The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (55 page)

In future sessions, Hall watched as a Lebanese captain used a wooden bat to hit Nimr across his shins. The torture worked—or at least it persuaded Nimr to tell Hall what he wanted to hear. Nimr confessed that he’d been part of the plot to bomb the embassy. He also confessed to having some complicity in the assassination of President-elect Bashir Gemayel the previous autumn. He admitted that he’d been taking orders from Syrian intelligence agents.
Hall taped Nimr’s confession and flew back to Langley, convinced that he’d broken the case.

Not long afterwards, however, Hall learned that
Nimr had died in his jail cell. Hall assumed Lebanese security officials had ordered Nimr’s death to silence him and protect other parties implicated in the embassy plot. Someone also leaked the fact that a CIA officer had participated in the kind of rough interrogation techniques that had led
to the death of the suspect. This earned Hall the moniker “Captain Crunch.”

Fred Hutchinson recalls that when Casey learned of Nimr’s death he hit the roof. Hall hadn’t been there when the man died, but he’d tortured the man. Casey thought this could embarrass the Agency, so he had Hall fired. “We had the Justice Department look into whether Hall should be prosecuted,” said Hutchinson. “But they said there was no case, so we just dismissed Hall. He later sued the Agency for wrongful dismissal, but nothing came of it.”

Hall remains bitter and disillusioned about his experience in the Agency. And apparently he’s unrepentant about his rough interrogation of Nimr. He believes the Agency made a mistake by refusing to pursue the leads he developed. The Lebanese eventually released all the suspects they’d rounded up. “
No one was punished for it,” Hall said, “except me!”

Unfortunately, the evidence against Nimr is less definitive than Captain Crunch would have us believe.
Newsweek
’s Dickey reported that in 1985 a Lebanese judge named Nimr as responsible for the embassy bombing. But Dickey also reported that “some of Nimr’s old colleagues say he was just a victim of bloody inter-service rivalries among Lebanon’s covert warlords and had nothing to do with the case.” And, of course, the very fact that Captain Crunch used torture devalues Nimr’s confession. Aside from that confession, there’s no other evidence tying Nimr to the embassy bombing. It was, in fact, a dead end.

Other Agency officers dismiss the evidence obtained by Hall against Nimr. Robert Baer was a CIA officer who joined the Directorate of Operations in 1976 and spent the next twenty years in India, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Baer never met Ames, but he made it his business over the years to investigate the embassy bombing. He wrote about his conclusions in his 2002 memoir
See No Evil
. The book doesn’t even mention Captain Crunch. Baer has a wholly different theory. “
Iran ordered it,” writes Baer, “and a Fatah network carried it out.” When he says “a Fatah network” he means Imad Mughniyeh, the elusive Lebanese Shi’ite operative who joined Fatah at an early age.
Baer makes a circumstantial case that Mughniyeh was still in touch with his old Fatah comrades when the embassy was attacked.

Soon after Ames was killed, his fellow Arabist Sam Wyman was appointed head of Arab-Israeli affairs in the Directorate of Operations. “
I was asked to keep tabs on the investigation of the embassy bombing,” Wyman said. “I went out to Beirut and met with officers from the Lebanese intelligence and police services. And I read the investigative reports. But I don’t recall ever seeing any hard evidence on who did it.” As late as 2001, former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger told PBS, “
We still do not have actual knowledge of who did the bombing of the Marine barracks at the Beirut Airport, and we certainly didn’t then.” Yet over the years, a consensus has gradually emerged that places Mughniyeh as the key protagonist in any narrative on who was responsible for the 1983 embassy bombing. Still, the evidence is curiously opaque.

Mughniyeh lived in the shadows. Even his birth is in dispute. Some accounts say he was
born on July 12, 1962, in the village of Teir Dibna, a mountainous region overlooking the southern Lebanese coastal city of Tyre. But Mughniyeh seems to have doctored any official records. He may have been born on January 25, 1962, in Al-Jiwar, a poor neighborhood in the southern suburbs of Beirut. He came from a poor Shi’a family who for generations had made their living from a small orchard of olive and lemon trees. He grew up in the slums of southern Beirut, bordering the largely Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. They lived in a simple cinder-block house with no running water. His friends described him as “
very smart” and “always alert.” In 1976—at the age of fourteen—Mughniyeh and some of his friends joined a Fatah student training camp near Damour, on the southern Lebanese coast. A Fatah intelligence officer named Anis Naqqash ran the twenty-day military training course. “
Imad stood out from the others,” Naqqash told Nicholas Blanford, the author of a history of Hezbollah, “because while everyone was looking forward to the end of the course when they would get to fire guns, Imad was more interested in learning
about tactics. He was the only one, apart from a teacher and a Maoist, who wrote down notes during the course. He was not interested in shooting guns like the others.”

Mughniyeh may possibly have spent a short time studying business at the American University of Beirut. But in the midst of the Lebanese civil war, probably in late 1978 when the Israelis invaded Lebanon for the first time,
Mughniyeh was recruited into Ali Hassan Salameh’s elite Force 17. At some point, he may have benefited from training provided by the CIA to “professionalize” Arafat’s personal bodyguard unit. Mughniyeh served as a bodyguard for Yasir Arafat, and he fought as a sniper along the Green Line dividing East and West Beirut. He made his
first visit to postrevolutionary Iran as early as 1979. Some accounts have him performing the Haj to Mecca in 1980 in the company of Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, then a leading Shi’ite cleric. Like many young Shi’ite Lebanese, Mughniyeh was radicalized by the disappearance of Lebanon’s charismatic Shi’ite cleric, Imam Musa Sadr, who vanished mysteriously on a trip to Libya in 1978. And he was further radicalized by the Israeli siege of Beirut in the summer of 1982. He’d witnessed the emotional scene between Janet Lee Stevens and Arafat in which Janet had pleaded with Arafat not to leave Beirut. And then, of course, Mughniyeh had been deeply affected by the Sabra and Shatila massacres in September 1982. He had plenty of motives.

But in April 1983 Mughniyeh was only twenty years old. As the CIA’s Robert Baer asks in his memoir, “How did a poor boy from Ayn al-Dilbah rise out of the ashes of the 1982 invasion and in less than a year put together the most lethal and well-funded terrorist organization in the world?” Baer points out the obvious: it just didn’t add up. Mughniyeh seems too young, at age twenty, to have been the mastermind for the embassy bombing. Yet in subsequent decades Mughniyeh was deeply implicated in all sorts of attacks. The CIA blames him for a long string of terrorist attacks over a period of twenty-five years: