William Buckley: The spy who never came in from the cold |
By
Gordon Thomas, Wednesday, October 25, 2006 |
On
Friday morning March 16, 1984, William Buckley, the CIA Station
Chief in Lebanon, began his three hundred and forty-third day in
Beirut. He was alone in his tenth floor apartment in the Al-Manara
apartment building in the western suburb of the city. Beyond the
windows of his living room were views of the Chouf Mountains and the
Mediterranean Sea. It was going to be one of those sublime days
which compensated for what Lebanon had become for the few foreigners
still living here: a dangerous and volatile hell hole. |
Below,
stretching into the distance, were a hundred and more spiralling
mosque minarets. From them loudspeakers would soon summon the
faithful to their first prayers. |
Despite its size -- four bedrooms, dining room, living room, maid's
cubicle -- Buckley had insisted on keeping house himself; he hated
the idea of anyone snooping through his personal belongings.
Evidence of his failure to be tidy was all around him: dishes
scattered casually about the living area and the laundry bag
over-flowing. |
Undoubtedly he had much else to preoccupy him. His attempts to
cultivate informants and gain information about Lebanon's disparate
political factions had met with mixed success. Part of the reason,
he believed, was he still found it difficult to communicate in
Arabic. |
Early
on in Beirut, Buckley had made contact with the senior Mossad
katsa, a field agent, in the city. |
A few
days before this March morning, the two men had met in the George
Washington cafˆ© on Beirut seafront. They were developing plans to
rescue the foreign hostages already held captive by the Hezbollah in
Beirut. A team of Green Berets would be flown from the United States
to Tel Aviv and sail with Israeli Special Forces on gunboats which
would drop them off the coast of Beirut. The craft would wait
off-shore while the team hid in the sand dunes waiting for the "go"
signal. |
That
would come when other Mossad agents had infiltrated into the city to
place bombs outside the homes of known Islamic terrorists. The
ensuing panic would be the signal for the force in the dunes to make
its way into the city and join Buckley. |
Dangerous and daring though the plan was, Buckley believed its
element of surprise would ensure success. Besides, he had carried
out similar operations in Vietnam to snatch Vietcong leaders from
their redoubts. The previous day, March 15, 1984, the plan had been
green lighted in an "eyes only" coded signal to Buckley from CIA's
William Casey. |
That
Friday morning of March 16, 1984, almost certainly Bill Buckley
followed a routine which had become part of his life. |
First
he placed a classical album on the stereo at the side of his bed and
carried one of the speakers on its extension flex to the door of the
bathroom. Shaved and showered, he dressed, selecting a short-sleeved
shirt, silk tie and a grey, light-weight suit. |
The
clothes were another of his unbreakable habits. For the past thirty
years he had bought them from Brooks Brothers in New York. He bought
four suits every year, two light-weight, two medium-worsted. He
remained a size 38. His ties came from the classical range of plain
or muted stripes. |
Having
a low tolerance for silence, he moved the speaker from the bedroom
to the kitchen and prepared a breakfast of orange juice, cereal,
toast and coffee. He had enjoyed an identical start to the day for
as long as he could remember. |
The
meal over and the crockery stacked in the dishwasher, he replaced
the classical record with one of Dean Martin singing. |
He had
met the crooner during one of his spells at Langley when he had
spent a weekend at Las Vegas. One Martin's song also had a more
personal memory for Buckley. It was a reminder of the one woman he
had established a personal relationship with. Her name was Candace
Hammond and she lived in the small hamlet of Farmer in North
Carolina. He had spoken to her on the phone a few days ago. He'd
ended the call by saying he hoped to be home soon and then she could
cook him a "good old-fashioned Southern-fried chicken," Candace
would recall. |
Listening to Martin singing Return to Me, Buckley prepared
sandwiches, something he had done every morning in Beirut. He
disliked the food at the embassy canteen almost as much as the
curious stares he attracted from other diplomatic staff. He
suspected they regarded him as a dinosaur, an old work-horse heading
for retirement. Let them think that. With his direct communication
to William Casey he was only a step away from the Oval Office. Casey
had said as much. "Anything you turn up, Bill, goes straight on to
the President's desk," was how the Director had put it. |
Sandwich-making over, Buckley returned to the living room. It
contained the only clues to his personal life. On one wall was a
framed copy of a French World War One victory poster. Candace had
given it to him. They had met when he had returned from Vietnam and
quickly became lovers. Over the years, she had written him scores of
letters. Sunday was her day for writing. He had seldom written back,
preferring to make phone calls from various parts of the world.
Proof of her love was the inscription she had written across the
framed portrait of her on a table in the living room: "To Bill. My
fearless warrior and wonderful lover. Candace." |
In a
few months he would be fifty-eight years old. But Candace had been
the only woman he had ever come close to loving. To demonstrate
that, he insisted on taking with him everywhere the ever-growing
bundle of letters Candace had written. |
They
went into the bottom of the briefcase he fetched from the safe in
his bedroom. Known as a "burn bag", it was intended at a twist of
the key clockwise, the usual way of opening or closing a bag, to
incinerate the contents by triggering flames from a ring of gas jets
built into the base. After the letters, Buckley placed a number of
files marked "Top Secret", "Secret" or "Confidential"
in the bag. The sandwiches went on top. |
Buckley locked the case by turning the key anti-clockwise, then
attached the bag to his wrist by a bracelet fixed to a steel chain
secured to the bag's handle. |
He
dead-locked the apartment door behind him and walked across the hall
to the elevator. It stopped at a floor below. A man entered. He was
young, well dressed and carried a leather briefcase. A few floors
further down the elevator paused again. This time a woman tenant
whom Buckley knew joined them. He exchanged polite greetings with
her. The man did not speak. |
At the
ground floor the woman stepped out, wishing Buckley to "have a nice
day", no doubt proud of her grasp of American idiom. The two men
rode down to the basement garage where Buckley kept his car.
Normally his embassy driver would have been waiting but this morning
Buckley had decided to drive himself to his appointments. He had
told no one at the embassy of this violation of security; it was an
unbreakable rule that no American official nowadays travelled alone
in the city. |
As he
walked towards his car, Buckley's first inkling of trouble may well
have been the fierce blow from the man's briefcase to the back of
his head, powerful enough to leave traces of blood and hair on the
hide. The attacker dropped his bag. When it was later recovered, it
was found to contain several rocks. From somewhere inside the garage
a white Renault drove up. There were two men in the car, the driver
and his companion in the rear. He may well have assisted Buckley's
assailant to get him and the burn bag into the back of the car. With
Buckley half-sprawled on the floor and the other two men squatting
on top, the Renault roared out of the garage, its rear door flapping
open dangerously. |
The
woman who had exchanged pleasantries with the CIA station chief
moments before was standing at a bus stop near the garage exit. She
glimpsed what had happened and started to scream for help. |
Bill
Buckley was not only an important and totally reliable source for me
in the intelligence world, but also became a good and trusted
friend. The idea of having a friend who operates in the nether
regions of our society does not always sit well with the purists of
our world. They regard men like Bill Buckley as belonging to a world
they want no part of. |
Bill
was highly educated and articulate and was a gifted host. He could
easily have found himself a secure place on Wall Street or some
other niche in the East Coast Establishment. Instead he chose to
work for the Central Intelligence Agency. He saw it as a real
opportunity to satisfy two powerful driving forces in his psyche, a
need to serve his country in a way that would satisfy that second
force by giving him a life of excitement and the essential sense of
danger that permeated so much of what he did. He was an authentic
man's man who regularly managed to seduce women with his
old-fashioned charm and a style that the Great Gatsby would have
admired. |
Physically he was not exactly handsome. The angles of his face did
not quite coalesce to provide a striking whole. His chin would jut
at unexpected moments and his eyes were a little too close set,
giving him a look of theatrical menace. To really appreciate his
best physical side you had to catch him in motion, crumbling a roll
for his soup or using his finger to make a point. |
As I
came to know him, I realized that Bill cultivated his little
eccentricities and displayed them like badges of honour. He liked
ties whose patterns never seemed to match his shirt or jacket. There
was the long leather topcoat he wore for a while so that he looked
like an extra in a wartime movie. His greatest concern was to ensure
his shoes always gleamed. He could not pass a shoeshine stand
without stopping for an application of further gloss. |
We
began to meet on a regular basis. Usually Bill would turn up with
two or three staff from the embassy. The conversation was as good as
the food. One night he arrived with William Colby, a quiet and
self-contained man with the inquisitorial manner of a foot soldier
in the Society of Jesus. He asked few questions but listened a great
deal. Later Bill told me that Colby had parachuted into
German-occupied France in 1944. After the war he had gone on
fighting the Fascists in Italy as an early member of the CIA. |
Bill
had a waspish way with words. He once said the only real way to
write about intelligence matters was to listen for "the murmurs in
the mush". It was his shorthand for learning about a deadly skirmish
in an alley with no name; the collective hold-your-breath when an
agent or network is blown; a covert operation that could have undone
years of overt political bridge building; a snippet of mundane
information that completed a particular intelligence jigsaw. Later,
as we came to know one another better, he convinced me that secret
intelligence is the key to fully understanding international
relations, global politics and terrorism. |
Eventually I came to know a great deal about Bill and his own life
and times. |
William Buckley was kidnapped shortly after eight o'clock in the
morning, Beirut time, on March 16, 1984. Several hours passed before
senior Embassy officials concluded he had been abducted.
|
A
priority signal was sent to the State Department and the Central
Intelligence Agency. It was still early morning in Washington. |
At
State, news of what had happened was given to Chip Beck who had
served with Buckley in Beirut. He was "too stunned to take it in. I
was having a hard time emotionally," he said later. |
At
Langley the signal had been delivered to CIA Director William
Casey's office on the seventh floor. Years later he would recall
how: "I just sat there and read the thing two, three times. Bill had
been a prime asset. For three decades, on three continents, he had
served the CIA and this nation with unfailing loyalty and without
question. He was one of the bravest men I ever met. He was can-do,
go-anywhere. He was street savvy in a way few agents were. So how
the hell had this happened?" |
An
ashen-faced Casey asked that question of anyone who could possibly
provide the answer. Receiving none, he shouted in frustration, "Find
him! I want him found. I don't care what it takes, I want him
found!" |
So
began an operation like no other the CIA had organised. Claire
George, the Agency's deputy director, was ordered to "turn the
Middle East upside down". A special in-agency committee chaired by
Casey was set up to monitor the search. The National Security
Agency, NSA, was ordered to provide high-resolution satellite photos
of known terrorist hideouts in Beirut and the Beka'a Valley.
|
The
intelligence services of Israel, Germany, France and the United
Kingdom were asked to help. Every CIA station in the Middle East was
ordered to treat the hunt for Buckley as a top priority. A joint
FBI/CIA team flew to Beirut. Shortly afterwards they were joined by
NSA technicians, each a specialist in ground communications. They
were to use their equipment to probe deep beneath the rubble of West
Beirut where satellites could not penetrate. |
In
Langley, psychiatrists, psychologists, behavioural scientists and
analysts were mobilised to try and assess how Buckley would
withstand being kidnapped and to get a fix on the mindset of his
captors. The task was put in charge of Dr Jerrold Post. The
fastidious, soberly-dressed psychiatrist also held a senior teaching
post at the capital's George Washington University. |
The
joint CIA/FBI team sent to Beirut established that embassy security
had not been compromised. In their first reports back to Langley,
the team painted a picture of the missing agent as idiosyncratic. He
had spent time cleaning mud from the inside of his car's mudguards
with a toothbrush. He kept his apartment untidy. He brought his own
food to work. |
The
judgement infuriated Casey. He knew Buckley; they had travelled
together widely through the CIA's global fiefdom. He said later,
"Buckley may have had unusual traits, but he was not a has-been." |
Yet,
despite the Director's support, the feeling grew in Langley that
Buckley was an "oddball", someone who had "goofed up". |
Reconstructing what had happened, the CIA/FBI team concluded that
the white Renault, with maximum acceleration, roared through the
Muslim quarter and was waved past several Hezbollah checkpoints
before reaching a well-prepared safe house. |
Buckley was manhandled out of the car and into the house. The team
was equally certain one of the kidnappers had unclipped the
briefcase from Buckley's wrist and found the key in his pocket. They
could only guess if the terrorist had been able to open the burn bag
correctly. |
The
team was quickly satisfied the Hezbollah had kidnapped Buckley, and
that most likely he remained somewhere in the sprawl of West Beirut,
between what remained of the heavily-shelled port in the north and
the Hotel Sands to the south, near the international airport. There
were simply not enough Green Berets to go in to rescue Buckley from
probably the most hostile area on earth. |
Former
State Department employee, Chip Beck, recalled that within the CIA
there was also a "mood that Buckley knew too much and that he could
blow away a lot of people if he was forced to talk. A lot of agents
were watching to see what the Agency would do to get him back. There
was a feeling that if Casey couldn't rescue Buckley, then no agent
was safe." |
In
Langley, some of those agents remembered what had happened to Tucker
Gouglemann, one of Buckley's closest friends in the CIA. They had
served together in Vietnam. When the Vietcong had swept into Saigon,
Gouglemann had stayed behind in the hope of bringing out his
Vietnamese wife and their small child. Within days he had been
arrested. Within a month he was dead from torture. It was eighteen
months before the Vietcong had turned over his body to the American
Red Cross. |
Within
the agency, Buckley had never tired of saying that more should have
been done to rescue Gouglemann. His claim had won him no friends
within the CIA hierarchy. |
Doctors at Langley continued to assess how Buckley would react to
captivity. The CIA specialists concluded Buckley's reactions would
follow an almost immutable pattern. |
"Even
while Buckley was reeling under the blow from the briefcase, he
would experience a feeling of disbelief, an instinctive denial that
what was happening was actually occurring to him. That may have
remained until his arrival at the hiding place his captors had
prepared," said Dr Jerrold Post. |
Desperate denial -- the
only immediate psychological defence response open to Buckley --
would be replaced by a sudden and shattering reality. Dr Post
told me Buckley's reactions could have included "frozen fright" and,
most disturbing of all a need to talk to his kidnappers -- if only
to try and convince them he should be freed. |
For
Buckley's captors that period was also one of critical importance.
They would begin to feed back to him information they had earlier
gleaned from Buckley, creating a feeling his captors were
all-knowing and therefore all-powerful and that to resist them would
be pointless. |
The
CIA doctors suggested of Buckley: a man bowed down by despair,
suddenly aged, his face haggard, slowed up physically and mentally,
his voice monotonous and every word and movement a fearful burden.
He would feel constantly exhausted and any sleep would leave him
unrefreshed. He would become most depressed in the small hours --
and then be at his most vulnerable, when his ability to resist every
slight pressure would be at its lowest. Self-accusation would be at
its most destructive and his lack of hope at its peak. |
Buckley's mental agony could be accompanied by other symptoms: loss
of appetite and constipation, followed by a growing feeling the only
solution for him was suicide. No one could guess how long that
feeling would last but at some point would come another shattering
self-discovery. Not only was resistance manifestly impossible, but
so was escape. That would be the point when he might regard
cooperating with his captors. |
The
doctors continued to make their first cautious predictions. If his
captors were sufficiently clever, they would recognise that
Buckley's mood changes were part of a continuously carving-out and
refilling of that inner void created by his kidnapping. Under their
manipulation, his guilt could be re-directed away from himself so
that he would come to believe that what was important was not so
much what he had done -- failed to avoid being kidnapped --
but what he had been: a hated "Western Imperialist". |
On
Monday morning, May 7, 1984, the United States embassy in Athens
received a video posted in the city. The wrapping, with its boldly
printed name and address, was carefully undone and placed to one
side. The VHS tape was a cheap German make commonly available
throughout the Middle East. One of the mail room staff inserted the
cassette in a video player. When the ambassador reviewed the tape,
it was couriered to Langley. |
In
Casey's office, the director and senior staff began to view the
video. It showed William Buckley undergoing torture. The absence of
sound made it all the more shocking. The camera zoomed in and out of
Buckley's nude and damaged body. He held before his genitalia a
document marked "MOST SECRET". It was proof the burn-bag had failed. |
Casey
later remembered how "I was close to tears. It was the most obscene
thing I had ever witnessed. Bill was barely recognisable as the man
I had known for years. They had done more than ruin his body. His
eyes made it clear his mind had been played with. It was horrific,
mediaeval and barbarous". |
The
tape was handed over to technicians. They enlarged frames to try and
establish the background against which Buckley had been filmed. They
decided it was rough-plastered stone, suggesting the filming had
taken place in a cellar. The wrapping paper was the kind
Mediterranean shopkeepers used to wrap groceries. The handwriting
suggested the writer was semi-literate. |
The
Agency's pharmacologists took over. They concluded Buckley showed
symptoms of being drugged; his eyes were dull and his lips slack.
His gaze was of a person deprived of daylight for some time. He
continuously blinked as if he had great difficulty in adjusting to
what appeared to be not a very powerful photo-flood used to
illuminate him for filming. They were certain Buckley had spent long
periods being hooded. Buckley bore chafe marks on his wrists and
neck suggesting he had been tethered with a rope or chain. A careful
study of every inch of visible skin revealed puncture marks
indicating he had been injected at various points. |
The
second video arrived twenty-three days later. This time it was
posted to the United States Embassy on Via Veneto in Rome. The tape
was air-couriered to Washington. |
The
video had been shot against a similar background as the first one.
It revealed Buckley continued to be horrifically treated. There was
sound on the tape. Buckley's voice was slurred and his manner
noticeably more egocentric as if not only the world beyond the
camera, but his immediate surroundings, held increasingly less
interest for him. |
The
pharmacologists found it impossible to decide which drugs had been
used. Any of a dozen of those powerful agents could have made him
appear sedated and stupefied. His voice was fuzzy and he appeared
often unable to shape words. His hands shook and his legs beat a
tattoo on the floor as he mumbled pathetic pleas to be exchanged
under a guarantee the United States would remove "all of its
influences" from Lebanon and would persuade Israel to do the same. |
Specialists tried to decide how long Buckley could survive. His last
Agency medical records showed he was physically fit. But no one
could say how his defence mechanisms would respond to anxiety
attacks, nightmares, and the overwhelming sense of helplessness.
While drugs would have an enormous impact on Buckley's mood and
behaviour, they might leave no permanent damage if he was recovered
soon enough. The possibility gave added impetus to the plans
beginning to take shape elsewhere within the CIA, in the Pentagon,
the State Department and, ultimately, the White House. Casey
repeatedly told colleagues they should see Buckley's release as the
Agency's personal crusade. "It is partly a matter of esprit de corps
-- we look after our own," was the Director's constant refrain. |
During
his first weeks in captivity, William Buckley was hidden in a
succession of cellars in West Beirut, each soon filled with the
stench of his body waste, misery and, no doubt, fear. |
On
Friday, October 26, 1984, two hundred and twenty-four days since
Buckley was kidnapped, a third video arrived at the CIA. The tape
was even more harrowing than its predecessors. Buckley was close to
a gibbering wretch. His words were often incoherent; he slobbered
and drooled and, most unnerving of all, he would suddenly scream in
terror, his eyes rolling helplessly and his body shaking. From time
to time he held up documents, which had been in his burn-bag, to the
camera. Then delivered a pathetic defence of his captor's right to
self-determination in Lebanon. |
Specialists reviewed the tape to try and decide whether he was
already resigned to inevitable death. The specialists wondered if he
had put aside the normal Christian abhorrence to suicide and
overcome the memory of his formative years when, as a devout
Catholic boy, he had listened to his priest speak of the Hell which
faced those who took their own lives. Would he remember he had been
told his work permitted suicide as the ultimate means to protect the
CIA's secrets? |
There
was no indication the ruined figure on the video remembered that as
he pleaded to live in exchange for the patently impossible demands
of his captors. |
The
specialists tried to estimate the level of anxiety in Buckley's
voice. It was clear he could no longer confront the sheer terror of
his situation. Its magnitude had overwhelmed him. For hours the
specialists considered whether his words showed "true guilt" or
"neurotic guilt". They used a language no outsider could readily
comprehend as they tried to make distinctions over how much in his
case "the human order of being is disturbed", and how far he might
have experienced "existential guilt arising from a specific act", in
his case revealing secrets to his captors. They returned to consider
whether Buckley not only accepted but yearned for the inevitability
of death. |
William Buckley's kidnapping was into its second year by the spring
of 1985. |
The
CIA consensus was that he would be blindfolded and chained at the
ankles and wrists and kept in a cell little bigger than a coffin. |
He
would, if he was lucky, be fed twice a day: early in the morning and
some time after dark. He would not know the time because his watch,
like all his personal belongings, would have been taken from him. |
From
close study of the video other clues had emerged. His loss of weight
was marked between the first and last tape, perhaps as much as
thirty pounds. His drugging was evident. |
How
had he spent those long, dreadful hours in isolation? One way could
have been to try and remember some of his training exercises,
designed to help him if captured. There was the one where he had to
try and recall as many passages as possible from the Bible, from his
favourite books, or dialogue from a film. Anything at all to link
him with the past, to remind him there was a world to return to, his
psychologist/instructor had said. |
Had
Buckley managed to do this? Had he been able to decipher time, the
passing of an hour, a half day, a day, a week, a month even? |
In
training he had shown himself able to calculate the hours. But a
week? A month? Had he learned to cope with silence in the stifling
darkness of his cell-coffin? Again, there was a way. He had been
taught to recall conversations and play back in his mind both sides,
his and the person he had spoken to. Again he had shown a certain
aptitude for that in training. But no matter how realistic that was,
it would still not match the reality of captivity. |
Over
the past two years, speculation had died -- just as some people in
Langley thought it would be best if Buckley was dead rather than he
should have to go on enduring. |
When
his name was mentioned and his fate speculated upon, colleagues
reminded each other that everything possible had been done to
retrieve him. "Short of sending in the Marines to fight their way
street-by-street through West Beirut, there was nothing else we
could have done," was a commonly-held view. |
Only
in William Casey's suite on the seventh floor of Langley had hope
refused to be extinguished. He had rejected the proposal made a year
after Buckley had been kidnapped that his name should be officially
added to the list of CIA agents killed or missing on duty. Their
fate was commemorated by small stars carved into the marble walls in
the CIA main lobby. Before Buckley had vanished, there had been over
fifty such stars, each representing an officer who had lost his or
her life in the service of the Agency. Since then a further half
dozen had been added. But Casey had mumbled it was too soon to
include Buckley among the display. |
The
director stubbornly clung to the hope Buckley was being kept alive
for a trade off. The idea had taken root in his mind when the
Israeli Ambassador in Washington had told Casey that a number of
Israel's own prisoners, who had been captured in various wars with
its Arab neighbours, were being kept alive in Syria and Iran as
barter for future exchanges. |
Encouraged Casey had sat, often late into the night, at his desk
going over all the reports on the hunt for Buckley. Reading the
files, it had not been hard for Casey to imaging Buckley chained in
some dungeon deep beneath the rubble of West Beirut. No satellite
camera, however powerful, would be able to penetrate that far down.
By now Buckley would be emaciated and probably kept in total
darkness. |
The
focus of the search had remained on Lebanon. But in Friday prayers
the priests in the mosques had given up referring to Buck-lee.
His name, once on the lips of almost everyone in West Beirut, was
now rarely heard. |
Reports from foreign diplomats in the city all said the same thing:
while the other Beirut hostages still clung to life in the bowels of
the infamous "Beirut Hilton" -- a series of cells scooped out deep
beneath the rubble of West Beirut -- of Buckley there was not even a
whisper. |
There
had been a rumour that Buckley had been transferred to a Hezbollah
redoubt out in the Beka'a Valley. Another rumour said he had been
secretly flown to Tehran for interrogation. |
Finally there were no more rumours to track down. Even the
newspapers, which had once routinely recycled old stories about the
kidnapping, had no new spin to put on it. |
Yet
William Casey still would not allow himself to give up. Everything
that made him what he was -- his quality of mind, his healthy
scepticism and detachment -- convinced him that Buckley was better
off alive than dead for his captors. As long as he lived, Buckley
had a value for them. |
By
April 1985, Casey became increasingly attracted to the idea of using
Israel to recover William Buckley. It had been done before, notably
after the 1965 Suez War. Mossad's chief, Meir Amit, had written to
Egypt's then president, Gamal Abdul Nasser, asking him to exchange
two Israeli spies in return for hundreds of Egyptian
prisoners-of-war captured in the Six Day War. Initially Nasser had
refused. Finally he had asked that the POWs be freed first. Amit had
agreed. The Egyptians were taken by trucks to the edge of the Sinai
Desert where they were transferred to Egyptian buses. Two days later
the two Israeli spies were back in Tel Aviv. |
Casey
knew there had been other occasions when similar swaps had been
organized by Mossad chiefs. And none of them was more astute than
Mossad's present Director General, Nahum Admoni. |
While
Casey knew that Admoni had a deep-seated suspicion of US intentions
in the Middle East, his own personal relationship with the Mossad
chief was cordial. |
Late
in April 1985, Casey flew to Tel Aviv. Admoni had been at the
airport to meet him. |
Once
Casey had settled into his Tel Aviv seafront hotel, he told Admoni
the purpose of his visit: to see if Israel would go along with a
deal to swap Buckley for Arab prisoners held in Israeli prisons. |
Casey
was to recall Admoni said it was a "no go area". With that avenue
firmly closed, Casey had asked if it was possible for Mossad to find
out if Buckley was dead? |
Over
the next few days, Admoni had introduced Casey to some of the key
Mossad operatives with up-to-date knowledge of Lebanon. They had
included David Kimche who until recently had been in charge of
Mossad's ‘Lebanese account'. He had no doubt: Buckley was dead.
Rafi Eitan, a former Director of Operations for Mossad, held a
similar view. So did Admoni. |
"Buckley's over and done with," Admoni said as he drove Casey back
to the airport to fly back to Washington. |
The
news Casey had gone on what had turned out to be a fruitless mission
had brought to the surface questions which had been simmering for
some time in Langley. |
The
impression had gotten around that Casey regarded Buckley as more
important than just an agent gone missing. People started to ask
more pointedly what was so special about Buckley that the Director,
beset with a hundred and more urgent and important matters, appeared
to be making Buckley his special case? |
There
were those who recalled it had been the same when Dulles ran the
CIA. In those days Buckley, gung-ho from the Korean War, had been
treated like a favourite son by Dulles, given access that at the
time even senior men had envied. |
Others
remembered the way Buckley had been allowed to operate in Vietnam.
He had come and gone more or less as he pleased and set his own
agenda. In the end others in the CIA had been badly burned over what
America had done in that war. But Buckley had come out without so
much as a stain on his character. In the closed world of Langley,
that alone was enough to raise eyebrows. |
A CIA
officer agreed to talk to me on the understanding he would not be
identified, said: "The blunt truth is that Buckley wasn't liked, not
liked at all. There were people who hated him at the CIA, who were
glad that he went to Beirut. Now that he has vanished in that sink
hole, why the hell should they go looking for him?" |
More
certain, a number of factors had come together to settle Buckley's
fate. He understood, better than anyone, that to survive within the
Agency you had to cope with the office politics, the battles for
turf, the back-stabbing. His way of dealing with any of that was to
fight back -- hard. It had not made him popular but then, as he used
to say: "I'm not running for Miss Langley Pageant Queen." He had
also acquired a record of success that was almost unmatched by any
agent in the history of the Agency. That had led some people to envy
him. |
Difficult, ruthless, short-tempered, yes, Buckley was all those
things, and he made no apology for being so. Shortly before going to
Beirut he had expressed his attitude to me: "I try and do my work
well, but I also understand that gratitude is not part of doing it." |
By
late May 1985, William Casey had finally given up hope of getting
Buckley back. Oliver North, the former Marine, was the lynchpin of a
plan to recover all the US hostages held in Lebanon. He was working
closely with Amiram Nir, an Israeli counter-terrorism expert. Nir's
sources had told him the decision over Buckley's fate had been made
at a meeting of the Hezbollah leadership. Nir had told North that
his contacts had no other information to offer, except they were
certain Buckley was now dead. |
No one
knows for certain when William Buckley did die. The likeliest date
is sometime during the night of June 3, 1985, the 444th
day of his captivity. |
David
Jacobson, who had been the director of the Beirut University
Hospital and had been kidnapped some months before and incarcerated
in the "Beirut Hilton", believed Buckley was in a nearby cell on
that night. When he was released some 17 months later, Jacobson had
tried to recall what he had heard in the stifling darkness of that
June night. |
"The
man was an American. Of that I have no doubt. But he was in a very
bad way, delirious and coughing. It was hard for me to make out what
he was saying because I myself was hooded. Then, in the end there
was just this long silence. After a while I heard the guards
shouting in Arabic and then what sounded like a body being dragged
away," Jacobson told me. |
In
October 1985, confirmation that Buckley was dead came in an
announcement by the Hezbollah. Accompanying it was a photograph of
his corpse, together with copies of some of the once secret
documents from Buckley's burn bag. The announcement added that the
body would not be handed over to the United States for burial. |
Casey
went to the White House to break the news to President Reagan.
Afterwards the two men had sat for a while in silence in the Oval
Office. Finally the President said: "The sooner we get all those
other hostages out of Beirut, the better. Do whatever it has to
take, Bill." |
The
arms-sales-for-hostages deal which became known as Irangate had gone
into overdrive. But what followed was for another day. |
Bill
Buckley had served the CIA for thirty years, joining at a time when
the agency had been part of the American dream of creating a new
world. He had died at a time when the Agency had become increasingly
a bureaucracy that was driven by a belief that technocracy and
qualitative analysis were the twin gods who ruled over Langley. In
that world Buckley had become an outsider. Buckley's vision of
America was that its strength was in being deliberately separate
from the world. The America he wanted was one of Midwestern virtues
that had largely gone and the all-embracing Christianity of his
youth no longer was there. |
Despite being a through-and-through professional, his ideals were no
longer those of his paymasters. To them there was something of a
past long gone about Bill Buckley; he was like a mediaeval knight
left alone on a battlefield that had moved on. Ari Ben-Menashe, the
former Israeli intelligence officer who had briefly known Buckley,
saw him "as someone who still clung to his sword while the rest of
us were using laser guns, but he was a decent man who was a faithful
servant of the Agency and his country." |
In the
intervening years since the Hezbollah announcement, there were
conflicting reports that Buckley's body had been burnt or had been
buried under the foundations of one of the new hotels going up along
Beirut's seafront to once more attract tourists to a city which
still styled itself as the Paris of the Near Orient. When none of
these reports could be verified, whispers ran through the alleys of
West Beirut that the Americans would pay big money for the
Buck-lee corpse. |
Early
in October 2002, two young Arabs drove a battered van out of West
Beirut heading for the Beka'a Valley. They reached the spot they
were looking for some hours later. It was marked on a piece of paper
for which they had paid a substantial sum. The man who had sold them
the paper had boasted he had been one of the guards who had watched
Buck-lee die and had brought him to this spot for burial. |
One
using a pick, the other a shovel, the youths began to dig. By late
afternoon they had excavated a sizeable hole but had not come across
even a bone. When darkness came, they dug on using the headlights of
the van. Finally they gave up, realising they had been the victims
of a con-man. |
Almost
certainly, if he had been alive, that would have brought a smile to
the lips of William Buckley. |