by Fred Burton
Buckley, I can understand. He had real value and his abduction served as a body blow to our intelligence efforts in the Middle East. Tracy just seems like a target of opportunity, guilty only of American citizenship and vagabondage in the midst of a war zone.
Then, just before Halloween, Gleason calls me at home again.
“Pack your bags. You’re going to Wiesbaden.”
The wait’s over. Somebody else is coming out.
twelve
THE STENCH OF GOOD INTENTIONS
Saturday, November 1, 1986
Wiesbaden, Germany
Three were supposed to come out. That was the gist of my transatlantic brief this time as I tried my best to relax and enjoy another ten-hour C-141 Starlifter flight to the nation my dad helped subdue a generation ago. Now, we’re back in Wiesbaden, playing the waiting game again.
I had hoped to see Sutherland, Jacobsen, and Anderson here at the hospital, ready to return home and be reunited with their families. So far, it hasn’t happened. They were supposed to come out on Friday. Friday came and went with no word from Beirut. Today, the debriefing team has waited around all day for them to show up. We’ve cleared out the upper floor of the air force hospital on base. When and if our people get released, they’ll each have a private room with a separate bath and lounge. Down the hall, we’ve set up a temporary communications room, complete with a STU-III secure phone. This is our portable version of the FOGHORN Bat Phone.
The wait gives me time to analyze the situation. Terry Waite’s been very busy, traveling between the United Kingdom, Germany, and Beirut as he works his contacts on behalf of the archbishop of Canterbury. Has he scored a breakthrough with Hezbollah? If so, he transmitted his success and tipped us off so we could be here when the hostages arrive.
Nevertheless, the forewarning unsettles me. Granted, it could very well be that Waite’s keeping us in the loop. On the other hand, I sense there’s something else going on way above my pay grade. It doesn’t seem right. This time, we received almost a week’s notice of the impending release.
Fortunately, the press has not picked up a whiff of it. That in itself is unusual, given how leaky Washington is at the moment. Secrets are hard to keep in the current climate. Gleason’s tight-lipped approach to everything is an anomaly. Usually some bureaucrat can’t wait to spill the beans to his favorite pet reporter. Instead, things are very quiet. I’ve been on the job long enough to know that this in itself is a cause for concern. I just don’t know what it means yet.
On Sunday, the STU-III rings in our makeshift commo room. The U.S. Embassy in Beirut passes us word that David Jacobsen is now in friendly hands. He was released earlier that day in the Christian-held sector of the city. He’s at the embassy now, awaiting transport to Wiesbaden.
Only one of three. Jacobsen is the director of American University in Beirut. He was snatched off the street while taking a walk almost a year and a half ago. I wonder what sort of condition he’ll be in when he gets here. Hopefully, he’ll be in better shape than Father Jenco was.
The day passes quickly. The principals on the debriefing team sit down and gameboard our plan. This time, instead of asking questions on the fly, we’ve prepared a meticulous list of questions that should take two days to get through. This time, our team consists of representatives from the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). We each have areas we’ll focus on in the course of the interrogation. Mine will be the mechanics of how Hezbollah kidnapped Jacobsen and how they moved him around the city. The mechanics of terror. If we break them down, we might be able to figure out how to stick a crowbar in their gears.
The next day, we gather at the airfield as Jacobsen arrives. The place is a mob scene. Once Jacobsen reached our embassy in Beirut, somebody notified the press. The media have flooded to Wiesbaden to capture his return to freedom. Flashbulbs fire so often I start to get dizzy. CNN covers the moment, and dozens of other TV crews jostle for position on the tarmac. When the plane from Cyprus finally arrives, the mob goes crazy. Jacobsen is given a rollicking welcome.
After he has a chance to see his family, we squirrel him away on the top floor of the hospital. The base is besieged with reporters, but air force security keeps them at bay.
Jacobsen appears haggard and world-weary when we sit down with him later Monday afternoon. Still, he looks better than the ashen-faced Father Jenco, and that is a relief. Perhaps they’d been treating the hostages better since July.
Wishful thinking.
Jacobsen’s tale is one of horror upon horror. The torture, beatings, and brutality we heard from Father Jenco were compounded after the priest’s release. It started with the videotape Father Jenco gave to us. In it, Jacobsen ad-libbed a couple of lines, which included a note of concern for William Buckley’s wife and kids. Buckley didn’t have children, and when the video reached the media, television newscasts focused on that segment and postulated that Jacobsen was trying to send a coded message to us.
Well, Hezbollah watches the news. The terrorists saw that speculation and it fed their inherent paranoia. They became convinced that Jacobsen had done something nefarious. The hostages lost all their few privileges. Books, radios, and pen and paper were taken away from them. Later, the guards stuffed them into trucks and moved them to a dank underground cell. From early August until yesterday, Jacobsen had languished in a vile hole.
Sitting on the edge of his hospital bed, Jacobsen begins, “September nineteenth…” Then raw anguish swallows his long, gaunt face, and his words trail off. His head drops and he covers his eyes with both hands. For a moment, he tries to continue, but the emotions of whatever happened to him that day assail his self-control. He surrenders to it. His bones seem to sag under the weight of his experience. We stare on in sympathy. This poor man only wanted to educate, to help build Lebanon through higher learning. Instead, the ignorance he strove to erase rose up from the gutters and claimed him as a victim.
Finally, looking resolved, he turns his eyes on us. “They came to get me.”
“Who?”
“Mokmoud, one of our guards. I knew it was going to be bad. As he pulled me to my feet, I heard him say, ‘I’m sorry.’”
Mokmoud took Jacobsen into another room, where his other captors beat him senseless. They bound his feet and whipped him with a rubber hose. They punched him and kicked him, laughing all the while at the punishment they inflicted on this slender-faced academic. They laughed even as he screamed in agony. Somebody battered both his ears, leaving him in excruciating pain. Other blows fell upon his arms, legs, and genitals. At one point, they turned him upside down so his shoulders and head were on the ground and his legs were exposed in the air. Then they flogged the soles of his feet with the rubber hose.
He pleaded for them to stop. He begged them to just shoot him and get it over with. Instead, the rain of blows continued.
“When they finished,” Jacobsen says, his voice choked with bitter tears, “one of the guards said, ‘Relax. The boys were just having some fun.’”
This was punishment for the “coded message” he’d inserted into the July videotape. Thanks to the media’s speculation, David Jacobsen had nearly been beaten to death.
As our debriefing evolves, it becomes clear to us once more that the guards are little more than armed thugs and that their own security is shockingly lax. Jacobsen tells us that not long after the September beating, the guards left a fully loaded AK-47 hanging on the wall next to his cell. After some serious introspection, he decided to try and snatch the weapon and shoot his way out of his cell. One night, he reached for it through the bars in his cell door. He pulled the rifle off the wall, but it was too big to fit through the bars. It took him the better part of an hour to get it hooked back onto the wall in its original position so the guards didn’t know what he’d attempted. He was sure they would have killed him had they found out.
The JSOC rep asks Jacobsen how he was bound when transported
. Jacobsen hops off the bed and tries to explain to us. Finally, when it’s clear we’re confused, he says, “Look, let me show you.”
After scrambling for some props, we tie Jacobsen up on the bed. He guides us through the process, and while the FBI and CIA agents are busy binding him up, I frantically take notes. Suddenly, the door swings open and an air force psychiatrist walks in.
All of us freeze. I feel like my parents have just caught me drinking with my high school buddies in the basement. The air force shrink studies the scene, and as the absurdity of the moment sinks in, his jaw slowly unwinds.
Here we are with a hostage who has spent the last seventeen months in chains. What do we do to him on his first day of freedom? Tie him to a hospital bed.
The shrink doesn’t say a word. He just shakes his head and closes the door. The tension breaks. Jacobsen starts to laugh, and pretty soon, we’re all in stitches.
Later in the day, we throw a satellite map of Beirut down on a table in Jacobsen’s lounge room. Together, the other agents and our freshly released hostage crawl across every feature of that map, searching for clues as to where the prison cells were hidden. Jacobsen’s finger slides from one slum to another as he racks his memory for exterior details, but nothing comes.
His finger traces circles over a couple possible locations. We huddle closer, notebooks ready. If we can just get a location, Delta will be spun up and launched. We can get them out. I know we can. These guards are Mickey Mouse. They wouldn’t last thirty seconds in a firefight with professionals.
“This looks familiar,” Jacobsen says, squinting at the map. Our pens fly across our notebooks.
A knock at the door causes everyone to go silent. In walks an air force enlisted woman, who timidly approaches our group then withdraws something from her pocket. She stretches a hand out to Jacobsen and says, “Here are your glasses, Mr. Jacobsen.”
“Thank you, miss,” he replies. “I can’t see a damn thing without these!”
All of us agents stare at one another with What the hell? looks on our faces. Then we burst out laughing again. We’ve just spent the better part of two hours looking at this map, which Jacobsen apparently couldn’t see.
“Much better,” he says with the glasses now perched on the bridge of his nose. “Now, where were we?”
We get back to work. But even with the glasses, Jacobsen cannot positively identify the current location of the hostages. It is not his fault. Though physical security is lax at times inside their makeshift prisons, Hezbollah has taken great care to ensure Jacobsen never saw anything outside that could tip us off.
We turn next to unfinished business. “Tell us about William Buckley.”
“Buckley?” Jacobsen replies. “He died.”
“Tell us how,” I prompt.
Jacobsen takes a deep breath. Profound sadness creeps across his face as he launches into Buckley’s story. “He was kept in solitary confinement. We rarely saw him. But we heard him. That was the hardest part. We could tell he was getting weaker.”
Jacobsen goes into details. Buckley had been tortured repeatedly. He’d been interrogated thoroughly, probably by Imad Mugniyah himself. Jacobsen recognizes his mug shot when we flash it.
The Iranians surely had access to everything Mugniyah learned. This is as bad as we feared.
The beatings, torture, and interrogations, combined with the squalor of their captivity, demolished Buckley’s immune system. At night, Jacobsen and the other hostages heard his phlegm-choked coughs. He began to hallucinate.
“We urged the guards to get him help,” Jacobsen tells us. The guards seemed interested in getting him antibiotics, but they lacked a sense of urgency. One night in June 1985, Buckley’s cries grew weaker and weaker, his coughing more labored and wet. Finally, he fell silent. The CIA’s station chief succumbed to pneumonia, chained to a radiator in the slums of southern Beirut.
“I knew immediately he had died,” Jacobsen continues. All eyes in the room are riveted on him. He sits on his hospital bed, and aside from his shaky voice, there’s not another sound within earshot.
“An hour later, they came to get him. I heard feet shuffling and muffled voices. The guards were very upset.”
Jacobsen’s memory of that night hits him full force, and I watch as all the color drains from his face. “I can still hear it.”
He stops, unable to finish. The FBI agent prompts him, “Hear what?”
Jacobsen’s head falls forward. He studies the floor, his eyes shielded from ours. One hand goes to his face. He holds it over his eyes, then wipes away a tear. “Hear how they took him away.”
He says those words so softly that we strain to catch them all.
“They dragged him past us. By his feet. Down the stairs. I heard his head thumping on every step.” Jacobsen suddenly claps hard. “Thump.” Clap. “Thump.” Clap. “Thump.” It is a slow and terrible cadence, and I wince every time his hands slap together. When he finishes, the silence leaves us shuddering. Buckley hadn’t just died of neglect, he’d been defiled. Even in death, they had granted him no dignity.
I can’t speak. Neither can the other agents. Nobody even tries. The minutes pass. Jacobsen stares at the floor, tears flowing freely now. The rest of us are so wrung out that I know we’re done for the day. I stand up, put my hand on Jacobsen’s shoulder, then leave the room. This will need to be reported back to Foggy Bottom, so I head for the temporary commo room. I turn left out of Jacobsen’s room and walk to an intersection in the hallway. A quick jog to the right and through a door, and I’m in our communications hub—a hospital room with the beds removed.
Inside, I run into Robert Oakley, a career diplomat who is currently serving as the director of the State Department’s Office of Terrorism. I’m surprised to see him here in Wiesbaden, but he greets me pleasantly enough.
I fill Oakley in on what we’ve just learned. He shakes his head angrily, then tells me to report back to D.C. Just as I reach for the STU-III, someone else walks into the room. I turn to see who it is and freeze, receiver in hand.
Standing in the doorway is Terry Waite.
What’s he doing here? I thought he was in Beirut.
He takes a step into the room. He’s a giant of a man, but his size is not imposing, thanks to his gentle demeanor. He greets us with an easy grace. Oakley and I nod and say hello. Waite walks up to me and hands me a slip of paper.
“I need to talk to Ollie. Can you dial this number for me?”
There’s a connection between Oliver North and Terry Waite?
I look at the number. It is a direct White House line. I glance down at the STU-III and wonder what I should do next. Something doesn’t smell right here. Why is Waite tied in with the NSC? Is Waite the administration’s go-between with Hezbollah? I thought he was only working on behalf of the archbishop of Canterbury. I bring my eyes up and study Waite. He looks anxious and tense, like something’s wrong. He’s trying to cover that up with a low-key, matter-of-fact approach.
Wheels within wheels, that’s how the Dark World works.
I dial the White House number. It rings twice before an NSC official answers it with a hurried “Hello.”
I begin slowly. “Yes, this is Agent Burton in Wiesbaden.”
He waits a beat before responding. “Go ahead, Burton.”
“I have Terry Waite here with me, and he wants to talk to Ollie.”
Another pause. The phone makes all those odd background electronic noises. Finally, I hear the NSC official say, “Ollie’s en route from Beirut, but let me talk to Waite.”
I hand the STU-III to Terry Waite. Oakley and I start to leave to give Waite some privacy, but he waves to us to stay. “What’s going on?” he asks into the phone. Standing next to Waite, I can hear the man’s voice on the other end but I can’t hear what he’s saying. Waite goes green. By the time he finishes the conversation, he looks like he’s seasick. He thanks us and hurries from the room.
Oakley and I exchange What just happened? glances.
I pick up the STU-III’s receiver. I still have to call the office and report what we know about Buckley’s death. Gleason answers my call and listens silently as I relate Jacobsen’s story. When I finish, my boss says, “Okay, Fred. Keep your head down. Bad things are happening.”
“Okay. I will.”
“When you get back, the FBI wants to talk to you.”
The line goes dead, but Gleason’s final words linger. Am I in some sort of trouble?
I return to Jacobsen’s hospital room. The mood is somber, and everyone is fatigued. After a spell, it is clear that Jacobsen and the other agents are done in and we’ll need to pick it up in the morning. A little small talk ensues before the group disperses for the evening. As we leave, one of the other agents takes me aside in the hall and asks, “Have you heard?”
“Have I heard what?”
“A paper in Beirut ran a story about an arms deal.”
“Arms deal? Between who?”
“Us and Iran.”
“What?”
“Yeah. We gave them antitank weapons. They gave us hostages.”
“That can’t be true.”
The agent shakes his head. “The press is going crazy. I just heard that Ollie North and Robert McFarlane were in Iran in May.”
Oh my God.
thirteen
SHIPWRECK
By the time I return to Andrews Air Force Base, a media tempest has engulfed Washington. Every hour, more details of the secret negotiations between the United States and Iran are revealed on the news. The sordid mess grows steadily worse. The Iranians confirm the negotiations publicly. Locked in a bloody World War I–style conflict with Iraq, the Iranians are desperate for modern weapons that can break the frontline stalemate. They don’t seem to realize how devastating these revelations are in the West.
We made a deal with the devil. Terry Waite was just the cover for the real negotiations, ones that treated each hostage as capital that the Iranians and Hezbollah could use to buy TOW missiles. No wonder Hezbollah grabbed three more Americans in September and October. They weren’t bargaining chips at all. They were currency.