by Ted Gup
A year later Twetten left Libya, never to return again. But Libya remained on Twetten’s priority list. On September 1, 1969, Gadhafi and others mounted a successful coup and overthrew Libya’s King Idris. At the time, Twetten was the Libya desk officer at CIA headquarters in Langley. Any cables from the field or operations against a Libyan passed through Twetten’s hands. Above him was a branch chief and a division chief.
At the time of the coup, there was no immediate announcement of who the new leader was. That was learned about a week later. Initially Gadhafi was viewed by U.S. Ambassador Joe Palmer as someone the United States could readily work with. But soon enough it became clear that Gadhafi had other plans. He shut down Wheelus Air Force Base and prepared to nationalize the oil industry. The days of wishful thinking were over.
About a year and a half after Gadhafi came to power Twetten was summoned to the seventh-floor office of the deputy director of operations, the man who oversaw all covert activities worldwide. His name was Desmond FitzGerald. He was a figure like Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner and Dick Helms, of Olympian stature in the eyes of the Agency’s clandestine rank and file. “It was like a phone call from God,” remembers Twetten. “I went up to his office with a good deal of trepidation, having never before even seen the man let alone been in his office.” FitzGerald invited Twetten to take a seat.
“What do you know about the Black Prince?” FitzGerald asked.
The Black Prince, so called because of the darkness of his skin, was a relative of King Idris. Twetten knew a good deal about him, none of it flattering. Twetten told him that the prince allegedly had been known to import Greek prostitutes for entertainment on the weekends, that he supposedly frequented the American PX and bought up numerous watches pledging to pay for them at a later date, and that he shamelessly exploited his royal connections.
“Well,” asked FitzGerald, “what do you think of him leading a coup against Gadhafi?”
“I can’t think of anybody who could be worse,” answered Twetten.
“Thank you very much,” said FitzGerald, accepting the fact that the Black Prince was, in Twetten’s words, “the wrong horse.”
And that was the end of it. The CIA would not again weigh mounting a coup to dislodge Gadhafi. A year later Twetten learned that it was the Israelis who had proposed arming the prince and organizing the tribes in the south into a Bedouin march to overthrow the Libyan leader. It was, said Twetten, “a harebrained scheme.”
But as it turned out, the Agency might have been overjoyed to have the Black Prince in power, or for that matter, just about anyone else but Gadhafi. Those within the CIA who were fighting terrorism would come to regard him as the devil incarnate. And in the end, none would have better reason to do so than Tom Twetten himself.
As chief of station, Twetten had the authority to block Matt Gannon’s move to Amman, but there was no cause to do so and nothing on the face of Gannon’s file to suggest that he was anything other than a standout. When the two of them finally met in Amman in August 1981, Twetten saw in the callow young case officer great promise. If there was any reservation about Gannon, it was a tiny one and left unspoken. Twetten wondered to himself if perhaps this well-heeled lad of gentle demeanor might not be a tad too nice, maybe a little soft in the center, indecisive. Would he, Twetten wondered, have the stuff to make the tough decisions called for in the Mideast?
Gannon for his part must have felt a twinge of awe for this station chief who had already garnered for himself a reputation for extreme coolness under fire and exceptional tradecraft as a spy.
It was not long after twenty-eight-year-old Gannon arrived in Amman that he found himself distracted by a pretty twenty-year-old who frequented the embassy. She had brown eyes, auburn hair, and pale skin. Her name was Susan, as in Susan Twetten, daughter of his boss, the CIA’s chief of station. In the Agency, as elsewhere, it was not a good idea to court the boss’s daughter, particularly given the personal and security complications such a relationship could entail.
Besides, Gannon was already involved with a woman named Susie who was then planning to visit him in Amman. “The past week has been tough . . . Have landed myself in a real spot,” Gannon wrote his brother Dick on November 6, 1981. “Have begun to see Susan Twetten the daughter of the Embassy Political Officer [Gannon referred to Twetten by his cover position]. She teaches at a kindergarten here having arrived in early October. Am trying to sort myself out, taking a step back . . . at the same time, I decided to tell Susie NOT to come out as we had planned in early December, just four weeks away . . . The fact that I am drawing myself into seeing someone else doesn’t help in the least . . . in the meantime, I feel like burying myself in my work . . . not seeing anyone, but I have made a commitment here and have to work that out some way . . . Why I bring this on myself, I don’t know. I’ll keep in touch on how all works out, or doesn’t work . . .”
Dick Gannon did not have long to wait to hear how things worked out. Three months later, at a February 11, 1982, embassy party hosted by the Twettens, it was announced that Matthew and Susan were engaged. In a letter to Dick Gannon written eight days after the party, Matt Gannon wrote: “I have joined Susan in the catechism classes! I know you are shaking your head as I have been deemed a ‘lost cause’ for quite some time.” And in a vain effort to muzzle his brother from telling his bride too many of his foibles too early, Matt wrote: “I want you to promise that you will tell only a certain number of stories about me to Susan, preferably only ones dealing with the parking tickets! We can leave passports and finances for another visit!”
Less than four months later, on June 3, 1982, Matthew Gannon and Susan Twetten were married at Holy Trinity Church in Washington, D.C.
As a parent Tom Twetten could not have been more pleased with his daughter’s choice for a husband. But as CIA chief of station, Twetten regarded the union between his daughter and Matthew Gannon as potentially nettlesome. After that, Twetten would sometimes go to absurd lengths to avoid even the appearance of furthering his son-in-law’s career. As Twetten rose through the Agency’s senior-most ranks, Gannon’s own innate talents distinguished him as a rising star in his own right. Inside Langley, there was inevitably the sense that Matthew Gannon had been anointed for great things, be it by pure merit, by blood, or by a combination of the two.
Early on, Gannon’s obsessive devotion to Agency work and the travel that went with it put a strain on the new marriage. “Matthew has been very busy at work, staying at the Embassy for long hours and then doing work-related activities in the evenings,” Susan wrote three months before the wedding. “He has a very bad cold now, which is probably due to a lack of sleep and good meals. He is also a bit stubborn in this area. (There, I’ve told!)”
Marriage did not alter his work habits. Less than two weeks after the wedding, Susan, then twenty-two, wrote Dick Gannon from Amman: “We have settled into as much of a routine as one can settle into when living with Matthew . . . He’s off to Paris next month. I will stay here with the cat and plants.”
Matthew Gannon, like many case officers, seemed wedded first to his work and second to his family. “Came down with a mild case of typhoid fever on 6 September,” he wrote. “Basically two weeks out of the office. Susan tried to keep me in bed, but work here has been a bit heavy lately, and I couldn’t afford to drop it altogether.” But he, too, fretted about the impact of his work on his marriage.
Four months after the wedding, he wrote his brother Dick, then stationed in Beirut: “I worry that I don’t see her enough during the work week . . . Not the best way to start off.” Like all case officers, he had to contend with the nocturnal life of running agents while during the day he had to fulfill his responsibilities as an economics officer, his cover in Amman. Sometimes the pressure of the two jobs was more than even he could take, fraying nerves and patience. “The embassy here appears sometimes like the monkey cage at the San Diego Zoo,” he wrote, “everyone running in different directions, and no control of the show.
Susan told me I had better start running again BEFORE I come home from work to get out all the frustrations. She has a point.”
The letter, dated October 7, 1982, closed, “Hope all is well, Dick, and Beirut is not proving too dangerous.” Gannon was by all accounts an excellent intelligence officer, but it was something more than intelligence that troubled him about Beirut. Call it a premonition. “The tension is in the air,” he wrote, “and Palestinians are rightfully angry at our support for Israel . . . Amman though is not a high risk place for Americans; but Beirut, what worries me is the unexpected event, the sniper, car bomb, mine. You are the best Sy [security] has to offer,” he wrote his brother, “and I am pleased, in a sense that you are in Beirut, but the unexpected incident, despite all planning, is really unsettling. We’re praying for you.” Six months later the Beirut embassy toppled and Dick Gannon narrowly escaped with his life.
From the summer of 1983 until the summer of 1986, Matthew Gannon was based in Damascus, Syria, a country long suspected of supporting terrorism. Nowhere in the Mideast could one be sure to avoid the ravages of terrorism. On October 7, 1985, an Italian cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, was seized by four Palestinian hijackers and held for forty-four hours.
Among those passengers looking on in horror was a sixty-nine-year-old American named Leon Klinghoffer. Disabled by a stroke, he was confined to a wheelchair. Terrorists put a machine gun to his wife’s head and forced her to leave him. A short time later she heard two shots. Klinghoffer’s body was dumped into the Mediterranean, along with his wheelchair. The notion that an old man in a wheelchair could be so coldly executed became one of the defining images in the war on terrorism, erasing any lingering illusions about the nature of this new enemy.
Worse yet were the denials that followed Klinghoffer’s murder. “News about the death of the crippled American passenger was fabricated by the American media to smear the image of Palestinian fighters,” declared Abu Abbas of the Palestine Liberation Front, to which the terrorists belonged. “This American could have been dead in his cabin out of fear or shock.” The Palestine Liberation Organization groused that the United States was making “an ado” over Klinghoffer’s death and refuted suggestions he was murdered. “Where is the evidence?” demanded Farouk Kaddoumi, the PLO’s foreign policy spokesman.
The evidence, Klinghoffer’s body, washed ashore a week later near the Syrian port of Latakia. Two bullet holes left little doubt as to the cause of death. But still there was the need for someone from the U.S. Embassy in Damascus to claim the body and oversee its preparation for a return to the United States. Such unpleasant tasks as this fall to those assigned to the consular affairs section, which is precisely where Matthew Gannon was working under cover. Despite the misgivings of some within the Agency that his going to claim the body might attract unwanted press attention, he volunteered for the assignment. It was the first time, but not the last, that he would face the casualties of terrorism.
Though a generation apart, Tom Twetten and his son-in-law, Matthew Gannon, shared much in common. Both entered the CIA as young men profoundly committed—some would say obsessed—with work. Both had come into the Agency in troubled times. Twetten joined in 1961, three months after the Bay of Pigs. At an orientation program an Agency officer had declared that the CIA would never fully distance itself from that fiasco. Twetten momentarily wondered why, if that was true, he had bothered to join so mortally wounded an institution. Gannon had joined in 1977 as the Agency was mired in scandal and investigations into the excesses of the past.
In the mid-eighties Twetten and Gannon shared the drive together from their homes to Langley, leaving in Twetten’s VW bus at 6:00 A.M. and often not returning until 8:00 P.M. Both men had brilliant futures to look forward to and both would suffer intensely personal losses at the hands of terrorists. That their paths should cross and their families unite was less a matter of serendipity than the realities of the clandestine service, itself a kind of extended family doubly bound by a culture of secrecy and a distrust of outsiders. By the time Susan Twetten took a part-time job at the Agency, it had become the center of their personal and professional lives.
As the years passed, young Matthew Gannon gathered for himself an enviable record and established himself as one of the foremost Arabists within the Agency. His ascent through the ranks seemed foreordained. Tom Twetten’s career also thrived. In the summer of 1975 he had been made deputy branch chief of North Africa, overseeing operations in Libya and Egypt. Later he was chief of station in Amman. In 1982 he returned to Washington and was made chief of operations of the Office of Technical Services, the vast support arm of the Agency that provides everything a spy in the field might need—instruments of secret writing, bugging devices, disguises, concealable cameras, and other exotic gear. In 1983 he was made deputy chief of the Near East Division, once again overseeing Libyan operations, among others.
In the ensuing years, hostility and suspicion between the United States and Libya deepened. Each seemed destined to provoke the other.
In March 1986 a daunting thirty-ship U.S. Navy task force conducted exercises in the waters just off Libya, an action seen as taunting Gadhafi. On March 25 U.S. and Libyan forces clashed as Libya fired missiles on U.S. planes and the U.S. responded by attacking Libyan patrol boats and a missile site. The United States did not have to wait long for Libya’s response.
On April 14, 1986, a West Berlin discotheque frequented by U.S. servicemen was bombed. Two American soldiers were killed and 229 were wounded. President Reagan, relying on U.S. intelligence reports, announced that there was “irrefutable” evidence that the bombing was the work of Libya. The United States had been waiting for just such a provocation to unleash a retaliatory strike.
The disco bombing gave the White House and CIA license to exact the most punishing attack on Libya, exposing Gadhafi’s vulnerabilities, degrading his terrorist training facilities, and perhaps even destabilizing his regime. The army barracks in particular were selected as a target in the hopes that the troops would turn their wrath against Gadhafi.
A key participant in those consultations was Tom Twetten, then deputy chief of the CIA’s Near East Division. Twetten and his staff provided intelligence that helped focus American targets in Tripoli, including Gadhafi’s living quarters, though it was the air force that selected the sites and the National Security Council that gave ultimate approval.
Nine days after the disco was bombed, the United States launched Operation El Dorado Canyon. Dozens of U.S. Navy A-6 Intruders and A-7 bombers as well as air force F-111s pummeled Libyan airfields, command posts, and training centers in Tripoli and Benghazi. The CIA was banned by law from any direct assassination attempt on a foreign leader, but the bombing of Gadhafi’s Tripoli residential compound could be understood as little else but an attempt on his life. Indeed, Twetten would later acknowledge that that was precisely what a senior Pentagon planner had in mind. Reagan himself had declared that Gadhafi was “this mad dog of the Middle East.” And if there was any ambiguity left, a senior U.S. official was quoted as saying, “We all know what you do with a mad dog.”
In the massive U.S. air assault Gadhafi’s adopted eighteen-month-old daughter, Hana, was said to have been killed; two of his sons, aged four and three, were injured; and his wife was left shell-shocked. Gadhafi, for all his ruthlessness, was said to be shattered by the loss and more intent than ever to exact revenge upon his tormentor, the United States. “Child-murderer,” Gadhafi branded Reagan, who had authorized the attack. But Gadhafi decided to bide his time before retaliating.
In 1987 Twetten was chief of the Near East Division and taking an active role in all intelligence operations against Libya. During this period he was intent not to take any action that might create the appearance of favoritism or particular interest in his son-in-law’s career. Gannon was assigned to the Counterterrorism Center, taking him somewhat outside of Twetten’s direct line of authority.
An Arabist by training with nearly a decad
e’s experience in the Mideast, Gannon was a major asset to the center. Those who knew him were amused that Twetten had gone to such ends to avoid meddling in his career. Gannon’s self-effacing brand of courage and his chameleon-like ability to adapt to life in the Mideast had long since ensured a meteoric rise within the CIA. For that, he needed no help from his father-in-law or anyone else.
By the summer of 1988 Gadhafi and Libya seemed to slip off the front pages of the news. The focus of the fight against terrorists had moved from Tripoli to Beirut, where American hostages continued to be held. At that point the Agency suspected that support for such terrorism came from Iran.
Tensions with that country ran high in the summer of 1988. On July 3, 1988, officers aboard the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes, deployed in the Persian Gulf, believed they detected an incoming Iranian F-14 and fired a surface-to-air missile to intercept the aircraft. The target proved to be not a fighter, but a civilian Iranian airliner, an Airbus A300. Flight 655 was blown apart by the missile and disintegrated midair. Two hundred and ninety passengers and crew members were killed. Once again Iran railed against the United States as “the Great Satan,” and once again there was a feeling of waiting for the second shoe to drop—for Iran to take its revenge.
Five months after the downing of Iran’s flight 655, the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center needed an Arabic-speaking case officer to send to Beirut on temporary duty. A CTC officer informed Twetten that his son-in-law had been selected for the assignment.
“I am not a part of that decision,” Twetten responded. “He’s your officer.” In his mind he knew he had no other choice. “It’s all a sham if I intervene and say, ‘No, you can’t send Matthew to Beirut,’ ” he told himself. But there was no one in the Agency who understood better the perils of Beirut. Terry Anderson, a correspondent for the Associated Press, had by then been a hostage for more than three years, along with other Americans, including agronomist Thomas Sutherland and university administrator David Jacobsen. And they could be counted among the lucky ones.