by Ted Gup
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’être, 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 Ar
ab 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.
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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.
