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THE BOOK OF HONOR -- DEADLY SYMMETRY |
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Deadly Symmetry AS THE Boeing 747 lifted off from London's Heathrow Airport into a calm December sky, thirty-four-year-old Matt Gannon had every reason to believe that good fortune rode with him. He had survived the perils of yet another clandestine assignment in Beirut, arguably the CIA's most hazardous post. With his swarthy complexion, thick black mustache, and gift for Arabic, Gannon had demonstrated once again his talent for blending into Mideast cultures, even one so wary of outsiders. He had exited unscathed, his cover intact, his superiors enamored with his performance. Just hours before takeoff the CIA's Beirut station chief had sent a glowing cable to headquarters at Langley; a further testament to an already gilded career. The classified missive read in part: "Matt's performance during his three-and-one half week TDY [temporary duty] in Beirut was outstanding. He produced 24 intelligence reports in as many days, several of which were multi- section studies of terrorist organizations or facilities in Lebanon which added substantive information to our knowledge of these subjects. He met seven different assets, bringing back on stream all of our Arabic-speaking assets that had been unexpectedly abandoned after [name deleted] was prevented from returning to Beirut ... "In short Matt made a major contribution to our operational and reporting mission which could not have been equaled by many other officers in the service. His operational judgment was consistently sound, his instinct for intelligence was unerring and, most important, his willingness to work the eighty to ninety hour weeks that characterize Beirut operations meant that he left with a series of major accomplishments during a relatively brief TDY. He is welcome back any time." As a token of the Agency's appreciation, Langley had granted Gannon's request to leave Beirut a day earlier than scheduled. But it was sheer luck that Gannon had been able to book a flight at that late date and at the height of holiday travel. It was just three days before Christmas. As he reclined in his seat some 31,000 feet above the Scottish countryside, he could at last breathe easy with the knowledge that Beirut and its insidious dangers were behind him. For a time at least, he could put out of his mind the agony of American hostages that had so haunted him and his Agency colleagues and whose liberation had preoccupied him in Beirut. Within hours he would be back in Washington. There he would again hold in his arms his twenty-seven- year-old wife, Susan, and his daughters, four-year-old Maggie and Julia, not yet one. In particular, he had been anxious to get home to help his wife with Maggie, who was autistic and had yet to utter her first words. But Maggie's hard-fought progress in recent months meant so very much to him. "We (I should say Susan) are working with her every day & we see the gains in her better behavior. Julia is a little doll, walking and beginning to talk -- growing up way too quickly." Those were the words he had written four days earlier from Nicosia, Cyprus. That letter was now tucked into his garment bag. It was written to his brother Dick Gannon -- the same Dick Gannon who five years earlier, as a State Department employee, had overseen security at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut when it fell to a terrorist car bomb. The two were not only brothers but best friends, and now they shared something else in common. They both inhabited a world overshadowed by the threat of terrorism. Matt had decided to mail the note from the States. It was written on a festive Yuletide card produced by UNICEF to benefit "the world's children." Now less than an hour out of London, Matt Gannon could finally relax. Lulled by the monotonous drone of the engines and the promise of a quiet Christmas at home, Gannon had much to look forward to. It was the evening of December 21, 1988. The flight was Pan Am 103. *** Matthew Kevin Gannon's story neither begins nor ends with that evening's flight, but straddles a critical moment in the CIA's history, a time of profound change. When Gannon joined the Agency in 1977, it was still fixated on containing Communism, as it had been for three decades. But with the gradual implosion of the Soviet Union and its waning capacity for mischief, the Agency found itself facing new and unfamiliar enemies. The superpower struggles of the Cold War, for all the human suffering and vast resources that were expended in that titanic contest, had imposed a kind of constraint on their respective client states. The world that Matthew Gannon and his colleagues in the clandestine service were to inherit was even more treacherous and uncharted a territory. Terrorists and ultranationalists, some equipped and trained by Washington or Moscow in the era of proxy wars and realpolitik, could care less about the finer points observed in the Cold War. To them, DMZs, safe havens, and diplomatic immunity were meaningless. Old refuges presented fresh targets. The new struggle played itself out in all the venues heretofore largely forbidden -- civilian aircraft, cruise ships, city buses, embassies, hospitals, department stores, marketplaces, even funerals. For all its well-earned reputation for Machiavellian measures, the CIA's clandestine service was filled with choirboys compared with some of the predators they now faced. The bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in April 1983 served notice that one era was ending and another beginning. Within three years the Agency established a Counterterrorist Center, or CTC, an interagency entity that combined cutting-edge hardware with old-fashioned human cunning. For the first time, the fire wall between CIA operations and analysis was torn down in the interest of providing the most current data to those in the field. CTC's single-minded purpose, its raison d'etre, was to stave off the sort of catastrophe that had cost so many lives in Beirut and elsewhere. But even as the CIA geared up to wage war with myriad shadowy cells of terrorists, some of them enflamed with visions of a jihad, or holy war, the Agency found itself under new constraints -- increasing congressional oversight, a prohibition on assassinations, closer scrutiny of its budget, an aggressive U.S. press, and a residual public revulsion to the cowboy tactics revealed in the course of stunning public hearings on Capitol Hill just a few years earlier. "The playing field, itself an expression of an earlier age, was uneven at best. American society in the late 1970s and early 1980s demanded of its covert operatives that they respect both law and morality even as they went up against often diabolical foes who openly embraced chaos and horror. Upon just such a field strode Matt Gannon, a perfect gentleman by all accounts, dispatched to the front lines of the war on terrorism. Matt Gannon lived on the very edge of a dilemma that would plague the CIA and the nation for years to come: can those who operate within the tenets of a civilized society effectively combat the unchecked powers of fanaticism? Gannon's brief life suggested that the answer was a qualified "yes." His death, to many, represented a portentous "no." *** To a stranger, there was nothing in Matthew Gannon's early years to suggest that he would become a spy in the Mideast, or that a life of intrigue would suit him. A calm and easygoing Southern California boy, he spent much of his childhood in San Juan Capistrano. Slow to anger and gentle by nature, he was one who, when a playmate pulled a toy out of his hands, would turn away and find something else to occupy him. As an adolescent he was neither a risk-taker nor possessed of particular physical prowess. But throughout those same years Gannon was immersed in the virtues of service and sacrifice that would define his personal and, later, professional values. Born on August 11, 1954, the eighth of ten children, Matthew Gannon came from a devoutly Catholic family where commitment to others was seen as a natural extension of the catechism itself: most of his siblings found their way into positions that served others. In addition to brother Dick, who chose the State Department's Diplomatic Security Service, two other brothers would go into law enforcement. Among his sisters, two became grade school teachers and a third, a nurse. Despite years of Catholic schooling, Matt Gannon was never religious, at least not outwardly. But what he lacked in public expressions of piety, he made up for in his own deeply held belief that individuals owed something to each other. Of course, he would have cringed at any such baldly altruistic talk. Faith for him demanded action, not words. Gannon attended the University of Southern California and the University of Grenoble. His senior year he studied at the University of Tunis. It was there that his fascination with the Arabic language and cultures was first whetted. It appeared that an academic with Agency contacts, recognizing Gannon's passion for distant cultures and his natural discretion, suggested he consider the clandestine service. So Gannon did just that in 1977, undergoing the basic training program at Camp Perry on the way to becoming a case officer in the Operations Directorate. Not long after completing the course, on September 24, 1978, Gannon was dispatched to Egypt to study Arabic at the American University Cairo, where he enrolled as a student. His Agency checks were deposited into his Washington bank account, but no one in Cairo knew he was with the CIA. He was not to go near the U.S. Embassy. It was his first experience living with a cover story. He immersed himself in studies of Arabic, Mideast history and culture, and Islam, He routinely left the confines of the campus to explore the crowded streets of Cairo. Often he would visit the main mosque, al-Azhar, where he would stand in the shadows and observe. He would tape the sheikh's services and play them over and over throughout the week, until he had memorized them and mastered the accent. As a break from studies he took a modest role in a play produced by the university. It was a Henrik Ibsen play, An Enemy of the People. "In a sense I feel as though I've steeped myself in so much work in several areas so as not to have time to feel alone or at a loss," young Matt Gannon wrote: His first formal CIA posting overseas was to Sanaa, Yemen Arab Republic, a natural assignment for a junior case officer. It was well off the main path of covert activities but a perfect place to observe and test a young recruit. Gannon's time was divided between the mundane consular duties that devolved upon him as a part of his cover, and the evenings spent in covert matters, including his attempts to recruit and run agents. Hints of his philosophy seep out in the letters he wrote to his brother Dick. Gannon recounted one planning session that apparently preceded a covert operation. "There was a long complicated discussion of a pending op, in which one of the participants, after three hours of debate, finally said that the issue had been tossed back and forth too long, that to think about something too much, to intellectualize a problem for too long, is detrimental in that it rules out acting out of instinct. He advised that action come 'clean' ... fortunately we did and everything is fine. Had we not gone ahead the other night, the chance would have been irretrievably lost. We gambled and won, the point being, I guess, is that decisive action is oftentimes required without agonizing over the decision itself." No one who knew Matt Gannon doubted his patriotism or devotion to duty, but for him there was also the lure of Arabic cultures. He took an almost childlike pleasure in "going native." He spoke Arabic, devoured the local foods, and melted in with the people on the street. He treasured his copy of T. E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and was not above fantasizing a role for himself like that of Lawrence of Arabia, who roused the Arabs to rebel against the Turks during World War I. "It was hard to imagine he was Irish Catholic," his brother Dick mused. While others dreamed of cushy assignments in Paris or London, Gannon longed for Baghdad and Beirut. On a home visit from Yemen, he showed up unannounced at his sister Cabrini's door, dressed in full Yemeni garb -- from the headdress to the billowy white pants and tunic. With his roguish mustache and dark complexion, his sister momentarily failed to recognize him. Gannon could scarcely contain his delight. His brother Dick remembers that on one visit home he noticed that Matthew's teeth were stained a yellowish brown. He asked if he had taken up smoking. Matthew laughed it off, explaining that the stain was the result of chewing qat leaves, a mild stimulant commonly used in Yemen in the afternoon, particularly as men gathered to talk business or politics. But if Gannon could maintain a laserlike focus on work, he was considerably less adept at the management of his own personal affairs. Notoriously absentminded, he was so preoccupied with Agency work that all else suffered. Some of those who spoke with him were convinced that he failed to hear a single word so lost was he in his own thoughts and Agency business. He rarely found time enough to even trim his mustache, which was often unruly and in dire need of scissors. Accounts of his forgetfulness and distractibility are legion. On the way to Dulles Airport before leaving the country for an extended foreign posting he casually turned to his brother Dick and declared, "By the way, I forgot my clothes in the dryer." As always, Dick Gannon baled him out, sending the clothes through the diplomatic pouch. Gannon was sometimes slow to pay bills, and on one occasion he wrote a flurry of checks on an account that had long before been closed. In Amman, Jordan, he took his typewriter to a shop to be repaired and forgot about it for more than a year. He took little notice of the necessity to file tax returns on time, and once, it was said, he had to be literally locked in his Agency office to get him to do his expense reports Once, in a rush to catch a plane at Washington's National Airport, Gannon flashed his diplomatic passport at a parking attendant and left his car for an entire week in a lot reserved exclusively for Supreme Court justices and other VIPs. He accumulated a formidable collection of unpaid District of Columbia parking tickets, which brother Dick paid off. One July evening in 1978, a year after joining the CIA, Matt Gannon was driving his brown Datsun 210 -- still with California plates -- through Georgetown, going the wrong way down a one-way street. Coming from the opposite direction was another car that happened to be a police cruiser. When the officer asked for Gannon's registration and license, the policeman discovered that both had expired. The car was towed to an impound lot. Once again Dick Gannon came to the rescue. That was just Matt Gannon's way and it endeared him to his friends and family, who felt a certain responsibility to keep an eye on him, lest things got out of hand. Only rarely did his inattention to personal detail spill over to his work. One such instance occurred in July 1980 as he landed in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. It was not until the next morning when Gannon flew to Jidda that he discovered he had left his passport at the airport in Dhahran. He managed to convince a security officer in Jidda to issue him a tourist passport so he could return to Dhahran and pick up his diplomatic passport -- which established his cover identity as a State Department employee. His superior was none too happy with the mishap. As a young officer, Gannon was virtually oblivious to material needs. His first year at the Agency his room in suburban Virginia was furnished with only a desk and a sofa purchased at a yard sale. When he ate or studied, he simply pulled the sofa up to the desk. At night the sofa was his bed. There was something of the Inspector Clouseau about Matt Gannon. Those who worked with him took it in stride. Gannon himself had long ago come to accept such contretemps as a minor though noisome character flaw -- one that he was readily able to accept in himself. *** From Yemen, Gannon was assigned to Jordan. It was a move that would profoundly affect the course of his life and that of one of the CIA's most venerated and senior case officers, Tom Twetten, then chief of station in Amman. It was the summer of 1981. The Agency had notified Twetten that, barring objection, it would be posting Gannon to his station. Twetten was a twenty- year veteran of the Agency, a courteous man with a scholarly bent, a love of old books and maps, and a manner that suggested he might be well suited to the university. It took no leap of faith to picture him lecturing on the early Ottoman Empire. Twetten had been raised in Spencer, Iowa. His family was in the furniture business and he had studied psychology at Iowa State. After a graduate degree from Columbia University and a hitch in the military, Twetten joined the CIA in 1961. He had been a part of that most remarkable class of junior-officers-in-training. His classmates included Mike Deuel and Dick Holm. One of Twetten's early memories of the Agency was when he and his fellow JOTs were taken to meet Director Allen Dulles, an august figure only recently humbled by the Bay of Pigs. Dulles asked who among the junior officers was named Mike Deuel and commented that his father, Wallace Deuel, was a stalwart of the Agency. Decades later Twetten could still remember the pang of envy that his peer was so well wired in with the Agency brass. Already there were hints that Twetten, brilliantly invisible, had his ambitions. The arc of Tom Twetten's career began in Africa. One of his earliest postings, from 1966 to 1967, was in the north of Libya, where he was under cover as a consular officer in Benghazi. There Twetten kept an eye on the Russians and East Europeans in town, one of myriad such sideshows in the global Cold War. In the same town was a young and ambitious lieutenant in the Libyan military. His name was Muammar Gadhafi. The two men, Twetten and Gadhafi, never met face- to-face, though in the years ahead their paths would cross in deadly ways. Libya would long remain a focal point of Twetten's career. On June 7, 1967, the Arab-Israeli War erupted, and Egyptian President Gamal Nasser called for a pan-Arab uprising. Twetten and those in the U.S. consulate knew they were in for trouble. Seventeen U.S. embassies across the Mideast were attacked. The first to come under assault was Benghazi, where Twetten was stationed. On the way into town Twetten heard the news on the radio and went straight to the consulate, knowing that a mob would soon form. A dozen Americans worked in the embassy, including three Agency employees -- Twetten, the lone case officer, a secretary, and a communicator. A week earlier Twetten had begun shredding sensitive CIA documents, convinced that either Nasser would attack Israel or vice versa. No sooner had Twetten ordered the doors of the consulate barred than the assault began. The first wave came over the roof of an adjacent building. A signal corps officer standing watch on the roof announced he would shoot anyone who attempted to bring down the U.S. flag. Twetten relieved him of his .45 and put it in the safe. Then Twetten removed the embassy's remaining classified materials and stuffed them into self-destruction barrels containing a kind of nitrate charge to incinerate the papers. The barrels were placed on the second-floor balcony, where they were to be ignited if the mob attacked. Then Twetten doled out the embassy's six gas masks to the secretaries and gathered together the consulate's tear gas grenades. As the perimeter of the embassy was breached and the mob came in, Twetten and the others lobbed the grenades down the stairwells and retreated into the vault, sealing it off and stuffing wet rags beneath the vault door. There Twetten and eleven other consular employees hid while the mob torched the curtains, destroyed furniture, and attempted to set the walls on fire. Within minutes the rioters withdrew, unable to withstand the tear gas. For six hours Twetten and the others remained hidden in the vault. When they emerged, the consulate was a shambles. There was fire in the streets as the mob torched cars. Twetten stood at the window and watched as someone put a wick into the gas tank of his year-old MG Sprite and blew it up. As he and others ignited the barrels containing classified documents, black smoke enveloped the consulate. A cheer went up from the crowd below, mistakenly believing the consulate itself was on fire. It was an unintended deception that may have saved Twetten's and the others' lives. A year later Twetten left Libya, never to return again. But Libya remained on Twetten's priority list. On September 1, 1969, Gadhafi and others mounted a successful coup and overthrew Libya's King Idris. At the time, Twetten was the Libya desk officer at CIA headquarters in Langley. Any cables from the field or operations against a Libyan passed through Twetten's hands. Above him was a branch chief and a division chief. At the time of the coup, there was no immediate announcement of who the new leader was. That was learned about a week later. Initially Gadhafi was viewed by U.S. Ambassador Joe Palmer as someone the United States could readily work with. But soon enough it became clear that Gadhafi had other plans. He shut down Wheelus Air Force Base and prepared to nationalize the oil industry. The days of wishful thinking were over. About a year and a half after Gadhafi came to power Twetten was summoned to the seventh-floor office of the deputy director of operations, the man who oversaw all covert activities worldwide. His name: was Desmond FitzGerald. He was a figure like Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner and Dick Helms, of Olympian stature in the eyes of the Agency's clandestine rank and file. "It was like a phone call from God," remembers Twetten. "I went up to his office with a good deal of trepidation, having never before even seen the man let alone been in his office." FitzGerald invited Twetten to take a seat. "What do you know about the Black Prince?" FitzGerald asked The Black Prince, so called because of the darkness of his skin, was a relative of King Idris. Twetten knew a good deal about him, none of it flattering. Twetten told him that the prince allegedly had been known to import Greek prostitutes for entertainment on the weekends, that he supposedly frequented the American PX and bought up numerous watches pledging to pay for them at a later date, and that he shamelessly exploited his royal connections. "Well," asked FitzGerald, "what do you think of him leading a coup against Gadhafi?" "I can't think of anybody who could be worse," answered Twetten. "Thank you very much," said FitzGerald, accepting the fact that the Black Prince was, in Twetten's words, "the wrong horse." And that was the end of it. The CIA would not again weigh mounting a coup to dislodge Gadhafi. A year later Twetten learned that it was the Israelis who had proposed arming the prince and organizing the tribes in the south into a Bedouin march to overthrow the Libyan leader. It was, said Twetten, "a harebrained scheme." But as it turned out, the Agency might have been overjoyed to have the Black Prince in power, or for that matter, just about anyone else but Gadhafi. Those within the CIA who were fighting terrorism would come to regard him as the devil incarnate. And in the end, none would have better reason to do so than Tom Twetten himself. *** As chief of station, Twetten had the authority to block Matt Gannon's move to Amman, but there was no cause to do so and nothing on the face of Gannon's file to suggest that he was anything other than a standout. When the two of them finally met in Amman in August 1981, Twetten saw in the callow young case officer great promise. If there was any reservation about Gannon, it was a tiny one and left unspoken. Twetten wondered to himself if perhaps this well-heeled lad of gentle demeanor might not be a tad too nice, maybe a little soft in the center, indecisive. Would he, Twetten wondered, have the stuff to make the tough decisions called for in the Mideast? Gannon for his part must have felt a twinge of awe for this station chief who had already garnered for himself a reputation for extreme coolness under fire and exceptional tradecraft as a spy. It was not long after twenty-eight-year-old Gannon arrived in Amman that he found himself distracted by a pretty twenty-year-old who frequented the embassy. She had brown eyes, auburn hair, and pale skin. Her name was Susan, as in Susan Twetten, daughter of his boss, the CIA's chief of station. In the Agency, as elsewhere, it was not a good idea to court the boss's daughter, particularly given the personal and security complications such a relationship could entail. Besides, Gannon was already involved with a woman named Susie who was then planning to visit him in Amman. "The past week has been tough ... Have landed myself in a real spot," Gannon wrote his brother Dick on November 6, 1981. "Have begun to see Susan Twetten the daughter of the Embassy Political Officer [Gannon referred to Twetten by his cover position]. She teaches at a kindergarten here having arrived in early October. Am trying to sort myself out, taking a step back. at the same time, 1 decided to tell Susie NOT to come out as we had planned in early December, just four weeks away ... The fact that I am drawing myself into seeing someone else doesn't help in the least ... in the meantime, I feel like burying myself in my work ... not seeing anyone, but I have made a commitment here and have to work that out some way ... Why I bring this on myself I don't know. I'll keep in touch on how all works out, or doesn't work ..." Dick Gannon did not have long to wait to hear how things worked out. Three months later, at a February 11, 1982, embassy party hosted by the Twettens, it was announced that Matthew and Susan were engaged. In a letter to Dick Gannon written eight days after the party, Matt Gannon wrote: "I have joined Susan in the catechism classes! I know you are shaking your head as I have been deemed a 'lost cause' for quite some time." And in a vain effort to muzzle his brother from telling his bride too many of his foibles too early, Matt wrote: "I want you to promise that you will tell only a certain number of stories about me to Susan, preferably only ones dealing with the parking tickets. We can leave passports and finances for another visit!" Less than four months later, on June 3, 1982, Matthew Gannon and Susan Twetten were married at Holy Trinity Church in Washington, D.C. As a parent Tom Twetten could not have been more pleased with his daughter's choice for a husband. But as CIA chief of station, Twetten regarded the union between his daughter and Matthew Gannon as potentially nettlesome. After that, Twetten would sometimes go to absurd lengths to avoid even the appearance of furthering his son-in-law's career. As Twetten rose through the Agency's senior-most ranks, Gannon's own innate talents distinguished him as a rising star in his own right. Inside Langley, there was inevitably the sense that Matthew Gannon had been anointed for great things, be it by pure merit, by blood, or by a combination of the two. Early on, Gannon's obsessive devotion to Agency work and the travel that went with it put a strain on the new marriage. "Matthew has been very busy at work, staying at the Embassy for long hours and then doing work-related activities in the evenings," Susan wrote three months before the wedding. "He has a very bad cold now, which is probably due to a lack of sleep and good meals. He is also a bit stubborn in this area. (There, I've told!)" Marriage did not alter his work habits. Less than two weeks after the wedding, Susan, then twenty- two, wrote Dick Gannon from Amman: "We have settled into as much of a routine as one can settle into when living with Matthew ... He's off to Paris next month. I will stay here with the cat and plants." Matthew Gannon, like many case officers, seemed wedded first to his work and second to his family. "Came down with a mild case of typhoid fever on 6 September," he wrote. "Basically two weeks out of the office. Susan tried to keep me in bed, but work here has been a bit heavy lately, and I couldn't afford to drop it altogether." But he, too, fretted about the impact of his work on his marriage. Four months after the wedding, he wrote his brother Dick, then stationed in Beirut: "I worry that I don't see her enough during the work week. Not the best way to start off." Like all case officers, he had to contend with the nocturnal life of running agents while during the day he had to fulfill his responsibilities as an economics officer, his cover in Amman. Sometimes the pressure of the two jobs was more than even he could take, fraying nerves and patience. "The embassy here appears sometimes like the monkey cage at the San Diego Zoo," he wrote, "everyone running in different directions, and no control of the show. Susan told me I had better start running again BEFORE I come home from work to get out all the frustrations. She has a point." The letter, dated October 7, 1982, closed, "Hope all is well, Dick, and Beirut is not proving too dangerous." Gannon was by all accounts an excellent intelligence officer, but it was something more than intelligence that troubled him about Beirut. Call it a premonition. "The tension is in the air," he wrote, "and Palestinians are rightfully angry at our support for Israel ...Amman though is not a high risk place for Americans; but Beirut, what worries me is the unexpected event, the sniper, car bomb, mine. You are the best Sy [security] has to offer," he wrote his brother, "and I am pleased, in a sense that you are in Beirut, but the unexpected incident, despite all planning, is really unsettling. We're praying for you." Six months later the Beirut embassy toppled and Dick Gannon narrowly escaped with his life. From the summer of 1983 until the summer of 1986, Matthew Gannon was based in Damascus, Syria, a country long suspected of supporting terrorism. Nowhere in the Mideast could one be sure to avoid the ravages of terrorism. On October 7, 1985, an Italian cruise ship, the Achille Laura, was seized by four Palestinian hijackers and held for forty-four hours. Among those passengers looking on in horror was a sixty-nine-year-old American named Leon Klinghoffer. Disabled by a stroke, he was confined to a wheelchair. Terrorists put a machine gun to his wife's head and forced her to leave him. A short time later she heard two shots. Klinghoffer's body was dumped into the Mediterranean, along with his wheelchair. The notion that an old man in a wheelchair could be so coldly executed became one of the defining images in the war on terrorism, erasing any lingering illusions about the nature of this new enemy. Worse yet were the denials that followed Klinghoffer's murder. "News about the death of the crippled American passenger was fabricated by the American media to smear the image of Palestinian fighters," declared Abu Abbas of the Palestine Liberation Front, to which the terrorists belonged. "This American could have been dead in his cabin out of fear or shock." The Palestine Liberation Organization groused that the United States was making "an ado" over Klinghoffer's death and refuted suggestions he was murdered. "Where is the evidence?" demanded Farouk Kaddoumi, the PLO's foreign policy spokesman. The evidence, Klinghoffer's body, washed ashore a week later near the Syrian port of Latakia. Two bullet holes left little doubt as to the cause of death. But still there was the need for someone from the U.S. Embassy in Damascus to claim the body and oversee its preparation for a return to the United States. Such unpleasant tasks as this fall to those assigned to the consular affairs section, which is precisely where Matthew Gannon was working under cover. Despite the misgivings of some within the Agency that his going to claim the body might attract unwanted press attention, he volunteered for the assignment. It was the first time, but not the last, that he would face the casualties of terrorism. *** Though a generation apart, Tom Twetten and his son-in-law, Matthew Gannon, shared much in common. Both entered the CIA as young men profoundly committed -- some would say obsessed -- with work. Both had come into the Agency in troubled times. Twetten joined in 1961, three months after the Bay of Pigs. At an orientation program an Agency officer had declared that the CIA would never fully distance itself from that fiasco. Twetten momentarily wondered why, if that was true, he had bothered to join so mortally wounded an institution. Gannon had joined in 1977 as the Agency was mired in scandal and investigations into the excesses of the past. In the mid-eighties Twetten and Gannon shared the drive together from their homes to Langley, leaving in Twetten's VW bus at 6:00 A.M. and often not returning until 800 P.M. Both men had brilliant futures to look forward to and both would suffer intensely personal losses at the hands of terrorists. That their paths should cross and their families unite was less a matter of serendipity than the realities of the clandestine service, itself a kind of extended family doubly bound by a culture of secrecy and a distrust of outsiders. By the time Susan Twetten took a part-time job at the Agency, it had become the center of their personal and professional lives. *** As the years passed, young Matthew Gannon gathered for himself an enviable record and established himself as one of the foremost Arabists within the Agency. His ascent through the ranks seemed foreordained. Tom Twetten's career also thrived. In the summer of 1975 he had been made deputy branch chief of North Africa, overseeing operations in Libya and Egypt. Later he was chief of station in Amman. In 1982 he returned to Washington and was made chief of operations of the Office of Technical Services, the vast support arm of the Agency that provides everything a spy in the field might need -- instruments of secret writing, bugging devices, disguises, concealable cameras, and other exotic gear. In 1983 he was made deputy chief of the Near East Division, once again overseeing Libyan operations, among others. In the ensuing years, hostility and suspicion between the United States and Libya deepened. Each seemed destined to provoke the other. In March 1986 a daunting thirty-ship U.S. Navy task force conducted exercises in the waters just off Libya, an action seen as taunting Gadhafi. On March 25 U.S. and Libyan forces clashed as Libya fired missiles on U.S. planes and the U.S. responded by attacking Libyan patrol boats and a missile site. The United States did not have to wait long for Libya's response. On April 14, 1986, a West Berlin discotheque frequented by U.S. servicemen was bombed. Two American soldiers were killed and 229 were wounded. President Reagan, relying on U.S. intelligence reports, announced that there was "irrefutable" evidence that the bombing was the work of Libya. The United States had been waiting for just such a provocation to unleash a retaliatory strike. The disco bombing gave the White House and CIA license to enact the most punishing attack on Libya, exposing Gadhafi's vulnerabilities, degrading his terrorist training facilities, and perhaps even destabilizing his regime. The army barracks in particular were selected as a target in the hopes that the troops would turn their wrath against Gadhafi. A key participant in those consultations was Tom Twetten, then deputy chief of the CIA's Near East Division. Twetten and his staff provided intelligence that helped focus American targets in Tripoli, including Gadhafi's living quarters, though it was the air force that selected the sites and the National Security Council that gave ultimate approval. Nine days after the disco was bombed, the United States launched Operation El Dorado Canyon. Dozens of U.S Navy A-6 Intruders and A-7 bombers as well as air force F-111's pummeled Libyan airfields, command posts, and training centers in Tripoli and Benghazi. The CIA was banned by law from any direct assassination attempt on a foreign leader, but the bombing of Gadhafi's Tripoli residential compound could be understood as little else but an attempt on his life. Indeed, Twetten would later acknowledge that that was precisely what a senior Pentagon planner had in mind. Reagan himself had declared that Gadhafi was "this mad dog of the Middle East." And if there was any ambiguity left, a senior U.S. official was quoted as saying, "We all know what you do with a mad dog." In the massive U.S. air assault Gadhafi's adopted eighteen-month-old daughter, Hana, was said to have been killed; two of his sons, aged four and three, were injured; and his wife was left shell- shocked. Gadhafi, for all his ruthlessness, was said to be shattered by the loss and more intent than ever to exact revenge upon his tormentor, the United States. "Child- murderer," Gadhafi branded Reagan, who had authorized the attack. But Gadhafi decided to bide his time before retaliating. In 1987 Twetten was chief of the Near East Division and taking an active role in all intelligence operations against Libya. During this period he was intent not to take any action that might create the appearance of favoritism or particular interest in his son-in-law's career. Gannon was assigned to the Counterterrorism Center, taking him somewhat outside of Twetten's direct line of authority. An Arabist by training with nearly a decade's experience in the Mideast, Gannon was a major asset to the center. Those who knew him were amused that Twetten had gone to such ends to avoid meddling in his career. Gannon's self-effacing brand of courage and his chameleon-like ability to adapt to life in the Mideast had long since ensured a meteoric rise within the CIA. For that, he needed no help from his father-in-law or anyone else. *** By the summer of 1988 Gadhafi and Libya seemed to slip off the front pages of the news. The focus of the fight against terrorists had moved from Tripoli to Beirut, where American hostages continued to be held. At that point the Agency suspected that support for such terrorism came from Iran. Tensions with that country ran high in the summer of 1988. On July 3, 1988, officers aboard the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes, deployed in the Persian Gulf, believed they detected an incoming Iranian F-14 and fired a surface-to-air missile to intercept the aircraft. The target proved to be not a fighter, but a civilian Iranian airliner, an Airbus A300. Flight 655 was blown apart by the missile and disintegrated midair. Two hundred and ninety passengers and crew members were killed. Once again Iran railed against the United States as "the Great Satan," and once again there was a feeling of waiting for the second shoe to drop -- for Iran to take its revenge. Five months after the downing of Iran's flight 655, the CIA's Counterterrorism Center needed an Arabic-speaking case officer to send to Beirut on temporary duty. A CTC officer informed Twetten that his son-in-law had been selected for the assignment. "I am not a part of that decision," Twetten responded. "He's your officer." In his mind he knew he had no other choice. "It's all a sham if I intervene and say, 'No, you can't send Matthew to Beirut,'" he told himself. But there was no one in the Agency who understood better the perils of Beirut. Terry Anderson, a correspondent for the Associated Press, had by then been a hostage for more than three years, along with other Americans, including agronomist Thomas Sutherland and university administrator David Jacobsen. And they could be counted among the lucky ones. The CIA's Beirut station chief William F. Buckley, was not so fortunate. He had been seized by gunmen four years earlier, on March 16, 1984. A man who had quietly supported war orphans in Vietnam, Laos, and Beirut, Buckley had been widely admired by senior Agency officers and was a favorite of CIA head Bill Casey. For fifteen months Buckley was tortured and interrogated. He is believed to have died in captivity on June 3, 1985. Six more years would pass before his remains would be recovered. At Langley and at the Oval Office, the hostage issue had long been an obsession. The murder of Buckley had convinced the Agency that the other hostages were likewise in imminent peril. Frustrations grew. So, too, did comparisons with the Iran hostage crisis that came to define the Carter administration as weak and ineffective. Reagan's victory had in part been in revulsion to the humiliating spectacle of American hostages paraded about day after day. But in Lebanon, despite its best efforts, not even the location of the hostages was known to the CIA. It was precisely such frustrations that led the administration and several within the CIA to appeal to Iran, which was believed to have sway over the captors. The plan that was concocted called for a trade of arms for hostages. Specifically the United States secretly sent TOW missiles to Iran in the hope of securing the hostages' release. The plan had a second aspect: proceeds from such sales would be diverted to fund the Contras in Nicaragua in their fight against the Sandinista regime, despite a congressional ban on such support. In November 1986 the scheme erupted into a public scandal known as Iran-Contra. It would nearly bring down the Reagan administration and once again fix in the public mind the idea that the CIA was out of control and contemptuous of congressional oversight. Fending off congressional investigators and reporters would consume massive amounts of CIA Director William Casey's time and flagging energy. On May 5, 1987 just as the congressional Iran-Contra hearings were getting under way, the once-indefatigable William Casey died of a brain tumor. His successor as Director Central Intelligence was William H. Webster, a former federal judge and director of the FBI. Selected for his reputation for probity and candor, it was hoped that he might restore credibility to the Agency and hold a firmer reign over Langley. In the wake of Iran-Contra he fired two CIA employees, demoted another, and sent out letters of reprimand to four more. By then it had become a recurrent and all-too-familiar pattern at Agency headquarters, wherein men of action -- a Dulles, a Helms, a Casey -- are eventually followed by more disciplined administrators -- a McCone, a Turner, a Webster -- who are expected to pick up the pieces and restore credibility. But the American hostages in Lebanon would long remain in captivity, some of them chained for upwards of a thousand days. It was their plight and the threat of even more terrorism that drew Matt Gannon to Beirut. In late November 1988 Gannon set off; traveling via Cyprus. For the next three weeks he worked relentlessly to reestablish contact with agents who provided him with critical intelligence on terrorist organizations in and around Beirut. But as Christmas drew near, Gannon thought of his family in suburban Maryland, of the burdens his wife faced without him, of his two daughters, Julia and Maggie. He had been scheduled to fly out on December 23, but as exhausted as he was, he asked the Beirut chief of station if he might leave a day early. His request was granted and Gannon arranged to fly to Frankfurt and then on to London and New York. He booked his flight on Pan Am 103. Some weeks before the flight the United States had received what it considered to be credible threats that there would be an attack on a civilian airliner and the warning was posted to State Department personnel, though not to travelers at large. Even if Matt Gannon had been made aware of such a warning, it is doubtful he would have given it much notice. Such a risk would have paled in comparison to those he faced daily in Beirut. The plane, named Clipper Maid of the Seas, was twenty-five minutes late in taking off from Heathrow, not unusual given the volume of travel at the Christmas holidays. Seven and a half hours later Matthew Gannon could look forward to landing at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport. Pillows were puffed up and in the galley flight attendants prepared to serve dinner. Sitting in business class, Matthew had room enough to stretch out. Then, at precisely 7:03 P.M. GMT; the plane simply disappeared from the air controllers' screen at Prestwick, southwest of Glasgow. At 31,000 feet above the Scottish countryside it had blown apart. Moments later debris and body parts rained down on the village of Lockerbie. Matthew Gannon was one of 259 passengers and crew members who died. It was later speculated that many of the passengers did not die in the blast but rode their seats down in a terrifying six-mile descent. Eleven residents of Lockerbie also lost their lives. *** Early in the afternoon of December 22 Twetten was in his Agency office when the phone rang. His secretary answered the call. It was the Counterterrorist Center. The message was brief. Pan Am 103 had gone down and Matthew Gannon was believed to have been on board. Twetten was at his desk when the secretary passed along the dreaded message. He asked that she inform him the moment anything more definitive was known, then he called his wife, Kay. He may also have called his daughter, Susan, that afternoon. He cannot now recall. "You're looking at a defense mechanism," he says. "I don't remember much of that afternoon. I know I made a decision that the moment there was any confirmation that he had indeed left Beirut a day early I would go home." And home he went. A senior Agency officer wrote to those who needed to know: "It is with profound regret and sadness that I advise that Matthew Gannon was on board the PA 103 flight which crashed yesterday. Although as of this writing remains have not been identified, there is no chance he survived." Twetten's superior, Deputy Director for Operations Dick Stolz, later asked if Twetten wanted his son-in-law buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Matthew had not been in the military, but the Pentagon had extended certain burial privileges in the past to CIA officers killed in the line of duty. Twetten left the decision to his daughter Susan, who said a burial in Arlington would be an honor. The arrangement was made between Stolz and senior Pentagon officials. "I doubt my position had anything to do with it," Twetten would reflect years later. "I didn't think it was appropriate to lift a finger myself." A consummate stickler for the rules, Tom Twetten was determined not to meddle in his son-in-law's career -- even in death. On the government-issued gravestone was written:
The abbreviation stood for "Foreign Service Officer." He had died under State Department cover. Now it was chiseled in stone. *** Not long after the crash of Pan Am 103, Matthew Gannon's brother Dick received a letter of condolence from Robert Pugh, who had been the number two ranking official at the Beirut embassy when it was bombed. He knew how much Dick Gannon had already suffered as a result of the car bombing of the embassy and its unspeakable aftermath. Pugh understood only too well the irony that Dick Gannon's brother Matt should have survived the perils of gathering intelligence on terrorists in Beirut only to perish at the hands of terrorists while aboard a civilian airliner. There was no safe haven. Dick Gannon, already touched once by terrorism, had now to endure that much more pain again. Pugh's letter meant a great deal to Dick Gannon. On Apri1 20, 1989, Dick Gannon wrote Pugh, thanking him and his wife, Bonnie, for their kind expression of sympathy at the loss of his brother. "Matthew was a wonderful brother -- he is never far from my thoughts. He leaves his wife, Susan and two beautiful daughters, Maggie age 4 and Julia age 1. They appear to be bearing up well. Our family and Matt's friends attended a funeral Mass at Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown where he and Susan were married in the summer of 1982. Matt was buried in Arlington on January 5th not far from some of our colleagues from Beirut." Just five months after Dick Gannon wrote his letter -- on September 19, 1989 -- a DC-10, UTA flight 772, was blown up over Africa by a terrorist bomb that had been tucked in the forward baggage compartment. The aircraft disintegrated, spreading wreckage across the desert of Niger in a scene all too reminiscent of Lockerbie, Scotland. Some 171 people lost their lives. Among the fatalities were 7 Americans. And among these was Bonnie Pugh, wife of Robert Pugh, then U.S. ambassador to Chad. It was now Dick Gannon's turn to write a letter of condolence to Pugh. Both men, twice struck by terrorism, shared a common bond that neither would have wished upon his worst enemy. But there was something not yet known to either man that would link their tragedies and point to the same sinister hand that may have been ultimately responsible for both Pan Am 103 and UTA 772. In October 1989 Dick Gannon and his wife, Betsy, made a sort of pilgrimage to Lockerbie. They went through a series of trailers lined up side by side where the yet-unclaimed belongings of the deceased were set out on tables, organized by type of item. On one table were rows and rows of shoes, on another glasses, on another shirts, and on yet another pants. It was a grim scene, curiously neat. Each item had been meticulously laundered and folded or arrayed in rows by the townspeople. Dick Gannon saw nothing of his brother's among the articles, but then a local constable escorted them to a table with a bag. Inside were many things Dick Gannon instantly recognized to be Matt's -- a Catholic missal, its delicate pages damaged by exposure to the rains, a check for $43 protected in a plastic sleeve, a plaid flannel shirt Matt often wore. The constable befriended them and drove them to an open field where sheep grazed on rolling green hills and the grass was high. It was a peaceful place beside a narrow country lane. The officer helped the Gannons as they stooped to clear some open slats in an old wood rail fence. He walked them well out into the pasture to a place undisturbed by the business of death and reclamation that still absorbed the town This was the precise place, he said, where he had found Matthew Gannon's body. The loss of Matt Gannon had hit particularly hard on the sixth floor of the old headquarters building at Langley where the Counterterrorist Center was located. The first reports of the crash had come not from some CIA agent in the field or satellite imagery, but from CNN. The entire CTC staff had congregated around the television in the so-called Fusion Center, the communications hub with other agencies, particularly the State Department's Office of Counterterrorism and the FBI. They had all watched in disbelief. First came the report that the plane was out of contact with Heathrow. Then came the haunting live pictures of wreckage strewn across the Scottish countryside. They had lost one of their own. The room filled with the sound of sobbing from those who had known Matt Gannon and who had worked so closely with him. Now came the leviathan task of finding out who was responsible for bringing down Pan Am 103. It would be a couple of days before explosive residue was found on the debris signaling that an "improvised explosive device," or IED, had brought down the plane. Almost immediately the CTC set up a Pan Am Task Force, commencing what was to be one of the most intensive intelligence operations in the history of the Agency. The five officers assigned to the task force often worked around the clock. Twetten purposely kept his distance from the daily investigative operations, but everyone on the task force understood that his desire to solve the case went well beyond a professional interest. More than once the CTC ran into a bureaucratic snag and it was Tom Twetten who quickly cleared the way. Initially the CTC presumed that the attack on Pan Am 103 was in retaliation for the July 3, 1988, downing of the Iranian airliner by the U.S. naval vessel Vincennes. Suspicions were strong within the CIA that the Iranians had worked with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine -- General Command, or PFLP-GC, a view that Israeli intelligence also promoted. But two breakthroughs in the investigation pointed to a far different culprit. The first clue came from an analyst assigned to the task force who determined that the device used to trigger the Semtex explosive on Pan Am 103 bore an uncanny resemblance to that used to bring down the civilian aircraft in West Africa -- the terrorist action that had claimed Bonnie Pugh's life. That attack had been linked to the Libyans. The digital electric timers were traced back to a Swiss firm that had allegedly sold its products to the Libyan military and Jamahirya Security Organization, the country's intelligence service. In the case of Pan Am 103, a large brown Samsonite suitcase stuffed with clothes was believed to contain a portable radio cassette tape player that held the explosive. That suitcase had been transferred from an Air Malta aircraft to Pan Am 103 in Frankfurt, Germany, and then onto the Boeing 747 in Heathrow, the continuation of that flight. It was thought that little more than a pound of high explosive placed in the forward cargo hold had brought down the 600,000 pound jumbo jet. A second, more serendipitous break reportedly came from within the ranks of the Libyans themselves. A code clerk stationed in a Libyan embassy in Europe cabled a cryptic message on a frequency readily accessible to the CIA. In what one senior CTC official said appeared to be a deliberate effort to contact the Agency, the code clerk claimed that the Libyans were behind the bombing. The message offered a detailed account of how the decision was made within Libya. In 1991 the United States and Britain charged two alleged former Libyan intelligence officers, Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, with the bombing of Pan Am 103. But the two had sought asylum in Libya, whose government steadfastly refused to turn them over to prosecutors to face trial. It was not until April 5, 1999, more than a decade after the bombing of Pan Am 103, that the two suspects were finally turned over to authorities to be tried under Scottish law in the Netherlands, the result of a carefully brokered deal with Libya. *** More than a year after the downing of Pan Am 103 a farmer walking through a field in Scotland came upon the remnants of a suit bag lodged in a tree. Inside the bag was found the note that Matthew Gannon had written to his brother Dick, dated December 18, 1988. "You won't believe this," it began, "but I've spent the last three weeks in Beirut. The Embassy needed an Arabic speaker so I volunteered." Matthew Gannon spoke of his wife, Susan, and daughters Maggie and Julia. "I couldn't have taken this TDY if Maggie hadn't improved so much in the last 6 months," he wrote. "We (I should say Susan) are working with her every day & we see the gains in her better behavior. Julia is a little doll, walking and beginning to talk -- growing up way too quickly." The letter ended, "Love, Matthew." There was this postscript: "We didn't tell Mom and Dad I was in Beirut because they would worry too much." The letter was handwritten and the ink had blurred and run from exposure to a year's worth of rains that had washed over it. In time the letter found its way into the hands of Matthew Gannon's widow, Susan, and ultimately to his brother Dick, to whom the letter had been written. For months thereafter, pieces of the plane and personal items turned up. The emotional wreckage caused by the crash was strewn over several continents and seemed to be without end. At 2:30 P.M. on January 9, 1989, just weeks after Gannon's death, the CIA held a memorial service for him in the auditorium known as the Bubble, directly across from the old headquarters building. Scores of covert officers, analysts, senior administrators, and members of the Counterterrorist Center filed somberly down the aisles and took their places. Tom Twetten escorted his daughter, Susan, into the auditorium. At the entrance was an enlarged photographic portrait of her husband. It was more than she could take. But for Tom Twetten's taking her by the arm and propping her up, she would have collapsed in grief. In the memorial ceremony's printed program was a picture of a smiling Matthew Gannon, and beneath it, fittingly enough, were words from the Koran: "And God gave them a reward in this world and the excellent reward of the Hereafter. For God loveth those who do good." There were so many ironies surrounding his death, not the least of which was that Matthew Gannon had been among those within the Agency most sympathetic to the interests and causes of the Arab world. In killing him, they had slain not an enemy but an ally. Susan Gannon would remarry in 1993, five years after the downing of Pan Am 103. She and her father, Tom Twetten, and mother, Kay, invited the entire Gannon clan to the wedding. The night before, there was a festive square dance at a farm outside of Washington and the sound of fiddles filled the air. Amid such merriment there was no mention made of Matthew Gannon, nor was there need to. Those who had known him simply exchanged knowing glances or paused an extra moment in each other's embrace. As for Tom Twetten, the only setback to his otherwise charmed Agency career came as a result of his position as CIA liaison to a National Security Council staff member named Oliver North. It was North who oversaw the scheme to sell arms to Iran in the hope that it would win the release of American hostages. "I like to call myself the chaperon for Ollie North," Twetten would joke years later. "I didn't aspire to the job but I got it anyway." For his reluctant role, Twetten would be called to testify some twenty-seven times, four of them to a grand jury. Six years after the calamitous operation was exposed he was still being called to testify. But his Agency career was intact. On January 1, 1991, at the age of fifty-five, Twetten was named deputy director for operations. As DDO, Twetten was the nation's spymaster overseeing an estimated $1-billion empire that included all of the CIA's worldwide covert operations, safe houses, overseas stations and bases, and a network of communications facilities. Twetten's seventh-floor office at Agency headquarters had a distinctly Middle Eastern flavor reflecting his scholarly interest in the region. On the walls were portraits of men in turbans and prints of antique maps, including one of Jerusalem and another of Turkey dated 1705. Under the coffee table was a Bedouin's camel saddlebag. Twetten had tried unsuccessfully to reclaim the desk of Wild Bill Donovan, the founder of the OSS, but settled for a standard wooden desk. On it were three STUs, secure telephone units, as well as a buzzer system by which the three Directors Central Intelligence under whom he served as DDO -- Webster, Gates, and Woolsey -- could ring him directly. Twetten could also have rung the director, but such an action was understood to be forbidden by Agency protocol. These were good years for Twetten. After a lifetime of undercover work he seemed relaxed and comfortable with his new authority. Though sober and serious, he could also be playful. One Halloween, after being placed in charge of all CIA spy operations, he had a "spook party" for his friends and colleagues at the Agency. Twetten gave instructions that guests were to arrive by passing through a neighborhood graveyard. Twetten, dressed as a ghoul, had dug a hole on his property, and as guests arrived, he rose ominously from the makeshift grave to greet them. But such moments of levity were rare. On June 2, 1993, still as deputy director for operations, he stood before the CIA's Wall of Honor and delivered the commemorative remarks for those who died in the line of service. Among those honored by a star on the wall -- but never named -- was his son-in-law, Matt Gannon. It was hard for Tom Twetten to deliver his remarks. His eyes filled with tears and his voice choked with emotion, but he never faltered. After thirty-four years, Twetten retired from the CIA at the end of September 1995. Today he lives in a rustic 1840s home built on the edge of Little Hosmer Pond in the north of Vermont, a quiet place by a tiny spillway where children sometimes look for frogs. From inside his den, Twetten can watch the mergansers searching for fish. Once a week he visits Montreal to study the art of rebinding fine leather books, his second passion. Downstairs, in his library and bindery, are his precious books, a copy of The Essays of Elia, by Charles Lamb, dated 1896, beside it New Improvements of Gardening, dated 1739, and an undated copy of Christian Lyrics. Once one of the most powerful figures in the CIA, he now contents himself with socializing with locals who know little of his background and could care less. In a sense, in retirement, he is again under cover. At a recent village barbecue at the Albany Church five miles from his home a woman patted him on the back for the fine 140-foot stone wall he erected, but scolded him lightly for a house she deemed too large. Twetten only smiled. He could not be further from power, or the violent world in which terrorists and those who stalk them live and die. For Twetten the battle with Gadhafi and terrorism is over. The Agency in which he had risen to the senior-most ranks, working together with the U.S. military, had played a key role in the bombing of Tripoli that cost Gadhafi his eighteen-month-old daughter. Two years later Twetten's own Agency would conclude that Libyan agents had brought down Pan Am 103, costing Twetten his son-in-law, widowing his daughter, and leaving his granddaughters fatherless. Terrorism and the war that sought to contain it had created a deadly symmetry in the lives of two men who had never met and had even less in common -- Muammar Gadhafi and Tom Twetten. "It's an irony that certainly has occurred to me," says Twetten. "I have never thought of it as a grotesque irony. It's never occurred to me for more than two seconds that there was a causal link. The Libyans aren't that good. Their timing was entirely accidental." Twetten is right. There is no evidence to suggest that the Libyans targeted Pan Am 103 because Matthew Gannon, Tom Twetten's son-in- law, was on board. It was a chillingly simple act of random violence. "It's fairly easy for me to dismiss the connection," says Twetten, "I have never permitted myself to feel any remorse or responsibility for his death. This is not a part of my baggage. I had so much authority over so many lives that I don't think I'd be among the sane if I permitted all the connections with all the people I had who are no longer living. I am saved some of that in terms of rationality because I didn't send Matthew to Beirut. This was the blessing of making sure that there was no potential nepotism." As for Matthew Gannon's brother Dick, he remains with the State Department. Far from retiring, he took on the ultimate job for a security officer -- overseeing the security of the new U.S. Embassy in Moscow. In his Virginia office just across the Potomac is a picture of Matthew cradling a small kitten and standing before a large wall map of the world. He is wearing a conservative white button-down shirt and a striped tie, but with his long hair and drooping mustache he has the hint of a desperado about him. A decade after his brother's death, Dick Gannon still sorely misses him. He is envious of his mother's faith and the comfort it has afforded her at the loss of Matthew Gannon, aged thirty-four. "God," she concluded, "must have wanted him awful badly." |
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