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

Chapter 12:

'You know, buddy, you don't have to do this if you don't want to,' Donleavy said. 'Those guys are bad news. Anything goes wrong, they'll just leave you face down in the shit.'

'So what else is new?'

It was already too late. Mary-Claude was hopping with excitement at the idea of showing off their new daughter to her family.

'Hey!' Donleavy did his best to look hurt. 'We're the guys who hate to make mistakes, remember? The DEA, hell -- it's just one big mistake. Which is why we want you out there. To keep an eye on 'em.'

'Sure.'

Heads we win, tails you lose. But there had been little doubt he would go from the moment Micheal Hurley had called during the Thanksgiving holiday to say he had at last been funded for a major operation in the Middle East and would Coleman be interested in going back to Cyprus as a DEA contractor?

Maybe, Coleman had replied cautiously, but it was not up to him. He had been involved in other things.

Hurley already knew that, but he was sure the logistics could be worked out if Coleman agreed.

So was Donleavy when Coleman told him about Hurley's call. The DEA had already expressed an interest in getting him back there, he said. If Coleman was willing, he was ready to second him to Hurley to protect the security of DIA's mission in the Middle East. While working on the DEA/CIA operation Hurley had mentioned, Coleman could keep tabs on DEA's Cyprus station and provide 'back channel' reports on what it was up to.

The Colemans were willing. During the first week of December 1986, Donleavy came down to the Windfrey hotel at River Chase, Alabama, just south of Birmingham, for the first of several briefing sessions.

The DIA was worried about DEA personnel getting caught up in secret intelligence missions, he explained. None of them had been trained in covert operations other than when dealing with criminals. Its misgivings dated from the DEA's links with the CIA under the late DCI William Casey, whose Contra operations, as Coleman well knew, had been childish and reckless.

In contrast, the DIA's covert activities had never been compromised and it had never become embroiled in public controversy. In order to keep things that way, the agency was obliged to keep track of other U.S. intelligence operations that might prove embarrassing and to head them off as necessary.

If Coleman accepted the assignment, under no circumstances would he permit anybody to have any direct contact with or knowledge of DIA operatives in the region or allow anyone to suspect that he was reporting 'back channel' to Donleavy in Washington.

'You'll also need a better cover story,' he added, 'if you're going to be seen around with Hurley and his crowd. So I want you to enroll for the winter term at Auburn for one course. Thesis Research. It's for your master's degree. And your thesis topic is "The Role of Illegal Narcotics Trafficking in the Lebanese Political Crisis".'

Coleman smiled.

Donleavy seemed pleased with it, too. 'Just tell your faculty adviser you got a research grant from the DEA, and you'll be spending the term at the American Embassy in Nicosia.'

And so it was.

In January, Donleavy called from Washington to say he had met with Hurley and his people to discuss Coleman's assignment to NARCOG Nicosia, and if he still wanted the job, he should collect the family's travel expenses and airline tickets from the DEA's Birmingham field office. In Cyprus, he would live in government housing, use a green staff pass to enter the embassy, and receive mail via FrO New York 09530, a federal postal address for U.S. government employees overseas. Anything else he needed, he should work out for himself with Hurley.

'Okay,' said Coleman. 'How much does he have to know?'

"About you? No more than he knows already. Just your vital statistics and your alternative I.D. In case they want to use you undercover.'

'The Thomas Leavy I.D.?'

'Right. He probably knows about it anyway. They're in pretty tight with Langley. But that's it. Not a word about me or the agency or anything you've done for us or why you're there or anything.'

'Fine,' said Coleman. 'And the back channel reports?'

'I'll come down and talk to you about that,' Donleavy said.

He arrived with a Radio Shack hand-held computer phone dialer and a two-speed microcassette recorder for Coleman to use, with the code that had worked so successfully before, based on a standard telephone touch-tone pad.

On 21 February 1987, the Colemans were met off the plane at Larnaca airport by Special Agent Dany Habib, Hurley's number two at DEA Nicosia.

An Arabic-speaking Tunisian-American, Habib was the son of Phillip Habib, a former government agent who had played a big part in breaking up the French Connection in Marseilles during the 1960s. Shrewd, devious and Arab-looking, Dany Habib and Coleman took to each other on sight, despite their professional caution, sensing they could work together.

Hurley was waiting for them on the tarmac near the terminal in his big blue BMW 520i. When the Colemans' baggage arrived, without the formality of having to clear Customs, Coleman jokingly observed that the DEA attache must have the island in his pocket, a suggestion that Hurley took quite seriously.

'You bet your sweet ass,' he said. 'I got customs and immigration working for me and the Cypriot National Police. Once you got that, you got the whole damn country by the balls.'

'So hearts and minds must surely follow,' said Coleman politely. Hurley did not improve on further acquaintance.

'You better believe it. Anybody gets out of line, we just run his ass clear off the island. So any problems, you come to me. I'm your sphincter muscle, okay? Everything passes through me. I'm your total interface with this operation.'

It was hard to tell if he meant this as a warning, a threat or an offer of assistance. Habib remained impassive, and Mary-Claude, with Sarah in her lap, looked out the window. She had long since realized her husband worked for the government, but he had never discussed it with her, much less told her he was a spy. The space between them was filling up with unasked and unanswered questions.

The Colemans were driven to Filanta Court, on Archbishop Makarios Avenue, and handed the keys of No. 62B, a large three-bedroomed apartment with a balcony overlooking the port of Larnaca from which everybody getting on or off the ferry from Lebanon could be observed through binoculars.

On the way in from the airport, Hurley had warned him that the back bedroom was full of electronic gear that nobody knew how to use. Coleman's first job for NARCOG would be to get it operational as a listening post to monitor Lebanese radio traffic and to keep track of shipping movements in and out of Lebanese ports. Among the equipment was a maritime receiver that automatically picked up ship transmissions while continuously scanning a preset frequency range and recorded everything on tape, including the position of each vessel.

'Taxi George' was waiting inside the apartment and 'Syrian George' arrived a few minutes later. While Mary-Claude saw to the baby and busied herself around the apartment, Habib made the introductions.

Syrian George would man the listening post every day, play back the tapes and provide translations as required. A former officer in the so-called Pink Panther Brigade under Rifat Assad, he held a master's degree from the University of Kiev and, as Coleman quickly discovered, worked harder than anybody because he was desperate to get to America and Hurley kept promising to get a visa for him if he made himself useful.

Taxi George, a likeable Iraqi Chaldean Christian who worked as an interrogator for the Cypriot National Police Narcotics Squad, was another key informant. Fluent in Arabic, Greek and English, he visited the U.S. several times a year as a DEA courier, making controlled deliveries of Lebanese heroin to dealer networks in and around Detroit, but had proved even more useful to Hurley as a taxi driver.

Lebanese drug traffickers visiting the island to close a deal would check into a hotel like the Palm Beach or the Golden Bay on Dekalia Road, and, on going out to dinner, would find Taxi George at the curb. With no reason to suppose he was anybody but a Greek-Cypriot, they would go on talking business in Arabic, and Taxi George would time their cab ride according to the intelligence value of their conversation.

Hurley had promised him a visa, too.

Then there was Ibrahim El-Jorr, who had an American passport already. An erratic Lebanese with a wife and family in Beirut and a Dutch mistress in Nicosia, he wore jeans and cowboy boots and drove around at high speed in a Chevy 4 X 4 with expired Texas licence plates. He claimed to have been at the Munich Olympics in 1972 while serving with the U.S. Army, and seemed particularly proud of a photograph of himself in officer's uniform (without apparently realising that the insignia were incorrect).

El-Jorr was Hurley's principal link to a network of DEA informants/CIA 'assets' in Lebanon, many of them members of the warring clans of the pro-Syrian Kabbaras and the anti-Syrian Jafaars in the Bekaa Valley.

Two of them, Zouher Kabbara and his cousin Nadim Kabbara, had unfortunately been arrested in Rome about a month before Coleman arrived on Cyprus, but he did meet Sami Jafaar, a short, stocky, fast-talking Shiite drug runner with a hairy chest festooned with gold chains and medallions.

Technically, Sami was a confidential informant (CI) for Michael Pavlick, the DEA's country attache in Paris, but he was to play a vital part in Operation Goldenrod, a project preoccupying the NARCOG task force in Nicosia when Coleman arrived there, and which was to touch off the chain reaction of events that exploded over Lockerbie 21 months later.

In January 1986, President Reagan had signed a secret directive -- 'They can run, but they can't hide' -- instructing the octopus to identify terrorists responsible for crimes against American citizens abroad and to bring them to justice in U.S. courts. By October, when the administration's Operations Sub-Group on Terrorism met in the White House Situation Room, the target list had been whittled down to one, Fawaz Younis, whom the CIA described as 'a key player in the back-street world of terrorism ... who reported directly to the leadership of the Shiite Amal militia'.

In fact, he was a Beirut used-car dealer who had once been a member of the Syrian-backed Amal militia headed by Nabi Berri, a Shiite Muslim cabinet minister in the Lebanese government (and a less well-known businessman in Detroit, Michigan).

Though not a high-level suspect, Younis was wanted in connection with the hijacking of a Jordanian airliner with three Americans aboard in 1985. He had also been identified as one of those who had guarded the hostages after the TWA 747 hijack in June of that year, which made him an accomplice in the murder of U.S. Navy diver, Robert Stetham. More to the point, he was the only accessible target the CIA had been able to find, and the DEA had an informant -- Sami Jafaar -- who was both willing and able to nail him.

Sami's cousin and business associate, Jamal Hamadan, had known Younis for six years. They had once shared an apartment in Beirut, and when Hamadan later moved to Poland to run the Jafaars' heroin export business to the Eastern bloc through their offices in Warsaw, Younis had paid him an extended visit there. The Jafaars' main competitor in Eastern Europe was, as always, the Assad cartel, which worked out of a front company on Stawkis Street and another, ZIBADO, on Friedrichstrasse in East Berlin.

Sami Jafaar was confident he could persuade Hamadan to renew his friendship with Younis, and that, between them, they could cook up some pretext to lure Younis out of Lebanon into neutral territory for an FBI snatch. Hamadan became equally confident they could do so when the CIA offered them both 'asset' status, which meant virtual immunity from prosecution or the risk of ever having to surface in court and testify as witnesses.

The Hamadan clan, like the Jafaars, had been involved in a losing struggle against the Syrian cartel ever since Rifat Assad and Monzer al-Kassar had taken over the Bekaa Valley in 1975 with the help of the Syrian Army. One of the reasons why Sami and Jamal were so happy to cooperate with the Americans was that Younis belonged to the Syrian-backed Amal militia, which had burned Jafaar and Hamadan poppy fields and destroyed their processing labs, and here was a chance for revenge.

The fact that the DEA and the CIA were heavily involved with both camps would have meant nothing to Sami and Jamal. As far as they were concerned, and like most Arab players in the narcotics game, the DEA was welcome to play one side off against another, so long as they could watch safely from the sidelines. Business was business.

By the time Coleman picked up the threads of the plot in February 1987, there was still no clear plan of attack, although it was generally agreed among Hurley and his colleagues that luring Younis into a drug deal was probably the key, and that a lot of political hassle would be avoided if he could be taken, say, in international waters. Precisely how he was to be enticed aboard a suitable vessel remained in doubt, particularly as the DEA neither owned nor controlled a suitable vessel.

Finding one was Coleman's first assignment for Operation Goldenrod, inbetween setting up a NARCOG listening post in his back bedroom and instructing the Cypriot Police Force Narcotics Squad (CPFNS) in electronic surveillance. At CPFNS headquarters near the Nicosia Hilton, a cupboardful of expensive audio and video equipment paid for by the U.N. Fund for Drug Abuse Control was gathering dust and Hurley was anxious to get it out in the field, even though wiretaps were strictly illegal in Cyprus.

No, it was okay, he said. The government would turn a blind eye if the targets were foreign nationals, and particularly a despised Lebanese like Fawaz Younis.

In 1986, Coleman had struck up a friendship at the Larnaca marina with Fohad Beaini, a lively boat-builder better known around the docks as Abou Talar. A short, wiry Lebanese in his fifties, Talar lived aboard a partially finished 81-foot yacht, King Edmondo, with a tall, blonde Danish woman who towered over him and was known locally as 'Foofoo', as she was thought to be somewhat strange. He had pumped all his savings into building the boat, using bits and pieces scrounged from all over the Middle East, and was suspiciously eager to part with it. When Hurley approved of Coleman's find and hurriedly arranged for the CPFNS to buy King Edmondo for $80,000, Talar pocketed the money, kissed Foofoo goodbye and disappeared into Lebanon before anybody thought to take the boat out on trial.

Although the funds had come from Hurley's budget, the yacht was bought in the name of Andreous Kasikopu, a retired Cypriot marine police captain who looked remarkably like Claude Rains. This was in the interests of deniability. The DEA was free to use it for any covert operation it wished, but if anything went wrong, Hurley could always say, 'Oh, you mean that Cypriot boat.'

In fact, something went technically wrong almost at once. A week after taking delivery, Kasikopu telephoned the American Embassy to report that the transmissions of both engines had broken down, and although new, were beyond repair. When Coleman checked with the American manufacturers in Indiana, he discovered that they were really tank engines which Talar had somehow scrounged from the Israeli Army.

After spending more of the taxpayers' funds to make the King Edmondo seaworthy, and to rig her out with state-of-the-art marine communications equipment, Coleman handed the boat over in late March to Hurley, who renamed her Skunk Kilo. At about the same time, Jamal Hamadan put in the first of the 60 telephone calls he would make from Paris to Fawaz Younis in Beirut before the trap was sprung.

As the plan now called for Jafaar and Hamadan to meet Younis in Cyprus before consummating their phony drug deal aboard Skunk Kilo, and as close electronic monitoring of their conversations would be essential to avoid last-minute surprises, Hurley was determined not to risk a breakdown in surveillance, after what had happened with the boat. Some sort of dress rehearsal was clearly required for the Cypriot police officers who were only just coming to grips with wiretap technology, and, right on cue, one of Hurley's informants passed the word that Abou Daod, a Lebanese drugs trafficker, was coming to Cyprus to set up a deal.

With CPFNS Inspector Penikos Hadjiloizu, Hurley rented several rooms in the Filanta hotel, across the street from Filanta Court and the NARCOG listening post in 62B. Under Coleman's direction, a carrier-current monitor, with microphones hidden in the sitting- room and bedroom table lamps, was installed in a first-floor suite facing the street. When the lamps were plugged in, the hotel's own electrical circuits carried the microphones' output to a receiver and voice-activated recorder in another room down the hall. As the telephone was also wired to interface with the bugs, any sound in the suite was thereby automatically recorded, the only human intervention required being a periodic change of tape.

All was in readiness when Abou Daod stepped off the Suny boat from Jounieh. Picked up by Taxi George, he was steered successfully to the Filanta hotel, where the receptionist duly assigned him to the 'hot' suite. And in the room down the hall, Sergeant Mikalis, the Cypriot police officer appointed by Inspector Hadjiloizu to sit on the wire and bring the recorded tapes across the road for translation, watched the reels begin to turn as Daod placed calls to his associates in Athens, Paris and Sofia.

A big, blustering, opinionated cop, full of self-importance, Mikalis soon grew bored with wiretap duty. After two days, in which it had become clear that Daod was organizing a drug shipment from Lebanon via Cyprus to Bulgaria, a well-worn route through the Eastern bloc into Western Europe, he decided to go home and sleep with his wife instead of staying on the job, as instructed, in case of overnight calls. At 11 p.m., he made sure there was still plenty of tape left on the machine and departed, returning at 8 a.m. the following morning to take it across the street to Syrian George.

After listening to it on his headphones for a few minutes, Syrian George stopped the tape, looked Mikalis up and down and turned to Coleman.

'Daod called Sofia at 3.03 a.m.,' he said, in Arabic. 'He told his contact he was on Olympic Airways' seven o'clock flight to Athens. You want to tell this dumb-fuck donkey son of a Shiite whore that Daod just left the country right under his nose?'

'What did he say?' asked Mikalis excitedly. 'Is there news?'

'Yeah,' said Coleman. 'He said to tell you that Mr. Daod's plane is just landing in Athens.'

The sergeant looked baffled. 'What is this meaning?' As it began to sink in, his eyes opened wider. 'He's gone? He's left Cyprus?'

'Without even saying goodbye. You want me to tell Penikos or will you?'

'No, no, no,' Mikalis said wildly. 'Gimme the tape -- I must investigate this. Gimme the tape.'

They had better luck with Fawaz Younis. By the time Jamal Hamadan, accompanied by Sami Jafaar, arrived in Cyprus to meet his old friend at the Filanta hotel, Sergeant Mikalis had been banished to police school in Germany, and his successors in the room down the hall from the 'hot' suite had been drilled by Coleman to within an inch of their lives. Every incriminating word that Younis uttered within range of the room bugs was meticulously recorded, transcribed and translated as evidence to be used against him in an American court.

Encouraged by Hamadan, Younis made much of the minor role Nabi Berri had assigned to him in the Air Jordanian incident and admitted he had helped guard the hostages after the TWA 747 hijack. He also allowed that the used-car business had failed to keep him in the style to which he had grown accustomed and rose to the prospect of a lucrative drug deal like a shark to a bucket of entrails.

To cement their renewed friendship, Hamadan then took Younis on a five-day spree through the bars and cabarets of Larnaca, topping off this dizzy round of DEA-financed hospitality by pressing $5000 into his hand as a parting gift -- an act of impulsive generosity that sent Hurley thundering upstairs to confront his CIA colleagues.

'I'm not gonna get hung with this whole thing out of my budget,' Coleman heard him insist, as did half the staff of the embassy. 'I'm just along for the ride, that's all. This guy belongs to you.'

As Coleman subsequently reported to Control, this pretty well summed up the relationship between Hurley and the spooks in Nicosia. With the national and strategic interest of the United States as part of its more elevated terms of reference, the CIA would co-opt DEA informants at will or take over a DEA operation that suited its purpose or use the DEA as a cloak for its own interests or activities without much regard for the lesser claims of law enforcement. It was already clear to Coleman from his analysis of the drugs-related intelligence coming out of Lebanon that the traditional heroin route to the U.S. via Cyprus, Frankfurt and London was used regularly by both agencies, that the traffic was not always in narcotics and that it moved both ways.

After visiting Hamadan twice more on Cyprus (to complete the softening up and the wiretap evidence), Younis was targeted for an FBI snatch on 13 September. A team from the Bureau's anti-terrorist squad flew out from Quantico, Virginia, a week beforehand to take charge of the arrangements and Hamadan placed his final call to Younis in Beirut, telling him to drop everything and come at once. He was to meet 'Joseph', a big-time drugs trafficker, aboard his yacht to conclude a deal that would solve all his problems forever.

Younis arrived in Larnaca on the 10th and joined Hamadan in another two-day, nonstop pub crawl that turned the knife in Hurley's wound and brought them, on schedule, to the Sheraton resort hotel in Limassol on the night of the 12th. Next morning, decked out like a sacrificial goat in his gold chains and designer finery, Younis left the Sheraton marina by speedboat with Sami Jafaar and Hamadan to meet the octopus.

The logistics of his complicated destiny involved not only Skunk Kilo, anchored by its FBI crew in international waters, but the USS Butte, a Navy ammunitions ship that had been shadowing the yacht by radar, the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga, standing by with a Navy S-3 jet and an escort of two F-14 Phantoms to fly him to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C., two KC-10 tanker aircraft to refuel the S-3 on the way, and 15 carloads of FBI agents to meet him on arrival.

Blissfully unaware that the full panoply of America's military might was about to deliver him up to the majesty of American justice, President Reagan's token terrorist was welcomed aboard Skunk Kilo by an undercover FBI team that was so wrought up by the occasion that in placing Younis under arrest they managed to break both his wrists, though he offered no resistance or showed any enthusiasm for the 12-mile swim back to Limassol. After that, it took the agents four days to extract a confession from their prisoner on the USS Butte before turning him over to the US Navy for the 13 hour 10 minute flight to Washington, a new solo record for a carrier-based aircraft carrying a second-hand car dealer.

After the arrest, Hamadan and Sami Jafaar returned to Limassol in the launch and were driven to the American Embassy in Nicosia.

Coleman recalls:

"It was mid-afternoon when they arrived at the compound's rear gate. Cypriot security guards checked the BMW's undercarriage with a large mirror, lowered the iron teeth into the pavement and waved them through. An Agent punched the buzzer next to the embassy's rear steel door. The men stepped inside, took the stairs to the right that led to the DEA office and rang the bell. Connie buzzed them in for a joyous greeting from Hurley, Colonel John Sasser, the Defense attache, and one of Buck Revell's FBI team, but there wasn't much time for celebration because Hamadan was wanted elsewhere for debriefing.

Hurley handed him a Turkish passport with a West German visa and he was escorted over the green line into Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus. After spending the night at an embassy cottage in Kyrenia, he was put on a Turkish Air flight to Istanbul connecting with a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt. He then spent three days at Fort King being questioned by people from the DIA, the FBI, the CIA and the DEA, and after that a bunch of U.S. Marshals took him away into the Federal Witness Protection Program. And as far as I know, Hamadan has never been heard of again from that day to this.

As for Sami Jafaar, the feeling was that he had not been compromised, although, with hindsight, it seems possible that Syrian intelligence had noticed his involvement. At any rate, he and his clan went to the top of the class as far as the DEA and CIA were concerned."

Back home, the massed ranks of the Federal government's press officers had been deployed to exploit the triumph of Goldenrod and the supposed deterrent value of President Reagan's 'They-can-run-but-they-can't-hide' anti-terrorist programme. To make sure that none of the macho details went to waste, the full, inside story of Washington's awesome display of military prowess was entrusted to Steven Emerson of U.S. News & World Report, who had shown in the past that he knew how to treat a government 'scoop' with respect, and who could be relied upon to resist the kind of sceptical impulse that sometimes afflicts reporters with a wider readership.

In the summer of 1987, while outwardly researching his master's thesis on Lebanese narcotics trafficking, Coleman met several newsmen of a less trusting nature, among them Brian Ross of NBC and his producer Ira Silverman. They already knew one another. Coleman had met Ross in 1981 while writing his book Squeal, in which he described how Las Vegas superstar Wayne Newton had sued Ross and Silverman over an NBC story connecting him with organized crime. The two had arrived in Cyprus, with the cooperation of the DEA, to prepare a documentary on 'The Lebanese Connection', and as Hurley did not want to be bothered, he deputed Coleman to look after them.

With his television news background and now intimate knowledge of Middle East drugs trafficking, Coleman helped Ross and Silverman prepare what was generally considered to be as balanced and authoritative a survey of narco-terrorism as the media had ever presented to the American public, a contribution which they both generously acknowledged on several occasions afterwards and which subsequently led to Coleman's appearance on NBC News after the Flight 103 disaster, although neither of them were aware then or before of his DIA/NARCOG affiliations.

For the most part, however, Coleman's experience with the media was disillusioning. While the intelligence community was specifically forbidden to compromise staff newsmen or to use media staff credentials as a cover for its agents, cutbacks and bureau closures had left most of the world's press, radio and television dependent on local freelance reporters and cameramen, to whom the restrictions did not apply.

Coleman himself had used freelance credentials supplied by Mutual Radio to get into Libya after Operation El Dorado Canyon a year earlier, and he would meet very few stringers during his various spells of duty in the Middle East who did not supplement their incomes from journalism by supplying material to government agencies like the DEA.

One morning, for instance, after monitoring radio traffic all night in the NARCOG listening post he had set up in his back bedroom, Coleman reluctantly opened his apartment door to a caller who introduced himself as David Mills, a British photographer for Newsweek.

It seemed they had a mutual acquaintance in 'freelance' W. Dennis Suit, president of Overseas Press Services, whom Coleman had met as a 'consultant' to Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network and with whom he had kept in touch, on DIA instructions, because of Suit's involvement with Oliver North's ragtag army of conmen, yahoos and armchair mercenaries from Georgia.

Mills had apparently met a very loquacious Dennis Suit in a bar in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and listened to him brag about the worldwide connections he had made in the course of his career as a self-proclaimed CIA agent. On hearing that Mills was headed for the Middle East, Suit had suggested he should look Coleman up in Cyprus because he was doing some research there and had a lot of good contacts.

'Oh,' said Coleman wearily. 'That's great. How are you? Come in. Would you like a cup of coffee?'

Doing his best to stay awake, he chatted to Mills until satisfied that the other was convinced of his academic credentials and then, to get rid of him before Syrian George arrived to transcribe the night's tapes and give the game away, sent him over to see Hurley, who wanted to know if Mills, in the course of his travels in and out of Lebanon for Newsweek, would like to shoot a few pictures for the DEA.

Seeing no conflict of interest in this, or any serious ethical problem in working covertly for the DEA, Mills joined the rest of the press corps on Hurley's freelance payroll and subsequently turned in some useful photo coverage of illegal port facilities in Lebanon.

Although Coleman still had qualms about the misuse of media credentials, foreseeing a time when immigration officials around the world would automatically assume that any visiting journalist was a spy, it would have been hypocritical to complain. But he did protest vigorously to Hurley when he discovered that a full-time British staff cameraman for a major news service was also secretly shooting stuff for the DEA, using his employer's equipment.

'There's a directive about that,' he said. 'I don't want to get involved. If Washington finds out, there'll be hell to pay.'

'He's a foreign national,' said Hurley impatiently. 'Fuck it.'

In the end, Coleman had to let it pass, although he contrived not to pay for the footage, and duly noted the DEA's systematic corruption of the media in one of his back-channel reports to Donleavy. It hardly mattered anyway, for in addition to his bootleg coverage, Hurley was also helping himself to anything he wanted in the legitimate footage brought out of Lebanon by television news teams.

As Coleman says:

"If CBS, NBC, ABC, the BBC -- anybody -- wanted to up-link video they'd shot in Beirut they could go either to Damascus or Nicosia. That was the choice. And a lot of times, particularly after shooting in the east, they were cut off from getting to Damascus so they had to put their tapes on the boat to Larnaca and up-link it from Cyprus.

Well, Hurley had this arrangement with Customs ... All those guys had DEA certificates of appreciation on their walls -- he'd greased the skids all the way. Anybody came in with videotape, Customs would grab it and say, 'Well, we have to look at this before you take it in.' 'But this is urgent news material,' the guy would say. Tough shit. He'd have to wait two or three hours while Customs ran it across the road to me so I could make a quick video dub for Hurley or his spook friends before they returned the original and let the guy on through to Nicosia.

Same thing with MEMO, Middle East Media Operations, just down the street from the embassy in Nicosia. It worked like a news bureau. You could rent office space and video equipment there. You could file your stories from there. They had secretaries, drivers, people to answer your phone -- it was a complete support operation on the ground, and most of the networks had a desk there. And everybody was working for Hurley, although most of them didn't know it. Anything going through MEMO ended up in the American Embassy. Assignment details. Progress reports. Private conversations. Notes. Videotape. Everything -- right down to scrap paper from the waste baskets. He had the whole thing fixed."

But NARCOG was not the only group using Cyprus as a base for its intelligence operations. When Beirut, the capital of Middle Eastern intrigue, was turned into a battleground in 1975 by the Lebanese civil war, the entire international espionage community moved out lock, stock and barrel to Nicosia. It used to amuse Coleman to saunter through the Churchill hotel around midday.

'It was like something out of an old Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet film,' he remembers. 'There were Libyans, Lebanese, PLO, KGB, Bulgarians, Romanians, British, Americans -- you could go by there and watch all the spooks watching each other have lunch.'

It was not so amusing, however, to have them on his doorstep.

One morning, it became clear that NARCOG was not the only group using Filanta Court as a base for its intelligence operations. Coleman had gone up on the roof the previous evening for one of his periodic checks of the antennae he had rigged for the listening post. All seemed to be in order, but next morning, after having trouble with one of the receivers, he went up again to make sure he had not inadvertently disturbed anything.

To his astonishment, a 30-foot latticework tower, neatly secured with guy wires, had sprouted there overnight, topped by a two-stack array of five-element, horizontally aligned, directional antennae, one pointed towards Nicosia, the other towards the Lebanese coast.

Was it possible that Hurley had forgotten to tell him they were putting in some decent professional equipment at last?

No, it wasn't possible.

Hoping no one was watching, Coleman climbed the tower's inspection ladder to look at the frequency allocation on the antennae. He then climbed down again, and followed the coaxial cables across the roof to the point where they went over the rear wall of the building and in through one of the bedroom windows of the apartment next to his.

Returning thoughtfully to his own back bedroom, he tuned one of his receivers to the frequency he had read off the antenna and hooked it up to a tape machine. Then he telephoned the embassy.

'Well, who the fuck did that?' Hurley demanded, when Coleman explained what had happened.

'Hell, I don't know. I got the frequency, so I'll ask Syrian George to listen in. See what he comes up with. And maybe you can get Penikos to find out who's renting the apartment.'

'Better than that, I'll have him kick their ass off the island.'

'Well, why don't we see what's going on first?' Coleman suggested. 'Whoever they are, these guys know their stuff. Could be interesting.

'Listen, you spotted them, maybe they spotted you. I don't want to take chances.'

'Don't worry about it.' Coleman was not used to such solicitude. 'Let's give it a few days. We'll be okay.'

'Hell, I'm not worried about that.' Hurley sounded astonished. 'I got a bunch of shitheads flying in from headquarters to take a look around. I told 'em about the listening post, so I don't want it compromised, okay?'

Over the next few days, Syrian George taped an assortment of Arab cab-drivers in Tel Aviv broadcasting on taxi frequencies with bits and pieces of low-level intelligence picked up from observations while driving around town and from eavesdropping on their fares' back-seat conversations. And twice a day, somebody would transmit a very brief, very high speed coded message from the apartment next door via the VHF array aimed at Nicosia.

Coleman recalls:

"I took the tapes up to the embassy for analysis, and sure enough, it turned out that Yasser Arafat's PLO had installed a listening post right next to ours. They had these cab-drivers in Israel using taxi frequencies to pass on intelligence to Cyprus, and as it came in, so they'd pass it up the line to the PLO office in Nicosia.

Hurley went dip-shit crazy. He had his top brass coming in from Washington to look at the operation and the first thing they'd see at Filanta Court was this 30-foot PLO radio mast. So he pulled all his strings, and although it was politically very sensitive, he got the Cypriots to close the Palestinians down and kick them off the island.

Well, he needn't have bothered. His guys showed up from Washington and they didn't want to see shit. It was a junket. When they came to the apartment, Mary-Claude was cooking up a storm in the kitchen, Sarah was squalling in her crib in the front bedroom and in the back it was wall-to-wall Star Wars, with all the electronic gear we had in there. So they walk in, wearing their Izod shirts and white walking shorts with clean sneakers, just like it was Miami Beach, and it was, 'Howiya? Howya doin'? Hey, what's going on here?' and all that bullshit, but what they really wanted to know was, where's the nearest topless beach?

I thought they'd probably want to see the video 1 was splicing together from the footage we were getting on opium growing in the Bekaa Valley, but these were cops on a government-paid vacation. They could watch that kind of stuff any time, back home at headquarters. They were there to get laid, that's all. It's an awesome sight, the U.S. government at work overseas.

The deputation from DEA headquarters had luckily chosen one of the cooler days of a very hot summer for their inspection visit. The NARCOG budget had apparently not stretched to air-conditioning, and there were times when life in Filanta Court was almost insupportable. At the height of the heatwave, with Hurley in Washington, Coleman finally had to notify the embassy that he was closing down the listening post and moving into the hotel across the street to save the equipment as well as the family from overheating.

But Donleavy, no less than Hurley, was anxious to get him back. From his response to the huge volume of encrypted data that Coleman was sending twice a week to his DIA number in Maryland, Donleavy was interested in his reports, not just for their own sake, but as a means of cross-checking the official inter-agency pooling of information by the DEA and CIA.

'Donleavy wanted to know everything. All he could get his hands on. Who the DEA were using and why. Names and descriptions of informants, their reasons for working with Hurley and the nature of their relationship. Details of DEA operations in Lebanon, cross-checked with whatever feedback I could get from my guys over there. Anything and everything to do with ongoing cases. Control wanted a complete run-down, and knowing the way Hurley operated, I think the DIA probably had a better handle on it from my back-channel stuff than DEA headquarters did through its own official channels.'

Although the principal objective of NARCOG remained the same, to piece together a detailed picture of Lebanese narcotics trafficking and its role in politics and terrorism, the emphasis in the DEA's contribution began to change after Dany Habib was reassigned to San Francisco in May. His replacement as Hurley's number two was Special Agent Fred Ganem, a tall, polite, soft-spoken Lebanese-American who had spent the previous five years in Detroit, on the receiving end of the Middle East narcotics pipeline.

While Hurley remained preoccupied with inter-agency projects like Operation Goldenrod, Ganem soon made it clear to Coleman that he had little patience with Hurley's intelligence operations. Ganem saw his role in Nicosia as an extension of his role in Detroit. He was interested primarily in law-enforcement, in using the pipeline through Cyprus to identify and arrest distributors of Lebanese narcotics in the United States. He was therefore interested in stepping up controlled deliveries, and for that he needed intelligent, well-motivated CIs who could pose as suppliers. Like the Hamadans and Jafaars.

Masked by the explosion in cocaine abuse, and by Washington's simple-minded preoccupation with the Colombian drug cartels, heroin addiction in the U.S. had risen steeply during the 1980s. Reflecting American demand, the acreage of the Bekaa Valley's opium poppy fields was doubling year by year. During the summer of 1987, Coleman helped identify 25 Lebanese laboratories with a combined annual output of six or seven metric tons of refined heroin, representing about half the country's gross national product.

Most of this was exported to the United States via the Cyprus-Frankfurt pipeline, nicknamed khouriah ('shit') by the couriers who used it, or via Turkey, the Balkans, central Europe and then on to New York and points west.

The profits were stupendous. Without needing to do more than put down sporadic resistance from the more independent clans, the 30,000 Syrian troops guarding the Bekaa for the heroin cartel were allowed to augment their pay by up to $1 billion a year in protection money. And this was chicken-feed next to the revenues earned by government- connected Syrians and Syrian-backed terrorist groups actually engaged in the traffic. Illegal narcotics contributed at least $5 billion a year to the Syrian economy, almost all of it in American dollars and other hard currencies. Without access to the American market for heroin and hashish, Syria and its Lebanese protectorate were as good as bankrupt.

But Washington's strategic interests in the Middle East ruled out the kind of interventionist policies pursued in Central and South America. With about 60 percent of its energy requirements supplied by a region racked with religious, ethnic and political conflict, the United States was as helpless in the face of state-sponsored narcotics trafficking as it was in dealing with state-sponsored terrorism. While Syria made the appropriate public disclaimers, insisting it was serious about eradicating drugs and denying sanctuary to terrorists headquartered in the Bekaa Valley, Washington could take no independent action without risking the charge of meddling in Syria's internal affairs and thereby still further inflaming Arab sensitivities throughout the Middle East.

In any case, with Muslim extremists threatening to dominate the region, the Western world needed Syria either in its camp or at least on the sidelines.

After watching DEA Nicosia at work, Coleman readily understood why the DIA felt it necessary to monitor Hurley's activities. Anything directed at rolling up narcotics distribution networks in the United States was politically neutral and therefore acceptable. The recruitment of 'mules' and CIs and their employment in a stepped-up programme of controlled deliveries down the pipeline offered little risk of embarrassment, provided the 'stings' were well organized and proper security precautions were observed. But the conversion of DEA informants into CIA assets, and their use in operations directed against Syrian nationals or Syrian-backed groups on the supply side of the narcotics traffic, was altogether more sensitive, and it was this area that, under Donleavy's direction, became Coleman's special study in the late summer of 1987.

Monzer al-Kassar and Rifat Assad were two of the names that cropped up most frequently in the cascade of raw intelligence from informants and intercepts that he was analysing for NARCOG and back-channelling to Donleavy. On principle, Hurley refused to share information with the Germans and British, except when he needed their cooperation for controlled deliveries through Frankfurt and London, but, braving his disapproval, Coleman made a point of renewing his friendship with Hartmut Mayer, the German police officer whom he had met in Munich during the 1972 Olympics and who was now the BKA's liaison officer on Cyprus.

Although the contact was more social than professional, the two inevitably talked shop when they met, and as Coleman zeroed in on al-Kassar as possibly the key player in the Middle East's narco-terrorist game, he decided to visit Mayer in his office at the German Embassy one day to see if his friend could be persuaded to take a more generous view of international cooperation than Hurley's.

Mayer obligingly pulled al-Kassar's file and, among other bits of useful information, told Coleman about two more of the Syrian's aliases, including the numbers of the passports held in those names, and details of al-Kassar's recent journeys to and from South America. These were of particular interest because they confirmed suspicions that Syrian traffickers were developing close commercial ties with the Colombian cartels, trading heroin base for cocaine base and bartering either or both as required for arms supplies to terrorist and revolutionary groups around the world.

Operating from one of several palatial villas in Marbella, Spain, al-Kassar was publicly one of the DEA's most wanted fugitives and privately one of the CIA's most useful 'capabilities', having supplied hundreds of tons of U.S. and Eastern bloc arms to Iran, as part of Oliver North's efforts to secure the release of American hostages, and to the Nicaraguan Contras as part of Oliver North's efforts to unseat the Sandinistas.

Though arrested in Denmark, Britain, France and Spain for narcotics and arms offences, al-Kassar had made himself too valuable an asset to European and American intelligence agencies for them to allow him to go to waste in prison, so that he went about his illegal business with a brazen assurance matched only among international criminals by his partner, Rifat Assad, younger brother of the Syrian president, who also owned a villa outside Marbella, and whose daughter, Raja, was al-Kassar's mistress.

After an unsuccessful attempt to depose his brother Hafez Assad from the presidency in 1984, Rifat had been banished to Paris, a punishment akin to being kicked out of purgatory and forced to live in paradise. Installed in a town house off the Rue St. Honore and accompanied everywhere in his armoured Mercedes by bodyguards armed with automatic weapons, he endeared himself to French society by throwing the kind of party that went out of style with Caligula while continuing to act as front man for the Syrian heroin cartel that underwrote his brother's fanatical Alawist regime in Damascus.

A volatile, erratic but undeniably charismatic figure, with a loyal following among the Syrian troops enriching themselves in the Bekaa Valley, among the Palestinian terrorists financed by Lebanese drug trafficking, and among Arabs living in Detroit and Los Angeles who distributed the product, Rifat Assad was also too valuable an asset to fear official displeasure from any quarter, Syrian, French or American.

Number three in Coleman's Syrian rogues' gallery was General Ali Issah Dubah, then chief of the Mogamarat, the Syrian secret service (and now President Assad's deputy chief of staff). One of Assad's closest confidantes (and Monzer al-Kassar's brother-in- law), Dubah was the cartel's principal enforcer, frequently co-opting Ahmed Jibril's PFLP-GC, the Abu Nidal faction and other Palestinian terrorist groups to do his dirty work as well as using them routinely as part-time agents in his 'legitimate' intelligence operations.

As the summer wore on and Dubah's name kept cropping up in raw intelligence data from DEA/NARCOG informants, Coleman eventually reported to Donleavy that, without ever leaving the country, the Syrian spymaster seemed to have his hand in the pockets of everybody engaged in the Bekaa's drug traffic, from Damascus to Dearborn.

General Ghazi Kenaan, head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon, and a subject of Coleman's close attention from the day he arrived in Beirut as a DIA agent, was the fourth key figure in the heroin cartel. With Monzer al-Kassar and Rifat Assad fronting for the group in Europe, it fell to Kenaan, as the man on the spot, to supervise the supply end of the business, to keep the Bekaa peaceful and productive, to suppress dissent, discourage private enterprise and mediate disputes. With 30,000 troops at his disposal, and everybody dependent on drug revenues, including the Palestinian terrorist groups based in the valley, Kenaan was the most powerful man in Lebanon.

Having learned from his first assignment that the general effectively controlled the hostage situation in Beirut, Coleman now came to realize that, in a broader frame but in the same sense, Kenaan also controlled the nature and scope of narco-terrorism itself -- or, at any rate, could do so when it suited President Assad's purpose.

Next to Assad's Syria, Colonel Gaddafi's Libya had become little more than a refuge for Palestinian extremists, a useful quartermaster's supply depot for arms and explosives, and a convenient whipping boy for Western governments anxious to be seen taking a strong line on terrorism without risking their strategic interests in the Middle East.

It was also beginning to worry Coleman that while he and the whole NARCOG apparatus of government agents and informants were watching the Syrians, Syrian agents and probably many of the same informants were watching them. He had already advised Donleavy in his bi-weekly reports that Hurley's security arrangements were derisory, that all sorts of people with no clear allegiance were wandering in and out of NARCOG, ostensibly selling information but just as likely collecting it; that agents and bona fide informants were being put at risk because of this, and that future DEA or inter-agency operations might well be fatally compromised from the start.

But Hurley himself was apparently unmoved by any such fear. For one thing, he found it hard to accept that anyone who lacked the advantage of being American could pose much of a threat, and for another, he needed every scrap of material he could get from any quarter, even the newspapers, to sustain the nonstop barrage of reports he was firing into headquarters.

Coleman remembers:

"We burned up the Xerox machine. 'Gimme paper,' he'd say. 'The more paper we send 'em, the more money we're gonna get next year -- that's all those shitheads understand. So keep it coming, you hear? Never mind what you think about it, I want everything you can lay your hands on. Just make a copy and send it over.'

In the end, this passion of his for generating paper got to be so ridiculous that we had T-shirts made up, with the DEA logo and OPERATION MAKAKOPI in big letters across the chest. Couldn't find a size large enough for Hurley so we got him a nightshirt instead. Everybody in the embassy thought it was funny as hell, but he was pissed with it. Came out of his office, waving it in the air. 'Got nothing better to do, goddammit?'

Flushed with the success of Operation Goldenrod, in late summer, Hurley and his CIA colleagues lent Sami Jafaar and other members of his clan to the DEA office in Bern, Switzerland, for Operation Polar Cap, aimed at closing down an arms/drugs-dealing business run by Arman Jirayer Haser, a CIA asset and long-time associate of the Syrian cartel, who had been making millions out of secret American arms shipments to Iraq. A Turkish national living in Monaco on a Canadian passport, Haser had somehow attracted the attention of the Monte Carlo police and the CIA was nervous that if the arms operation had been blown, he might expose the agency's role in it.

The DEA's quid pro quo was to be a huge money-laundering operation run, under Haser's direction, by the Magharian brothers, Berkev and Jean, in Switzerland for Monzer al-Kassar. Besides handling a substantial slice of Syria's drug revenues, Haser and the Magharians also laundered drug profits for the Colombian cocaine cartels through a number of Swiss banks controlled by Arab interests. If Haser could be brought down by the Swiss for money-laundering, so the theory went, then he would have no reason to dig the hole he was in any deeper by embarrassing the CIA with gratuitous revelations about the agency's arms deals with Saddam Hussein.

Beginning in September 1987, the CIA's Department of Justice Liaison Officer, Richard Owens, began feeding evidence against Haser and the Magharians to the DEA so that its country attache in Bern, Gregory Passic, could pass it on to the Swiss authorities.

On 19 October, barely a month after the arrest of Fawaz Younis had made him a DEA star, Sami Jafaar was seen lunching in Marbella with Monzer al-Kassar and Stanley Lasser, a big-time money launderer with close ties to the Cali cocaine cartel in Colombia.

Jafaar was seeking a way in through al-Kassar to Haser and the Magharians, ostensibly to have them launder the clan's drug profits, and, through Lasser, to explore the unholy alliance that appeared to be in the works between the Syrian and Cali cartels whereby each would not only take the other's product but also share intelligence, smuggling routes and defensive tactics.

Jafaar scored with both barrels. With al-Kassar's blessing, he met the Magharians in Bern and Zurich to set up accounts for his family, each meeting taped and monitored by Coleman's assistant Syrian George, who had been flown in from Cyprus for this purpose. When the Swiss police agreed to tap Lasser's telephone in his Zurich apartment, Syrian George stayed on in Switzerland to sit on the wire while Sami Jafaar and other members of his clan kept watch to identify Lasser's Arab visitors.

On the strength of this, the Swiss issued arrest warrants for all the DEA/CIA targets, and before returning in triumph to Paris, Jafaar rounded off his winter's work by trapping Haser into a highly incriminating recorded conversation about heroin and morphine base shipments.

Over Christmas 1987, with his stock standing higher than ever, Sami introduced Michael Pavlick, the DEA country attache in Paris, to his cousin, another eager and potentially valuable recruit to the anti-Syrian cause. He was Kalid Nazir Jafaar, still in his teens, and the favourite grandson of the clan's patriarch, Moostafa Jafaar.

Though living with his father in Dearborn, near Detroit, Kalid visited his mother and grandfather in the Bekaa Valley several times a year, a family duty providing him with perfect cover for the job of courier in the DEA's stepped-up programme of controlled heroin deliveries. Too young to be hired as a full-blown Cl, he was signed up on the spot as a 'subsource', a convenient arrangement whereby he was paid by a DEA Cl, rather than by the agency itself, so that, in the interests of 'deniability', his name did not have to appear on any official payroll records.

Congratulating themselves, and the Jafaars, on a six-month run of unparalleled success, DEA Nicosia greeted 1988 in a mood of cavalier optimism. With the NARCOG anatomy of the Syrian cartel now virtually complete, with a major Lebanese clan working for them and a better organized monitoring and intelligence network feeding them more reliable information, Hurley and his CIA colleagues prepared for the new growing season in the Bekaa with a sense of having seized the initiative at last.

There was just one problem they knew nothing about.

The Swiss money-laundering network run for Monzer al-Kassar by Arman Haser and the Magharian brothers was altogether too valuable an asset for the Syrians to have left unprotected. As Coleman had feared, while the DEA and the Swiss police had been watching and collecting evidence, KGB-trained agents of the Mogamarat, commanded by al-Kassar's brother-in-law, General Ali Dubah, had been watching them. Although the Magharians were arrested, al-Kassar and Haser had been under protective surveillance the whole time and were both spirited away before the trap closed.

The Syrians had also observed the Jafaars. The link between Sami Jafaar and the DEA, suspected by the Mogamarat at the time of the Fawaz Younis affair, had been confirmed -- and the result, a year later, was catastrophic.

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