CAPTIVE CIA AGENT'S DEATH GALVANIZED HOSTAGE SEARCH

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91-00587R000100450001-3
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 30, 2011
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: November 25, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Approved For Release 2011/03/30 :CIA-RDP91-005878000100450001-3
WASIIIi1GTON POST
25 November 1986
~ five American hostages in Lebanon;
~?dptlVC' Cj~a Agent s Df'ath Buckley would be the sixth.
Gal~-anized Hostage ~eareh According b) knowledgeable
sources, Buckley's death redoubled
l3uckler:ti Plight Became
Ag'e-tcY Crusade administration interest in hip fc~;Euw
hostages. A personal order from
~' By Bob Woodward
~- and Charles R. Babcock
Wa,hmgton Pant Staff Waters
For the Reagan administration
and especially the Central Intelli-
gence Agency, Iran and the Moslem
extremists it supports in the Middle
East took on urgent new signifi-
cance on March 16, 1984, when a
man named William Buckley-de-
scribed at the time as a political of-
ficer in the U.S. Embassy in Leb-
an~n-was snatched off the streets
of Beirut by a group calling itself Is-
lamic 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 C[A's leadine exerts on
terrorism, and his kidnaping initi-
ated what one C[A 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 !ed from Beirut to
the revolutionary government in
Tehran.
For at least a year, the C[A un-
dertook extraordinary measures,
spending what one source called a
"small fortune" on informants, in-
tercepting 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
the group had "volumes written
with [Buckley'sJ own hand and
recorded on videotapes." President
Reagan indirectly confirr-:ed that
Buckley is dead in his news confer-
ence last week, when he spoke of
Reagan led to intensified effnr*..; to
tTnd and free them, the ,~nirces
mid.
i lYone of the remaining Auiencan
fios[ages has any connections-di-
ciect ur indirect-to the CIA or any
tither intelligence agency, accord-
ipg to authoritative U.S. govern-
ment sources and colleagues of the
txistages. Also, well-placed source,
.>~iy those hostages have received
getter treatment from their cap-
tprs, includingq competent medical
cHre, 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 otfi-
4tials never felt confident that ,~ res-
ytie attempt would succeed. The
:#gency did obtain "irrefutable" ev-
idence that Buckley had beta tor-
tlued and, after inuially resisting,
t~inally broke down and disclosed
information about CI:~ operations,
~~ne source ,aid. Some senior CIA
officials wept whin they heard de-
tails of the turtur a, winch was pr~-
longed and painful, the s~wrce said.
For Depury CIA Direrrnr Cl~iir E.
George, woo oversee> ..II i`L~ ~ ~~~-
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
Getxge went to Athens to take the
place of assassinated station chief
f'' Richard S. Welch.
"This [the Buckley kidnaping)
was like all of Clair's bad dream
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
ui mid-1983 to help the Lebanese
develop methods for thwarting ter-
rorism and to rebuild the U.S. in-
telligence presence after the bomb-
ir:g of the U.S. Embassy a few
months earlier, the sources said.
WILLIAM BUCKLEY
...was CIA station chief in Beirut
Seventeen Americans died in the
/~ attack, including Robert C. Ames,
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 away-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 1~toslem extremists in Lebanon.
Ile had no wife or close family to
ape;ik for him. One source said
Buckley was picked for the danger-
ous assignment because he did not
have a family. Previously, one
,uurce said, Buckley was in Cairo,
::here he had helped train body-
guard, for Egyptian President
.1u~~ar Sadat, later assassinated.
'I't~rrorists might have suspected
I' i, kiey's true identity and targeted
hi;n far kidnaping, the sources said.
Buckley often carried a walkie-talk-
ie in 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-
c~ials, 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.
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 Approved For Release 2011/03/30 :CIA-RDP91-005878000100450001-3
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
an 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. "He said 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.
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