Ghost

by Fred Burton

  My stomach is twisted in knots. I haven’t slept. We bargained with the enemy. There are few countries the American people despise more than Iran. The embassy hostage crisis six years ago filled our nation with a collective hate for Iran that was only inflamed by Beirut I and II and the barracks bombing. Dead marines, stolen honor, our prestige in tatters. That’s what Iran has done to us. And now we’ve been caught selling them missiles that will help sustain their war effort. There’s talk of a congressional investigation. Already, the FBI has unleashed its hounds. Everyone’s scrambling to save their own skins. I wonder if my career will end before it really begins. Six months on the job, and I’m already on the edge of the storm. Was it worth it to get the hostages out? Do the ends justify the means here? I don’t know. I struggle with this all afternoon as I review the paperwork that had piled up while I was gone.

  Neither Father Jenco nor David Jacobsen had any idea why they were released until the story broke on the major networks. I can’t even imagine Father Jenco’s reaction. He must be horrified that his life was traded for weapons that surely will kill countless Iraqi soldiers.

  Ignorance of the drama playing out over my head may save me. I don’t know anything. I’ll have nothing to offer when I’m interviewed. All I can do is tell them what I know. And what I know is nothing—nothing beyond Terry Waite’s suspicious phone call from the commo room in Wiesbaden.

  Waite must be reeling as well. He’s been negotiating with his contacts in good faith. Now it turns out that Ollie was using him as nothing but legitimate cover. He’s been used, and his reputation has taken a huge hit. Before I left Wiesbaden, I heard he was going to return to Beirut and try to repair the damage to his reputation. I hope he doesn’t do that. Hezbollah shows little mercy.

  I get home well after midnight. I come through the door of our townhouse feeling dispirited and exhausted. Sharon wakes up and greets me. “I know you were in Germany,” she tells me. “I saw you on CNN when that hostage was released.”

  I wish I could tell her everything. I can tell her nothing. Instead, I must keep my silence and face the FBI in the morning.

  Sharon soon falls back asleep. I lay in bed, my mind running through all the things that have happened. Periodically, it flits back to the hospital room, and I see Jacobsen, head down, clapping his hands as he described Buckley’s head smacking on the steps outside their apartment prison.

  “Thump.” Clap. “Thump.” Clap. “Thump.” It was a fate no patriot like Buckley should have faced. If only we’d been able to get to them. If only we’d been able to find where Hezbollah had them stashed. If only…

  And what of Hezbollah? What sort of game is Mugniyah playing? All along, his public demands have focused on the Dawa 17. Hezbollah’s hostages would be freed when the Kuwaitis released Mugniyah’s terrorist brother-in-law and his cell. Was that just a cover, too? Was it always about weapons?

  Nothing is ever as it appears. Washington is seething right now, and it is axiomatic that D.C. will eat its own in the flame-fest that is sure to follow in the weeks to come.

  I just hope I don’t end up as collateral damage.

  Morning comes. Tyler Beauregard and I go for our predawn run. It is cold and dark on the street, and my beautiful dog senses my foul mood. She stays close and casts anxious looks my way. She knows something is dreadfully wrong. She doesn’t know what to do but reveals her loyalty to me by refusing to budge from my side. That makes me wonder if true loyalty can really exist outside a man’s relationship with his dog.

  A quick shower back at our townhouse and I’m ready to face whatever is to come. I strap my Smith & Wesson into its shoulder holster, throw my coat over one shoulder, and head for my Jetta.

  I reach the office before six. Three hours later, the FBI comes calling. I head for a conference room, where an agent greets me with a perfunctory “Hello.” And then the grilling begins. It is obvious from the outset that I don’t know anything about the negotiations. The agent is still thorough. He goes through a list of questions, almost none of which I can answer. I was never in the loop. This time, it looks like my ignorance will save me.

  The interview reveals the depth of the machinations at work. A witch hunt is afoot. People will go to jail for this. The search for scapegoats has begun.

  By lunchtime, I’m back behind the big blue door. Gleason looks burnt out. Mullen is nowhere to be seen. He’s probably on assignment somewhere. I’m shaky after the grilling. I try to get back to work, but my mind refuses to focus.

  The whole deal has the smell of good intentions gone awry. I heard a rumor on the flight home that President Reagan met with Father Jenco’s brother shortly after Hezbollah grabbed the priest. Jenco’s sibling demanded to know what the president was doing to get his brother out of captivity. Reagan tried to assure him that the government was doing everything possible. Jenco’s brother refused to relent; he was like a terrier and he shattered Reagan’s placid façade. When the meeting ended, Reagan told his staff to do whatever it took to get the hostages out.

  That is a dangerously broad license for a president to issue, no matter how good his intentions. Now we’ve been embarrassed, and all the globe has born witness to our humiliation. Year after year, we have piously proclaimed that we will not negotiate with terrorists. We’ve totally undermined our international position on that front, and no doubt it will take years to rebuild our credibility.

  Still, Ben Weir, Father Jenco, and David Jacobsen are free men because we funneled arms to a rogue nation.

  I am a man who lives by a strict code. Life until now has been black and white, right and wrong. There’s no wiggle room. You’re either acting honorably or you’re not. Where does swapping arms for hostages fit into this equation?

  I don’t know. Or maybe I do know, but don’t want to face it. My country has made a dreadful mistake. The consequences are sure to be sharp and painful.

  As November continues, the crisis spirals into a full-blown scandal. President Reagan addresses the nation and admits we did try to improve relations with Iran by selling them weapons. He denies we got Weir, Jenco, and Jacobsen in return. The press continues digging. More revelations emerge. The Israelis transferred the initial shipments. More than just TOW missiles went to Iran; we also sent them Hawk antiaircraft systems and were negotiating about spare parts for their F-14A Tomcat fleet. They purchased those F-14s in the seventies just before the shah fell.

  There is a deeper, darker side to Irangate, as the media is now calling it. The Iranians not only paid for their weapons with our three American citizens, they also forked over millions of dollars in cash. Where did that money go? Some media outlets reported that thirty million dollars is missing, and Oliver North’s fingers are all over the disappearance.

  Just before Thanksgiving, Oliver North and his secretary, a blonde named Fawn Hall, get caught shredding documents. Four days later, Attorney General Edwin Meese releases the truth: The money the Iranians paid us was funneled to the Nicaraguan contras. Oliver North was in charge of that operation. Later that day, he is fired from the NSC. His boss, Admiral John Poindexter, resigns. It looks like both will face criminal charges for what they have done. The disaster is complete: arms for hostages for cash funneled to the contras via the NSC. It is a media feeding frenzy extraordinaire.

  Late that afternoon, I close the open files on my desk and stuff them into my safe. I’m done for the day. I’ve got to get away from this craziness before it eats me alive. A half hour later, I’m on the Brandt Place porch, drinking coffee with Fred Davis. I can’t tell him what’s going on, but I suspect he knows.

  “I saw you on CNN the other night,” he tells me.

  “Yeah, so did my wife.” I take a sip from my cup of joe and start thinking of ways to change the subject.

  “Didn’t know you were in Germany.”

  I nod my head. “Neither did I until I got off the plane.”

  We both laugh. I steer the conversation in a different direction. “I heard there was ano
ther Bradford Bishop sighting in Europe.”

  Interest flares in Fred’s eyes. “Really?”

  “Yeah. Unconfirmed though.”

  “He gets around.”

  “That he does.” I finish my coffee, place the cup on the table between us, and lean back in my chair.

  “What do you think? Is he still alive?”

  Fred’s mutt comes over and sits next to his legs, waiting for some attention. Absently, he reaches over and strokes the dog’s head and ears. “I don’t know. I always kind of thought he committed suicide in that national park.”

  Growing up in Bethesda, Bradford Bishop was the Lizzie Borden of our generation. While we were still kids, Bishop moved into our neighborhood with his wife, mother, and three boys. The oldest was our age. Bishop worked for the State Department as an assistant director in the special activities and commercial treaties office. He was a quiet man, one who by all reports was thoroughly henpecked by his wife and mother. For years, they had ganged up on him, deriding his achievements and telling him what a failure he was as a human being.

  One day in 1976, after getting passed over for a promotion, he came home and murdered his entire family with a ball-peen hammer. He killed his wife first, then his mother when she came back into the house after walking the family dog. Then he killed his boys, one at a time, while they slept in their beds.

  That night, he gathered the bodies in the family station wagon and took off. He drove to North Carolina and burned them in the woods. It was three weeks before anyone discovered the family was gone.

  The Bethesda–Chevy Chase Rescue Squad responded to the house once a neighbor and police officer discovered blood on the front steps. Inside the house, blood was everywhere—in the living room, on the walls, the bedrooms, and the beds. Sitting around the station house on the weekends, the old-timers would tell us stories of that crime scene. It was a chamber of horrors. One of the boys’ bedrooms was drenched in blood from floor to ceiling.

  By the time the bodies in North Carolina were linked to the crime scene in our neighborhood, Bishop was long gone. The station wagon later turned up at a Great Smoky Mountains National Park campground, but there was no sign of Bishop. The station wagon was covered in dried blood. Some of it had pooled and congealed in the spare-tire well.

  For years, on slow nights at the station house, we would speculate on what had become of Bradford Bishop, the henpecked bureaucrat turned mass murderer. It led to endless discussions on his whereabouts.

  I reach forward and scratch the mutt’s ears. He growls happily and tilts his head my way. I’m glad for this diversion. I’m glad to be thinking about anything other than the hostages and North, and the unfolding national embarrassment that has exposed so much of the Dark World to media scrutiny.

  “Well, they never found any evidence that he committed suicide,” I offer. We’ve been over this ground many times before. It is comfortable and it sets me at ease, even if the subject is a gruesome one.

  “True, but none of the sightings have ever really been confirmed.”

  Being a diplomat, Bishop knew how to travel incognito. I think he’s stayed off the grid all these years by moving frequently and using false identities.

  “Well, remember a friend of his spotted him in Sweden back in ’78.”

  Fred shakes his head and says, “Tentative at best, just like the one in Italy when that other DOS guy said he saw him in a bathroom.”

  We discuss the other possibilities. Some say he defected to the Soviet Union. There’s no evidence of that, and he’s never surfaced in Russia. I don’t buy it. More than likely, he’s living the life of a fugitive, staying one step ahead of the authorities with frequent moves and ID changes.

  “Well, someday I’ll look into that case, if I ever get any authority,” I tell Fred.

  He looks at me for a moment and says, “Yeah. That one and that other one. You know? Where that Israeli was whacked right in his front yard. What was his name again?”

  “Alon. Yosef Alon.”

  “That’s right. Alon. Man, Fred, you have a memory for these things.”

  I guffaw. “Yeah, but is it a blessing or a curse?”

  “Maybe just your purpose.”

  The sudden sincerity leaves me silent. I’m not sure how to answer that.

  “The old crew responded to Alon’s murder, too.”

  “That’s right.” The rescue squad was right on the scene. Alon had been killed only a few blocks from the house I grew up in. He’d been coming home from work that night—he’d been assigned to the Israeli Embassy as an air and naval attaché—when a car rolled up behind him. As he stood in his front yard, gunmen in the car opened fire on him. Five shots hit him. By the time the rescue squad’s old rig arrived on the scene, it was too late. He died in our neighborhood, victim of a professional hit. Media speculation hinted that he’d been assassinated in retaliation for the death of an Arab militant in Paris.

  None of us believed that, especially after the killing was so quickly swept under the rug. It has always bothered me, and someday I want to reopen that old case.

  Fred Davis gets to his feet and gives me a smile. “When you do get to the bottom of that one, please let me know, okay?”

  “You know I will.”

  We wrap things up for the night. I want to tell Fred how grateful I am for this diversion. I just don’t know how. Instead, all I manage to do is say good-bye.

  Thanksgiving comes and goes. Christmas approaches. The country has been rocked to the core by the Iran-contra revelation. President Reagan’s popularity is plummeting. A congressional commission, led by John Tower, is picking through the wreckage, trying to figure out who knew what and when. The special prosecutors are lining up. This one is sure to get ugly.

  And the main problem remains. Hezbollah still holds five Americans hostage. We must find a way to get them out—that is, if Mugniyah doesn’t decide to quit the game entirely and summarily execute his captives. Given what’s happening, I wouldn’t put it past him.

  January proves me wrong.

  fourteen

  THE BEER HALL ENCOUNTER

  February 1987

  Wiesbaden, Germany

  Terry Waite has vanished. Against all advice, he returned to Beirut last month to try and salvage something of his honor—and to assure his own network in the city that he had nothing to do with the hostage-for-arms dealings. Last seen on January 20, Waite was en route to a meeting with his Hezbollah contacts.

  I shudder to think what’s happened to him. Either he’s dead and buried in a shallow grave in the Bekáa Valley, or his good intentions earned him a shackle and a slumside prison cell.

  I’d like to be surprised by this development, but I can’t be, not after what’s happened in the past year. I feel myself growing cynical, a state of mind that is required if you intend to survive long in the Dark World. And I intend to survive. I intend to thrive. I have things to do. Wrongs to right. Mass murderers to catch.

  Terry Waite is only one new disappearance in Beirut. All month long, Hezbollah has declared open season on Westerners in the city. The situation is so out of hand that the American government issued a flat ultimatum to its own citizens: Get out of Lebanon, we can’t protect you. And, if you get kidnapped, you’re on your own. After Iran-contra, there’s no way the Reagan administration can negotiate with terrorists now. Exactly why Hezbollah’s gone on an abduction spree is anyone’s guess, but from the American perspective it doesn’t make much sense. The time when our citizens were used as currency and bargaining chips is over. The Tower Commission and the special prosecutors have seen to that.

  The universities and their apparently oblivious staff of ivory tower types are the easiest hunting ground for Hezbollah snatch squads. In one haul on January 24, they grabbed three professors from American University in Beirut. That operation also netted Hezbollah an Indian academic. He must be lonely among all the Westerners.

  Another Frenchman has been taken as well. He disappeared on
January 13, just before things got ugly with the West Germans. That’s one reason why I’m here, back in Wiesbaden. The Germans are now caught up in the hostage crisis, too.

  Last month, the West Germans arrested Muhammad Ali Hamadi, a Shiite leader and terrorist who worked with Imad Mugniyah to plan the TWA Flight 847 hijacking. In apparent retaliation for his arrest, the so-called Strugglers for Freedom bagged two West Germans in Beirut. Rudoph Cordes and Alfred Schmidt are now prisoners of Hezbollah. The Strugglers for Freedom is just another front name for Iran’s puppet terror organization in Lebanon.

  Which brings me to this snowy German night in February. I’m alone on a street within the U.S. Air Force base at Wiesbaden. The weather has driven most folks indoors. I pad along atop the freshly fallen snow, pulling my Barbour Beaufort’s collar tight to my neck to ward off the cold. The snow is quite lovely tonight. It is still pure white, untrampled by passing cars and people.

  The air force base is one of those places that has come to symbolize the enduring American occupation of West Germany. Thousands of U.S. airmen and aviators are stationed here at this ex-Luftwaffe airfield, and on weekends they flood into town to fill the beer halls with American voices. The locals have come to accept, if not enjoy, the company of their conquerors turned allies.

  Tonight, I have a meeting in one of the local beer halls. It is a small place and poorly lit, but the food is supposed to be excellent and the beer plentiful and cheap. That makes it a perfect spot for two spooks to talk.

  I make my way to the beer hall, walking past an enormous Luftwaffe eagle painted on the side of a building. Why nobody has bothered to paint over that symbol of Germany’s darkest age is puzzling. The paint is flecked in places, but from a distance, it still looks almost fresh, as if this is 1943 and the local Nachtjäger Geschwader was just waiting to scramble off the runway and intercept an incoming British bombing raid. A different age, a different war. Who knew that the victory in 1945 would lay the foundations for the chaos we face today: a cold war between superpowers overlayed atop a growing struggle between the Christian world and radical Islam?