Site Map

TRAIL OF THE OCTOPUS -- FROM BEIRUT TO LOCKERBIE -- INSIDE THE DIA

Chapter 10:

Having successfully worked himself out of the job of CBN's Beirut correspondent, Coleman went back to the Middle East in December 1985, as Condor Television Ltd., a one-man production company with an 'office' in the Kastantiana hotel, Larnaca, Cyprus.

Set up by his guru, James McCloskey, as an offshore Gibraltar corporation, with bank accounts (Nos. 00569798 and 02843900) at the First American Bank of Maryland (a BCCI subsidiary), Condor was to be Coleman's front for resuming control of Tony Asmar's network of agents in Lebanon.

As before, his duties were to direct and evaluate the flow of intelligence data, channel it back to the DIA in Washington, and act as paymaster for what was now by far the most valuable Western intelligence asset in the Middle East. To avoid any possibility of its being compromised by payments traceable to the DIA, Coleman used Visa traveller's cheques drawn on BCCI, Luxembourg. These were delivered to him by DHL, the international courier company, in shipments containing ten packets of ten unsigned $100 cheques. Every month, Asmar's secretary would take the Sunboat from Jounieh to Larnaca to collect the payroll from Coleman for distribution within the network, each cell member then signing his cheques and counter-signing them on presentation to a Lebanese bank for payment.

No sooner had he set up these new procedures than Coleman was summoned to the American Embassy in Nicosia by the Department of Defense attache, Col. John Sasser, to whom he had reported on leaving Beirut as a CBN 'refugee' a few months earlier. Although Donleavy had told him to stay clear of American officials overseas in case they were under surveillance by foreign intelligence agencies, Coleman assumed that Sasser had cleared the meeting with Control and drove up from Larnaca to keep the appointment, expecting to be briefed on some unexpected emergency, Instead, Sasser showed him a home videotape of a Hezbollah demonstration in Beirut and asked if he could identify anybody.

Annoyed that his cover might have been jeopardized for such a trivial reason, Coleman left Sasser's office with the intention of coding an immediate complaint to Donleavy -- only to run into Micheal T. Hurley on the stairway. This was even more embarrassing, for Donleavy's strictures about keeping away from the embassy had focused particularly on the risks of associating with the Drug Enforcement Administration's 'cowboys', the DIA's contempt for the CIA under William Casey being exceeded only by its detestation of the DEA.

Greeting Coleman like an old friend, although they had met only once before, Hurley said Sasser had told him about Condor Television and its plans for covering events in Lebanon, and how about joining him for lunch? As much to find out how much Sasser had told him as to learn what Hurley was up to, Coleman agreed, and over a sandwich from the embassy canteen in Hurley's basement office, discovered that the DEA attache was trying to put together a videotape documenting narcotics production in the Bekaa Valley.

'Think you can help us out with that?' Hurley asked, 'You got anybody over there can shoot some pictures for us?'

'Well, I don't know,' said Coleman cautiously. 'We're just setting up here -- we don't have much equipment or anything yet. Why don't I get back to you when I have this thing up and running?'

When he reported this encounter to Control, Donleavy hit the roof and summoned him to Frankfurt,

They had met there before for face-to-face debriefings during Operation Steeplechase, and the routine was always the same. Coleman would check into the Sheraton airport hotel and call a contact number, identifying himself as Benjamin B, and almost immediately, Donleavy would call back.

"Howyadoin', buddy?' (He always called Coleman 'buddy'.) 'Have a good trip? Here's what I want you to do. In exactly thirty-five minutes, I want you to leave and go to the airport terminal. Take the escalator down to the lower level. Get on the train and get off at the third [or fourth or fifth] stop. Cross over and go back two [or three or four] stops. Get off, cross over again and come on in to the Meinhof. Get off, go through the gate, and I'll meet you, okay?'

'Okay?' Coleman shakes his head at the memory of it.

Like hell I was okay. Two stops, did he say? Is this the right train? I could have wound up in Wiesbaden for all I knew. But I'd get off at the Meinhof, looking straight ahead and keep on walking and I'd feel this presence move up beside me. In a trenchcoat. 'Hey, buddy,' he'd say, and get real animated. 'How's everything? How's Mary-Claude?' And there we were, two friends coming off the train together.

After leaving the station, we'd just walk around for ten or fifteen minutes, doubling back on our tracks, heading in through the lobby of a big hotel and straight out again through the rear entrance, until finally we'd come to some itty-bitty hotel in a back street with a desk in the hallway, and we'd do the elevator routine. Up to the fifth floor, then walk down to the third, where he'd taken a couple of rooms. It was always the same with him. I used to call it the spook walk.

And once we got there, the routine was always the same. We'd have a drink. He'd chain-smoke a couple of Merits while we chatted about what had happened since our last meeting and then he'd hand me over to the guy in the room next door for a routine polygraph. Happened every three or four months. 'See you later,' he'd say, and often it was five or six hours later. There would be the guy with the black box in a suitcase and the chair facing the wall that I would sit in while he sat in a chair behind me. He'd fit the electrodes to my fingers, a band around my chest and a blood-pressure gauge to my left arm and then we'd go at it, heat full up, windows closed, sweating like pigs because that was supposed to make the polygraph more accurate.

Same questions over and over again. A lot of them related to the data I'd been passing but also he'd want to know who I'd been talking to. Had I been in contact with officials of other governments? Any close contacts with foreign nationals? If so, when, how and why? The whole thing was designed to smoke out double agents, to make sure you hadn't gone over and started to work for the other side. I didn't mind. Seemed like a sensible precaution to me. After that, I'd take a shower, we'd have a meal sent up, get a good night's sleep, and start fresh in the morning.

Donleavy had thought seriously about the chance encounter with Hurley, and, on balance, had decided that they might turn it to account, although ...

He was mad at Sasser for calling me in [Coleman remembers]. 'In future, if he wants to know anything,' Donleavy said, 'he can go through channels.' And as it looked like Sasser had told Hurley something about me, Control passed the word that I had handled some contract work for the Defense Department in the past, just minor stuff, but that it was all finished now.

'So if Hurley asks you again if you can do something for him,' he said, 'tell him, okay. Otherwise he's going to get suspicious. But you don't tell him Condor is a DIA operation or let him think you're with DIA HUMINT. And under no circumstances do you tell him about any assets we have in place in Lebanon. If he wants to know who your contacts are over there, make 'em up.' 'Fine,' I said. 'And I'm going to have to make up the cameras and equipment, too, because we don't have any.'

'That's all right, buddy,' he said. 'Just string him along until we get things squared away. There could be a positive spin to it because now you can keep an eye on Hurley for us. We've been picking up some bad vibes on that guy. But watch yourself. That whole bunch is into cowboys and Indians. Just don't get too close.'

Returning to Cyprus on 16 February, Coleman engineered another meeting with Hurley and told him Condor would be glad to do what it could to help.

'Hey, that's great,' Hurley said. 'We heard some good things about you -- and you'll find we pay better than the military. We got all kinds of people shooting stuff for us out there. Mostly media people, so you probably know 'em already. One way or another, we get to see most of their stuff before it gets Stateside. So pass the word to your guys. Tell 'em we'll buy anything they can get on narcotics. People. Places. Labs. Illegal ports. We want the whole picture. And here's a few bucks to grease a few palms.'

Signed up as a 'contract consultant', Coleman was paid $4000 in the next two months for supplying Hurley with absolutely nothing. His 'guys' in Lebanon, the Asmar network, were not to be risked on routine intelligence for the DEA, and Coleman had no other contacts there that he cared to expose to the Syrian-backed heroin cartel in the Bekaa Valley.

"Donleavy was right [Coleman says]. They were cowboys. Rock'n' roll cowboys, with beards, long hair, leather boots and jeans -- the embassy people couldn't stand them. Not their sort of bridge partners at all. And to see 'em hanging out upstairs with the spooks in their tennis shorts -- God, what a picture. America in action overseas.

But Hurley was no fool. At first sight, he was the kind of big, bull-headed Irish-American you'd expect to see in a blue uniform directing traffic, but he had Cyprus pretty much in his pocket and was planning to retire there after he'd put in his twenty years. He was shrewd, in a self-serving way, and friendly enough. But if anybody crossed him, or if he thought the embassy establishment was trying to put him down, he'd stand on his desk and raise hell.

He was always screaming about how they dumped on him. How he had the worst office space in the building, and the worst housing of all the embassy staff. When Hurley got off on one of his tirades, Danny Habib, his number two, would stand in the doorway and roll his eyes, and Connie, his secretary, a typical career civil service type, would cluck around like a mother hen. 'Now, Mike, don't do that. Get off the desk. You just cool down now, you hear me?'

But nobody could tell Hurley what to do. Not Connie, not me and certainly not anybody in Washington. They were all assholes at DEA headquarters, according to Hurley. They'd never understood him or what he was trying to do, he once told me. That was in the beginning, during our honeymoon period. But after two months and $4000 and still nothing to show for it, he was getting a little hacked off at Condor Television."

Control came to the rescue. On 4 April 1986, Coleman was summoned to Frankfurt for another 'spook walk' and polygraph.

'How long since you were in Libya?' Donleavy asked, once the formalities were over.

Coleman shook his head. 'You probably know better than me,' he said. 'Not for years. Not since the late sixties.'

'Well ... Hasn't changed much. Think you can find your way around Tripoli?'

'I guess so. I still know some people there anyway. Why? What's going on?'

Donleavy seemed not to hear. 'Do you have a way to get in?' he asked. 'Or do we need to set something up? There isn't much time.'

'Well, I wouldn't want to use Condor. I mean, I still don't have any cameras or gear, do I?' It was getting to be a sore point. 'How about as a newsman? I can probably get freelance credentials. There's a couple of radio people I can call.'

'Okay. Sounds good. But get right on it, buddy. Because when I say go, I want you gone.'

He closed his briefcase. The meeting was over.

Coleman laughed. 'You mean, I'm not supposed to know why I'm going?'

Donleavy sat down again and lit another Merit. He had the air of a man about to break a rule of a lifetime.

'You're going in there to observe the effect of Operation El Dorado Canyon,' he said.

Coleman waited, but that was all. 'Okay. So what the hell's El Dorado Canyon?'

'We're going to give Gaddafi a slap,' said Donleavy. 'Maybe take him out.'

'No shit.' Coleman whistled. 'What's he done now?'

Control shrugged. 'They reckon the disco bombing was enough.'

'In West Berlin? The Libyans didn't do that.'

'I know,' said Donleavy.

Coleman flew back to Cyprus on 6 April to rejoin Mary-Claude in Larnaca. She was particularly glad to see him as she had just been told she was pregnant.

The next day, finding it difficult to concentrate on anything as mundane as a punitive airstrike against Gaddafi, he called Evelyn Starnes, managing editor of Mutual Radio, in Arlington, Virginia. Ms. Starnes, who had once worked for him in the news department of WSGN Radio in Birmingham, Alabama, agreed at once that he should cover pending events in Libya for Mutual Radio and promised to get the necessary credentials to him within 48 hours. He then called his father, now living in retirement at Lake Martin, and got the name of a former Libyan engineering colleague, whom Coleman immediately telexed, saying he was coming out for a visit.

Control said all that was just fine, and to stand by for instructions.

On 16 April, Coleman met Donleavy in Zurich for a last-minute briefing. His mission was now critically important, he was told, because the CIA had pulled its operatives out of Tripoli in advance of the attack. Never mind that they might have tipped off Gaddafi by doing so, there was nobody now left on the ground to report back directly to the United States government on the effects of the bombing. It was all up to Coleman.

Well, thanks, he said. Libya was a big country. Expect him back in six months.

He could have three days, Donleavy said. They were not so much interested in damage assessment. They could do that by satellite. What the bird couldn't do was measure the impact of the raid on Libyan morale. How would the population react? Would its response be positive or negative? If Gaddafi survived, would it weaken or strengthen his position as leader? Would the bombing succeed as a deterrent, discouraging popular support for terrorism, or would it provoke a desire for revenge? Coleman's job was to get out on the streets and talk to people, to come back with a feel for what the bombing had achieved.

Donleavy posed these questions as if, like Coleman, he knew what the answers were already.

In the wake of the F-111s that had flown out from their British bases to bomb targets in Tripoli and Benghazi, Mutual Radio's correspondent arrived on the scene on 17 April with a laissez passer from the Libyan Consulate in Zurich. He had no difficulty getting in. Mourning the death of his adopted daughter in the raid, Gaddafi was inviting the world to come and see what the Americans had done to him.

After dutifully inspecting the destruction at the El Azziziya barracks, where the Libyan leader lived, at the port of Sidi Balal and at Tripoli airport, as well as the damage done to the French Embassy and to civilian homes adjoining the target areas, Coleman left the media pack clamouring for phone lines at the El Khebir hotel or doing 'stand-ups' on the roof and went off on his own. (To avoid getting bogged down with routine reporting at the expense of his DIA mission, he had telexed Ms. Starnes from Zurich to say he had been denied entry, a diplomatic untruth that still gives him a twinge when he thinks of it.)

Luckily, his father's former colleague at Esso Libya invited Coleman to stay with him, for there had seemed a pretty obvious danger in starting a cold canvas of opinion so soon after the raid. Feeling was running high in the city against the American 'butchers'. Whatever internal dissent there might have been had clearly been silenced by a unifying sense of outrage over the city's 37 dead. Coupled with a wave of popular sympathy for Gaddafi as a bereaved father, resentment at what was seen as Washington's bully-boy tactics appeared to have rallied the Libyans behind him with a solidarity he had rarely enjoyed before.

Networking out through the families and friends of Libyans he knew, talking to people in their homes, in coffee shops, in the markets and on the streets, Coleman met no one prepared to acknowledge even the smallest justification for the American action. From all that he heard, it was clear that Gaddafi's position had been secured for him in a way that his palace guard and secret police could never have managed on their own. Any question of a coup or a move towards popular democracy had been snuffed out.

With his knowledge of Arab ways, Coleman was not surprised. What did surprise him a little, and which argued a political maturity that even sensitive Western observers were sometimes inclined to overlook, was that, in three days of systematic canvassing of Libyan opinion, he encountered little or no personal hostility. The anger and resentment expressed at every level, from street vendor to middle-class intellectual, was almost entirely directed at Washington, not at him as an individual American. It was almost as if they considered him to be as much a victim of his government as they were of theirs, as if he could no more be held responsible for Reagan's actions than they could for Gaddafi's.

He told all this to Donleavy on his return to Zurich on 19 April. They talked for hours, and as he piled on the detail in his report, so Donleavy became ever more thoughtful and preoccupied.

'Okay, buddy,' he said eventually. 'Send Hurley a postcard. Tell him you're not coming back.'

'Say again?'

'Deactivate yourself. I need you back home for a spell.'

'Okay. But why don't I tell him myself? I can call from Larnaca.'

'No, no. I want you to head right on out of here to D.C. We got a lot of debriefing to do.'

'Now, wait a minute, Bill,' Coleman protested. 'What about Mary-Claude? I can't just leave her behind. She's pregnant.'

'Sure.' Donleavy nodded. 'So give her a break. This way, she can take her time packing your stuff and follow on when she's good and ready.' He checked his watch. 'Call her. You got an hour. If you get your ass in gear, you can make it out of here tonight.'

'Hold on, Bill. What about Tony Asmar? I can't just leave him high and dry either. We got a shit-load of stuff coming through about the hostages.'

'I know, buddy, but this is more important. Call Mary-Claude and write Hurley goodbye. You'll find your ticket downstairs by the time you check out.'

Coleman sighed.

'Come to think of it,' said Donleavy, 'maybe it's not too smart to get a U.S. entry stamp in your passport right after this. You better fly back via Canada and go in on your Leavy I.D.'

Donleavy tried to make up for it later by arranging a champagne thank-you weekend for the Colemans at the DIA's expense in an exclusive little Georgetown hotel, but by then they were almost too tired to enjoy it. Mary-Claude's pregnancy had been troublesome from the start, even without the stress of a month's separation and having to cope by herself with the move back from Cyprus, and Coleman was exhausted from a grueling month of detailed debriefings by a stream of DIA officers and analysts at an assortment of Ramada Inns in the Baltimore/Washington area.

He was also for the first time vaguely troubled about the DIA's priorities in the Middle East, particularly with respect to the Western hostages in Beirut. As far as Donleavy and his masters were concerned, clearly nothing was more important than preserving the integrity of Tony Asmar's network of agents in Lebanon. They were Washington's eyes and ears.

"We could have gotten the hostages out any damn time we wanted to [Coleman insists], but nobody was willing to rock the boat with a rescue operation. We knew where they were. We knew who their guards were. We knew what they had for lunch. We knew when and where they were going to be moved before their guards did. But the DIA wouldn't risk any action based on information that might have been traced back to one of Asmar's people. If we'd blown the network because of the hostages we would have left ourselves blind in the middle of a minefield. So there had to be another way. And it was in trying for another way that the CIA let in people like Monzer al-Kassar and, without meaning to, set up the whole Lockerbie scenario.

One of the factors that led me to sign up with the DIA was the idea that I might be able to do something for my friend Jerry Levin, who had been taken hostage in Beirut by Hezbollah, but as it happened he was released before I got out there. He and I had met in Birmingham, Alabama, while he was news director of WBRC TV and I was news director of WSGN radio. When he landed the job of Beirut bureau chief for Cable News Network, I remember I said to a colleague that if Jerry was ever taken hostage, his kidnappers would probably wind up paying CNN to take him back -- and I was only half wrong. He had a wicked tongue when roused and could talk a blue streak. The story going around at the time was that he had ticked off the Lebanese bureau staff to the point where they sold him to Hezbollah for a bit of peace and quiet!

Officially, he was supposed to have escaped by sliding down bedsheets from an upper window, but the truth is that CNN's vice president, Ed Turner -- no relation to Ted Turner -- had to pay a hefty ransom for him. The deal was set up by Ghazi Kenaan, Syria's head of security in Beirut, who naturally took his cut off the top.

Another wave of kidnappings began soon after I got out there in 1985. Terry Anderson was taken, then Brian Keenan and John McCarthy in Apri1 1986, followed by Terry Waite in January 1987.

Waite was a special case, of course. It's no secret now that he hooked up with Oliver North and Bill Casey of the CIA in an effort to trace the hostages -- all of them unaware that the DIA, through Tony Asmar's network, already knew where they were. North wanted to have Waite wired to keep track of his movements electronically, but Waite, very sensibly, refused. So naturally they went ahead and did it anyway, without Waite's knowledge. Before he left Larnaca airport on a U.S. Navy helicopter for the hop over to the American Embassy in East Beirut, his briefcase was rigged with a microchip Gigaherz transmitter no bigger than a butter biscuit.

That was stupid, and typical of North's cowboy mentality. As soon as Waite vanished, the trail went cold, because the first thing his kidnappers did was separate him from his briefcase.

It took Tony Asmar a month to find out where he was. Islamic Jihad had stashed Waite in the basement car park of a four-storey building in Baalbeck, in the Bekaa Valley. After that, they moved him to a building near Rue Michelle Boutros, and later on to the cellars of two different hospitals in West Beirut, both of them supplied by Tony's company, AMA Industries.

These hospitals were funded by Iran to treat battle casualties -- Hezbollah, Amal militiamen and Syrian troops, depending on who happened to be fighting whom at the time -- and they were ideal places for holding hostages. Not only Waite, but Anderson, McCarthy, Keenan, Mann and most of the others were also hidden there at various times, housed underground on two soundproofed levels. There were reliable supplies of electrical power, food and water, and if anybody got ill, help was available just upstairs.

The hostages were also pretty well protected from the fighting in the city. After all, who was going to bomb or attack a hospital? And when it came to moving them around, who was going to take any notice of vehicles coming and going from a hospital? The set-up was perfect.

It was even good enough to ease the conscience of the people on our side who decided to leave them where they were. If the hostages were reasonably safe and reasonably well cared for, why jeopardize our policy and priorities in the Middle East by trying to rescue them by force? An armed raid on a hospital was bound to cause an international outcry, particularly if we came out empty-handed.

Even so, Waite had everybody worried. I remember one time I reported that he had developed a cough and back came a directive that we should try to make an audio recording of it. Can't imagine why. Maybe somebody in the Pentagon figured they could find out how ill he was just by listening to it. Another time they asked if the hospital had taken delivery of a large bed. The Lebanese being quite short and Waite being quite tall, I guess they thought that this would show if Islamic Jihad was treating him right.

With his respiratory problem, he was lucky they didn't move him much. As I recall, they took him out in a refrigerator once, but the usual method with the hostages was to wrap them in blankets or carpet, strapped up with grey plumber's tape, cover them in sheets, then wheel them out in the middle of the night and stuff them in a van or the boot of a car for the journey. Before, during and after each move, the signals would really fly between us and Washington. We had to keep tabs on Waite at all times.

Not so with John McCarthy. The Brits' attitude was, well, he was a journalist. He had been warned the night before not to attempt to go to the airport but had done so anyway. The impression we got was that they thought it was pretty much his own fault. Like Anderson, Keenan and the others, he was a low priority. If it hadn't been for Jill Morrell and the people at WTN, London would have left him to rot.

All the noise being made about the hostages at that time was just political rhetoric. Nobody could move in those Beirut sectors without the consent of the Syrian occupying forces. If the Syrians had not permitted Hezbollah to have a presence in the southern suburbs of Beirut, there would have been no Iranian presence there. When the Syrians said, 'We don't know where the hostages are but we'll be glad to help locate them,' all they had to do was pick up the phone. Never mind what the U.S. government says or what the public thinks -- that's how it worked. The hostages could not have been held for ten minutes without Syrian permission.

General Ghazi Kenaan, commander of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon, was on top of every move the whole time. How do I know that? Because we had somebody living in his house. Because he was screwing one of Tony Asmar's Filipino operatives.

The truth is the hostages were cynically exploited by both sides for political and tactical purposes. Okay, so we couldn't afford to compromise the Asmar network with a rescue operation, but there was another reason, too, why we had to leave them where they were. We needed to keep Hafez Assad, the Syrian president, in place. He's probably the most astute politician in the Middle East, and we knew we could do business with him.

If we'd upset his applecart in busting out the hostages, then the radical fundamentalists might easily have taken over in Syria and given us a much worse problem. So, well before the Gulf War, when he turned out to be a useful counterpoise to Saddam Hussein, Assad was serving our purpose by keeping Ayatollah Khomeini quiet. Much easier for us to deal with a conniving, self-serving bastard like Assad than try to cope with a religious fanatic. Those were the priorities. The hostages had to stay where they were, and we had to play the game. But I can't say I enjoyed it."

After their weekend in Georgetown, the Colemans moved in to his family's lakeside cottage at Lake Martin, near Auburn, Alabama, to await his next assignment. Donleavy kept in touch by telephone, sometimes talking to Coleman's father by mistake as they both sounded very much alike.

'My Dad would say to Donleavy, "I think you want to talk to the other Les." Then he would hold the phone out to me and say, loud enough for Donleavy to hear, "Hey, it's the spook."

Although the DIA clearly had plans for him, it was evidently in no hurry to send him back to the Middle East. That summer, Donleavy arranged for Coleman to enroll for graduate study, with a teaching assistantship, at Auburn University, one of the many land-grant universities involved in secret government research. No one at the university was to know of his DIA connection, and to avoid any written record that might compromise his cover, Donleavy arranged for him to be paid during this period with American Express money orders drawn at 7-11 stores around Falls Church, Virginia.

On 31 August 1986, just three weeks before the Fall Term was due to begin, Donleavy called from Washington and told him he had to make an urgent trip to Lebanon.

'No way,' said Coleman. 'Mary-Claude is due in four weeks. I can't take her with me and I can't leave her here, so forget about it, Bill. I'm just not available until the baby's born.'

'I know how you feel, buddy. And I wouldn't ask you if we didn't have a real serious problem here. If there was anybody else we could send, I would, you know that. But it'll only take a couple of days.'

'Bill --

'Listen, I don't want to talk about it on the phone. Come on up here, and we'll work something out.'

On 3 September they met for dinner at the Day's Inn on Jeff Davis Highway in Crystal City, Virginia.

'Sorry to do this to you, buddy,' Donleavy said. 'But we got a national emergency on our hands with your name on it.'

'Bill, I'd like to help you out but --

'Well, we just don't have a lot of choice here. You'll be back in a week, I guarantee you. And Mary-Claude'll be just fine. Maybe you can get somebody to move in with her for a couple of days. Family, maybe.'

'Now wait a minute, Bill --

'We got you on a flight out of Dulles via Heathrow the day after tomorrow. That'll get you back here by the fourteenth.'

'That's not a week. That's ten days.'

'At the latest. Cut a few corners, and you can maybe pick up a day or two along the way.'

'Well, that depends on what you want me to do, doesn't it?'

Donleavy chuckled. 'You're going to like this one. But eat your steak. I'll tell you about it in the morning.'

This was the military. Orders were orders. Coleman ate his steak.

Next morning, Donleavy came up to his room to lay out the assignment.

'Two things,' he said. 'First, you're going to get the video equipment you want for Condor and take it out there. Tony Asmar's lined up a couple of people in Beirut to shoot some pictures for us near the airport. When they're through doing that, bring the equipment out again and come on home with the videotape.'

'Okay. Good.' Coleman looked at him curiously. A national emergency? 'So where is it? This equipment.'

'Here's what you do.' Donleavy opened his briefcase and placed an envelope on the bed. 'There's twenty-two hundred dollars. That'll buy you a Sony video system from Errol's Video Supply Store in Falls Church. Take a cab, have it wait for you, and you'll be back here in an hour.'

Coleman shook his head. But for his trust in Donleavy, he would have dropped out at this point, military or no military.

'You said two things. What's the other?'

'I'll tell you when you get back.'

An hour later, Coleman returned to the hotel with the Sony system from Errol's. He produced the receipt, Donleavy carefully itemized the equipment on a small yellow legal pad and Coleman signed for it with his code name, Benjamin B.

'Okay,' said Donleavy, putting the pad away in his briefcase. 'You're all set. Now here's the national emergency.'

He produced a Mattel Speak 'n' Spell toy computer, and Coleman sat down slowly.

'What the fuck is this? Some kind of joke?'

'No joke, buddy.' Donleavy was deadly serious. 'I want you to take this out to Tony Asmar.'

'Come on, Bill. Are you kidding me? I'm risking my marriage for this?'

'Remember a year ago?' Donleavy said. 'When you pulled the plug on CBN and the Contra deal? Well, this is it. The bottom line. This is where you get to wrap the whole thing up.'

'With that?'

'Yep.' He patted the toy. 'You got a little something extra in there.'

'Great.' Coleman weighed it in his hand suspiciously. 'It's not going to blow up on me, is it?'

'Nothing like that. We put in an extra chip, that's all. When you sit down with Tony, punch in your code word, he'll punch in his, and you'll retrieve the data we loaded in. He'll know what to do with it.'

'Oh, God. Suppose I forget the code word. You know what I'm like with those things.'

'You won't forget this one. You're from the South. What's the Southern slang word for peanut?'

'You mean, goober?'

Donleavy beamed.

Next day, Coleman flew to Heathrow with the camera equipment and the Mattel Speak 'n' Spell, arriving on the morning of 6 September. From there, he took a direct flight to Larnaca, Cyprus, and after four hours' sleep, caught the midnight ferry to Jounieh. Asmar's fiancee, Giselle, Mary-Claude's sister, met him off the boat, and as it was now Sunday, they joined the family for lunch at their house in Sarba.

On Monday, 8 September, Coleman got to work with Asmar in his office at Karintina. After testing the video equipment, they sent Asmar's volunteer cameramen off to start shooting the locations Control had specified in the western sectors of Beirut, places where, Coleman assumed, the hostages were being held. They then put the Speak 'n' Spell on Asmar's desk, set it up in accordance with the maker's instructions, and punched in their code words.

Out poured a detailed account of visits made by Robert McFarlane and Lt-Col. Oliver North to Iran, traveling on Irish passports, to organize the sale of TOW missiles and launchers to the Iranian government in exchange for the release of American hostages; details of money transfers and bank accounts, with dates and places -- most of it based on incidents and conversations that could only have been known to the Iranian or American negotiators.

'My God,' said Coleman. He had known North was seriously out of favour at the Pentagon, but here was another glimpse into the pit. 'What are you supposed to do with this stuff?'

Asmar looked at him soberly, and Coleman did not press the point.

He left Beirut with the camera equipment and videotapes on 11 September, arriving back in Cyprus on the 12th. Next day, he flew to Heathrow, and after an overnight stop in London, traveled on to Montreal, and from there, as Thomas Leavy, to Baltimore Washington International airport, where he checked in, as instructed, at the Ramada Inn. Donleavy, accompanied this time by another agent, arrived there early next morning, the 15th, for a full day's debriefing, and that night Coleman headed south for Alabama to rejoin Mary-Claude at the Lake Martin cottage.

On the 23rd, he began his postgraduate studies as a teaching assistant at Auburn University, and on 2 October, also on schedule, Mary-Claude presented him with a daughter, Sarah.

Meanwhile, one of Asmar's operatives had delivered the Speak 'n' Spell material to a relative who worked for Al Shiraa, Beirut's pro-Syrian Arabic-language news magazine. When the story ran on 3 November, it was picked up at once by the Western media, touching off an international scandal of such embarrassing proportions that President Reagan was forced to act. On 25 November 1986, he fired North, accepted the resignation of Rear-Admiral John Poindexter, McFarlane's successor as National Security Adviser, and spent the rest of his administration trying to dodge the political fallout from Irangate.

'Most people assumed it was the Iranians who blew the whistle on North, McFarlane and Poindexter,' Coleman says. 'Some even said it was the Russians who leaked the story after the failure of the Reykjavik summit. But it wasn't. It was the Pentagon. It was the DIA. It was me, with my little Speak 'n' Spell.'

Go to Next Page