by Ted Gup
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.”
CHAPTER 13
Damage Control
Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak
Whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break.
SHAKESPEARE, Macbeth
WHAT Debra Spessard remembers clearly is helping her husband, Jimmy, pack on the morning after Thanksgiving 1989. She remembers folding his jeans and T-shirts and laying them out for him to put in his brown leather suitcase. She knew he was going to Zaire and she knew that, even in November, it would be sweltering.
It was a morning like many before it, full of the rituals of leaving. She watched as her husband emptied his wallet of any identification cards that might conflict with the pseudonym under which he was to work overseas. Out came the Social Security card, the credit cards, driver’s license, even the family photographs—anything that might betray him. He sifted through his passports, selecting the right one for this mission’s cover story. He was to be a civilian employee of the Defense Department. It was not the first time he had used that cover.
But on this morning he broke from the familiar pattern and removed even his gold wedding band, setting it gently in a small wooden box in his top dresser drawer. Inside the ring were engraved their initials: “DKS to JES.” Never before had he done that, and the divergence, slight as it was, unnerved her. Even before that, Debra had sensed some higher element of risk to this mission.
He said he would be gone two weeks. “Is this necessary?” she asked, trying to mask her apprehension. She was still grieving over the loss of her father and was feeling needy. She was dreading Jimmy’s absence. “Yes,” he nodded, and that was the end of it. She knew not to ask for any particulars.
That morning she would have to steel herself as she and the boys, Jarad, aged five, and Jason, seven, drove Jimmy to the tiny Hagerstown, Maryland, airport to see him off. There he again broke with habit. Once out of the airport door, instead of making directly for the plane, he turned and walked back to the fence where Debra, Jarad, and Jason were waving. He gave his wife a final good-bye kiss. “I love you guys,” he said, and boarded the tiny aircraft for the first of several flights on his way to Africa.
Jimmy Spessard was not a spy in the traditional mold of the clandestine service. He didn’t even work for the CIA’s Operations Directorate, which oversaw covert activities. Instead, Jimmy was chiefly answerable to “S&T,” the Science and Technology Directorate that kept those in the field supplied with whatever electronics and paraphernalia were needed. After six years in the navy working with Terrier and Harpoon missiles Jimmy Spessard had emerged as a bona fide “techie.”
A small-town boy, he had grown up in a crossroads called Halfway, so named for its position between Hagerstown and Williamsport, Maryland. The son of a railroad brakeman, he had spent mornings before school working at a nearby asparagus farm. He had been an Eagle Scout and an active member of the Grace United Methodist Church and was considered by his pals as something of a good-time Charlie. He joined the navy straight out of high school but was hardly gung ho. He signed his letters home as “A POW” and wrote “Go Navy (go somewhere else).” He married his childhood sweetheart and for a couple of years worked as a traveling salesman peddling copy machines and calculators. He lived a life so ordinary it bordered on the humdrum—until, that is, he linked up with the Central Intelligence Agency in the early 1980s.
For the next six years he commuted an hour and a half each way to Warrenton, Virginia, to an office at Computer Data Systems, a company that provided a wide array of high-tech electronic gear to the CIA. His work for the Agency took him to Athens, Amman, Ankara, Bangkok, and innumerable other far-flung outposts. A part of his duties involved
the testing, delivering, and installing of complex surveillance systems destined for CIA stations in U.S. embassies abroad. From each trip he would bring back a lapel pin and a miniature flag, gifts for his sons.
Throughout those years he worked for the Field Support Branch on contract to the Agency. His specialty was something called “collection and signal processing equipment.” In the summer of 1989 he apparently became a full-fledged employee of the CIA. It was hardly the stuff of spy novels, but a slipup or blown cover could prove messy, even deadly, for himself or those with whom he worked.
In November 1989 Spessard received an unusual set of orders. He was to go to Zaire and then on to Angola, part of a covert mission of particular sensitivity. It was the last chapter in the Cold War. An anemic Soviet Union was so absorbed in its own woes that it was scarcely capable of or interested in meddling in the sort of proxy wars that had come to characterize the post–World War II era. Just two weeks earlier the Berlin Wall had fallen. Bulgaria’s dictator had resigned. So, too, had Czechoslovakia’s Communist Party general secretary. At Langley there was a mix of disbelief and euphoria, a sense that history and destiny had, at long last, proved them right. But some fires were slower to burn out. Among the most persistent was that which engulfed Angola, where Spessard was headed. It was as if the rest of the world was embracing its future while Spessard was assigned to the past.
The country, which gained independence from Portugal in November 1975, had long been the subject of a brutal civil war. Early on, the CIA heaped covert paramilitary support on an organization known as the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, or UNITA, led by Jonas Savimbi. Scores of CIA operatives were assigned to the Angola Task Force. But Congress was in no mood for CIA adventurism, fearful that it might lead the United States into yet another Vietnam. Saigon had fallen only months earlier. In June 1976 Congress passed the Clark Amendment banning all covert action in Angola. It was said to be the first direct congressional interference with a covert action and it would stand for a decade.
But the ensuing decade since gaining independence had bankrupted Angola and rendered it one of Africa’s most desperate economies, its 10 million people utterly sapped by civil war and outside intervention. During those years the upper hand seemed to shift back and forth between UNITA and the leftist MPLA, or Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola. By the early 1980s Soviet aid was said to total several billions of dollars, and an estimated forty thousand Cuban troops were in country. South Africa stood firmly behind UNITA, helping to stave off defeat.
In the summer of 1985 the MPLA with Soviet aid and Cuban support had launched an offensive and UNITA was pushed back. On August 8 of that year, Congress lifted its ban on covert support to Angola. Three months later Reagan signed a presidential finding providing covert lethal assistance to UNITA. The Agency even dispatched one of its operatives to Savimbi headquarters. He would live in a thatched hut for years. Matériel and weapons soon flowed into the country. In February 1986 the National Security Council approved the covert shipment of TOW antiarmor and Stinger antiaircraft missiles to Savimbi.
For years the CIA continued its secret resupply of UNITA, determined not to allow a Marxist regime to prevail. To do this, the Agency relied on the support of Mobuto, leader of neighboring Zaire and one of the world’s most corrupt leaders. Mobuto had long enjoyed the CIA’s favor and had allowed the clandestine resupply effort of Savimbi to operate out of one of Zaire’s remote air bases—Kamina. It was the same base from which the CIA’s John Merriman had taken off in his fatal flight against leftist Congolese guerrillas some twenty-four years earlier. Headed by a CIA base officer, Kamina provided a barracks, showers, and even rental movies to the crew that manned the huge cargo plane that made the perilous nighttime flight into and out of Angola. Still there was an undeniable sense of isolation at the base. There were no telephones. The link to the outside was by radio to Kinshasa, formerly Léopoldville.
Spessard’s first mission in aid of Savimbi’s troops was, after many delays, scheduled to take off on Monday, just three days after his departure from Hagerstown. While the precise nature of the equipment he was to deliver to Savimbi is not known, those familiar with Spessard’s work say it would probably have been used to help UNITA locate hostile forces by getting a fix on their transmissions.
The lumbering cargo plane that would take him into Angola was to be one of the “Gray Ghosts,” so named for their slate-colored paint. The plane had four seats in the front—for a pilot, copilot, navigator, and loadmaster. The fuselage was largely open for cargo. On board that night was a seasoned crew of six. Even by Agency standards, it had a distinctly international flavor. Heading the team was Pharies “Bud” Petty, a veteran Agency pilot who, at least on paper, presided over a Florida firm called Tepper Aviation, located in Crestview, just off Eglin Air Force Base. The other crew members were all ostensibly employees of Tepper. The CIA often uses such contracts as a mask to conceal its activities from public scrutiny, suspicion, and ultimately, accountability.
Petty, then forty-nine, was a husky six-footer with a full head of hair, hazel-blue eyes, and an easy, soothing manner. He was a shadowy character with an illustrious war record and a deep, some would say unquestioning, trust in government. Whatever his country asked of him he would do. In 1955, at age fifteen, he had joined the navy using a family Bible that contained an altered birth date showing him to be three years older than he was. A year later he stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Badoeng Strait and shielded his eyes from the flash of a nuclear test, part of Operation Redwing in the Pacific Ocean. As ordered, he would dispose of his radiation-contaminated clothes, but never, even years later, second-guess the wisdom of exposing the troops to such a test.
By the time he reached Vietnam he was an army pilot, his dazzling record capped off with a Distinguished Flying Cross, a Silver Star, a Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster, and an Air Medal with V Device. As fire team leader with the 334th Armed Helicopter Company he had led a devastating air raid that sank 174 sampans, some of them apparently loaded with ammo. In 1977 he retired as a major. He never spoke of Vietnam thereafter. But for years it invaded his sleep.
In 1981 Petty had gone to work for the Agency, living for a time in Washington, D.C. Later he moved to Florida and set up a series of dummy companies and Agency proprietaries that provided the CIA with planes and crews. During the mid-1980s he played an unseen role in what would come to be known as Iran-Contra. He was a part of that tight-lipped circle of pilots and crew associated with St. Lucia Airways as it ferried missiles to Iran, supplied anti-Communist insurgencies, and engaged in other Agency-sponsored activities.
That November night, as the plane lifted off from Kamina Air Base in Zaire, Bud Petty was in the cockpit as pilot or copilot. There was none steadier. Still, his family had fretted about this mission. “Don’t worry,” he had told his eldest sister, Joyce, “this is my last trip. I’m tired.”
He had seemed to think himself invincible, but he was savvy enough to understand that even the best are at risk. He took what precautions he could, always mindful of security. Several times he had told his sister Losue that if she should ever receive a collect call from someone named Grant Eugene Turner, she would know it was from him. The name was a corruption of his wife’s maiden name, Gracie Tyner.
The aviation mechanic that night was thirty-three-year-old George Vincent Lacy. Raised in Lawton, Oklahoma, he had only recently signed on to Tepper. He came from a family in which service to government was a given. His father was a twenty-year army man and his uncle had died in the crash of an air force jet. As with so many others, working for the Agency was a family business. His older brother had spent a career serving Langley. But extended trips overseas were tough on George Lacy and harder still to explain to his fiancée.
Two Germans were also on board that night. One was forty-nine-year-old George Bensch, the other forty-one-year-old Gerhard Hermann Rieger. Bensch was a mechanic. He had moved to the S
tates just two years earlier. Before that he had serviced St. Lucia’s planes in Europe as they set out on covert Agency operations. Rieger, the flight engineer, was the father of two sons. Both men had been born in West Germany.
The last member of the crew was a Brit, forty-four-year-old Michael Atkinson. A hulking six feet four, he might easily have passed for the Marlboro Man. Born in Yorkshire, England, he had made his home for over a decade in the British West Indies on the lush island of St. Lucia. Formerly the captain of a three-masted schooner, Atkinson was now a pilot. And though he had flown with St. Lucia Airways, the Agency proprietary, he had little interest in ideology or fighting the Communists. What he lived for was adventure, be it on the sea or in the air. He also had to think of providing support for his two sons, Oliver and Jason, and his wife, Madeleine, then pregnant with a third child.
Also on board were eleven of Savimbi’s men and a fuselage full of supplies, including crates of ammo. So secretive was the operation that even at Kamina the men lived under aliases. When airborne, flight records listed them not by name, but by number. The two nightly flights were simply designated “Flight One” and “Flight Two.” Even Savimbi was referred to only by an Agency code name. All knowledge of the operation was compartmented on a need-to-know basis.
The destination was a remote gravel airstrip in Angola. Landings kicked up huge clouds of dust. From there, it was nearly an hour to UNITA’s base camp. Sometimes Savimbi himself would meet the plane, shake hands, and give out wooden carvings in appreciation. In the past, most such flights had been “touch-and-gos,” meaning that the engines were never shut down, and once the cargo had been unloaded, the plane would take off again for Zaire.
