Gideon's Spies

Over a Perrier he confirmed the conditions for our meeting. No notes, no tape recordings; anything he said would be purely background. He then produced a sheet of plain paper on which were typed his biographical details. He had been born in New York on March 13, 1913, and graduated from St. John’s University in 1937 with a law degree. Commissioned into the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1943, within months he had transferred to the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. In 1944 he became chief of the OSS Special Intelligence Branch in Europe. Next came the chairmanship of the Securities and Exchange Commission (1971–73); then, in quick succession, he was undersecretary of state for economic affairs (1973–74); president and chairman of the Export-Import Bank of the United States (1974–76); and a member of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (1976–77). In 1980 he became campaign manager for Ronald Reagan’s successful bid for the presidency. A year later, on January 28, 1981, Reagan appointed him DCI, the thirteenth man to hold the single most powerful office in the U.S. intelligence community.

In response to my remark that he appeared to have been a pair of safe hands in a number of posts, Casey sipped more water and mumbled he “didn’t want to get into the personal side of things.”

He put the paper back into his pocket and sat, watchful and waiting for my first question: what could he tell me about Bill Buckley, who, almost two years earlier to the day—on Friday, March 16, 1984—had been kidnapped in Beirut and was now dead. I wanted to know what efforts the CIA had made to try to save Bill’s life. I had spent time in the Middle East, including Israel, trying to piece together the background.

“You speak to Admoni or any of his people?” Casey interrupted.

In 1982, Nahum Admoni had become head of Mossad. On Tel Aviv’s embassy cocktail circuit, he had a hard-nosed reputation. Casey characterized Admoni as “a Jew who’d want to win a pissing contest on a rainy night in Gdansk.” More certain, Admoni had been born in Jerusalem in 1929, the son of middle-class Polish immigrants. Educated at the city’s Rehavia Gymnasium, he developed linguistic skills that had earned him a lieutenant’s stripes as an intelligence officer in the 1948 War of Independence.

“Admoni can listen in half a dozen languages,” was Casey’s judgment.

Later, Admoni had studied international relations at Berkeley and taught the subject at the Mossad training school on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. He’d also worked undercover in Ethiopia, in Paris, and in Washington, where Admoni had linked closely with Casey’s predecessors, Richard Helms and William Colby. These postings had helped hone Admoni into a soft-spoken intelligence bureaucrat who, when he became Mossad’s chief, in Casey’s words, “ran a tight ship. Socially gregarious, he has as keen an eye for women as for what’s best for Israel.”

Casey’s thumbnail sketch was of an operative who, he said, had “climbed through the ranks because of his skills at avoiding his superiors’ ‘corns.’”

His next words came in the same mumbling undertone.

“Nobody can surprise like someone you took to be friendly disposed. By the time we realized Admoni was going to do nothing, Bill Buckley was dead. Remember what it was like at the time over there? There had been the massacre of almost a thousand Palestinians in those two Beirut refugee camps. The Lebanese Christian forces did the killings; the Jews looked on in a kind of reversal of the Bible. Fact is, Admoni was in bed with that thug, Gemayel.”

Bashir Gemayel was head of the Phalangists and later became president of Lebanon.

“We ran Gemayel as well, but I never trusted the bastard. And Admoni worked with Gemayel all the time Buckley was being tortured. We had no idea where exactly in Beirut Bill was held. We asked Admoni to find out. He said no problem. We waited and waited. Sent our best men to Tel Aviv to work with Mossad. We said money was not a problem. Admoni kept saying okay, understood.”

Casey sipped more water, locked in his own time capsule. His next words came out flat, like a jury foreman handing down a verdict.

“Next thing Admoni was selling us a bill of goods that the PLO were behind the kidnapping. We knew the Israelis were always ready to blame Yasser Arafat for anything, and our people did not buy at first. But Admoni was very plausible. He made a good case. By the time we figured it wasn’t Arafat, it was long over for Buckley. What we didn’t know was that Mossad had also been playing real dirty pool—supplying the Hezbollah with arms to kill the Christians while at the same time giving the Christians more guns to kill the Palestinians.”