These days, we live with the constant threat of random bombings and hijackings. Terrorism is a demon we recognize, a familiar evil. At the time of its debut, though, this type of violence perplexed U.S. authorities and horrified the American public. Surely the government must know something, people thought as they turned on their televisions to see plumes of smoke rising and shrouded corpses wheeled from ruined buildings. Surely our country can find and punish these monsters.
But U.S. intelligence agencies were stymied. Fred Burton is now vice president at Stratfor, a private intelligence firm known as the shadow CIA. He’s written several books and has become a prominent expert on counterterrorism. He joined the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service in 1985, right around the time my father was taken, and worked extensively on the Islamic Jihad file. In a phone conversation with me, he describes American efforts to unearth the identity and motivations of the terrorist group. According to Burton, U.S. intelligence agencies didn’t have enough local informers and experience to understand or anticipate the IJO’s tactics, which were alien to them at the time.
“I’ve got to tell you, Sulome, in many ways we were somewhat dysfunctional,” Burton says. “We just consistently lacked the human intelligence to tell us basics. Who were the IJO? What did they really want? We just didn’t know.”
I don’t know either, and that’s troubling. Hezbollah was never shy about expressing what it wanted: an end to Israeli occupation and American “colonialist” influence in Lebanon, legal retribution for the Phalangists’ war crimes, and the right of all Lebanese to choose the system of their own government, preferably an Islamic one.
In February 1985, Hezbollah “came out,” so to speak, as a political and military movement. It published a manifesto describing those very objectives. Interestingly enough, the manifesto included a reference to the IJO’s terrorism:
The US has tried, through its local agents, to persuade the people that those who crushed their arrogance in Lebanon and frustrated their conspiracy against the oppressed were nothing but a bunch of fanatic terrorists . . . such suggestions cannot and will not mislead our umma [community of Muslims], for the whole world knows that whoever wishes to oppose the US, that arrogant superpower, cannot indulge in marginal acts which may make it deviate from its major objective.
So even back in 1985, at the time of its birth, Hezbollah was denying involvement in the kidnappings and bombings. Maybe its members were just trying to distance themselves from the terrorism, as the conventional narrative of the hostage crisis dictates. Perhaps I should unquestioningly bow to U.S. government wisdom on the matter, as have countless analysts and reporters who have written about this topic. But their fathers hadn’t been kidnapped by these men, so perhaps I have more incentive than they did to pull at the dangling threads of this story.
If I pull long and hard enough, maybe I’ll see a pattern there that no one has seen before. Maybe then I can end that sense of uneasy confusion that’s been nibbling at me for years before I began this investigation; that little faraway murmur I’ve been hearing since I was old enough to understand the complexity of what happened to my father. Something doesn’t fit.
Even before social media spurred the short attention span of today’s news cycle, television and print media brought these atrocities to American homes. One-off attacks like the embassy and barracks bombings make for compelling airtime: the blood, the bodies, the wails and moans of survivors. But the thing is, TVs switch off, and news stories are plentiful. Our collective memory is brief. The bombings happened in a place as unfamiliar to most Americans as the surface of Mars, an alien region of strange-faced people who speak a strange language. Those disturbing images quickly faded for viewers snug and safe in our national bubble. Lives must be lived, after all, and shock can last only so long.
The terrorists needed a different approach, one that would linger in our minds. The suffering of the dead is quickly forgotten, but the long-term pain of innocent people held against their will—that has staying power. So the kidnappings began.
Robin Wright, a fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center, both think tanks in Washington, has written several widely acclaimed books on militant Islamist movements. At the time of my father’s kidnapping, Wright was also a familiar face at the Commodore Hotel, reporting on the civil war for a number of prominent publications.
“[The Islamic Jihad] discovered that the Americans were quite emotional about their hostages,” Wright tells me in her colorful, chaotic office at the Institute of Peace. There are books and documents scattered everywhere; it’s a work space I quite identify with. “They learned that was a far more effective technique, and the suicide bombs stopped.”
David Dodge was one of the first to be taken, in July 1982. He was president of the American University of Beirut—perhaps the single most valuable gift the United States ever gave Lebanon. It remains practically the only Lebanese institution for higher education from which a degree holds some value outside of the country. The important thing about David Dodge’s kidnapping is that he was initially held in Lebanon, but his captors eventually took him to Iran. From what’s been documented, Palestinian militants controlling West Beirut, which was the site of Dodge’s abduction, were originally implicated in his capture. But Yasser Arafat, then chief of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), was perceived to be searching desperately for the kidnappers, hoping to see Dodge freed. The Palestinians seemed to already be aware that their cause did not need more bad PR.
It wasn’t long before there were indications of Iranian and Lebanese Shia involvement. “Unofficial sources” suggested to the Associated Press that Dodge had been taken with the intention of using him to secure the release of an Iranian diplomat and three of his aides who had been kidnapped in Lebanon, likely by Christian militiamen, earlier that month. This motive seemed to be confirmed when Dodge was released a year later and explained that he had indeed been taken to Tehran and interrogated about the missing Iranians.
Wright says Dodge’s kidnapping was a clear cause-and-effect scenario. “The sequence of events was quite logical,” she explains. “The Iranians were picked up, and when the outside world did nothing, Iran kept appealing: ‘Do something about them. Find them; tell us what happened to them. Look for them. They had diplomatic plates. They had protection. This is the route they were taking, these are the checkpoints.’ There was this plaintive appeal, but in the aftermath of the embassy takeover in Tehran, in the midst of the Iran-Iraq War, there was a sense of, ‘Why should we help the Iranians?’ Nobody really cared, and the Lebanese weren’t very helpful.”
The motives for the next abduction of a U.S. citizen seem less clear-cut. Reverend Benjamin Weir was captured in May of 1984 while he was taking a walk with his wife. Weir lived in Shia West Beirut and worked for Muslim charities, so it was sadly ironic that Shia Muslims would kidnap him. The Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for this as well. In another telephone message, they expressed their ultimate goal: “We will not leave any American on Lebanese soil.”
At this point, the State Department issued an urgent warning to all U.S. citizens in Lebanon: essentially, get the fuck out of the country, or stay at your own peril.
There’s another very important hostage who was kidnapped almost exactly a year before my father was taken: William Francis Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut. His kidnapping was another catastrophic blow to the agency. As station chief, he had plenty of secrets inside his head that the U.S. government was deeply invested in keeping from terrorists. Also, his friends in the CIA must have had an idea of the vicious torment an agent would be subjected to at the hands of people like the Islamic Jihad. The first of three videos showing Buckley being tortured that were sent to the U.S. embassy removed any doubt. From what I hear, by the third tape, the man had been abused into insanity. At the end of it all, he was “a gibbering wretch,” barely able to string words together into a sentence.
A littl
e over a year later, Buckley would die in the same room my father was being held in. Apparently he was talking to himself as his life slipped away; Dad wrote about it in his book. I remember crying as I read that passage for the first time, at about age ten.
“Oh God,” Buckley had muttered in the dark place they shared, no longer cognizant that he was speaking his thoughts aloud. “I’ve lasted for a year, and now my body is failing me.”
Dad was well aware of the dangers he faced before he was taken. But until my father was kidnapped, journalists in conflict zones hadn’t become the walking bull’s-eyes they are today. There was an implicit understanding that parties on all sides should avoid targeting reporters, who were, ostensibly anyway, neutral witnesses.
I still have an AP T-shirt my father gave my mother before he was taken. I often sleep in it. It reminds me of a different time in journalism, one I fear will never return. On the back, it reads PRESS, DON’T SHOOT in five different languages. The idea of wearing such a T-shirt in most wars these days is ludicrous. Advertising oneself as a member of the press basically means issuing an invitation to every asshole with a longing for ransom money or a hankering to televise the gruesome death of a Westerner.
So maybe it was that Dad felt a false sense of safety as a reporter documenting the atrocities of the Lebanese civil war, many of which were being committed against Muslims, both Shia and Sunni. Or perhaps it was just the arrogance and delusion of invincibility that plague so many of us, not only journalists. Either way, while most Americans in Lebanon listened to their government and skedaddled, my father stayed put. I wonder if he would take that back now. If he were given a ride in a time-traveling car, Back to the Future style, would he return to 1985 and abandon the innocent people dying, starving, and suffering—the ones he felt such a calling to tell the world about? I’m not sure. Knowing my dad as I do, there’s a good chance he still wouldn’t have left Beirut, even if he had known what was in store for him. My father is a reporter to the core. He considered it his life’s work to tell the truth about war—no matter the price.
Then, another whispered name. A culprit began to materialize: the ultimate boogeyman. I’m not sure when the U.S. government first heard of him, but two of my father’s friends would see his name scrawled on a napkin in a Cyprus bar, and soon after, it became clear that this man was a key player in the Islamic Jihad’s twisted game.
All of Dad’s circle of friends were reporters. They had their own sources, and after he was abducted, they all worked their connections as hard as they could, trying to find information on his whereabouts and condition. During my first Skype conversation with Shazi, as I sit sweating at my dining room table in Fanar, she tells me about how she and Robert Fisk began their quest to find my father.
“I had a very good source in Tehran,” she begins. “We used to call him Annie so that nobody would know who we were talking about, but it was a man. Anyway, this guy used to be part of the Iranian regime, but at the time when I got in touch with him, he had left his job and was doing business. I called him in Tehran and I said, ‘Can you do something? What can you do?’ He said, ‘Let me find out.’ After a few exchanges, he told me he had talked to the Iranian regime and they wanted to know what happened to the four Iranians who had disappeared.”
Shazi and Fisk made some inquiries into the whereabouts of the missing Iranians. Most of their sources seemed to think the men were dead, and they relayed this to Annie. But their dialogue with him continued.
“I put Fisk in charge of contact with this guy, but of course we kept your mother informed, and she became very dependent on Annie,” Shazi murmurs softly. “I think she was clinging to him, to his information. It made her keep going.”
This hurts my heart a little. I remember how my mother’s face would tighten and turn ash gray sometimes when I was very small. I can still hear her sobbing behind a closed door.
“This guy started coming into Cyprus to talk with us, because it was very dangerous to talk over the phone,” Shazi tells me. “We [Shazi and Fisk] went one night to a pub, because it was dark and noisy. We didn’t want anybody to hear us. It was like a James Bond movie. He wrote down—and I still have this piece of paper; it’s become yellow now—he wrote down the name Imad Mughniyeh. We had never heard of him.
“He didn’t even want to utter his name,” says Shazi. I shiver.
It wasn’t long before the United States became aware of Mughniyeh’s connection to the IJO. The common understanding of his motive at the time—which has largely stayed the same—is that he was kidnapping Westerners to force the United States into putting pressure on the Kuwaiti government. Supposedly, Mughniyeh wanted to free seventeen Shia men imprisoned for bombing the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait earlier in 1983. One of the prisoners was Mustafa Badr al-Din, Mughniyeh’s friend and brother-in-law. The IJO communiqués always demanded that the “Kuwait 17” be freed in exchange for the Western hostages.
But I don’t believe that could have been the sole factor driving Mughniyeh to commit such acts of violence. Besides, his seventeen cronies were all freed when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990—yet my father wasn’t released until December 1991, a year and a half later. The United States clearly didn’t have much influence over Kuwait, or the men would have been freed right away. I need to find out more about why Mughniyeh kidnapped my father and the other hostages, because this explanation seems inadequate.
A year or so before my father was released, Barbara Bodine would become the U.S. State Department’s acting coordinator for counterterrorism. As such, she was extremely preoccupied with the hostage file. Her name caught my eye in some documents on my father’s captivity Dad requested be declassified under the Freedom of Information Act shortly after he came home. Well into my investigation, I travel to D.C. to view them at George Washington University’s National Security Archive. I’m shocked to discover that despite the fact that Dad was requesting information on his own kidnapping, what seemed like a good 80 percent of the documents he received from government agencies were completely redacted.
Apparently, when presented with a list of the names my father and his lawyer believed were members of the Islamic Jihad, the Drug Enforcement Administration, which had agents in Lebanon at the time and was monitoring narcotics activity among Shia Muslims, gave him a politely worded response I still laugh about. In a letter, they expressed their regret that they were unable to provide him with any information on these people, as doing so would violate their privacy. However, if Dad would kindly print out letters of authorization, find his kidnappers, and get their signatures, the DEA would fulfill his request.
Whatever happened to Dad, the U.S. government was in no hurry to tell anyone about it; not even him.
I do manage to get some sources out of the declassified papers, though, and Bodine is one of them. I interview her shortly afterward in her office at Georgetown University, where she now teaches. She’s a kind, competent-looking woman in her sixties, and she’s unusually frank with me during our conversation—well, unusual for a diplomat, anyway.
“There are some people who are fundamentally pathological,” Bodine says firmly when asked about the IJO and Mughniyeh. “These groups will attract them and give them a purpose and a reason . . . These are murderers and kidnappers and hijackers. To them, the political cause is utterly and completely irrelevant.”
Part of this makes sense. Anyone who would take a man against his will, keep him in chains for years, and treat him like an animal is clearly not morally sound. But as far as I know, there were dozens of men involved in the bombings and kidnappings. Could all of them have been psychopaths without consciences, men who reveled in hurting others? Or were there some who told themselves they were doing all this for the good of their country? Did they justify their actions as they lay awake at night, reciting like a poem the wrongs perpetrated against their people? Were they convinced that committing these atrocities was their only weapon against the powerful nations that opposed them and the worl
d that stood by and watched as they suffered?
When asked about this, Bodine acknowledges the complexity of a situation that breeds terrorism.
“There is a very high correlation between being occupied and terrorism,” she admits. “Probably that’s the highest correlation. It’s higher than a poverty correlation; certainly higher than a religious correlation. In the case of Lebanon, there was Israeli occupation. That tends to make people far more militant and desperate.
“All I can imagine is that you would have to be at a level of hopelessness and anger to sign up to die,” she continues thoughtfully. “It is almost inconceivable to the rest of us. On one level, it’s harder to understand than even the drive to kill somebody. You might kill somebody for self-preservation, but killing yourself is a very extreme step . . . the occupation aspect is very interesting and says a lot about Lebanon, which has been occupied by someone almost continuously. The Lebanese and the Palestinians are in a race for longevity of occupation by another country, and what you will sometimes do if you can’t actually get at your immediate occupier is to go for their outside supporter.”
In this case, that was America, of course. The United States’ close relationship with Israel seems to have cost it dearly during the Lebanese civil war. But that’s an alliance rarely questioned in Washington. It’s become as familiar as the national monuments we immediately recognize, as American as the Statue of Liberty or the Lincoln Memorial. Our special friendship with the Jewish state is automatic, knee-jerk, like a child yelling “Polo” in response to “Marco.” But I think the years have proved it comes with a price.
Around the same time that Mughniyeh was leading the Islamic Jihad on its terror spree, a different name was being whispered in the south of Lebanon. A group of extremely religious Shia Muslims seemed to have nominated themselves as the chosen defenders of their tiny, beset nation. Sponsored and trained by Iran, they emerged from a religious movement into a militia and began to engage in effective guerrilla-style warfare against occupying Israeli troops as well as Israel’s local Christian proxy, the South Lebanon Army. These people have also gone down in history as the first Islamic group to embrace suicide bombings, a tactic they employed with great success against Israeli convoys and checkpoints. The group would become known as Hezbollah, the Party of God, and it quickly became a serious headache for Israel.
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