The agency had some experience with hostages. One of its officers had just been freed from forty days of harsh captivity.
Timothy Wells, a thirty-four-year-old combat-wounded Vietnam veteran, had been sent to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, in 1983. The nation was controlled by the Marxist dictator Haile Mengistu, whose palace guard, provided by Moscow, was led by East German intelligence officers. Wells was on his second tour of duty with the CIA. His orders were to create a political uprising. "There was a presidential finding signed by Ronald Reagan," Wells said. "It was a mandate. I was there to help overthrow the goddamn government."
Ten years before, Wells had been a marine guard at the American embassy in Khartoum when Palestinian gunmen took the American ambassador and the departing charge d'affaires hostage at a reception. President Nixon made a no-concessions statement off the top of his head. The PLO chairman Yasser Arafat answered with a go-ahead to kill the Americans. The harrowing experience made Wells change his life. He returned to the United States, went back to college, and joined the CIA. He underwent eighteen months of training for the clandestine service and arrived in Ethiopia after a two-year tour in Uganda. He was posted under State Department cover as a commercial officer. The United States had little commerce with Ethiopia at the time. Mengistu had made the White House's most-wanted list.
Under President Carter, the CIA had a minuscule covert-action project of financial support for an exile group called the Ethiopian People's Democratic Alliance. Under President Reagan, the program became a no-holds-barred multimillion-dollar affair. Wells inherited a network of Ethiopian intellectuals, professors, and businesspeople that he suspected had been penetrated by Mengistu's security forces. His mission was to keep them supplied with money and propaganda written by an exiled former Ethiopian minister of defense who worked with the agency. Posters, pamphlets, and bumper stickers arrived in diplomatic pouches at the embassy, where CIA personnel outnumbered State Department officials two to one.
Wells knew that he was being tailed. Yet he persisted. "I'm surprised it took them as long as they did to get me," he said.
On December 20, 1983, Mengistu's thugs burst in on a meeting Wells was holding in an upper-middle-class neighborhood and arrested three leaders of the opposition--a seventy-eight-year-old aide to the late emperor Haile Selassie; a fifty-year-old businessman; and his niece, a biologist. Wells hid for two days and two nights in a closet where the propaganda was kept. Then Mengistu's palace guard found him. They hogtied Wells, brought the three dissidents back to the house, and began to torture them. Wells heard their screams and confessed that he was a CIA officer. His captors blindfolded him, tossed him in a car, and drove him away. On Christmas Eve, they took him to a safe house south of the city, in a place called Nazaret. He spent the next five weeks being interrogated and beaten. His skull was fractured and his shoulders dislocated.
"To save his own ass, this American rolls up the rest of the organization, gives it away," said Joseph P. O'Neill, the deputy chief of mission at the American embassy. Scores of Ethiopians were jailed, tortured, or killed as a consequence.
At the end of the five weeks of torture, the Ethiopians sent word through the Israeli embassy in Nairobi that they had imprisoned a CIA officer. Within a day, President Reagan dispatched his ambassador-at-large, General Vernon Walters, who was in Africa at the time, to free Wells.
On February 3, 1984, the former deputy director of central intelligence, sixty-seven years old and riddled with gout, came lumbering off a plane in Addis Ababa, flopped into a car, and rode up to the embassy, gasping in the thin air at 8,300 feet. "What are you going to say to Mengistu?" O'Neill asked. Walters replied: "The President of the United States wishes to have back Mr. Timothy Wells." He had no intention of negotiating.
Walters went up to the presidential palace in Asmara, where Mengistu gave him a three-hour lecture on Ethiopian history. Wells was set free the next day. His hair had turned gray. He had told his captors the identities of the four other members of the CIA station. "COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY ELEMENTS CAUGHT RED-HANDED," said the morning headline in the Ethiopian Herald, the English-language newspaper in the capital. It ran alongside a front-page picture of eighteen terrified Ethiopians standing in front of a table littered with weapons, pamphlets, and cassettes. Most if not all of the people in the picture later died in confinement.
Wells flew back to Washington in a Lear jet. A team of CIA officers met the plane. It was not a welcoming party. They suspected him of treason. They took him to a safe house in the Virginia suburbs and interrogated him for six weeks. "If I had wanted to stay a captive I would have stayed in Ethiopia," Wells told them.
"I had wanted to join the agency because they took care of their own," he said. "They did not take care of me in any way, shape, or form. They thought I was a traitor for talking. I was asked to resign. That was devastating to me." The pain remained more than twenty years later.
"The Reagan Administration took a covert operation that had been begun on a very small scale under Carter and made it into an activity to be carried on inside of Ethiopia," said David Korn, the American charge d'affaires in Addis Ababa when Wells was taken hostage. "This was something I didn't believe could go undiscovered and tried to get stopped. I was sure that given the surveillance the Ethiopian government exercised over us that this would be discovered. It was."
"WHAT THE HELL KIND OF INTELLIGENCE AGENCY ARE YOU RUNNING?"
On March 7, 1984, Jeremy Levin, the CNN bureau chief in Beirut, was kidnapped. On March 16, Bill Buckley, the CIA's station chief, disappeared. On May 8, the Reverend Benjamin Weir, a Presbyterian missionary, vanished from the streets of the city. In all, fourteen American hostages were taken in Beirut during the Reagan years.
But Buckley always was uppermost in Bill Casey's mind, and with good reason, for the director was personally responsible for his plight. Casey played a tape of Buckley being tortured to President Reagan. By all accounts, it had a profound effect.
The CIA came up with at least a dozen plans to free Buckley, but it never had enough intelligence to execute them. In frustration, the clandestine service set out to try to kidnap Imad Mughniyah. "The President had approved Director of Central Intelligence Casey's recommendation to kidnap Mughniyah," said the government's counterterrorism coordinator, Robert Oakley. The CIA thought he was in Paris. Alerted by the agency, French intelligence officers raided the hotel room where the CIA said they would find him. They found a fifty-year-old Spanish tourist where a twenty-five-year-old Lebanese terrorist was supposed to be.
One of the many sources that the CIA station in Paris had cultivated in the name of counterterrorism was an Iranian swindler named Manucher Ghorbanifar, a wheeler-dealer who had been an agent of SAVAK, the shah's secret police. Fat, balding, goateed, clad in fancy suits, carrying at least three fake passports, Ghorbanifar had fled Iran after the fall of the old regime. He had been selling dubious information to the CIA and Israeli intelligence ever since. Ghorbanifar had a pattern of predicting events after they happened; his information was carefully crafted to create cash payoffs. One day after Buckley was kidnapped, Ghorbanifar met with CIA officers in Paris, and said he had information that could free him. The agency subsequently subjected him to three lie-detector tests. The last time, he flunked every question but his own name and nationality. On July 25, 1984, the CIA officially certified Ghorbanifar as a consummate liar--"an intelligence fabricator and a nuisance"--and issued a rare worldwide burn notice in his name, an order stating that the truth was not in him and his word was never to be trusted. Nonetheless, on November 19, 1984, Ghorbanifar lured the veteran CIA officer Ted Shackley to a three-day meeting at a four-star hotel in Hamburg.
After a ruthlessly ambitious rise to second-in-command at the clandestine service, Shackley had been forced into retirement by Admiral Turner five years before, to the great relief of some of his CIA colleagues. His name had become synonymous with professional dishonesty at the agency. He now worked as a private intelligence broker--a seller of secrets, like Ghorbanifar. He had represented himself in meetings with various Iranian exiles as an emissary of the president of the United States.
Shackley listened with interest as Ghorbanifar discussed ways to free the American hostages. Perhaps it could be a secret ransom, a straight-cash deal. Or perhaps it could be profitable. The United States could ship missiles to Iran, using a trading firm called Star Line, which Ghorbanifar ran in tandem with the Israeli intelligence service. The sale of weapons would create goodwill in Tehran, millions for the private traders involved, and a large cash ransom to free Bill Buckley and his fellow American hostages. Shackley reported the conversation to the ubiquitous Vernon Walters, who passed it on to the counterterrorism czar Robert Oakley.
On December 3, 1984, Peter Kilburn, a librarian at the American University in Beirut, was kidnapped. In Washington, the families of the American hostages begged the White House to do something. Their pleas wounded the president, who asked Casey constantly what the CIA was doing to set them free. "Reagan was preoccupied with the fate of the hostages and could not understand why CIA could not locate and rescue them," said Bob Gates. "He put more and more pressure on Casey to find them. Reagan's brand of pressure was hard to resist. No loud words or harsh indictments--none of the style of Johnson or Nixon. Just a quizzical look, a suggestion of pain, and then the request--'We just have to get those people out'--repeated nearly daily, week after week, month after month. Implicit was the accusation: What the hell kind of intelligence agency are you running if you can't find and rescue these Americans?"
"IT WAS OF OUR OWN MAKING"
In December 1984, as Washington prepared for Reagan's second inauguration, Ghorbanifar's offer to facilitate a profitable arms-for-hostages deal still stood. Casey kept it alive. That same month, he formally proposed that the CIA should finance its war in Central America with money from abroad. He had been kicking the idea around at the White House for half a year.
Congress outlawed American funding for the war shortly before election day 1984. Two snafus at the clandestine service had compelled the cutoff. First there was the comic-book fiasco. Since Casey had exhausted the CIA's small reservoir of paramilitary expertise in Central America, "the Agency had to reach outside itself and bring in people who could conduct that war for them," said Deputy Director of Central Intelligence John McMahon. "That was mainly done through retirees from the Special Forces who had learned their trade in Vietnam." One of these veterans had an old comic book that had been used to train Vietnamese peasants how to take over a village by murdering the mayor, the chief of police, and the militia. The CIA translated it into Spanish and distributed it to the contras. It quickly became public, and when it did, some high-ranking officers at the agency thought that "somebody's pulling a covert action against us," McMahon said. "This has to be absurd. And it turned out it was of our own making." Casey issued reprimands to five senior CIA officers over the comic book. Three refused to sign them. Their insubordination went unpunished.
Then there were the mines. Aiming to destroy what was left of Nicaragua's economy, Casey had authorized the mining of the Nicaraguan port of Corinto--an act of war. This was a Duane Clarridge brainstorm, born of desperation after the funds for thecontrasstarted running dry. "I was sitting at home one night--frankly, having a glass of gin--and I said, you know, the mines has got to be the solution!" Clarridge said. The agency made them on the cheap, out of sewer pipe. Casey had notified Congress about the mining with an inaudible mumble. When Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican chairman of the intelligence committee, raised a ruckus about it, CIA officers defamed him as a muddleheaded drunk.
Congress, wary of Casey's ways, had specifically prohibited the agency from soliciting funds from third countries to evade the ban on aid to the contras. Casey nevertheless arranged for Saudi Arabia to kick in $32 million, Taiwan another $2 million, the money flowing through a Swiss account controlled by the agency. But it was a stopgap.
In January 1985, at the start of the second Reagan administration, the director faced two urgent commands from the president. Free the hostages. Save the contras. The missions commingled in his mind.
Casey saw life as an enterprise. He believed in the end that politics, policy, diplomacy, and intelligence were all business deals. He saw how the hostage crisis and the cash crunch confronting the contras could be resolved through a grand bargain with Iran. The director would have preferred to run the Iranian operation by himself, but he faced the universal opposition of his clandestine service to working with the notorious Manucher Ghorbanifar, and the CIA had no other channel into Iran. Casey would have loved to save the contras single-handedly, too, but the CIA was prohibited from providing them with direct assistance. His solution was to run both operations outside the government.
He conceived what he believed to be the ultimate covert action. It lasted less than two years from conception to destruction, and it came dangerously close to ruining President Reagan, Vice President Bush, and the agency itself.
"He was running a great risk," Bob Gates reflected, "jeopardizing the President, himself, and CIA."