The Hostage's Daughter

by Sulome Anderson

  Strong words, but by all accounts, Casey was deeply disturbed by Buckley’s kidnapping. Then again, Casey expressing frustration over the lack of interagency cooperation doesn’t prove Asgari was an Israeli mole. I wonder if anybody in D.C. thinks the Israeli government might keep important intelligence from us, even when Americans are at risk, so I pose that question in a couple of interviews.

  Bodine offers her thoughts when we speak. “The Israelis are going to want to know what these people are planning vis-à-vis Israel,” she tells me. “There may be a callousness, like if they know about a plan to pick up an American they don’t say anything, because to them the bigger mission of the job is to protect Israel. It’s America’s job to protect Americans. I don’t think they would have used their influence to protect or get Americans released in and of itself; to be blunt, it wouldn’t have been smart tradecraft on their part.”

  Not everybody takes the possibility seriously. Vincent Cannistraro, who used to be CIA chief of operations for the Middle East until just before my father was taken, is quite adamant that Ostrovsky’s allegations couldn’t possibly be true.

  “Where it really mattered, [the United States and Israel] were very close,” Cannistraro tells me at his house in a D.C. suburb. “When the marines were killed—if Israel knew that that was coming, I don’t believe they would’ve hidden that and I don’t think Ostrovsky would know if they had.”

  But over the phone, Fred Burton, the ex–diplomatic spook, tells me that he doesn’t remember the Israelis being particularly helpful to U.S. intelligence at the time.

  “One thing you learn early on, Sulome—in this business, each nation is looking out for its own,” he says. “Each nation spies on each other. Everybody looks out for their own interest and welfare. Yeah, there are liaison channels and everybody makes nice, but the reality is, there are no friendly intelligence services, so the Israelis would only have told us something they wanted to for a very specific purpose, and that would have been either to trade information or collect information to fill their intelligence gaps. I don’t know if they had human assets—their facilitators, the folks that they could use at the time who helped the State of Israel—but it wouldn’t surprise me. Iran has always been a critical intel collection point for them. But if they garnered anything, it certainly wasn’t shared with us.”

  Burton has something to add just before we hang up.

  “Your father is a good man,” he says to me with regret in his voice. “I view that period of time as one of failure in many ways. There was just nothing good to come out of it.”

  I’m touched by this expression of feeling from someone in his position. “Well, he’s alive,” I offer. “That’s the good thing.”

  “I know, but he certainly suffered mightily and there were good people trying to get him out,” Burton says. “We were just not successful. I view that as a failure on our part, but we certainly cared and still do.”

  A week later, I receive a package from Fred Burton. It contains a copy of his book Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent and a plastic silver bracelet with my father’s name on it. I remember that hundreds of people used to wear these bracelets, the same way people now wear pink bracelets for breast cancer—to remind themselves and others that Dad was suffering. It’s very moving to think about Burton wearing this, and it gives me a little more faith in our country’s spooks.

  I’m Skyping with the man widely credited with freeing my father: Giandomenico Picco, former conflict negotiator for the United Nations. In his book Man Without a Gun, Picco describes how his negotiations with the Islamic Jihad single-handedly resulted in the release of the Western hostages. He doesn’t differentiate between the IJO and Hezbollah, but he claims to have met with Mughniyeh in person—quite a dangerous thing to do—and persuaded him to let my father and the others go through sheer force of personality and his connections in Iran.

  The first thing I notice is that Picco, who remains a friend of my father’s, thinks the hostage crisis ended quite differently than I’ve hypothesized.

  “Someone told me that the crisis wrapped up because Hezbollah coalesced more and wanted to become more politically legitimate, while Iran and Syria were trying to mend ties with the West,” I ask. “Do you think that’s accurate?”

  “No,” Picco says firmly. “I agreed on the timing with the Iranians. The price I had to pay was that I would have a committee of professors make a report on who started the war between Iran and Iraq. Nothing to do with Lebanon; nothing to do with hostages. The report worked because by the late eighties, any head of state in the world . . . never said formally or officially that the war had been started by Saddam Hussein, which was for the Iranians very, very important. It occurred to me in ’88 after the end of the war, that was a tool I could use . . . that’s why I called the report Truth for Freedom.”

  It sounds strange that Iran would trade the hostages they supposedly held on to for years in exchange for a UN report, even if it was condemning Saddam.

  “But why do you think the Islamic Jihad stopped taking hostages?” I asked. “It can’t have just been because of a report.”

  “Because that was organized with the Iranians and the Revolutionary Guard,” Picco responds. “They freed the hostages because that report from the UN was more important to them. That’s what people don’t understand.”

  I don’t understand it either, frankly.

  “I was taken [to meet Mughniyeh and the IJO] three or four times over a period of two months,” Picco continues. “The first time, they said ‘We want something in return.’ I said, ‘I have negotiated with Iran.’ The guy told me—and I assume he was Mughniyeh, I know he was—he said, ‘Who cares? I’m Lebanese. I’m not Iranian.’”

  “That’s really interesting,” I murmur. It seems to me that by this point, something important had shifted in the relationship between Iran and the kidnappers. I already know that Rafsanjani and others in the Iranian government had previously been frustrated in their attempts to pressure the IJO into releasing Dad and the other hostages. This bolsters my theory regarding a Hezbollah takeover of the IJO. Once that had taken place, Iran would have much more control over how—and for what price—the hostages were released.

  It sounds to me like the Iranians saw another opportunity to benefit from the negotiations; a little something to sweeten a deal many in the government had been trying to make for years. It was clear the hostages had become a serious impediment to their ambitions, a reason for Iran’s continuing exile from the international community. So Hezbollah could have absorbed the IJO and with the encouragement of its Iranian sponsors, indicated that it was open to negotiating the hostages’ release. This doesn’t mean that Iran and Hezbollah were consumed by concern for my father and the other hostages—it just makes sense given the political dynamics of the time.

  It also stands to reason that Hezbollah would have tried to figure out how it too could benefit from the final transaction, which is where Israel came in. Picco describes how he convinced the Israeli government to release some Shia prisoners held in Israel in exchange for Hezbollah releasing the hostages. Again contradicting his earlier statement that the hostages were freed solely in exchange for a UN report, Picco describes how he negotiated between Hezbollah and Israel. He says the Israelis were very concerned with looking good, like they were trying to show that they were reasonable and helpful in the negotiations.

  “The second time I came to them, the Israelis said, ‘No, we don’t want to free any more [prisoners]; if we don’t let them go, you don’t free anybody,’” he tells me. “I said to them, ‘Wrong, my friends. I’m not stupid . . . if you’re not going to release them, the only thing that happens is that you will not be part of the deal, you cannot say to the world that you were helpful.’ I convinced Hezbollah by saying, ‘Look, why don’t you become smarter than the Israelis? You release the hostages and the Israelis will not be able to claim that they helped.’ So I convinced Hezbollah to give up the hostages .
. . When the press announced that they were going to be released, Israeli intelligence called me and said, ‘How did you do it? Because we did not release anybody.’ I said, ‘My dear friend, decide what you want to do. Do you want to appear that you helped me or do you want to appear that you obstructed me?’ Within two hours, they released the prisoners. They said to me, ‘You’re the only one who was able to convince us of that.’”

  “Right, that makes sense,” I tell Picco. “That’s a great tactic.”

  “Yes, but nobody has ever done this with the Israelis,” Picco says proudly. “They don’t have the guts.”

  I don’t want to offend Gianni because I’ve always thought him a lovely man and it’s clear he put his life on the line to help free my father, but I doubt it was as simple as Iran just wanting a report or Hezbollah trying to get some prisoners released. I ask some other sources why they think the hostage crisis ended.

  Crocker, former U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, says there were larger forces at work in the background of Picco’s negotiations.

  “This was the beginning of something that looked like it might be a new start for the peace process,” Crocker explains. “The war was over in 1990 . . . Hezbollah was changing. They had, for the first time in 1992, contested parliamentary elections and gained seats. They were doing some outreach to Western leaders. While certainly showing no signs of getting out of the military game, they were quite obviously interested in establishing themselves as an influential and respected political force within Lebanon.”

  “What about Iran?” I ask.

  “The Islamic Republic was now over a decade old, well established, threatened neither from within or without,” Crocker replies. “It was a very different place than it was in the early eighties. I think you had a confluence in a changing region. Hezbollah was looking at Syria, which was looking at Iran, which was looking at both. It must have been some sort of conversation saying what used to be an asset has become a liability.”

  Under Bashar’s father Hafez al-Assad, Syria invaded Lebanon in 1976 at the behest of the Christians, supposedly to restore order to the war-torn country. In reality, their occupation just helped fuel the violence. A treaty of “Brotherhood, Cooperation and Coordination” was signed between Lebanon and Syria in 1991. It allowed the Syrians to continue the occupation, supposedly to prevent Lebanon’s chaos from spreading to Syria, and made Syria responsible for protecting Lebanon against external threats. Today, the Syrian civil war is pulling Lebanon into its vortex. Let no one say the Middle East is without irony.

  The occupation is part of the reason why so many Lebanese nowadays have no sympathy for the millions of Syrian refugees pouring into their country, fleeing the war. “Look how they treated us,” sneered one man in a café near my house when he overheard me talking to my mother about how poorly the refugees are treated in Lebanon. “Did they let us into their country when we had a war? No. They’re like cats; when they want something, they come purring, but when you are nice to them, they scratch you. They’re cats, and they should be kicked like cats.”

  Xenophobia aside, after the invasion, the Syrians continued to occupy the country and overtly meddle in Lebanese affairs until 2005, when they were blamed for masterminding the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri, allegedly with Hezbollah’s connivance. A special tribunal formed under Lebanese law to investigate the circumstances of Hariri’s assassination has indicted a few of the group’s members. Hariri’s murder is another crime Hezbollah denies authorizing, claiming Israel engineered the event to destabilize the country and tar the group’s image. It’s quite a complex story, though, and I think I have enough complexity on my hands here, so I’ll leave that investigation to someone else.

  It’s not clear exactly why my father was freed, but when all was said and done, Dad was put in a car and dropped off on a road somewhere in Beirut. I’ve heard him speak about it. One of his captors quite sincerely presented him with a bouquet of pink carnations to give my mother. As soon as they drove off, he threw it away, along with his blindfold. Some Syrian soldiers picked him up almost immediately and he was soon taken to the U.S. embassy in Damascus, where a tired little girl was sleeping on a couch, waiting for him to wake her.

  At the end of January 2015, while I’m in Beirut, Israel carries out an airstrike in the Golan Heights, killing the late Imad Mughniyeh’s son as he traveled in Syria with a Hezbollah convoy. A couple of days later, Hezbollah retaliates by taking out an Israeli convoy on the Lebanese border. All fired up to report on an impending war, I send a pitch to one of my editors, and as soon as he accepts it, I pack up and head to Jnoub (southern Lebanon) to find a story.

  True to form, Lebanon precariously balances itself on the edge of another massive conflict without actually falling in. There is no war. But one of the people I interview for that piece is a local Hezbollah official, or masuul, in one of the southern towns near the Israeli border. That’s all I’ll say about him, because I’ve sworn up and down throughout this process I will not include any information that could identify him. I’ll just refer to him as the Masuul.

  The Masuul and I establish a good rapport during the interview. He’s not creepy in the slightest, but I can tell he enjoys talking to me, though not all my questions please him. “You’re straightforward,” he tells me once. “I like that.” He seems kind, although iron-hard in his political rhetoric. I ask him questions about the recent flare-up with our neighbor to the south and he’s quite open with me, in that swaggering, bravado-filled way that Hezbollah members have when asked about their militarily superior enemy. As we’re getting ready to leave when the interview is over, the fixer I’m using that day happens to mention to the Masuul who my father is, almost offhand.

  The Masuul visibly recoils, his face turning ash gray. “Why didn’t you warn me?” he asks my fixer, after a few moments of open-jawed, blinking silence. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

  My fixer laughs. “Why would I have warned you?”

  The Masuul ignores him, instead looking me full in the face. He doesn’t touch my hand, because that would be haram, but I can tell he wants to.

  “I feel ashamed,” he tells me in Arabic.

  “Why would you be ashamed?” I ask, puzzled.

  “I think you must hate us.”

  “Not really, no,” I reply honestly. “It was a war, and I’m starting to find out there were probably more outside forces involved than anyone really knows about.”

  The Masuul pauses for a moment. I feel him step across some line in his mind. “One day I want to introduce you to someone,” he says. “This person will be able to tell you all about what happened. He can give you facts, details, because he was there the whole time. He was one of the people who held your father.”

  I’m floored. What are the odds? “Please, I need to meet this man,” I tell him.

  But the Masuul is evasive. “Next time you come here, I will bring him.”

  I visit the Masuul three more times over the course of four months. On one of those trips, I interview him for another story, and manage to sneak in a question about Hezbollah’s legacy of terrorism. He looks at the floor while he talks.

  “Parts of our past are not clean,” he says. “Some of us thought we were doing what was best for our country. But we were manipulated.” When pressed for details, the Masuul will only say that the man I am to meet will tell me all about it. But every time my fixer contacts him to follow up, he keeps delaying my meeting with this man. He always swears he will make it happen in the next couple of days, but two trips come and go without the interview. Each time I go home, see Jeremy for a month, and fly right back to Beirut, determined to nail the Masuul down and get him to introduce me to the person who had held my father captive for seven years.

  In March, I visit the Masuul at his home again. We chitchat for a while, then I ask him when I can meet this mysterious man. “I know three of these men,” the Masuul finally says. “The man I want you to talk to must convince the
other two to let him see you. There is a price on his head for what he did. He’s very high up, you know, so no cameras or recorders. You’ll probably have to be searched to ensure you aren’t carrying anything on you.”

  I nod impatiently. I know the FBI still offers hefty rewards for information leading to the apprehension of the men involved with the kidnappings, hijackings, and bombings—but the possibility of turning in anyone I speak to as a journalist, even my father’s captors, never crosses my mind. I’m a reporter and the commitment I make to my sources is sacred. I’d sooner go to jail than turn any of them in; but he doesn’t know that. “Yes, that’s not a problem, but when will I meet him?”

  The Masuul smiles enigmatically. “Soon. And you will get a very big surprise when you do. It’ll make your hair turn gray. You’ll know his face when you see it. You know who he is.”

  I walk back to the car, lost in puzzlement. My fixer stays behind to try to get more information out of him while I wait outside. I can hear them talking quietly in Arabic. Finally, my fixer comes outside, with an expression on his face like someone just punched him in the stomach.

  “Hey, what’s wrong?” I ask him. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “I’ll tell you in the car,” he hisses through a smile, waving good-bye to the Masuul. As soon as we get in, I turn to him, tense with curiosity.

  “Well?”

  “It’s him,” my fixer says. “He is the man. He’s one of the people who kidnapped your father.”

  I feel the bottom drop out of my world. I’ve spent hours with the Masuul by this point. I drank his coffee and played with his little daughter. I almost like him, for fuck’s sake. I can’t reconcile that hospitable, honest-seeming man with one of the monsters who destroyed my childhood. I spend the ride home in silence, watching the spring-green mountains of Jnoub rise and fall as we pass them by.

  11. THE INTEGRATION