Approved For Release 2000108/08: CIA-RDP96-00788ROO1900530002-3 Captive CIA A*ent's Death Galvanized Hosta"Un Search Buckley's Plight Became Agency Crusade By Bob Woodward and Charles R. Babcock ,, WAlingtoll Post soff writen For the Reagan administration and especially the Central Intelli- gence Agency, Iran and the Moslem extremists it supports in the Middle East suddenly took on a new urgen- cy on March 16, 1984, when a man named William Buckley-described at the time -as a political officer in the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon-was snatched off the streets of Beirut by a group calling itself Islamic Jihad. As his captors have since charged, Buckley was the chief of the CIA's Beirut station, U.S. sources have confirmed. He was one of the CIA's leading experts on terrorism, and his kidnaping initi- ated what one CIA official called the agency's "private hostage crisis." At agency headquarters in Langley, Buckley's colleagues watched help- lessly as their expert on terrorism became a victim of terrorism, which the CIA believed led from Beirut to the revolutionary government in Tehran. For at least a year, the CIA un- dertook extraordinary . measures, spending what one source called a "small fortune" on informants, in- terCCptiDg communications and en- hancing satellite photographs in hopes of determining where Buck- ley and other U.S. hostages might be held. The effort failed. After torture and a long period of medical ne- glect, Buckley died in Beirut, appar- ently in June 1985. His captors first declared him dead later in 1985. In a statement released in Beirut ear- lier this month, they reiterated that Buckley had been "executed" after having "confessed" to working for the CIA. The Islamic Jihad statement said See BUCKLEY, A14, Col. I Approved For Release 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDP96-00 788 ROO 1900530002-3 Approved For Release 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDP96-00788ROO1900530002-3 "Hunt for Kidnaped Aide 'Became Crusade for CIA BUCKLEY, From Al Ahe group had "volumes written ~-with [Buckley's] own hand and recorded on videotapes." President "Reagan indirectly confirmed that -Buckley is dead in his news confer- `ence last week, when he spoke of Jive American hostages in Lebanon; 113uckley would be the sixth. According to knowledgeable sources, Buckley's death redoubled ~administration interest in his fellow bostages. A personal order- from Reagan led to intensified efforts to find and free them, the sources ..'said. None of the remaining American hostages has any connections-di- rect or indirect-to the CIA or any other intelligence agency, accord- ing to authoritative U.S. govern- ment sources ar .id colleagues of the hostages. Also, well-placed sources say those hostages have received better treatment from their cap- tors, including competent medical care, since Buckley's death. Before Buckley died, the search for him became a crusade for the CIA and a preoccupation of William J. Casey, its director. Agency offi- cials never felt confident that a res- cue attempt would succeed. The agency did obtain "irrefutable" ev- idence that Buckley had been tor- tured and, after initially resisting, finally broke down and disclosed information about CIA operations, one source said. Some senior CIA officials wept when they heard de- tails of the torture, which was pro- longed and painful, the source said. For Deputy CIA Director Clair E. George, who oversees all CIA co- vert operations abroad, the kidnap- ing was personally anguishing. George had been station chief in Beirut in 1975-76, when two U.S. government officials were abducted and held hostage for four months before being released. Then George went to Athens to take the place of assassinated station chief Richard S. Welch. "This [the Buckley kidnaping] was like all of Clair's bad dreams revisited," said one source. "He just about turned the building [CIA headquarters], and our capabilities' and the limits of our imagination on end to get [Buckley] back." Buckley was assigned to Lebanon in mid-1983 to help the Lebanese develop methods for thwarting ter- rorism and to rebuild the U.S. in- telligence presence after the bomb. ing of the U.S. Embassy a few months earlier, the' sources said. Seventeen Americans died in the atta&, including Robert C. Am__, the CIA's chief Middle East analyst, and several other CIA officers. On March 16, 1984, Buckley was seized on a Beirut street and spir- ited ~way-the first of what would become a.-string of kidnapings of Americans ,. Buckley has been the least known among the group of Americans held by Moslem extremists in Lebanon. He had no wife or close family to speak for him. One. source said Buckley was picked for the danger- ous assignment because he did not have a family. Previously, one source said, Buckley was in Cairo, where fie had helped train body- guards for 'Egyptian, President Anwar Sadat, later assassinated. Terrorists might have suspected Buckley's true identity and targeted him for kidnaping, the sources said. Buckley often carried a walkie-talk- ie iri Beirut and went nearly every day to the headquarters building of the Lebanese intelligence service- and could have been followed, the sources said. For more than a year, CIA offi- cials, including Casey, held out hope that Buckley was alive, deciding that reports on his whereabouts and condition were contradictory and did not support a'definitive conclu- sion that Buckley had been killed. At one point, the CIA received help from an FBI team trained in lo- cating kidnap victims. The team went to Beirut but failed to locate Buckley after a month of careful and -sophisticated detective work, according to a. senior Reagan ad- ministration official. Officials now think that Buckley was in Lebanon during the entire period of his cap- tivity, most of the time in Beirut. At the time. of Buckley's capture, the State Department released a brief biography, which said he was from Medford, Mass., and was a graduate of Boston University. It said he had worked as a librarian and as a civilian employe of the Army until joining the State Depart- ment shortly before he was as- signed to Beirut. Candace , Hammond of Farmer, N.C., who said she had been a close friend of Buckley for 10 years, said in can interview that he told her before he left for Beirut that "he wasn't real thrilled with the assignment," She said Buckley had called her from Beirut shortly before he was kidnaped. "Helsaid there was a lot of bombing, that it was a madhouse. There was shattered glass in his apartment. And he hoped he would be coming home sooner than ex- pected because it was such a stress- ful situation." She said she received a letter from Buckley the day after he was kidnaped, thanking her for a box of valentine gifts she had sent him. "That just about broke my heart," she said. Approved For Release 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDP96-00788ROO1900530002-3