentials, right down to the last tooth.” Any mistake can be fatal.
After so many brushes with death, MacPherson remains almost at ease with the idea of his own mortality. “I really absolutely no longer fear death. I’ve sort of been there,” he says. “I came within a whisper of dying.” That is not to say that he is ready to die. More than death, he fears being crippled. From his earliest mission to his most recent, he does not get on a plane or embark on any mission without first intoning the same silent prayer that he learned from his school days in Europe, a prayer that dates back more than 350 years to the English Civil War. “Lord, we are about to go
into battle and I know that most of the day I will forget about you. Please don’t forget about me.” That prayer has served him well.
He has known many men who have died. Some are represented by nameless stars in the CIA’s Book of Honor. And he has known many men who, like himself, have survived against the odds, among them Dick Holm, whose crash in the Congo in 1965 left him disfigured. MacPherson and Holm have been friends for twenty years, though the two of them have never spoken a word to each other of their respective plane crashes. MacPherson believes in honoring those who perished, not in dwelling on near misses. He is fond of citing lines from Laurence Binyon’s poem “For the Fallen” that appear in a place where many British SAS soldiers are buried:
They shall not grow old
As we that are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them
Nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun
And in the morning
We shall remember them.
Just what the three CIA officers—King, Gabriel, MacPherson—were doing that July night more than twenty years ago remains something of a mystery. Relatives of Berl King and Denny Gabriel each have their own theories based in part on hints from CIA colleagues and in part from the irrepressible need to find some transcendent meaning in the loss of a loved one.
The King family was given to believe that that night’s operation was preparation for a specific hostage rescue mission. Perhaps. Denny Gabriel’s brother, Ron, a medical professor, is convinced that that night was a practice run for the insertion of a CIA team into Cuba, where it was suspected that a Soviet brigade was present. In fact, some months later the presence of such a brigade was confirmed, nearly scuttling the SALT II treaty. Also plausible. Hardest of all to accept is the idea that it was merely a routine training exercise, a fluke accident oblivious to consummate skill and courage. One man who knows the truth about that night’s mission is Alexander MacPherson. The lone survivor, he’s not saying a word.
PART THREE
Chaos and Terrorism
CHAPTER 11
Indestructible
SUNDAY EVENING, April 17, 1983, had been a festive time for CIA employees stationed in Beirut. Thirty-nine-year-old James Lewis, a veteran covert operative, and his Vietnamese-born wife, Monique, had invited Agency colleagues to their apartment for a dinner as only Lewis could prepare. A gourmet chef, he had spent hours fixing the meal—nothing but the freshest ingredients, the best spices, the perfect wine. The Agency’s top Middle East specialist, Robert C. Ames, was in town on temporary duty, and there was a sense that what was happening here made this shattered capital city, once likened to Paris, some sort of epicenter—a place of deadly intrigue, espionage, and ancient rivalries. In short, Jim Lewis’s kind of place. Monique, too, had special reason to celebrate this evening. The next day was to be her first on the job, working as a CIA secretary in the embassy. It was spring, a time of hope even in Beirut, and a time for Jim Lewis to put his culinary skills to the test on behalf of friends old and new.
Across town somewhere, other preparations, no less elaborate, were under way. Two thousand pounds of high explosives were being readied. The target: the U.S. Embassy, Beirut. For the driver of the truck that would carry the massive bomb and steer it squarely into the embassy’s glass and concrete facade, there were preparations of another kind to be made, for whatever promised glory might await, it would be not in this world, but in the next.
The Beirut embassy had come to be the gathering point to which many seasoned CIA operatives had made their way. Over the years, these same individuals had come to know one another and to share a common history. Like a pooling of mercury, they had been called upon to go their separate ways over the years, but inevitably would be drawn together again in places such as Beirut where the stakes were high and so, too, the rewards. What the Agency could not yet know was that Beirut was the face of its own future, a place where hostilities would have little to do with the Cold War, where the enemy belonged to no foreign embassy, wore no uniform, and would hide behind not a border of barbed wire but a smile.
The Agency operatives in Beirut each had their cover, their bogus stories, their mundane tasks that they hoped would shield them from suspicion. Jim Lewis was listed as an embassy political officer. His wife, Monique, was said to be a State Department secretary. Kenneth Eugene Haas, the Agency’s thirty-eight-year-old chief of station, was also listed as a political officer. Recently married, he had served in many sensitive posts—Bangladesh, Iran, and Oman among them. Frank J. Johnston was carried as an econ officer, as was Murray J. McCann.
Fifty-nine-year-old William Richard Sheil was said to be a civilian employee of the army. A veteran of Vietnam, he had made a name for himself as a superb interrogator, a man who relied on honey, not horror, to wrangle information from his subjects. Deborah M. Hixon, a thirty-year-old from Colorado and daughter of an airline pilot, was said to be a foreign affairs analyst with State. Phyliss Faraci, forty-four, was an “administrative assistant,” under cover with the State Department.
Less than twenty-four hours after the Sunday evening dinner, all but one of them would be dead.
James Lewis bore little resemblance to the fictional James Bond, but in Lewis, 007 would have more than met his match. A lanky six feet two, he had boyish good looks, a full head of dark hair parted perfectly, kind eyes, and an easy smile. He was most comfortable dicing onions in the kitchen, listening to a French chanteuse, or sipping a good Bordeaux. He might as easily have been taken for a fresh-faced teacher at a prep school as one of the Agency’s premier covert operatives.
A personable fellow, he thrived on entertaining and mixed easily with diverse peoples, but even those who worked with him daily would later reflect that they knew almost nothing about him. It was not a dark reclusiveness, but a talent for appearing open and guileless, all the while giving up nothing of himself. But those who underestimated him did so at their peril—literally. Fluent in Arabic, French, and Vietnamese, he was an expert with an M-14, a .45, a parachute, and scuba gear. He was as capable of underwater infiltration as dropping silently from the skies. His work for the Agency had taken him to every country in Southeast Asia and most of those in Europe and the Middle East.
From earliest boyhood, James Lewis had but one ambition—to be a soldier. Not just any soldier, but a paratrooper. There was no great mystery to his attraction to the military. His father, James Forrest Pittman, had been a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne. Lewis was born James Forrest Pittman, Jr., on February 29, 1944. His father was overseas fighting World War II. Little Jimmy would be nineteen months old before he would first set eyes on his father. Forrest, as his father was known, returned to his rural hometown of Coffeeville, Mississippi, and like many of his generation, was greeted as something of a local hero. His three sons and daughter would sit wide-eyed listening to his accounts of combat far beyond the confines of Yalobusha County.
But in 1952 Forrest simply walked out on the family. He was never to return again. A heavy drinker and a poor provider, he vanished. Lewis’s mother, Antoinette—Toni to her friends—moved to Gulfport, Mississippi, and struggled to raise four young children. Much of the burden fell upon the slender shoulders of the oldest, Jimmy, then aged eight. Neither as a child nor as an adult would he permit himself to speak of his father, but the lingering pain of that loss would define the landscape of his life for many years to come. Already a sober child, Jimmy learned to hold his emotions tight within, sharing them with no one. He was as slow to show affection as he was to show pain. It was not that he did not feel both, as would later be abundantly clear, but that he would not allow himself to show any vulnerability. And so, even as a child, he became practiced in the art of deception, accustomed to living with secrets and self-containment—liabilities in all but a spy’s trade.
To his sister and two brothers, he was seen as the consummate leader, a boy who squared his shoulders and naturally assumed command in every situation. An aunt would
always think of him as “indestructible.” His military demeanor and self-discipline provided a way to conceal the hurt behind a facade of spit and polish, and at the same time, to obliquely express his adoration for the father who had disappeared. It was no coincidence that Jimmy and his two brothers would all become paratroopers in their father’s image.
Lewis took it upon himself to watch over this cadre of three younger siblings, not as a protector or ersatz father, but as a drill sergeant, demanding obedience and seeking to toughen them up. His sister, Susan, recalls him leading the three of them out on “a combat expedition”—that was what he called it—into a neighboring swamp. Deep into the morass, Jim Lewis announced that the others would have to fend for themselves. He disappeared, leaving his siblings to find their own way home. Hours later when they appeared, safe but exhausted, he reviewed them with pleasure. “Oh, you made it back,” he said, confident that he was whipping them into shape.
The world as he knew it was plenty tough. To win his love, one first had to pass muster. When he took his little sister and brothers to the movies, he insisted they walk “ten paces” behind him. It was simply a privilege of rank.
Though a mediocre student, he had a voracious interest in geography and military affairs and was said to have read The World Book Encyclopedia nearly cover-to-cover. Other times he buried himself in comic books featuring square-jawed soldier heroes invulnerable to fear or pain. His favorite hangout was the local army surplus store with its camouflage gear, its footlockers, machetes, vests, and other accoutrements of war—all of his father’s vintage.
As a child he was not a troublemaker, though at times he would do something that would unsettle his mother and reveal something of the turmoil within. At age twelve he ran away to New Orleans, but, ever dutiful, he left a note for his mother, who notified the police. A day later he was returned to the house. Another time he and his sister pilfered three dollars from a collection box at a local church. His mother found out and had them return the money to the preacher along with an apology. In 1959 his mother married George Lewis. He promptly adopted fifteen-year-old James, who changed his name to James Foley Lewis, the Foley being his mother’s maiden name. Enraged that the family was moving to Phoenix, he took a stick and shattered the glass in the French doors of the dining room—perhaps the only such outburst he ever allowed himself to have. But after the move, by all accounts, he settled down and seemed to flourish.