See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (32 page)

In a pre-grand jury session on June 5, I told Laura Ingersol, the head of the Justice task force, about my dealings with Tamraz. Her deputy and an FBI agent attended the meetings. Ingersol listened patiently, took notes, read the Tamraz documents - she had a complete set - and asked some very good, pertinent questions.

I zeroed in on the fact that Tamraz didn’t have a penny in his name, at least any accounts we knew about. OCL, Delaware, was a phantom company, with something like $250 in its Citibank account and no employees or other assets. It was the same thing with OCL, Panama: no assets, no money. The company was run out of a lawyer’s office. Since Roger appeared to be broke, wasn’t there a strong possibility that the money he shelled out to the Clinton people had come from some other source? Maybe even the KGB? Yes, Ingersol allowed, that might be so.

In front of the grand jury, though, the source of Roger’s money was the last thing on Ingersol’s mind. When I tried to bring up the evidence that Russian money might be going into the campaign, she called a recess. After we returned and I tried to raise the subject again, she cut me off cold. When I asked her if she wanted to know the truth or continue with her pointless questions, she threatened me with contempt. Ingersol avoided the Russian angle and the Milan meetings altogether. She didn’t have a single question about Tamraz’s claims that he’d bought access to the White House. Nothing about Don Fowler’s price list. Nothing about his hiring Ted Kennedy’s wife. Nothing about Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s son being on his payroll. Nothing about the other political figures - Democratic senator Tom Harkin of Iowa among them - who appeared to have solicited donations from the always affable, always generous Tamraz. Nothing at all. It was as if I somehow had accidentally found my way into the wrong grand-jury hearing.

But it wasn’t until her very last question that I understood where she intended to take the grand jury. ‘Did Tamraz ever offer you a job?’ she asked, looking around the room to make sure the jurors understood the serious implications of her question.

There it was, in all its beauty: the one question solely meant to discredit everything I had managed to get in about Russia and the DNC. Like every good prosecutor, Ingersol already knew the answer. She’d talked to enough of Tamraz’s acquaintances to know he offered everyone he met a job, from the waiter at the Four Seasons to two congressional staffers who flew out to Geneva to interview him. He’d probably even offered one to Heslin. The grand jury, though, knew none of that. In the version of events Ingersol had scripted for them, the whole Tamraz affair boiled down to a venal CIA officer playing the system - a perfect red herring to draw attention away from his DNC donations and the Russians. Obviously, Laura Ingersol knew who signed the paychecks at Justice.

The Senate’s televised hearings on campaign financing were no different. No one wanted to touch the Russian-money question. The only thing anyone seemed to care about were the titillating rumors about the CIA. And why not? A CIA officer who fronted for a shady oilman of Middle Eastern descent satisfied everyone’s interests. Senators Kennedy, Harkin, and others certainly didn’t want to linger long over Roger Tamraz’s largesse. The Republicans also knew that the National Republican Senatorial Committee had solicited Roger’s money, as had the Reagan administration. And of course Democrats were understandably squeamish about the possibility that KGB rubles perhaps had purchased some first-rate face time with the commander in chief. Roger might not have been called at all if it weren’t for his entertainment value. Sitting alone without a lawyer as he promised to double his contributions to $600, 000 the next time around, Roger provided a brilliant coup de theatre with which to bring the curtain down on the whole sham operation.

As for me, I made it into the hearings as a sound bite, most notably when Illinois Democratic senator Dick Durbin, who had clearly bought in to Heslin’s version of events, said of me: ‘What does this guy do for a living? It sounds like he worked for the Chamber of Commerce.’ But I couldn’t help noticing that I was the only witness to be disinvited from appearing in person. Senator Fred Thompson had probably heard that once I started to open up my fat mouth about foreign money oozing around American politics, there’d be no way to close it. Instead of an appearance, the CIA wrote up a one-page stipulation of fact that said basically nothing.

How do you call an end to a career that has taken you so far into the heart of darkness and shown you so many of the secrets that lie there? I didn’t want to go out bitter, but I didn’t want to just slink away, either. I’d spent a quarter century building up a body of knowledge and a set of instincts about some of the worst people and most dangerous organizations on the planet. I decided to find out, really find out to the best of my knowledge, what the truth was behind Iranian-sponsored terrorism. Maybe, I thought, the search would lead me to what I considered the biggest secret of all, the one that had been gnawing at me for more than thirteen years: Who bombed the US embassy in Beirut, and why had they never been brought to justice? I wanted to tie up loose ends, especially after being pulled off the trail to spend time in Tajikistan and northern Iraq, and the embassy bombing was the loosest end of my career as far as I was concerned. But there was more to it than just satisfying myself. Whoever bombed the embassy was clearly someone to be reckoned with. He - or it or they - had the will, the experience, and the determination to do enormous damage. If we couldn’t identify who had done it, if we couldn’t even learn what kind of explosives had been used, chances are it would all happen again, maybe at a far greater magnitude. I didn’t want that on my conscience if I could avoid it, and by now it had become obvious to me that the new, politically correct CIA was neither up to nor interested in the challenge.

There was one more advantage to tackling Iranian terrorism for an encore: Not only was it familiar territory, but I was also convinced it was the last issue Washington politicians would try to manipulate to their personal benefit. Sure, I’d seen Sheila Heslin try to block our operation against the Iranian Pasdaran to help an oil company, but she was one person and was eventually overruled. I’d also heard rumors that the Clinton administration was putting the brakes on the investigation into the Khobar barracks bombing. But I figured that had to be an exaggeration: Even the White House wouldn’t dare cover up a terrorist attack in which nineteen servicemen were killed.

I started out by running a computer search for intelligence we knew to be factual on the hostages in Lebanon. The first thing I noticed was that, by the time Iran made the decision to release the hostages in March 1991, it had given up any attempt to hide its hand. Two senior Pasdaran officials, Feridoun Mehdi-Nezhad and Hossein Mosleh, directly supervised the releases. Then, on April 28, 1991, both men flew to Damascus to see Imad Mughniyah. Their message was clear: Iran was getting out of the hostage business, and so was the super-shadowy Islamic Jihad Organization. The orders, they said, came directly from Iran’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khameini. Mughniyah left the same day for Beirut and started making preparations to carry out Iran’s orders. By September 1991 Mehdi-Nezhad and Mosleh were in Beirut pretty much full time, closing down safe houses, paying off guards, and preparing communiqués, as well as reassuring the IJO that Iran wasn’t getting out of the terrorism business entirely. There was still work for the IJO.

Once I was sure I had that trail down, I went back to the 1987 release of French hostages, looking for comparables. In fact, the process played out much the same way. After then prime minister Jacques Chirac agreed to give Iran everything it wanted, we watched Mehdi-Nezhad and Mosleh roll into action, handing down orders to the Iranian Pasdaran office in Lebanon and the IJO. On November 26, 1987, the Pasdaran office at the Shaykh Abdallah barracks composed and translated into Arabic a communique related to the two hostages, Roger Auque and Jean-Louis Normandin. The next day, the communique and the Frenchmen went free.

The deeper into the files, the more I was struck by the fact Mehdi-Nezhad and Mosleh were at the center of every major Pasdaran terrorist operation. Their involvement went back to the early eighties, when the two were assigned to Balabakk after the Israeli invasion. They were also there when our own American hostages were incarcerated in the married officers’ quarters, and they kept showing up at the edge of other events as well. Mehdi-Nezhad met with Mughniyah’s deputy halfway through the hijacking of TWA Flight 847. As the hijacking drama was playing itself out on the tarmac at Beirut International Airport, Mosleh could be seen talking to Mughniyah at planeside. We didn’t know the subject, but it had to be something important for Mughniyah to take time out of his busy, murderous day.

Mehdi-Nezhad, especially, seemed to be involved in more than just Lebanese-based terrorism. In 1989 he personally led an Iranian hit team that assassinated a Kurdish leader in Vienna. One of his Lebanese agents, Talal Hamiyah, was involved in two attacks in Buenos Aires. He was implicated in the Al-Khobar barracks attack in Saudi Arabia. Mehdi-Nezhad, you will recall, showed up in the Pan Am 103 chronicles: in January 1988 in Tripoli, Libya, and again in July 1988 in Frankfurt - six months before Pan Am 103 exploded over Lockerbie. Was he the Pasdaran officer who met Muhammad Hafiz Dalqamuni in the Biqa Valley and instructed him to blow up an American airplane? It was circumstantial at best, but the man did have a track record.

The phantom I kept running up against in my investigation was the IJO. It seemed to pop into existence whenever some new horror was inflicted in the Middle East and elsewhere, and then it seemed to slip completely back into the shadows again. We knew it had deep ties to the Iranian Pasdaran, but we knew next to nothing about its command structure, its recruiting methods, its personnel, its training bases, or anything else. How was it possible? More to the point, how could you ever begin to solve the embassy bombing and other outrages if you could never penetrate the group that took credit for so many of them ?

And then it occurred to me, as clearly as it had been hidden the moment before: The IJO had never existed. It was only a name the Pasdaran used for communiqués to claim terrorist operations. What’s more, the CIA knew the IJO was merely a front for the Iranians. It was clear from the documents I dredged up that, by at least 1997, the CIA knew the Pasdaran’s command structure inside and out, just as it knew that Ayatollah Ali Khameini and President Rafsanjani approved every terrorist operation to come out of Iran. As I looked at the evidence in front of me, the conclusion was unavoidable: The Islamic Republic of Iran had declared a secret war against the United States, and the United States had chosen to ignore it.

I had to be missing something, I felt, so I went to see an analyst who had followed Iran since the 1979 revolution. I’ll call him Jim. A maverick, Jim made a lot of people in the bureaucracy uncomfortable. He stuck to the facts and wouldn’t budge no matter how hot it got. The only solution was to take him off a sensitive account like Iran, but like me, Jim kept his own files.

I laid out for Jim what I’d found. I showed him the pile of documents I’d assembled, the important parts underlined in yellow. ‘Who do Mehdi-Nezhad and Mosleh work for?’ I asked.

‘That’s a question I once struggled with myself,’ Jim said, pushing the papers back to me. He’d already seen them. ‘Mosleh was the interesting case. Early on, in 1983, we came across his name. At first he was referred to only as Shaykh Hossein from Khurasan. We didn’t have a full name for him or a title, and no one paid much attention to him. The assumption was that he was a rogue operator and had no position in the Iranian government.

‘I didn’t ignore him, though. He seemed to be everywhere there was trouble. He often met Mughniyah. It wasn’t until later, after the Algerians fingered Mughniyah, that a member of the IJO put it together and identified him by his full name, Hossein Mosleh. Using a little regressive analysis, I determined that Mosleh had organized the IJO. He had good connections with Fatah, and he organized the IJO along the lines of Fatah’s Black September - no identifiable leaders, no office, no logo. In other words, no return address for its terrorist operations. And yes, you’re right. The IJO is a fiction, meant only to hide the Iranian hand in its operations.’

‘I’d already more or less figured that out,’ I said. ‘But how long ago did the CIA know it?’

‘I’m trying to tell you. Right from the beginning. It was there in black and white, at least if you looked at the evidence objectively.’

Jim pulled out a stack of files and leafed through them, pulling out the best reports to show me.

‘Why didn’t I know this when I was in Beirut?’ I asked, my jaw slack.

‘Because all the good stuff was squirreled away in the Hostage Task Force.’

Made up of a half-dozen analysts who convened privately from time to time to discuss hostage issues, the Hostage Task Force kept no minutes, produced no disseminated assessments, and maintained no computer databases. Under normal circumstances, it would have prepared what is called an National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the hostages and Iranian terrorism. But this didn’t happen. The raw reporting on Iran was simply buried, all to keep it out of the hands of Congress and the press. Incidentally, the same thing happened with Saudi Arabia. The CIA was not allowed to produce an NIE on the growing fundamentalist threat there. Had it leaked, it would have offended the Saudi royal family. All this I should have worked out before now.

I had one last question. ‘What did we know about Iran and the 1983 embassy bombing?’

Jim sucked in some air and reached in the back of his safe to pull out a three-page paper. ‘Take a look at this puppy.’

It was an intelligence report from March 1982 - a full thirteen months before the embassy bombing - stating that Iran was in touch with a network capable of destroying the US embassy in Beirut. A subsequent report even specified a date the operation should be carried out. The source was firsthand and its reliability rock solid.