The Hostage's Daughter

by Sulome Anderson

  Also, I never forget that I have a diagnosed mental illness. In fact, though, borderline personality disorder is nothing like schizophrenia in that it doesn’t involve hearing voices or having delusions. While paranoia is associated with BPD, the word is generally understood to describe social paranoia, or the fear that people are saying negative things about you behind your back. But I’m also aware the distinction between social paranoia and delusional paranoia will be lost on most people, given widespread ignorance regarding mental illness. So that leads me to consider my actions more carefully as I proceed.

  Years of therapy have trained me in the art of self-awareness, so as the investigation progresses, I often ask myself if I’m letting go of my grip on reality and wonder whether I’m caught up in a paranoid fantasy that happens to exist along somewhat the same lines as my personal political opinions. After all, living with mental illness is a constant struggle, and I will never forget what it felt like to lose my reason, as I did when I had my psychotic break in Ain el-Hilweh. So I spend much time examining my own thought processes as they relate to my reporting on this topic.

  The first thing I realize is that try as I might to be objective, this is my father we’re talking about, so my attempts to distance myself from the information I gather can only go so far. I make a valiant effort to ignore this at first, insisting to myself that I’m a journalist and therefore must report with complete detachment. But the more I learn, the more I realize I’m lying to myself in regard to my objectivity. Apart from the fact that Dad, whom I’ve come to love very much despite the complexity of our relationship, was imprisoned and brutalized for years, his kidnapping robbed me of a childhood and poisoned much of my adulthood. I can pretend to myself that my experience as a reporter affords me the ability to examine his captivity with impartiality, but as I find myself vacillating between utter conviction that Zein’s statements about Asgari and Israel are gospel truth and anxious self-doubt that my mental condition is causing me to consider a lunatic theory as though it were credible, I increasingly realize the pretense of complete objectivity is pointless. I am personally invested in this investigation. How could I possibly not be?

  So I struggle with that for a while, until I finally determine that the best I can do is to try to let my skeptical journalistic perspective inform my reporting as much as possible while also acknowledging the impossibility of that process being complete. Yes, there is a chance that this is all in my head. I know I shouldn’t allow myself to get pulled into the appealing trap of certainty, or when I feel it closing around my feet, I have to at least try to yank myself free before I convince myself that I can believe any of these theories to be absolutely true.

  These events took place thirty years ago, I remind myself. Almost nothing I learn will be able to quiet all my doubts.

  Around this time, I begin to experience some serious trouble with my electronics. My brand-new Apple laptop’s Internet access becomes increasingly slow, then stops altogether. I call a tech company to look at it, and when they can’t find a reason for why it’s become so difficult for me to get online, they wipe my hard drive. Less than a day after the company returns the computer to me, the exact same thing occurs again.

  Then very strange things start happening. Unfamiliar executable files appear on my computers and devices such as my digital recorder and hard drives. Saved files containing information about my investigation duplicate themselves. Some e-mails I send to sources don’t arrive. Warnings about unknown devices on my network and other computers using my IP address pop up on my screen with increasing frequency, both in New York and Beirut.

  The next three months are what I can only describe as a nightmare. One after another, six more computers cease to function properly. Two PCs stop powering on altogether. Two smartphones stop accessing the Internet for no apparent reason. I won’t go through all the scenarios that run through my head or every security measure I try to take, because they barely make sense to me. As someone who is technologically challenged, to say the least, I have to do much research and beg many people and organizations for help. No one seems to be able to provide much assistance, and I’m quite certain a few of them think I’m just being hysterical. I spend a lot of money and many frustrated tears trying to figure out what’s happening, and it isn’t long before I’m convinced someone is gaslighting me.

  I spend a significant amount of time obsessing over this, and yes: at this point, I somewhat succumb to paranoia. Around this time, the movie Citizenfour is released, and as I follow Edward Snowden’s exposure of the NSA’s surveillance program, it becomes abundantly clear that governments using technology to violate our privacy is a reality of the world we live in. So I’m occupied by that thought for a while until I realize there’s no possible way for me to find out whether this is a legitimate effort to stall and intimidate me or just a series of unfortunate electronic malfunctions and an overactive imagination. As soon as I let go of my efforts to discover the reason for my online woes and continue my investigation, for whatever reason, my computer starts functioning normally again. Once in a while, a file will still duplicate or a warning pop up on my screen, but as I’ve resigned myself to the fact that there’s nothing I can do about it, I continue to work without giving these incidents much more thought.

  All this might further indicate to some that I’m losing it, and I’ll be honest—there are moments during these few months of electronic purgatory in which I question that myself. In my defense, though, catching a glimpse of what goes on under the surface of our understanding and the governmental fuckery that indisputably takes place while we live in blissful ignorance—that is something one can’t really un-see. I have a feeling even people with pristine mental health begin to question their sense of reality after encountering that world.

  In any case, all this makes me seriously consider abandoning the Asgari line of reporting, as does my immediate impulse to buy into it wholeheartedly. But I can’t let go of it until I’ve been convinced it has no credibility, so I contact someone who was involved, albeit unwittingly, in Iran-Contra and would be well informed about this case from all perspectives, including that of hostage: Dad’s old cellmate, Terry Waite.

  “I’m going to bring up this claim to you now, and I have difficulty believing it because it just sounds so outlandish, but there’s been a claim made that one of the people in the Islamic Jihad was either directly or indirectly allied with the Mossad,” I tell Waite. “It seems fantastic, but I just wanted to see what your reaction was to the likelihood of something like that.”

  “That is a theory one hears,” Waite responds calmly, if somewhat carefully. “It’s not the first time I’ve heard that the Mossad were actively involved in promoting that for their own interests’ sake, through their intelligence agents. It’s a theory that could possibly be true, but I have no evidence for it whatsoever.”

  “Absolutely, no, I completely understand,” I respond. “It’s so hard to know what’s real.”

  “It doesn’t mean to say that the theory is wrong,” Waite interjects, a smile in his voice. “It means to say it’s extraordinarily complicated, and I can’t see that the CIA, for example, is going to reveal any documentation they have, certainly not within living memory.”

  It’s becoming obvious that I need to talk to some Israelis about this investigation. I reach out to several people who were in the Israeli government or intelligence services at the time, but receive no response. Until I happen upon an article about Victor Ostrovsky while looking through a box of clippings about my father’s kidnapping provided to me by the AP.

  Ostrovsky wrote a book, By Way of Deception, just after he left the Mossad in 1990. The Israeli government tried to prevent it from being published in the United States—and they actually succeeded at first, although the ruling was overturned and the book was released as planned. In its lawsuit, Israel confirmed that Ostrovsky was a Mossad agent, and although much of the criticism leveled at his claims centers around the fact that he w
as not a high-level agent and couldn’t have had access to all this information, Ostrovsky explains that the Mossad at the time was extremely close-knit, and says he heard his superiors discuss these things openly. He also claims to have had access to the Mossad computer database, where he accumulated knowledge of the operations he describes.

  Of course, Ostrovsky’s claims have been challenged, and I have to take that into account. Then again, when an ex-Mossad katsa (case officer) leaves the agency and starts writing highly uncomplimentary books about his former employers, I’d imagine people ideologically aligned with the Israeli government would challenge his credibility. False flags, morally reprehensible covert operations, and professional betrayals do happen in this environment. Spy agencies don’t spend their time knitting sweaters.

  Yet we continue to dismiss almost all suggestions of covert operations, especially those of Western or Western-allied nations, as conspiracy theories. In fact, it’s usually only when a government openly acknowledges these events, leaks information about them, or holds formal investigations, as in Iran-Contra, that people seem to take the possibility seriously. But governments don’t generally announce what their spy agencies are doing. That’s why these operations are called covert. I’m not suggesting that every crackpot conjecture should be taken seriously; neither am I certain that Ostrovky’s version of events is the correct one—but in this case, I find myself believing that it deserves as much time and consideration as other narratives.

  One of the major claims Ostrovsky makes in the book is that the Mossad had specific intelligence regarding the car that blew up the marine barracks before the attack took place, but chose to share only very vague information with the United States. I approach Ostrovsky, he agrees to speak with me, and we chat on the phone.

  “The thing about Israeli intelligence is that they had more knowledge and access on the ground, because the ground is [geographically] closer,” Ostrovsky tells me. “We never shared intelligence. We made it look like we did, but if we ever gave information, it was very vague.”

  “If that’s true, on a personal level, as the daughter of someone involved, it would feel very much like a betrayal to me, you know?” I say.

  “And in a way, it is.” Ostrovsky sighs. “I’m trying to be balanced in my answer, because you have to consider that your first priority is your own. But then that carries on to . . . well, it’s just your own. Everybody else is just a tool to get more information. And allies shouldn’t act like that.

  “Don’t forget, Lebanon was divided into so many groups, and every group had its own agenda,” Ostrovsky continues. “We were just hiring everyone we could and recruiting them left, right, and center. We had people on the ground, we had a submarine in Beirut—a submarine was what we called an underground station. We were sitting in Jounieh, we were sitting in the Beqaa, we had the South Lebanon Army that was doing things for us. So we were very well saturated in the area. Very few things could happen without us knowing about it. And there was a huge Palestinian refugee presence, which was very easy to recruit because they had ties to their families in the West Bank or Gaza, and promises can be made. Refugees are the easiest to target, and most of the activity in that area started in the refugee camps or around them. Information was abundant . . . and a lot of the intelligence was coming from civilians we would tap into in various ways, which the Americans were prohibited from doing.”

  “That’s true,” I interject. “Several CIA people told me that they were constrained in that way.” Burton, Baer, and others had lamented agency regulations regarding the development of civilian sources.

  “Let me explain to you a little bit about the journey I’ve been on,” I continue. “The whole idea of—well, it came up as Israeli involvement in the whole thing, which I found extreme. I mean, my first reaction was ‘This sounds insane.’ But then people who didn’t seem nuts started telling me that it might be true but is probably a little more complicated than that—more like the Israelis didn’t give the orders but knew what was happening, could have stopped it at any time, and used it to their own advantage instead. That seems more along the lines of what you say in your book.”

  “Well, here’s maybe a comparison,” Ostrovsky says. “Let’s say you take a city or neighborhood in America that’s run-down. The FBI doesn’t really know much about it, and they can’t. But the local police and the precinct in that area, they know everything that’s going on, because they have to. So consider that Lebanon was our precinct. There wasn’t terrorism in Syria, we were okay with Jordan, we had an okay situation in Egypt. Really, the only problem areas were the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and of course Lebanon. So we saturated the place . . . there was barely a movement in Lebanon that we didn’t know about.”

  “What about the hostages?” I ask. “Do you think the Israelis had an idea of where they were, who had them, how to get to them, stuff like that?” That is, obviously, the most pressing point to me.

  “Well, think about this from an Israeli perspective,” Ostrovsky says. “Let’s say we know a hostage is being held in this-and-this place. How many people actually know that? Not many. So if the place is attacked and he’s released, our sources are burned. Do we let our sources go, or do we see if we can get something for us? Because the same sources that bring you information about where hostages are held are the same sources that give you information about a team of terrorists who are planning to attack one of our bases or something.”

  That’s an explanation I hadn’t considered for this type of double-dealing. In a war, every intelligence agency has to look out for their own first. The Israelis may have thought, Why should we risk the lives of our soldiers by sacrificing these sources to free American hostages?

  “I get where you’re coming from,” I tell Ostrovsky, somewhat reluctantly. “But it seems like, from what I read in your book, that it went further than that. Instead of saying, ‘We’re not going to reveal our sources,’ it went to ‘Let’s take advantage of this situation to gain whatever benefits we can.’”

  “Well, that is true,” Ostrovsky admits. “But consider this: you have to think historically, the way the Mossad thinks. In its infancy, it had people in Egypt who were captured and held in prison for many years. They were sent from Israel to bomb American installations in Cairo to make it look like there was an anti-American movement in Egypt and cause damage to that relationship.”

  The episode in Egypt that Ostrovsky is referring to is known as the Lavon affair, which took place in 1954. It’s a documented false-flag operation in which a group of Egyptian Jews was recruited by the Israeli military to plant bombs inside American and British civilian targets, such as movie theaters and libraries. The attacks were meant to turn the Americans against Egypt and create an environment of instability that would prompt the British to retain their troops in the Suez Canal. Israeli historian Shabtai Teveth wrote in his book Ben-Gurion’s Spy that the assignment was “to undermine Western confidence in the existing Egyptian regime by generating public insecurity and actions to bring about arrests, demonstrations, and acts of revenge, while totally concealing the Israeli element. The team was accordingly urged to avoid detection, so that suspicion would fall on the Muslim Brotherhood, the Communists, ‘unspecified malcontents,’ or ‘local nationalists.’”

  The Lavon affair led to the arrest of several Mossad agents, both Egyptian and Israeli. Two members of the cell committed suicide and two were executed by the Egyptian government. The Israeli defense minister Pinhas Lavon tried his best to deflect responsibility for the operation but was eventually forced to resign. Israel continued to publicly deny any role in the incident until Israeli president Moshe Katzav awarded the surviving agents with certificates of appreciation in 2005.

  “The picture I was trying to portray in the book was: ‘anytime my enemy becomes more of your enemy is to my advantage,’” Ostrovsky says. “And the U.S. has a basic policy flaw—it’s a flaw, in my opinion, because you can’t keep to it—that they kept saying, ‘W
e don’t negotiate with terrorists.’ So the reliance was completely on the information that Israel would provide.”

  Hearing this, and being aware of other similar, equally well-documented Israeli covert ops in recent decades, all I can say is “Wow.”

  “Imagine that all the hostages were released and everything would be nice and dandy,” Ostrovsky explains. “American memory is very short. If you take a thorn out of their foot, it heals very shortly and they’ll start walking back and forth again.”

  “But it sounds so crazy,” I murmur.

  Ostrovsky laughs. “The nice thing about craziness is that time dulls it and makes people understand that it’s actually not so crazy, that crazy is the way things work . . . It’s the balance of weakness. Separate and rule. Once one group gets stronger, you help the other group, so they get stronger and the other gets weaker. Just keep everybody down so that no one group can suddenly get up and take over. Because then you have stability.”

  “Do you think Israeli intelligence went all the way up to the top, or were their sources just people on the ground?” I ask. I’m thinking of Asgari.

  “In some areas, the intelligence was going almost to the top,” Ostrovsky replies. “If the head of the organization was recruited, I wouldn’t have been at a high enough level to know about it. That would have been kept between maybe three people: his handler, the prime minister, and the head of Mossad. That’s not the mundane, everyday operation. But yes, we definitely had people who were hearing what the top guy was saying . . . The thing about human intelligence is that the higher you go, the more you understand the intent. The lower you are, the more you have to rely on what you see in the movement and try to analyze the intent.”