The Watchers

by Shane Harris

  The president had not authorized them to fire, but he was willing to let the fighters scare the hell out of the airline pilot. They could blast their cannons across his path if he didn’t yield. Once they secured his cooperation, the Navy planes would escort the pilot to the NATO base of Sigonella, near the coast of Sicily, where they’d force him to land. The base was on Italian soil, but the United States had long maintained a military presence there, which was under the command of a Navy captain.

  The Hawkeyes and Tomcats took their positions, and the description of their target came in over the radio. EgyptAir flight 2843. A Boeing 737, tail number SU-AYK. The Hawkeyes’ commanding officer scanned the dark skies for aircraft traveling west, possibly toward Tunis, the PLO’s headquarters and a logical safe zone for the hijackers.

  The skies were busy. Planes taking off from Egypt diverged along a number of standard travel routes over the Mediterranean. The Hawkeye got a hit and sent a pair of fighters in for a closer look.

  As the pilots approached they could make out the shape of a 737 against the starry sky. One Tomcat moved in for a closer look. The radar operator, seated in the rear of the cockpit, peered through the dark at the plane’s logo. EgyptAir.

  “Get the flashlight,” the pilot said. The fighter closed within feet of the two-engine jet. The radar operator shined a beam on its tail. SU-AYK. The pilot radioed back—contact confirmed.

  Flight 2843 was already on a westbound course, taking it in the direction of Sigonella. The Tomcats fell in behind it, running without any lights and keeping enough distance to disappear into the black sky. The Hawkeye commander tuned his radio to intercept the airliner’s communications. The pilot was looking for a place to land, radioing airports at Tunis and Athens. Each turned him down—Poindexter and the crisis team already had sent word to each country to deny the plane landing rights.

  His choice of escape routes diminishing, the pilot took up a holding pattern south of Crete. He radioed Cairo, where controllers told him to change course and come back to Egypt. Now was the time to pounce.

  The Tomcats pushed forward, fell in behind the tail, and blasted their lights onto the 737, illuminating it as if under a spotlight. The Hawkeye commander broke through on the radio: “EgyptAir 2843, you are being escorted by U.S. Navy fighters and are instructed to proceed to Sigonella.”

  Alarmed passengers, the Achille Lauro hijackers among them, looked out their windows and saw the F-14s zip alongside the aircraft. The fighters pulled up to the cockpit, locking eyes with the airline pilot, and dipped their wings—the international signal for forced landing.

  “I am following your orders,” the pilot declared, with remarkable calm. “Don’t be too close. Please.” He set the plane on a new heading and sped across the Mediterranean to his landing spot.

  Stiner and his JSOC team caught up with the improbable band of fighters and a civilian jet in the air. A few of his men were already on the ground in Sigonella, allegedly for a refueling stop. The ground team would surround the EgyptAir plane on the ground, whisk the hijackers onto their military transport, and then take off before anyone could stop them.

  The plane touched down at 1:30 in the morning, as if forced from the sky by some invisible hand. As the pilot taxied off the runway, a team of Navy SEALs surrounded him. Stiner’s transport planes, running with their lights off, landed on the main runway, blocking any escape. More JSOC troops poured out, and snipers took aim at the airliner’s doors. Stiner picked up the radio and informed the pilot he was about to be boarded.

  The passenger side door opened, and a ladder slowly lowered. Stiner, accompanied by one of the SEALs, climbed up and entered the cabin. As they stared down the aisle, the four hijackers stood out—they were the ones surrounded by a clutch of armed Egyptian guards.

  The White House was humming. Word of the audacious mission had filtered out, and staff was eagerly roaming the halls for any tidbits about how it all went down. The drama wasn’t quite finished. A band of Italian carabinieri had surrounded the JSOC team, and for several tense hours it was unclear whether there’d be a shoot-out. But the White House agreed to hand the hijackers over to the Italian authorities and immediately got to work on extradition orders. One way or another, they thought, Leon Klinghoffer’s killers would stand trial. The NSC even had managed to get Craxi and Reagan on the phone together, after North called a friend who knew the prime minister’s mistress and tracked them down at his residence in Rome.

  As the Navy fighters closed in on the airliner, around dinnertime in Washington, one face was conspicuously absent in the Situation Room and its surrounding offices: Poindexter’s. Keeping to his normal schedule, the admiral went back to his office and enjoyed his evening meal, a grilled ham and cheese sandwich and a glass of white wine.

  Poindexter sat in his cubbyhole of a work space, located on the first floor of the West Wing, next to McFarlane’s spacious quarters. He enjoyed the view of Pennsylvania Avenue out the window. Savoring the sandwich and sipping his wine, he felt no sense of urgency to oversee the final act. There were no calls to make. No lists to check. The Navy had improvised a beautiful plan. The system had worked. The only things that bothered Poindexter were those he could not understand. And right now, there weren’t any.

  Three White House aides came into the office. They’d been living vicariously through Poindexter’s adventures. Didn’t he know the planes were in the air? Didn’t he want to be there for the landing?

  Poindexter looked up from his dinner. His placid face gave the answer.

  The next morning, 9:30 sharp, the door to the Oval Office swung open and Poindexter strode in for the president’s daily security briefing. Reagan jumped up from his desk, clicked his heels together, and put hand to brow. “Admiral, I salute you!”

  Poindexter allowed the well of pride to bubble up, but just a bit. He smiled. “Thank you, Mr. President. But you should really salute the Navy.”

  “Well, then, I salute the Navy!”

  Poindexter, the president, and a few attending White House staff took their seats and got on to business. But no one could deny that something had been altered irreversibly. The air seemed different. Poindexter had purified it. Purged it of doubt. Like a smelter, he had rearranged the pieces of the system and forged something new. From now on, when the time came to act no one would question who was in charge.

  CHAPTER 4

  UNODIR

  One wintry morning in 1986, Ollie North strode into the spacious West Wing office of the national security adviser, where John Poindexter had set up shop. A few months earlier, Bud McFarlane had resigned his post, and Reagan chose Poindexter to replace him. Poindexter and North were still riding a wave of success after the Achille Lauro operation. They’d had to give up the hijackers, at least for now, but the system had worked. Poindexter had never had more credibility and political capital in the administration, and he intended to use it.

  North arrived this morning, like so many others, in search of his boss’s approval. For some time now the NSC staff ’s ultimate can-do man had been running a clandestine operation to aid the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, providing weapons and paramilitary training through an extensive network of private benefactors and a cohort of CIA officers. The Contras’ struggle to overthrow the socialist government resonated deeply with Reagan, aligning both with his geopolitical view of good and evil and his personal affinity for the underdog.

  Reagan had admonished his NSC staff to “keep the Contras alive, body and soul.” But the fighters were in trouble. Congress had pulled the plug on U.S. funding the previous spring. The intelligence community was expressly forbidden to provide aid and assistance. And while the administration remained hopeful that lawmakers might lift the restrictions and approve a new financial injection, the NSC staff had been improvising ways to bridge the gap until then.

  North had an idea how to do just that. And it involved a predictably tricky maneuver for a staff that had mastered the management of covert policies to serve the pre
sident’s agenda and draw as little public attention as possible.

  As he explained to Poindexter, North wanted to siphon money from a preexisting operation, this one involving weapons sales to Iran, which had run up an unexpected profit. He would divert some of the money into a funding scheme he had set up outside official channels. And he would run the transfer through the NSC staff, which, since it wasn’t technically a member of the intelligence community, wasn’t covered by Congress’s prohibition on funding.

  Poindexter liked what he heard, for a couple of reasons. First, he’d been looking for a way to get the troublesome Iran operation under control. For several months now the NSC staff had been managing a complex transaction to sell missiles and weapons parts to Iran in exchange for the release of seven Americans held hostage in Lebanon. The scheme had evolved from a rather straightforward quid pro quo into one of the most delicate and convoluted counterterrorism actions in the NSC staff ’s ever-widening portfolio. Several foreign governments were involved, as were a troubling number of shady intermediaries and brokers whose loyalty and discretion Poindexter questioned.

  It wasn’t even Poindexter’s idea, which also bothered him. McFarlane had kicked things off months earlier, after Iranian officials claiming to represent a rising moderate contingent in the Islamic republic reached out to the White House through go-betweens in Israel. They were willing to intercede on the hostages’ behalf, they said, if the U.S. administration would sell them antitank and cruise missiles. The moderates wanted to increase their credibility in Iran by proving that they could defend the country against their neighboring nemesis, Iraq, and against Soviet meddling. You sell us arms so that we can beat our chests, they proposed, and we’ll make contact with the people holding your citizens.

  Poindexter had disliked the idea. Not because it violated Reagan’s public declaration that the United States never negotiated with terrorists. He thought that leaders said one thing publicly and did another privately with remarkable consistency. As long as their principles remained pure, he thought, the policy was intact; and the president’s policy of doing all things possible to bring the Americans home had never been unclear.

  No, it was the arrangement of the scheme that perturbed the order-minded admiral. It was sloppy. And it involved too many parties who couldn’t be trusted, specifically the Israelis, who were selling the weapons to Iran with the White House’s commitment that they would be replenished from military stockpiles.

  The transactions ran up against a law governing weapons transfers to third countries and violated a U.S. embargo against arms sales to Iran. The White House had never informed Congress, and so the NSC staff walked a perilously thin line separating the executive and the legislature. Tip over to one side and the future promised indictments and possibly impeachment proceedings.

  Poindexter had spent the past five years of his life making sure the NSC staff didn’t have to rely on outsiders to carry out the president’s policies. And the White House had paid a political price for his zealous service. In the corridors of the State Department and the Pentagon there were agitated complaints and whispers about a rogue NSC staff that had “gone operational,” putting the president too close to controversial actions that by their very nature he should remain distanced from publicly. Poindexter, North, and the others didn’t recognize Reagan’s political vulnerabilities, people said.

  Poindexter also had raised eyebrows by extending the administration’s reach beyond government. As he added more sophisticated computer systems and networks to the counterterrorism mission, he grew fearful that hackers could penetrate those systems, stealing vital secrets or paralyzing the government’s communications apparatus. A band of teenage computer whizzes had recently compromised the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a real-life version of the techno nightmare popularized in the hit movie War Games, in which a precocious high school student cracks the codes of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Poindexter wrote a lengthy national security directive, which Reagan signed in September 1984, that established a high-level committee to set security policies for sensitive government computer networks. Most of the members hailed from the intelligence agencies and the military, and the entire panel was overseen by the NSC. Technology-savvy libertarians and privacy activists howled at the audacious power grab, accusing the White House of anointing a shadowy “computer czar” to control a burgeoning new information system. Poindexter’s critics called him Big Brother incarnate.

  He brushed off any suggestions that he’d overplayed his hand, as he had with the critics who accused him of jeopardizing the president and of taking unreasonable risks. As Poindexter saw it, too many outside forces had stuck their noses where they didn’t belong. Congress was the worst offender. In 1978, lawmakers had passed a sweeping new intelligence law that restricted the executive branch’s ability to monitor foreign spies inside the United States. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed in the wake of explosive revelations about the FBI and intelligence agencies’ illegally tapping the phones of civil rights activists, political dissidents, even justices on the SUPREME Court. FISA was meant to rein in the intelligence community, and it set up a special court to review intelligence wiretapping requests and issue warrants in secret. The requirements for obtaining a warrant were much lower than in law enforcement cases, and in that sense FISA was an act of compromise, a way to give the spies the latitude they felt they needed to follow leads and expose foreign agents. But Poindexter still resented the incursion and saw it as a prominent example of Congress chiseling away at the executive’s national security authorities. Ever since the Watergate scandal lawmakers had marched steadily into the executive’s domain, asserting the prerogatives to micromanage foreign policy, national security, and intelligence. Poindexter believed that a significant part of his job was blocking any further advances by a group of men whom he derided as dilettantes.

  It was against that backdrop of suspicion, mistrust, and disdain that Poindexter listened to North’s proposal for merging the Iran and Contra operations. It was an economical plan, an opportunity to serve Reagan two ways at once.

  It’s a neat idea, Poindexter thought.

  But he had no time to study the matter. There was no time to consider much of anything these days. Henry Kissinger, a previous occupant of his office, had been regrettably spot-on when he offered Poindexter a piece of professional advice not long after his promotion: Rely upon your staff, and upon everything you have learned up to this point, because you will have no time to learn anything new. Your only resources will be the hard work you’ve done, your intellectual capital. You can only hope that it will save you.

  Poindexter pondered for a moment.

  “Okay,” he told North. “Let’s do it.”

  In the days before satellites kept sea captains under the constant, watchful eye of a central command, sailors followed a dictum. The captain is the master and commander of the ship, and his orders are the only orders—unless otherwise directed.

  UNODIR. Management by exception. Asking forgiveness instead of permission. The captain transmitted his intentions to his superiors, marked them UNODIR, and before anyone could protest he was already under way.

  UNODIR (pronounced “yoo-no-dear”) was the understanding of authority that led Poindexter to fuse the Iran and Contra operations without asking for the president’s permission—and without telling him what he’d done. unless otherwise directed, keep the Contras alive, body and soul. Unless otherwise directed, bring the hostages home.

  Not only had Reagan not directed otherwise, he had left no doubt about his intentions. Only three days after he’d promoted Poindexter, Reagan called a meeting in the White House residence with his top aides: the newly minted national security adviser, the secretaries of defense and state, and the deputy director of the CIA, who was standing in for Bill Casey. It was a Saturday, the day of the Army-Navy game. They debated the merits of the Iran initiative and whether to move ahead or dial it down. Was it worth the risk of int
ernational scandal? Was there some other way to rescue the hostages?

  Reagan’s secretaries quarreled. But the president sat silently, his arms folded, perched on an ottoman made out of a camel saddle, rocking back and forth on the heels of his cowboy boots. Poindexter watched him closely and read his body language and the quiet resolve in his face.

  “I think we ought to keep trying,” Reagan said, after the others had stopped talking. “I just couldn’t live with myself if we didn’t take all possible action to get them back.”

  Reagan was haunted by things left undone. The hostages’ families had scolded his administration publicly for not doing more to obtain their release. They said he’d devoted more energy to higher-profile incidents—the hijackings of TWA 847 and Achille Lauro. The sister of a Roman Catholic priest, kidnapped almost a year earlier, said Reagan wanted to keep her brother and the others “out of sight, out of mind.” Perhaps he was guilty of the former, but in the pages of his diary Reagan kept a tortured, deeply personal vigil. He felt that he’d come to know these people. And Poindexter knew that as well as anyone in the residence that day.

  Reagan was not ignorant of the risks of moving ahead with the weapons sales. “If it ever becomes public,” he said, “it’ll be very difficult to explain. It will be like trying to define the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.” He paused. “But I think I can do it.”

  And that was the end of it. The ship had sailed, and on a banner day—Navy beat Army 17-7.

  Poindexter set about reengineering the Iran operation. The first order of business was to get the president’s rationale on paper. Remarkably, McFarlane had never asked the CIA to draw up an intelligence finding on the arms sales. Poindexter had no intention of notifying Congress; indeed, he took an expansive reading of the law’s requirement that Congress be apprised of all findings in a “timely manner.” Who could say what timely really meant? he reasoned. Adjectives were subjective.