For more than a decade, terrorists had been hijacking airplanes, taking hostages, and killing American ambassadors. Neither the CIA nor any other branch of the American government had a clear idea of what to do about it.
On the last Saturday of January 1981, Anthony Quainton, then still serving as the government's counterterrorism coordinator, received an urgent phone call from Secretary of State Haig: on Monday at one o'clock, Quainton would brief the White House on his work. "I gave that briefing to the President, who was joined by the Vice President, the head of CIA, the head of the FBI, and a number of National Security Council members," Ambassador Quainton said. "After a couple of jelly beans, the President dozed off. That in itself was quite unnerving."
That same week, Haig announced that international terrorism would replace human rights as the number-one issue for the United States. Soon thereafter, Haig proclaimed that the Soviets were secretly directing the dirty work of the world's worst terrorists. He asked the CIA to prove this bold assertion. Casey privately agreed with Haig, but he had no facts to prove the case. The CIA's analysts could not provide them, despite bitter tongue-lashings from the boss. Under pressure, the CIA produced a fraud--Casey's conclusions placed precariously atop an analysis that could not support them. The attempt to place the blame on the Kremlin was a failure to understand the true nature of terror in the Middle East.
The CIA once had possessed an exceptionally well-placed source: Ali Hassan Salameh, chief of intelligence for the Palestine Liberation Organization and henchman in the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The information he offered was an olive branch being extended to the United States by the PLO's chairman, Yasser Arafat. His case officer was Bob Ames, who worked the streets of Beirut before rising to deputy chief of the Near East division at the clandestine service. Starting at the end of 1973, Salameh and Ames negotiated an understanding that the PLO would not attack Americans. For four years, they shared intelligence on their mutual enemies in the Arab world. During that time, the CIA's reporting on terrorism in the Middle East was better than it ever had been, or ever would be again. It showed an understanding that terrorism transcended state sponsorship, that it was rooted in the rage of the dispossessed. An April 1976 CIA study concluded that "the wave of the future" was "the development of a complex support base for transnational terrorist activity that is largely independent of--and quite resistant to control by--the state-centered international system."
This line of thought disappeared from the CIA's reporting after 1978, when Israeli intelligence assassinated Salameh in revenge for Munich. It did not reappear for a generation. When President Reagan took office, the CIA had next to no good sources on terrorism in the Middle East.
"TOO LITTLE INTELLIGENCE FOR A LONG TIME"
On Friday, July 16, 1982, the day he was sworn in as secretary of state, George Shultz confronted an international crisis in Lebanon. The second telephone call he placed from his new office that day was to Bob Ames, who had become the leading CIA analyst of the Arab world.
Ames was the most influential CIA officer of his generation--a "uniquely talented" man, Bob Gates said. Tall, handsome, fond of hand-tooled cowboy boots, he dealt personally with Arafat, King Hussein of Jordan, and the leaders of Lebanon. Among his recruited agents was a political strongman in Beirut named Bashir Gemayel, a Christian of the Maronite sect and the CIA's most highly placed source in Lebanon.
The agency's Maronite network was a controlling force in Beirut. The CIA's reliance on it blinded the agency to how deeply the majority of Lebanese despised the power of the Maronite minority. That anger was a principal cause of the civil war that shattered the nation and opened the path for the Israeli invasion of June 1982.
By August, the country was flying apart--Muslim against Christian, Muslim against Muslim. Gemayel, with the strong backing of the United States and Israel, was selected as president by Lebanon's parliament. The CIA once again had a national leader on its payroll. Gemayel personally assured the agency that Americans would be safe in Lebanon, once the PLO's armed forces were evacuated and Israel ended its brutal shelling of Beirut.
On September 1, President Reagan announced a grand strategy to transform the Middle East. It had been put together in secret by a small team that included Bob Ames. Its success depended on a harmonic convergence in which Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and the PLO cooperated at the command of the United States. It lasted all of two weeks.
On September 14, President Gemayel was assassinated when a bomb destroyed his headquarters. In revenge, the CIA's Maronite allies, abetted by Israel's troops, slaughtered some seven hundred Palestinian refugees stranded in the slums of Beirut. Women and children were buried under rough stones. In the wake of the killings and the outrage they engendered, President Reagan sent a contingent of U.S. Marines to serve as peacekeepers. There was no peace to keep.
As the marines landed, "the Agency people were busy trying to recreate some of their disrupted networks," said Robert S. Dillon, the American ambassador in Lebanon. "They remained involved--probably in a dangerous way--with the Maronites."
As the CIA fought to rebuild in Beirut, it did not see a new force rising from the rubble. An assassin named Imad Mughniyah, a chieftain of the violent terrorist group called Hezbollah, the Party of God, was gathering money and explosives, training his thugs for a series of bombings and kidnappings that would paralyze the United States for years to come. He reported to Tehran, where the Ayatollah Khomeini was creating an Office of Liberation Movements to further his messianic vision of conquering Iraq, seizing the holy shrine of Karbala, and marching onward across the River Jordan to Jerusalem.
Mughniyah's name has been forgotten now, but he was the Osama bin Laden of the 1980s, the scowling face of terror. As of this writing, he remains at large.
On Sunday, April 17, 1983, Bob Ames flew into Beirut, dropped by the American embassy on his way from the airport, and then sat down to supper with three fellow officers at the home of Jim Lewis, the deputy chief of station, who had survived a year at the Hanoi Hilton after being captured up-country in Laos fifteen years before.
Ames had been away from Beirut for five years. "He was exhilarated to be back," said the CIA's Susan Morgan, who was at the table Sunday night. He had returned to try to resurrect what the agency had lost with Gemayel's assassination.
On Monday morning, Ames called Morgan and invited her to supper that night at the Mayflower Hotel. Then Morgan went off to a luncheon in Sidon, south of Beirut. As the plates were being cleared, her hostess told her that there had been a radio report about an explosion at the American embassy. Morgan drove back to Beirut in a daze, barely seeing the ruined villages around her, destroyed during the Israeli army's assault. She had to walk past a police cordon on the Corniche to get to the embassy. It had been destroyed. Ames and his fellow officers had been killed instantly by the shock wave and buried in stone and steel and ash. It was two-thirty in the morning when they found him in the rubble. Morgan retrieved his passport, his wallet, and his wedding ring.
Sixty-three people were dead, among them seventeen Americans, including the Beirut station chief, Ken Haas, a veteran of the Tehran station; his deputy, Jim Lewis; and a CIA secretary, Phyllis Filatchy, who had toughed it out through years in the provinces of South Vietnam. In all, seven CIA officers and support staff were killed, the deadliest day in the history of the agency. The blast was the work of Imad Mughniyah, supported by Iran.
The obliteration of the Beirut station and the death of Robert Ames destroyed the agency's capability for gathering information in Lebanon and in much of the Middle East, "leaving us with too little intelligence for a long time thereafter," said Sam Lewis, the American ambassador to Israel at the time. "It made us very dependent on Israeli intelligence." The CIA would see the Islamic threat in the Middle East through an Israeli prism for the rest of the cold war.
Now Beirut was a battleground for the United States. But the CIA's reports, bereft of sources, had no impact whatsoever. American marines were siding with the Christians, American jets were dropping bombs on Muslims, and American ships were lobbing one-ton shells into the hills of Lebanon without knowing what they were hitting. The White House had gone to war in the Middle East with no idea of what it was getting into.
On October 23, 1983, Mughniyah's terrorists drove a truck bomb into the American barracks at Beirut International Airport and killed 241 marines. The blast was estimated at the kiloton level, the metric used for tactical nuclear weapons.
"OPERATING VIRTUALLY IN THE DARK"
Thirty-six hours after the barracks bombing, with the dead and wounded still being counted in Beirut, the White House, the Pentagon, and the CIA diverted America's attention to a nasty little Marxist insurgency in Grenada, a tiny island in the Caribbean crawling with a Cuban brigade of military construction workers. The island's leader, Maurice Bishop, had been killed in a power struggle, and that death provided "an excuse to go deal with that problem," said Duane Clarridge, chief of the Latin America division and one of three principal planners of the Grenada invasion.
"Our intelligence about Grenada was lousy," Clarridge said. "We were operating virtually in the dark." That contributed to the confusion of an operation in which nineteen Americans died and at least twenty-one patients at a mental hospital were killed by an American bombing raid.
The CIA staged its part of the invasion out of a hotel in Barbados. Clarridge's deputy handed the agency's proposal for a new Grenadian government to his State Department counterpart, Tony Gillespie. "The CIA had a plan to form a government," Gillespie recalled. "This was a top secret list, with all kinds of code words on it." He ran it past the most experienced American diplomats in the region. "They looked at it and then just threw up their hands. They said: 'These are some of the worst people in the Caribbean. You don't want them anywhere near this island.'" The list included "the worst crumb-bums...narcotics traffickers and crooks." These miscreants were the CIA's paid sources. As Allen Dulles had judged the value of his analysts' work by its weight, his successors assayed the value of secret information by virtue of what it cost. That was the rule in Beirut, in Barbados, and around the world.
The good vibrations resounding from the liberation of Grenada had faded by the time the last of the American marines left Beirut on February 26, 1984, their failed deployment doomed by a near-total lack of accurate intelligence. The mission had left 260 American soldiers and spies dead and America's enemies in control.
Casey had looked long and hard to find a new station chief with the courage to restore the CIA's eyes in Lebanon. The only candidate was an experienced but aging officer, Bill Buckley, who had served before in Beirut and whose cover had been blown. Casey decided it was worth the risk to send him back.
Eighteen days after the last marine left Lebanon, Buckley was kidnapped on his way to work. He was in enemy hands.