Pod Insights John Kiriakou's Dead Drop S1E4 Good Spies, Bad Endings About this episode THE BLURB: Among the things that make spies tick is fear. Fear of being caught - and then tortured and/or killed. Stories like Beirut Station Chief Bill Buckley's are what keep spies like John Kiriakou up at night. Buckley came to the CIA from the US Army where he was a highly decorated special forces officer. Once recruited by the CIA, Buckley served successfully in places like Cambodia, Egypt and Pakistan. Beirut was another story - a difficult one filled with questions.
SHOW NOTES
You can find Fred Burton and Samuel Katz's Beirut Rules here -
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31019046-beirut-rules?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=wsCKRCuTSK&rank=1 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31019046-beirut-rules?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=wsCKRCuTSK&rank=1
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone. And including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage HMO and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.
0:32 Speaker 01 This podcast, it's a Coster and Touchstone production.
0:42 John Kiriakou? Welcome to Dead Drop: What Makes a Spy Tick. I'm John Kiriakou. Before we get down to it, I want to ask a small favor. That is, if you're enjoying the podcast. If that's the case, we would really appreciate it if you'd share that fact with people you know, but also with the platform on which you listen to Dead Drop. When you like, subscribe to, review, positively of course, and/or comment on the podcast, it helps more people find it. Your recommendation really does matter. It's a little like having your work show up in the President's Daily Brief. One of our goals with Dead Drop is to give you the deepest possible perspective on the world of spying and what makes any spy tick. It's like living life with an additional layer to it,
1:28 John Kiriakou? a layer only you and a handful of other people know about. Understandably, therefore, a significant influencer of any spy is other spies. And what happened to them as a result of their spying? The perils are always part of a spy's internal calculus. That is, the perils we know about and the perils we don't. Those are the ones that will invariably bite you. In this episode, we're going to take a momentary break from what makes this spy tick to explore a spy whose story always spoke to me personally. William Francis Buckley's story always, well, it fairly shouted at me. Bill Buckley, you see, was a very good spy who came to a terrible ending. And it didn't have to be.
2:13 John Kiriakou? For a spy, Bill's story is a valuable object lesson. Knowing his story and his fate were essential elements of how I understood my working environment. I knew Bill's story. I emulated his heroism. But his fate, on the other hand...
2:31 John Kiriakou? Before joining the CIA, Bill Buckley was a soldier, an exceptional one. He was US Army Special Forces. He was awarded plenty of medals for his service in Korea and in Vietnam. He got a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts, and others. Korea impacted Bill profoundly, we'll get to that. It seemed to steal something inside him. The CIA knew a good counterterrorism officer when they saw one, and they recruited Bill, putting him right to work in South Vietnam before moving him to assignments in Zaire, Cambodia, Egypt, and Pakistan. In 1983, the CIA made Bill the Beirut Station Chief, one of its most challenging assignments.
3:14 John Kiriakou? On March 16th, 1984, Hezbollah kidnapped Bill as he headed into work. How that happened, well, we'll get into it. Why it happened, though, that we'll debate. Over the next seven months, Hezbollah used Bill as a bargaining chip and as a punching bag. They made no secret that they were torturing him. Breaking him was the whole point of the exercise. Hezbollah's videos perfectly illustrated Bill's terrible physical decline and clear descent into madness. On October 4th, 1984, Hezbollah announced that they had executed Bill. More like they murdered what was left of him.
3:56 John Kiriakou? In 2018, journalists Fred Burton and Samuel M. Katz wrote a book called Beirut Rules: The Murder of a CIA Station Chief and Hezbollah's War Against America, a riveting account of what happened to Bill Buckley. This past September, they published an updated version of the story. Fred Burton himself is a former State Department Counterterrorism Deputy Chief and a diplomatic security agent. He's one of the world's foremost experts on security, terrorists, and terrorist organizations. And on the story of what happened to Bill Buckley.
4:33 John Kiriakou? So, late 1987, I went to the CIA for the very first time to interview for jobs. I remember going into an office, it was, to the best of my recollection, was the office of Near Eastern and South Asian operations. Any division, Near East division, in operations. And they had a map of the Middle East on the wall. And they had little circles, like stamped circles, of of all of the, of the area, the territory that was covered by satellite imagery. And so, you know, there's a circle here, a circle there, a circle here, and then you couldn't even see Lebanon, because it was covered in circles. And I said, "What the heck are you looking for in Lebanon?"
5:19 John Kiriakou? And this woman turns to me and she says, "Bill Buckley." And I thought, "Oh, my God, of course you are." They did everything they could, everything they could to find him. Bill Buckley was not your stereotypical CIA recruit. He had an incredible military career before being recruited into the CIA. And when I say incredible military career, I mean the Silver Star. From combat to Silver Stars. The Purple Heart. This is incredible bravery. Can you tell us a little bit about his military career before he joined the agency?
6:00 Speaker 03 Thank you so much, John, for having me on your podcast, and thank you for what you've done. And also, thank you for remembering Bill. As I look back on that time period, when I was assigned to the CIA's Hostage Location Task Force, which was called HLTF. And it was stood up as a result, inside the Counterterrorism Center, as a result of the kidnapping of Bill Buckley in Beirut. But as you wind back the clock, and I was putting together Beirut rules... In talking to his sister and talking to his significant other, you learn a lot about a man as to how he grew up. And Bill always wanted to be a soldier,
6:45 Speaker 03 his sister told me. And unfortunately, his sister recently passed away, which I'm sad to hear. But she was so cooperative in helping us with the story. And so has Bill's significant other. These were two very, very tough, tough women that were very protective of their brother and loved one. But once they started to tell me about Bill playing with soldiers as a young boy, wanting to always join the army. And he did. He joined the army as soon as he graduated from high school. And he went off to the Korean War, where, as you mentioned, he was assigned to the first cab for a while. And he was awarded a Silver Star for rushing a machine gun nest.
7:31 Speaker 03 And after the Korean War, it was, I was really got down a Korean War rat hole for a while. I went up to Fort Hood to their archives and started looking. None of that is digitized. So I was looking for an needle in a haystack, trying to find Bill's time in Korea.
7:48 John Kiriakou? And let me interrupt you on that point specifically. This was an important, very important part of his life. But he never really talked about what happened that day when he, when he was able to overtake that machine gun nest.
8:01 Speaker 03 No, he didn't. And, you know, sadly, John, and you know how it is in the government, when we were assigned to, to hunt for Bill. I did not know, and I blame myself for that, for not knowing more about the man at the time. You know, when he was kidnapped and held hostage, we just knew he was a CIA station chief. We knew he had been in Vietnam and had been a Green Beret. And that was it. I frankly did not even know that he had been in the Korean War. And, you know, I blame myself for that at the time when I was in the government. So in putting together Bayrul's Rules, I learned of his heroic efforts in the Korean War. And then he comes back.
8:40 Speaker 03 To the Boston area and he goes to college at Boston University and he's in the reserves. And, um, once he graduates, he goes, volunteers to go off to Vietnam to become one of Kennedy's first Green Berets. Where, you know, he's again awarded a, a second Silver Star for heroism and one of the treasure troves, uh, in, in piecing this together was the sister gave me these little 1960s versions of selfies. They were black and white photographs of, I've got a few in the book, of Bill in the bush in Vietnam. I don't have any from Korea, but I, she had some from Vietnam.
9:25 Speaker 03 And on the back of the picture was Bill's handwriting, you know, like hot as hell, you know, I'm hoping to get out of here soon, kind of, uh, notes. And he would ship those back home to his sister and, you know, kind of update them. And there's amazing pictures of just Bill in Vietnam as a Green Beret. And one thing that, that also kind of fascinated me, John, as, as I've become a student of history, was every time I saw Bill in Vietnam, he was with a Australian Special Forces guy. And specifically like an Aussie radio man. Really? Yeah. And, and, and so I go down that rat hole for a couple of months. What was Australia's relationship with the Green Berets and the CIA in Vietnam and...
10:10 Speaker 03 That's another book. I don't think anybody's ever written about that. I, I couldn't find much written about it. And you're right, someone should. That was fascinating to me in itself, just learning these kinds of things. I also learned that while Bill was back in the Boston area going to college, he actually worked as a private investigator for F. Lee Bailey. What? And, you know, like who knew? You know, that was one of the more interesting aspects that I uncovered about him. So, you know, there was a side of Bill that, um...
10:43 Speaker 03 He was always, always running towards danger, John. And I got mixed opinions at the CIA in putting the story together as to whether or not he was the right man to go to Beirut after the disaster we had in the 83 bombing of the embassy. Having said that, in many ways, Bill would have been the kind of man that would be sent to a place like that because of his storied career in the paramilitary space all around the globe with the CIA.
11:18 John Kiriakou? He didn't have what I would call a typical CIA career. He was in the CIA relatively briefly, then he left, and then he went back. When he initially left the CIA, did he really leave the CIA? Or do you think maybe it was possible that he went into a deep cover position and then came back out from the deep cover? Because it was just such an unconventional career path. And every time he either came back or moved from one position into another, he moved into a position of greater authority. He was promoted very, very quickly. Now, he may have been promoted very quickly just because he was a great officer and not for any other reason, but I wonder if there was any other reason.
12:02 Speaker 03 You know, John, I was not able to specifically nail down whether or not he went into, let's say, for example, a non-official cover position or a deep cover kind of assignment. Having said that, I think that he was certainly engaged with the early efforts with that paramilitary relationship between the CIA and the Green Berets, to the point that I would not be surprised in the least that he still was in some sort of contractual arrangement or some sort of succumbent to the US Army in some capacity. But it's a great question.
12:43 Speaker 03 You know, the official record has him leaving the agency allegedly and then coming back in, but I don't know. I did ask his sister that question, and Bill did not disclose that to her. I did ask Bill's significant other, Bev, who recently passed away as well, and she did not know the answer to that either. And if memory serves, I think in piecing this together, I must say this, the agency... Did a good, good, solid kind of help to me in, in digging up information to help me tell this story. And they were all in, but there were certain, you know how you get information from the
13:26 Speaker 03 agency of time and, and segments or compartments? And they did not identify a, a missed time block as to him being employed with the agency during that time period. So what he was doing, I have no idea.
13:40 John Kiriakou? Tucker Guglman, as you note in your, in your book, was a legendary figure at the CIA. And he was one of those CIA officers, senior CIA officers who commanded the respect of everybody who met him. He died actually trying to rescue people in South Vietnam as South Vietnam was falling. And to the best of my recollection, please correct me if I'm wrong here, he was caught by North Vietnamese officers hiding behind a refrigerator, trying to save himself at the last possible second. He realized he couldn't, he couldn't rescue anybody else. And then in the end, he couldn't rescue himself.
14:21 John Kiriakou? He was taken captive by the North Vietnamese and tortured to death. And you note in the book that this is something that weighed very heavily on Bill. They had been friends since 1962, I think is what it was. And, um, and this was something that he always kept at the front of his mind. Can you talk a little bit about that?
14:40 Speaker 03 I, I did, uh, secure Tucker's, uh, records from the military and, and I do believe I got some from the agency as well concerning, uh, his service, uh, in Southeast Asia. And Bill would tell friends, close friends, that his greatest fear would be ending up like Tucker. Again, that was one of those kinds of statements that when we were assigned to find Bill in the eighties, that at, at least we were not briefed on, we did not know, we did not live in a digital age in that time period. It wasn't easy to reconstruct the life of, of a guy like Bill, even inside the agency.
15:22 Speaker 03 You know, we only were working with current information to find Bill. As I dug more and more into Tucker's past, Sam Katz and I put this story together, I said to Sam, I said, my gosh, there's a book here about Tucker of his legendary and storied career with, in, in that arena. And So they were very close. I, I can only imagine from a psychological perspective for Bill, being kidnapped and held in captivity, ending up in the same fate in many ways as Tucker. And I just wonder, you know, I'll never know the answer to this, but what was going through his mind at that time. It was his worst nightmare, John. I'm very sad to
16:05 Speaker 03 say that, yeah, very sad to say that he ended up in a very similar situation as Tucker. I mean, look, these were two men of war. These are two men that, that were all in for their country, went wherever the hot wars or cold wars or clandestine wars, however you want to phrase it, were going on, and never thought twice. I'll tell you an interesting backstory, John, which I think you'll appreciate. When I, when I decided to do this story, I reached out to SAM because we had done a book on Benghazi together and we worked
16:47 Speaker 03 very well together. And I said, let me email the agency and see what they say. And I emailed the agency and I said, hey, you know, Fred Bird and I used to be assigned to the hostages location task force. I want to tell a Bill Buckley story. And the agency came back literally that same day and said, we're all in. How can we help you?
17:06 John Kiriakou? Wow.
17:07 Speaker 03 I mean, how often you get that, you know, a response from a government agency telling you they'll help you, right?
17:14 John Kiriakou? Usually you have to wait the 90 days and then sue them to get a response.
17:19 Speaker 03 Right. And, but anyway, they, they could not have been more helpful. It's a horrible story as to how it ended. But as I told Bill's family and his, you know, his sister, I must have had countless exchanges with his sister and Bill's significant other just to learn more about him. And I said, I just want to tell the story of, of a hero who died for his country. And I said, I, I think our nation needs these kinds of stories to inspire others to, to volunteer and to serve.
17:48 John Kiriakou? I couldn't agree with you more. And you chose probably the single best subject to.
17:56 John Kiriakou? Teach the American people what CIA heroes are really like. Ted Gupp, in his book about the CIA's Wall of Honor, said that everybody universally at the CIA respected Bill Buckley, but not many people really knew Bill Buckley. He was intensely private. He wasn't very friendly, but he commanded respect. Can you tell us a little bit about his personality? And do you think that maybe any difficulty that he might have had with others was a result of his war experiences?
18:30 Speaker 03 John, that's a great question. I think Bill was your stereotypical soldier spy. And what I mean by that is I think he was a soldier slash Green Beret, special forces guy first. And I think he was that kind of person, at least from the interviews I did with all the folks that worked with Bill in Babe Ruth Station and elsewhere. There was not one person that I interviewed that said a negative thing about Bill. My goodness, if you interviewed some folks that know probably me, Lord knows what they would say at times.
19:12 Speaker 03 But having said that, I was shocked as to the scope of people that just respected him for what he was as a leader and a boss. That was his military bearing. Was he old school? Yes. Was he the kind of guy that commanded a degree of if you say you're going to do something, you're going to do it? But he was also the kind of guy that folks rallied around and would listen to him. One thing that I still can't wrap my head around with Bill, I understand him wanting to live, for example, off compound, out so he could be in the field and be able to do clandestine meetings and so forth.
19:58 Speaker 00 At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone. And including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage HMO and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.
20:33 John Kiriakou? If you're enjoying Dead Drop, and of course, we hope you are, then while you're waiting for new episodes, I'd like to suggest another great granular story podcast from the Costard and Touchstone family. Just the Photographer with David Swanson does for photojournalism what Dead Drop does for spies. Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist David Swanson tells you stories his amazing news photos just can't. What it felt like being in all those dangerous places, like war zones and natural disasters, doing his job taking pictures. Having been to a few war zones myself, I can tell you this. Just the Photographer will put you right there, on the ground, right next to David. Inside his head, in fact. It's a hell of a podcast,
21:18 John Kiriakou? and you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts or at costardandtouchstone.com. There's a link in this episode's show notes. In fact, you'll find lots of great story podcasts at Costard and Touchstone, like The Donor, a DNA horror story, The Hall Closet, Sage Wellness Within, and the How Not to Make a Movie podcast. Who knows? Your next favorite podcast might be just a click away. Now, back to Dead Drop.
21:47 Speaker 03 I wonder why he never picked up on the Hezbollah Islamic Jihad surveillance? Because, you know, this was a man who had been in every war zone since Korea, and he certainly was thrown into this war zone. I mean, Dewey Claridge, God rest his soul, he was a very, um, when I was assigned to the Hostage Location Task Force, he was Mr. Claridge. He was the boss that someone at a lowly level like me really never engaged with. But Dewey told me that Bill was the wrong guy chosen to go there. And I said, "Well, why, Mr. Claridge?" And he said, "Well, he never was a clandestine officer.
22:31 Speaker 03 We really needed someone who'd have been behind the wall, for example, in Moscow. We needed a case officer kind of person." And, you know, who am I to gauge what's best for personnel assignments at the agency? You know, Dewey was an amazing storied career at the agency. But I do think Bill was the right kind of person for Beirut because we were in a paramilitary war with an asymmetric enemy that I don't think the agency had wrapped their hands around. Lord knows, I knew we did not have it in the 80s. We had no idea for a long period of time, John, who the hell the Islamic Jihad was.
23:13 John Kiriakou? Mm-hmm. I have to agree with you strongly. Bill Buckley was a man who was able to create paramilitary teams from scratch where they hadn't existed before. He had extensive combat experience. I knew of very few case officers in my years at the agency who had actual combat experience. Sure, it's great if you've been trained as a case officer to recruit spies to steal secrets, but it wasn't just a question of recruiting spies to steal secrets. It was a question of trying to head off the next attack, the next terrorist attack, the next explosion. I have to agree with you.
23:55 John Kiriakou? All due respect to Dewey Claridge, and I agree with you, he's a legendary figure in the CIA. I think he's wrong in this assessment.
24:03 Speaker 03 I forget which agency officer told me this. It said, "When they were looking for someone to go to Beirut, there was a lot of people heading for their cars in the parking lot." I don't think, for the benefit of your viewers or listeners in this podcast...
24:20 Speaker 03 You have to understand in context, in the mid 1980s, we were losing badly. You know, we had suffered horrific embassy bombing in 83. Uh, we had hijackings, hostage takings. Uh, literally terrorism was winning. We were so far behind the curve. You know, after the agency station, all the personnel were, were killed in the car bombing in 83. Uh, literally the eyes and ears of, um, the CIA and, and Beirut, which was like Casablanca during World War II, were shut down. Bill's job was one to stand up a new team to try to figure out
25:02 Speaker 03 who the hell were these folks that were blowing up our embassy and killing our folks? And so I agree wholeheartedly that Bill, with his military storied career in Vietnam, battlefield experience in Korea, he was the perfect choice to go in. Uh, but I also know the class system inside the agency, as you know better than I, that, um, there was always this friction between the paramilitary snake eaters and ground pounders and then you had the elites from Yale and Georgetown. And, uh, no offense, no offense to those graduates, but it was not like that.
25:46 John Kiriakou? I wanted to ask what role you thought that played in that awful day when he was snatched? We know actually a lot about the day that he was, he was taken. We know that he woke up that morning in his apartment. He moved one of the stereo speakers near the bathroom so he could play classical music while he was shaving. We know that he did not have a driver that day. He took his briefcase, went downstairs, got in the elevator, actually to go downstairs, saw a neighbor in the elevator, nodded to her. There was another man in the elevator whom he did not recognize. He went down into the garage to get to his car and the man that had been in the elevator hit him in the back of the head with something,
26:31 John Kiriakou? a rock, his briefcase, whatever it was. They snatched him, put him in the back of the car and took off. How is it, do you think, that he didn't sense danger? That he didn't see the operational, the pre-operational surveillance? That he didn't smell a rat even in the elevator? Not recognizing this young man going down into the garage?
26:56 Speaker 03 I don't know, John. We dissected, thought about that, just like you and I are talking about that. Hell, I still talk about that with folks that ask me that question. You would think that this was a man who would certainly recognize, or at least from a situational awareness perspective, know that something was wrong. I don't know the answer to that question. I asked all the folks who were in Beirut Station that day that I interviewed for the story, you know, "What do you think happened?" And none of them had an answer. It's like, "Look, you know, we knew we were living on the edge.
27:40 Speaker 03 We knew we were living in a dangerous environment." Did Bill think that he was untouchable? Because he was, you know, the American boss and perhaps the Lebanese G2 would be looking out for him, and the French, and whomever. You know, having said that, I don't know the answer to that question. I struggle with that. You know, if, I know for a fact, and obviously it never happened, I debrief many, many hostages looking for Bill Buckley, like, you know, Reverend Martin Janko, and David Jacobson, the AUB director, and Charlie Glass, and Donald Sutherland, and the list just goes on and on and on.
28:25 John Kiriakou? All big names from the 80s.
28:27 Speaker 03 Yes, and Bill would not, Bill never conveyed to any of the other hostages exactly what happened because Bill was always held separately from the hostages. So, for example, when Father Janko, David Jacobson...
28:47 Speaker 03 Were all chained to radiators on the sixth floor of some apartment building in the southern suburbs with Terry Anderson, another legendary AP reporter. Bill would be held around the corner like in a closet or in a bathroom. He was never, he was never in the same location as all the other hostages. So the other hostages would always talk together, but they never had an opportunity to talk to Bill and Bill never had an opportunity to talk to them because the guards would come in and slap them around and, you know, hit them with the butt of a rifle or tell them to shut up. And so I don't know the answer to that question.
29:31 Speaker 03 It's one of those mysteries that I simply don't know.
29:34 John Kiriakou? I have to say, the kidnapping of Bill Buckley sent chills through the CIA. If the bad guys can get Bill Buckley, they can get anybody. At the time, the CIA was experimenting with trackers. Bill may have had a tracker in his belt that would have helped to locate him, but they threw the belt in a parking garage. And so there was no way to track him. There was nothing in his briefcase that would have allowed the CIA to track him. Do you know if, well, let me rephrase. What changes did the agency make because of the lessons learned in the Bill Buckley kidnapping? Were there major changes on a personal level for station chiefs or CIA officers in the
30:19 John Kiriakou? field?
30:20 Speaker 03 You and I both know this, that tragedy forces change. And in the government, I'm sad to say, it takes tragedy to force change. We saw that with the embassy bombings where we had to do all the physical security upgrades such as Mylar ballistic window glass, standoff distance and so forth.
30:39 Speaker 03 And Bill's abduction is one of those kinds of incidents that creates that groundswell of support back in Washington as, Lord knows, we can't let this happen again. For the context of your current viewers, who may have remembered Ambassador Stevens kidnapped in Benghazi, this is one of those kinds of moments inside the Beltway, meaning here you have the nation's premier intelligence agency station chief who is missing and kidnapped by a terrorist organization. If this happened today, it would be non-stop 24x7 social media news reporting. So when Bill's kidnapping occurred, of course, you have not only a witch
31:22 Speaker 03 hunt from a counterintelligence perspective, could Bill have been set up, could he have been a hostile intelligence agency help, the list just goes on and on. You know how the agency tries to dissect that. And then it creates, well, how are we going to protect future station chiefs? So you create a bodyguard force then of internal CIA personnel to keep an eye on their case officers and station chiefs. So when they fan out around the globe, they are protected. And so the other thing that really caused the State Department, as you know, under chief omission authority, has a lot of sway. And at times, they're
32:01 Speaker 03 always butting heads with CIA, FBI, DOD, whomever. But under chief omission authority, they can say, look, I want to limit the amount of people that are in country. Not only did we have the horrific bombing in 83, which wiped out the station, which I believe still is the largest loss of life in CIA history. Then you have the CIA station chief sent into Beirut to stand up intelligence operations. He's kidnapped and missing. So then the State Department says, hey, wait a minute now, we're going to start limiting the amount of people that are coming in from the agency and the intelligence community, DOD and so forth, because, God forbid, we have more people kidnapped. And...
32:44 Speaker 03 You know, I think it's important from a contextual perspective to understand too, that in 1976, we had the murder of our US Ambassador and Economic Officer, Lloyd and Waring. Tragedy and kidnapping and murder in Lebanon was something that was, at the time Bill's kidnapping took place, the old Foreign Service Officers, the old Guard, the old Agency Personnel knew that this was no man's land. So we have to really think about how many people we send in and what are the protection protocols and so forth. And then, of course, the embassies had been hit so bad that we couldn't fly into Bay Ridge International Airport.
33:26 Speaker 03 Obviously, you didn't want to because we'd had folks kidnapped and surveilled there. And Hezbollah, you know, owned the airport, we would later learn. You had to fly people in on helicopters to get in and out of the embassy. So if you ever had to evacuate the embassy, you had to think about, well, how the heck can I get people out quickly? So you have to minimize the amount of people that are there. The dominoes really started to fall after Bill's abduction. And it really also restricted, John, our operational capability to try to find him. But today, in our Jack Carr world, who is a good friend of mine, you know, he does
34:05 Speaker 03 great books and good films, we could not put in SEAL Team Six or Delta Force to find Bill because we had no operational capability on the ground to be able to do that. We couldn't protect our own people that were going in, perhaps to even hunt for Bill.
34:23 John Kiriakou? Do you think that the fatal flaw that ended up killing Bill was Bill's flaw or the agency's flaw? You make a very important point here, that real change only comes after a tragedy. Just look at 9/11. We're 24 years after 9/11 now, and we're still adapting to the changes wrought by that horrible day. Was Bill just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Did he not have appropriate security from the agency? Or tradecraft training from the agency? Would anyone not named Bill Buckley in the same position have the same fate?
35:06 Speaker 03 Bill's kidnapping, it was an intelligence failure. We lacked human intelligence sources at the time to give us a heads up. Obviously, if you're putting together a threat assessment on the heels of everything that occurred in Beirut with the hostage-taking of other Americans, one would have to assume that that threat persisted. It was a failure on the part of the intelligence community to recognize that. I think it was a failure on the part of the intelligence community to recognize that. Bill volunteered to go when other folks would not. And I think he was a victim of terrorism that had literally started to emerge that we were not prepared to combat.
35:50 Speaker 03 We were fighting an asymmetric enemy that owned the turf, owned the surrounding area, owned the intelligence, and they could have grabbed anybody. Thinking through it at the time, it was a significant intelligence coup on the part of Hezbollah/Iran to be able to pick up America's senior intelligence officer sent into Beirut at the time after the horrific embassy bombing in 1983. My only regret is that we could not get to him in time.
36:32 Speaker 03 Having said that, I want to believe that if we could have found him, that the White House would have greenlit an operation.
36:41 Speaker 03 I want to believe that. I've been told at the time that if we could find them, that that was something that was certainly on the table, but unfortunately, it didn't turn out that way.
36:52 John Kiriakou? One of the most horrific things about this whole episode is that when Bill was tortured by Islamic Jihad, they videotaped the torture and they would send these tapes to the American Embassy in Athens, the American Embassy in Rome, and the tapes would then be forwarded to the CIA. I've not seen them, of course, but I've read descriptions of them and they're absolutely horrific. What was the point in doing that? Was it mockery? And did the CIA make appropriate changes, do you believe, based on the content of these tapes?
37:32 Speaker 03 When you look at this time period, from a technology perspective, we lacked, for example, the forensic capability to examine these tapes, which caused changes inside not only the agency, but the FBI to be able to dissect these tapes. So, for example, when we had to photograph a bill or a tape, we would put it off and compare it to previous tapes, and we got very good at dissecting forensically, from a technology perspective, these tapes. We're looking right now in backdrops, looking for audio signals that we could hear, whether
38:14 Speaker 03 it be children playing, cows mooing, chickens. We'd listen for aircraft taking off or landing in the background as part of our forensic digital kind of analysis, but this was a very early kind of technology that we at first did not have the capability to even examine. Literally put a picture of Bill on a board, taken from a badge photo at the agency, and asked the agency's Office of Medical Services to tell us, has Bill lost weight? What does he look like? Has he been beaten? And... One of the early pictures we had was Bill with a broken nose. We knew that he was being hit, and hit hard.
38:59 Speaker 03 Typically, we would get a photo just from the chest up to kind of dissect. The other thing that really caused us to do was the concept of psycholinguistic analysis, meaning, once we got a tape, we would usually get it, be accompanied by an Islamic Jihad communique. We would read those communiques and try to make sense of them. And then we had a wonderful man at Syracuse University at the time, Dr. Murray Myron, who had the Psycholinguistics Institute. He was a pioneer in that space. He would dissect those communiques, because we wanted to see if we could make sense of whether or not this was a single writer. I can't tell you how badly we had intelligence gaps on this organization that had kidnapped Bill. And all the other Americans.
39:44 Speaker 03 So we figured that if we could find Bill, we could find the other Americans. So, we started also looking at, much like we're doing now, and thinking, okay, well, who's taking these videos? Let's see if we could find the folks that do videos in Beirut. So, we started really thinking about how to use basic investigative tools and analysis. We developed some of our own with the technology to be able to dissect these videos and so forth. So, there was a lot of enhancements that came out of that. We got pretty good at that, in comparing videotapes and the communiques. But, unfortunately, at the end of the day, John, and you know this, the lack of human
40:29 Speaker 03 intelligence that we had, to be able to tell us that Bill Buckley is at this flat at this moment in time, was our Achilles' heel. Heck, I remember, we had a bright young analyst that was from, at the time, the National Photographic Interpretation Center, NPIC. And we would have one satellite shot of Beirut a day, one. She would take a magnifying glass and look at the rooftops of Beirut, trying to marry it up with hostage debriefing reports on similar structures. Can you imagine? That's the kind of tools and technology that we had at the time. And unfortunately, we just could never pinpoint his location.
41:14 John Kiriakou? Years later, after Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2nd, 1990, we needed, of course, satellite coverage of Kuwait. We had no satellites looking at Kuwait. We didn't need them. And I remember that it took us six months to move a satellite that had been over Moscow so that it could show us Kuwait. I can only imagine the work involved in looking at individual rooftops from one satellite over Beirut with a magnifying glass.
41:48 Speaker 03 Right. There was no Google Earth.
41:51 John Kiriakou? You took the words right out of my mouth. I was gonna say exactly the same words. The conventional wisdom is that people join the CIA because they're patriots, right? We all want to serve our country. The travel's a nice little benefit too, but we do it because we're patriots. Was that the driving force for Bill Buckley?
42:09 Speaker 03 Oh, my gosh, yes. I think Bill was very proud to serve his country. I think as his sister told me, as a little boy, he wanted to be a soldier. He would listen to the war reports growing up on the radio as they huddled around.
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43:00 Speaker 03 Found their house there in Massachusetts. He was from that generation that just wanted to serve. Think about it, you know, the Korean War cooks off and he graduates from high school and immediately volunteers to go. There's brave men and women that do that every day around our country. But I think this was a different time and a different era in America's history. At the end of the day, men like Bill Buckley were a different breed. As I've said on many, many occasions, this was a man who was constantly running towards danger. Thank God that he did the work that he did. Did our nation let Bill down? Maybe so.
43:43 Speaker 03 Maybe so.
43:46 John Kiriakou? Thank you again, Fred, for sitting down with us today. Fred and Sam Katz's Beirut Rules book is a legendary piece that absolutely needed to be written about Bill Buckley, a man whose heroism we would forget at our own peril. And peril, you will see as we segue back into our story next time, was about to come at us from all directions. Until then, I'm John Kiriakou. Dead Drop is written by John Kiriakou and Alan Katz. Costar and Touchstone produced the podcast and John Kiriakou, Alan Katz and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers.
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