Ghost

by Fred Burton

  Five Americans. Each file I’ve created now has a photo of an abductee. They’re hard to look at, as it brings home the human dimension of this crisis. More innocent victims caught up in the Dark World.

  I pack things up just before six. I’d love to get home early and be with Sharon. I’d barely parked the Jetta in the garage when the phone rings. I look at the time: 6:30. With a sigh, I answer it.

  “Fred?” It’s Steve Gleason.

  “Yes?”

  “Be at Andrews at 2100 hours for a trip. Pack for a week, maybe two.”

  “Okay. Where am I going?”

  “You don’t need to know that yet.”

  Click.

  So much for an evening with my wife. I’ve got two and half hours to get to Andrews Air Force Base. In the bedroom, I find my Hartmann suit bag and slide my gray Jos. A. Bank into it. Two button-down shirts and an extra pair of lace-up Johnston & Murphys soon follow. I zip it up, grab my carry-on bag, and stuff it full with my earpiece, protection pins, badge, creds, some gum, two newspapers, and a John le Carré novel. I’m reading The Honourable Schoolboy at the moment.

  Sharon comes home, and I say a hasty good-bye to her. It must be tough on her, but she’s stoic about this development, even though she won’t have any idea where I will be for the next week.

  I get to Andrews just before 9 P.M. The gate guard looks at my creds then gives me a smart salute and directs me to the special air-mission hangar.

  An air force sedan rolls up a few minutes later, red light flashing on the roof. The driver waves me to follow him, and I throw the Jetta in gear. He leads me out to a remote hangar, where he points to a parking slot. I slip the Jetta into it, cut the engine, and pile out. The sedan disappears into the night, leaving me alone, bags in hand. This area of Andrews seems all but deserted. Not a soul is in sight. No airplanes are warming up or coming in. The silence is almost eerie. I turn to walk into the hangar, which is swathed in darkness. Only a few lights are on inside, creating little pools of brightness in the cavernous interior.

  “Can I help you? Are you here for the flight?” a voice calls to me. I spin around, searching for its source. A second later, an air force master sergeant crosses into one of the puddles of illumination.

  “I guess so,” I reply. I don’t know which flight he’s referring to, and suddenly I get a stab of anxiety. What if I catch the wrong secret flight and end up in Togo when I’m supposed to be in Beirut or Cairo?

  “My name is Agent Fred…”

  With a wave of his hand, the master sergeant cuts me off. He’s ten feet away now, regarding me severely. “No names, sir. We don’t need your name. Just wait here.”

  He turns and vanishes into the darkness.

  The roar of jet engines draws near, and down the taxiway I see a huge green air force transport jet cruising toward me. As it gets closer, I can see it is a Lockheed C-141 Starlifter.

  Is that my ride? Sure enough, it turns toward the hangar, and I get a head-on view of its 160-foot-long wings. They droop slightly, giving the huge plane a beleaguered look, as if its four massive Pratt & Whitney turbofans are too much of a load for the wings to bear.

  A moment later, the engines shut down and the crew emerges. One of the pilots, an air force officer about my age—twenty-eight—spots me and walks over to talk.

  “Looking for a ride?” he asks.

  “Yes, I guess so.”

  “Great. Where are we going?”

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  The pilot shakes his head. “No idea.” He seems matter-of-fact about this. It must be standard procedure.

  We stand together in silence as I puzzle this through. Then Gleason bursts through the door with five or six other spooks in tow. He huddles with the pilots, then comes over and sits next to me. “Fred, we’re heading to Rhein-Main Air Base in Germany. We’ll stop there and drive to Wiesbaden. A hostage is coming out.”

  “Is it Buckley?” I ask hopefully.

  “Don’t know. We’ll talk about it in the plane.”

  A half hour later, we climb aboard the Starlifter and spread out. Gleason finds a spot with an empty seat between us. After takeoff, he opens his briefcase and withdraws a pile of file folders. I notice that the stack includes my hostage profiles. Without comment, he hands me part of the stack. I start flipping through what he’s given to me, and find that the top file is Jeremy Levin’s debriefing report. Levin had been a CNN reporter held hostage by Hezbollah. He’d managed to escape on Valentine’s Day 1985. The second one is a thick file full of debriefings related to the Tehran embassy crisis in 1979. As I leaf through it, I discover that our boss, Clark Dittmer, conducted them.

  “Look those over,” Gleason tells me. “Figure out what questions to ask, what we need to know.”

  “What are we looking for?” I ask.

  “Everything. Find out how he was taken, who took him, where they took him. Get details of every place he was held. Pick up anything that might be useful to Delta Force and the special operations teams at Fort Bragg. Maybe if we can get enough, we can launch a rescue operation for the rest. Okay?”

  “Roger. Am I doing this alone?”

  “I’ll be there for a while. There’ll also be one agent from the FBI and one from the CIA asking questions with you. You’ll be lead on these debriefs for us after this one.”

  I start plowing through the files. I scribble notes and use my own knowledge as a cop. If I were leading a rescue operation, what sort of intel would I want?

  Guards: Number and armament? What sort of training? Professionals or thugs? How did they hold their weapons? That alone can telegraph how alert, disciplined, and prepared they are. When did they change guards? Were they on a regular schedule? How many were there? Are they paid lackeys or committed jihadists?

  Location: Where do they lock the hostages up? Rural farms, urban basements? How many windows in the rooms or cells? How do the doors swing, into the room or out? Where are the hallways? Dimensions? Did they move the hostage around? If so, how did they transport him? Day or night?

  How about sounds and smells? We must dig up anything and everything that might help our analysts find Hezbollah’s makeshift prison cells holding our people.

  Two hours into the flight and I’m shivering in my Barbour Beaufort. The freezing mid-Atlantic air is turning the passenger bay into a refrigerator. Leaning across the empty seat between us, Gleason says, “Look, Fred, we’ve got to confirm if Buckley is still alive or not. You know Islamic Jihad announced they executed him.”

  I nod. Last October they tipped the media and sent along a few fuzzy photos of a corpse to prove it. The jury is still out on his fate.

  “He’s one of us. He’s a legend in the business. Company commander in Korea. Silver Star. Soldier’s Medal. Two Purple Hearts. Military Assistance Command in Vietnam. He was William Casey’s fair-haired boy. Had lots of latitude. Made some enemies. The Agency wants him back at all costs, okay?”

  “And if he’s dead?”

  “Then we find out who did it, and who interrogated him.”

  I make a note to check with the hostage—provided he isn’t Buckley—and find out if there were Caucasians working with the Hezbollah cell who kept him. If so, that means there’s probably KGB involvement. If the KGB got to Buckley, it would be a disaster far worse than if the Iranians had squeezed him. Buckley’s been with the Agency since before Vietnam. He worked with the CIA’s assassination program during the war, then later served in Cambodia, Egypt, and Pakistan. The stuff he knows could fill volumes.

  “Look, Fred,” Gleason’s voice drops an octave and takes on a tenor I hadn’t heard before. “I’ve been doing this for two and a half years without any help. I’m getting out soon. You and Mullen will be the institutional memory around here. I know I’ve left you in the dark a lot. I’m sorry for that, but there is a reason. I’ve been through a leak investigation. You don’t want to go through that. The one thing that will help you survive is a reputation for tight lips, ok
ay? Not everyone is with us.”

  His words flash me back a few weeks. We’d been trying to get some information out of a bureaucrat upstairs, but the guy had been stonewalling us. Gleason sent me up to tell him if he didn’t shake loose the stuff we needed, Gleason would file charges against him for withholding evidence. These little moments made me realize the essential truth of Steve Gleason: He will get the job done at all costs. If somebody becomes an obstacle to his objective, he will go around him or through him. Or arrest him. Whatever it takes.

  I’ve felt lost these past months, struggling to learn on the fly all the thousand things I need to know in order to do my job. In a way, my own game of catch-up mirrors our counterterror effort. Now, as I’ve progressed along the learning curve, Gleason’s starting to put his trust in me. He’s given me this assignment to get me ready. This is my step forward from rookie agent to veteran counterterror investigator. He’ll hold my hand for part of the time, then he’ll cut me loose to sink or swim in front of the FBI and Agency guys.

  Gleason leans back in his seat, “It’s been a long two years, Fred.”

  “I don’t know how you did this by yourself.”

  He ignores my comment. “We’re going to get more help before I leave. You and Mullen won’t have to hold the fort down alone, okay?”

  He stands and heads up the aisle to talk with one of the other spooks. I’m left alone, wondering if I’m ready to fly solo. This is what I wanted when I first decided to join the DSS. I wanted to do something more with my life than breaking up high school keggers and getting in the middle of domestic fights. I wanted a bigger role, and federal service seemed to offer it. This trip is my final exam as far as Steve’s concerned. Pass it, and my apprenticeship will be over.

  I bury myself in the files again. Hours pass, and my notes pile up.

  Gleason returns, and says, “After the debrief, each agent will file a report. We’ll send it flash precedence.”

  “Roger, sir.”

  “Bring your A-game, Fred. Your report will go directly to the NSC and to the White House. The president is very interested.”

  My report will be read by the president? Back when I was a cop, I was lucky if our watch commander read anything I wrote. I will be under a microscope, with all the pressure that entails.

  “I’ll oversee things and run air cover for you with D.C. and the DOD, okay? That way you guys can focus on your job.”

  “Thanks.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “I’m ready.”

  “Good. Get some sleep. We’ll be landing in a few hours.”

  Gleason slumps into his seat and I turn to the window. There’s nothing but black beyond the glass. The Atlantic in the dead of night is the darkest place on the planet.

  I find myself thinking about my father. He’d been in the army during World War II, serving as a military policeman in Western Europe. He saw the concentration camps, saw the worst of what humanity could do. He smelled the bodies, saw them stacked like cordwood. When the war ended, his MP unit guarded the Nazi leaders whom the Allies subsequently tried at Nuremberg. He stood in the courtroom, guarding the prisoners as the Allied prosecutors revealed all the barbarity and cruelty of Hitler’s Germany. Day after day, the testimony revealed just how far the descent into madness had gone. The sallow-faced bureaucrats sitting in the dock were among history’s greatest mass murderers. Nobody shed a tear when they were hung.

  Years later, my dad’s stories of his time in Germany filled me with indignation. His sense of right and wrong became my own. I learned through him that there is no space between black and white, there is only right and wrong. Take that first step down the wrong path, and it can lead only to evil. For me, my path through life has been a narrow one, defined by that sense of right and wrong. But in my world now, the justice my father witnessed at Nuremberg seems such a distant hope. Today there are only victims with faint hope of seeing justice served on their tormenters. The two Libyan hits taught me that. Prevention is the best form of justice in this line of work. But how do you prevent such random, brutal acts?

  Maybe the Atlantic isn’t the darkest place on earth after all. Maybe that distinction goes to the human heart.

  ten

  ONE MORE GOLD STAR

  July 27, 1986

  Wiesbaden, Germany

  U.S. Air Force Hospital

  Staring out the hospital window at this ex-Luftwaffe base in Wiesbaden, our released hostage, Father Martin Jenco, answers our most pressing question.

  “Buckley? William Buckley is dead.”

  I don’t want to believe those words. From the look on the FBI and CIA agents’ faces, neither do they. Father Jenco sees the shock register on all of us and offers, “He died of natural causes.”

  More surprises. “What?” all three of us ask.

  Puzzled, he replies, “I assumed you knew.”

  Nobody answers. We just stare.

  “I can’t tell you much,” Jenco explains. “It happened right after they moved me. I’d been chained to a radiator for six months by myself. For some reason, they decided to put me with the other Americans in early June of ’85.”

  Father Jenco’s voice is steady, but he looks weak from his ordeal. His eyes are ringed, his face is pallid, and his white, General Ambrose Burnside–style beard is bushy and untamed. He came out of Syria on July 26 and was flown straight to us in Wiesbaden. He hasn’t even had a chance to see his family yet. I understand about a dozen of his relatives have just flown in from the States, eager to welcome him back to civilization.

  “I heard him calling out. He was hallucinating, ordering breakfast from the bathroom. I think he said, ‘I’ll have blueberry pancakes.’ He coughed all the time, and that got worse as he got weaker. David Jacobsen and I pleaded with the guards to get him medical assistance.”

  He pauses. His eyes are dry, but I can see he’s in tremendous pain. He adjusts his wide, goggle-style glasses before continuing. “One night, they dragged him past me. They told me he was going to the hospital, but I knew he was dead.”

  And there it is.

  “Father,” I ask, “was he tortured?”

  “Not to my knowledge. But I was only with him for a short time.”

  All I can think of are the stars on the wall at Langley. Buckley’s will be another anonymous addition. The man was a hero, a patriot. He fought in two wars and countless skirmishes in the Dark World. He should not have died this way. We should not have let this happen.

  We’re only ten minutes into our debriefing with Father Jenco and already the pages of questions related to Buckley have been made irrelevant by the news. I set them aside and rethink how to proceed.

  “After he died, they brought in a Jewish doctor to examine us. They later killed him.” Father Jenco’s voice trails off. The hospital room we’re in is suddenly deathly silent.

  The FBI agent asks, “On the videotape you brought out, Jacobsen says Buckley was executed.”

  I haven’t seen it yet, but Hezbollah gave Father Jenco a seven-minute-long tape of Jacobsen. He apparently read from a script and asked President Reagan to do more for their release.

  “I don’t know about that,” Jenco replies.

  Nods all around. This wouldn’t be the first time Hezbollah claimed to have executed somebody who died of natural causes in their hands. With Buckley, though, we need to learn more. What had happened to him?

  “Do you know what they did with William Buckley’s body?” the Agency man asks.

  “No, I’m sorry. I don’t know. I was almost always blindfolded. I was in chains. I never saw much.”

  We need to start at the beginning. I shuffle my notes. What do I need to learn from Father Jenco to help keep others alive? First off, we need to know how he was abducted. If we can dissect Hezbollah’s snatch-and-grab tactics, maybe we can construct some counters to them that will dissuade further attempts on Americans in Beirut.

  “Father Jenco, please…let’s start from the point you were abd
ucted. How did they do it?”

  The priest takes a deep breath and begins the story of his ordeal. As his words tumble out, the angst on his face grows. He looks frail and even wearier than ever. It does not take long to understand why.

  Five hundred and sixty-four days ago, Father Jenco climbed into his car and sped off to work. He served as the head of a Catholic relief operation in Beirut. Because he was well known around the city and because he helped everyone equally—Muslims, Christians, Jews—he did not fear abduction. What would they want with a priest, anyway?

  Well, they wanted him. An eight-man team stopped his car not far from his office. The men, all armed with automatic weapons, dragged him out of the car, bundled him up, and threw him into the trunk of their getaway vehicle. At first, they kept asking him if he was Joseph Curtin and seemed confused that he was not. Curtin had been Father Jenco’s predecessor at the Catholic Relief Service in Beirut. They had abducted the wrong priest.

  But they held on to him anyway. In the first days of Father Jenco’s ordeal, the Hezbollah guards wrapped him in packing tape until he resembled a mummy. Stuffing a rag into his mouth, they carried him to a truck and crammed him into the spare-tire well under the frame. They drove him into southern Beirut, leaving him limp from the exhaust fumes and claustrophobic conditions. This was the first of several times they moved him in this fashion.

  The weeks that followed were a blur of degradation, humiliation, and torture. They kept him blindfolded and chained by the ankle. They threw his paltry meals on the floor, forcing him to eat with his hands. Cheese and water sufficed for breakfast. Sometimes they gave him rice and beans for lunch. Dinner was little more than bread and jam. The guards varied from polite and respectful to barbaric and sadistic. One thug stuck a pistol to Father Jenco’s head and told him he was about to die. When he pulled the trigger, the hammer fell on an empty chamber.