Fawaz Younis

Steven Emerson and Richard Rothchild got the exclusive story for U.S. News & World Report, and it was a sensational saga of how the US government got its man. The story of a brave informant named Jamal Hamdan reeling in hijacker and terrrorist Fawaz Younis is celebrated on the FBI Web site and has been immortalized in low-budget television documentaries using dramatic re-creations. Swaggering retired CIA men like Dewey Clarridge have shared their versions of the story in memoirs vetted by the CIA. Various “experts” on terrorism have written the official story, which is used to demonstrate how Noel Koch’s counterterrorism team at the Pentagon worked together with the CIA, FBI, DEA, and naval intelligence to capture a dedicated Hezbollah terrorist. Once the good guys lured the terrorist into custody, the Justice Department nailed Fawaz Younis with a thirty-year jail sentence.

As with Saddam’s arrest, the publicity surrounding the Younis arrest was designed to make Americans feel better about themselves. What Emerson and Rothchild were not told was that the Younis arrest was more about protecting a powerful Lebanese politician than about protecting innocent Americans. The events before and after the Younis arrest go to the heart of why our government has failed to protect American citizens or remained credible on the world stage.

The terrorist attacks and kidnappings in Lebanon in the 1980s had put the Reagan administration on the defensive. In response, the Reagan-Bush team, in effect, escalated the policies put in place by the Carter administration. Working closely with Saudi intelligence, the administration increased its involvement in Islamic matters as part of its plan to use the Muslim world to put added pressure on the Soviet Union.  It was a culturally ignorant approach that underestimated the complexity of the Middle East and overestimated US power to control and manipulate it. Predictably the short-term political gain from these policies came with a huge toll.

As government officials like Koch at the Pentagon and Clarridge at the CIA began to grapple with the problems of Americans being targeted by Islamic terrorists, past political realities complicated their response. The Reagan team had negotiated with Shi’a Iranian intermediaries prior to Reagan’s election. After the election, using Nabih Berri in Lebanon to keep a line of communication open with Tehran was seen as vital.

Berri gave every appearance of being the ideal intelligence resource. He reported back to the CIA faithfully about all his trips to Tehran. He happily accepted rewards of American visits and green cards for him and his associates, as well as other offerings from his CIA handlers. His Amal Militia got help from the United States in the post-civil-war environment in Lebanon to assist his climb to power.

The Saudis appreciated Berri because he was flexible. The French liked Berri because the information he provided was reliable. Even the Israelis felt Berri was a man who could be counted on to recognize the right course in his own self-interest. The Syrians believed he was loyal to them — after all, in exchange for power, he could be very accommodating. So many governments had invested in Berri and bought into his leadership that not one of them could expose their man for what he really was. To expose Berri would also mean exposing those countries’ governments to the charge of having negotiated with and paid off a man who at best stood by while Hezbollah was kidnapping and killing innocent people. If Lebanon was an international chessboard, Berri was everybody’s queen. And no country had more to lose in its secret relationship with Berri than the United States.

According to intelligence officials and Younis, during the secret US cooperation with the Iranian government that would become known as the Iran-Contra scandal, Berri was a key American conduit to the Iranians. With a single interview to the right reporter, Berri could give the lie to Ronald Reagan’s assertion that his government did not negotiate with terrorists. The truth is that from 1981 to today, intelligence assets from every administration from Ronald Reagan’s through Barack Obama’s have worked with terrorists in numerous countries. Berri, according to Younis and US intelligence officers, was a key go-between in that effort.

By 1986 it was clear that the Reagan administration had to do something about terrorism. Hundreds of Americans had died or been kidnapped overseas, and the country’s intelligence and military services had responded ineffectively.

Reagan’s anti-terrorism team was desperate for a high-profile success. Its government-wide response was dubbed Operation Goldenrod. The idea was for the CIA, FBI, DEA, and naval intelligence to be able to take credit for bringing in a known air pirate and hijacker. The government needed a win, and the CIA had an informant in Lebanon who could supply one. In a piece of political theater, Fawaz Younis, a captain in Berri’s Amal Militia, was captured by American authorities. Noel Koch’s team fell upon him eagerly, although unlike the original TWA Flight 847 hijackers, Younis had never killed anyone during a hijacking. More importantly, Younis was a soldier who always acted on Berri’s orders. But the administration didn’t care. It now had its trophy terrorist. Meanwhile, the arrest of Younis allowed Berri to be a hero to both sides. He hadn’t impeded the Americans in getting what they wanted, and his vocal outrage after the arrest endeared him to his Amal followers in Lebanon.

The fact is, the US government fully understood that Berri was involved in the hijacking of both the Royal Jordanian airliner and TWA Flight 847. If Berri didn’t cooperate, it was just a short series of steps to expose him as the man who had allowed Hezbollah to get through Amal lines to blow up the US embassy and its annex, kill the entire CIA station, murder hundreds of US troops, and kidnap the replacement CIA station chief, William Buckley. Unfortunately Berri, too, had a big card to play. “He had full knowledge of the arms-for-hostage deal,” one of his former intelligence handlers says.

The man the US intelligence team used to get close to Younis was a criminal by anyone’s standard. Jamal Hamdan was a street hustler, murderer, and drug dealer. But he was what the Americans needed to reel in their terrorist. Though never a real member of Amal, he became a driver for Younis after they met on a trip to Poland, and they had worked together on various smuggling enterprises.

Hamdan’s Beirut police file is impressive. His first big crime was in 1981. In the course of trying to kill a man named Khouder Habngar, he accidently shot and killed his own brother Mohamed Hamdan. Jamal then succeeded in putting the blame for the killing on Habngar. In 1982, before Habngar was prosecuted, Hamdan killed him in “revenge” for his brother’s death.

In 1983 Beirut police suspected Hamdan in the execution-style killings of two Egyptian citizens in the Khandakalghaiq area of Beirut. Later that year, according to police files, Hamdan murdered a doctor just because the physician blew his horn at him on a street in old Beirut. In 1983 he shot and wounded four members of the multinational force who were camped at the local Pepsi-Cola bottling plant. The same year, he was charged with smuggling hashish into Saudi Arabia.

Later in 1983 he traveled to Poland and got into an argument over drugs with his business partner from Lebanon. Hamdan, according to Beirut authorities, stabbed the man a dozen times and left him to die in a hotel bathroom. The Polish authorities arrested him but allowed him out on bail. Hamdan quickly left Poland and never returned to face the charges. Once back in Lebanon he spent his time running a Bekaa Valley business selling counterfeit currency and drugs.

In 1984 he attempted to kill two Lebanese security agents in Restaurant Masiss in Beirut. The next year he was charged with the kidnapping and torture of a Lebanese man over a drug deal that went bad in the United States. In 1985 Hamdan was charged with killing a high official of the Druze Party in Beirut. Later that year he was indicted for cocaine dealing and for using and carrying illegal weapons. According to Fawaz Younis and police sources in Beirut, Hamdan had always been able to get out of trouble using his connections in Amal or offering the police someone they wanted more. But Hamdan’s string was running out with Amal. The killing of the Druze official was an unnecessary embarrassment.

In 1986 Hamdan’s temper got the better of him again when in a fit of rage he murdered his sister-in-law Lela Hamdan. He told police he’d killed her because he considered her a tramp. This time Hamdan had nothing that would convince Lebanese police to drop the charges, and he was sentenced to prison.

Long before Noel Koch and his colleagues in the US intelligence community presented Operation Goldenrod to the White House, Nabih Berri’s Amal team had made it known to them that there was a local drug dealer who could help out with some major cases in the United States. According to Beirut authorities, representatives of both the DEA and CIA visited Hamdan in his Beirut cell. During these visits Hamdan informed on a series of dealers in the United States. Shortly afterward he was released from prison. His cooperation with American intelligence not only won him his release, but also resulted in a new life with an apartment on the island of Cyprus.

When Operation Goldenrod started up, the Americans turned again to Hamdan. But he proved to be as wily as Nabih Berri at making deals. He insisted on huge cash payments and asylum in the United States for his family. The government agreed to move most of Hamdan’s family to the United States, give them green cards and eventually citizenship, and give them money to start their own businesses. In other words, the FBI arranged to bring into our country a murderer and terrorist in return for the capture of an airplane hijacker who had never killed any Americans. Unfortunately, like most things the government has done in the name of national security, this operation was much more about public relations than public safety. The planned arrest of Fawaz Younis was much more about protecting intelligence assets, covering up mistakes and secret deal, and giving the Reagan-Bush administration a military, war-on-drugs, national security victory. Operation Goldenrod played out, as planned, on the public stage for public consumption. It was a very expensive public relations stunt that – much like Dick Cheney used Judith Miller and the New York Times to give legitimacy for the Iraq War – used the mainstream media to project an image of success and toughness.

Jamal Hamdan had had his differences with Amal. Hamdan’s father, a successful Beirut merchant, had refused to join Amal, angering Nabih Berri. Indeed, Ali Hamdan said that one item in his brother Jamal’s arrest record is fiction: “There was no murder of a doctor. It was set up by Berri to cause bad relations between our family and Christians in Beirut City.” The Hamdan family, though Shi’a, had gotten along well in their community near the Muslim-controlled Green Zone, which bordered the Christian section of Beirut.

While the FBI was the lead police agency in Operation Goldenrod, it relied on the connection the CIA already had with Hamdan. If the Hamdans had a special friend in the US intelligence community, it was a CIA officer named Richard C. Hile. Hile had begun his career with the US Army Security Agency and then switched to the CIA. It was near the end of his career that he became the case officer for Jamal Hamdan and helped arrange for his release from prison after the murder conviction.

CIA director William Casey saw the information Jamal Hamdan brought to Hile as a boon to the agency. Hamdan was also willing to take part in risky operations. Since the Reagan-Bush administration could not attack the real culprits in arming and training terrorists – Iran or Saudia Arabia – because of intelligence and financial ties – it had to find a country, an enemy, it could attack. Much like the George H.W. Bush’s and, later, his son’s administration would turn Saddam Hussein into a super villain, the enemy became Libya and the villain Muammar Qadhafi.

The summer before Goldenrod, the agency used Jamal and Ali Hamdan to set up an operation that allowed President Reagan to justify the bombing attack against Libyan strongman Muammar Qadhafi. That attack was carried out in response to the bombing of the Lebelle nightclub in West Berlin in April 1986, in which two US soldiers and a Turkish woman were killed and 229 others were injured.

A few weeks later The Wall Street Journal and other news organizations were leaked stories by CIA sources that a plot to bomb a movie theater in Berlin had been organized by the Libyan Peoples Bureau in East Berlin. That leak allowed the administration to quell the criticism over the bombing of Qadhafi’s compound.

In fact the whole thing was a ruse. The CIA arranged a series of phone calls from Hamdan’s apartment in Cyprus to suspected terrorists in Germany. “The idea was to convince German intelligence and police there was a terrorist cell,” says one CIA officer who worked the case. According to CIA sources, a young cousin of the Hamdans living in West Berlin, Hossein Issa, was told a package would be coming in — carried by Ali Hamdan and a friend — and he was to hold it but not open it. It was strongly implied by Jamal Hamdan that the package contained explosives.

To add to the realism of the ruse, Ali Hamdan and a nineteen-year-old friend, Abbas Aoude, sneaked into West Berlin illegally from East Germany. The German authorities became convinced a real bomb had been smuggled into the country and arrested the frightened cousin and Ali. The CIA stepped in through the BND (West German intelligence) and arranged for everyone to be released. Meanwhile, the ruse had worked, and the phony terrorist attack was accepted as further evidence against Libya.

What Jamal had not been able to do was get at Nabih Berri. While Jamal had Hile as a case officer, Berri dealt at a much higher level. Hamdan thought that one way to get rid of Berri was to deliver an operative who might turn on him. Hamdan’s family considered Berri a “blood enemy,” according to Ali Hamdan. That was the prime motivation for his brother Jamal to propose to Dick Hile that he could deliver a real hijacker and terrorist: his old boss and “friend” Fawaz Younis.

According to Ali, it was a dangerous offer to make. “I was supposed to be flown to Beirut after the West German operation, but instead they flew me to Cyprus, but kept me from talking to Jamal. My brother had to deliver Younis before the CIA would let me see him. Because if this operation went down we could not go back to Lebanon. The promise was a new life for all of us in the United States.” When the CIA began to pull back on its promises to relocate the Hamdans to the United States, according to Ali Hamdan, Jamal’s greatest champion, Dick Hile, told his colleagues that “the Hamdans go out on the plane when I go out.” Hile also championed a handsome resettlement deal for the Hamdans that was approved by his CIA superiors.

The entire operation had to be planned to the split second. The legendary Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, a favorite of CIA director William Casey, supervised a sophisticated CIA operation run out of the new Sheraton Hotel in Nicosia. The fact that the hotel staff were not fooled as the FBI and CIA brought in cases of electronics equipment did not seem to worry Clarridge. It should have. The local Cypriot authorities, not at all friendly to US interests, were well aware what was up. Using the National Security Agency and CIA technical services, the agency arranged for all calls from Hamdan’s apartment on the island of Cyprus to be monitored. The decision to proceed with the operation came after Hamdan was successful in getting Younis to detail his role in the hijackings.

Although Amal friends of Fawaz Younis suggested that he avoid his onetime driver and fixer, Younis still trusted his old friend. They had been making large amounts of money together on cigarette smuggling. So Jamal called Younis, with Hile and Clarridge listening in, and invited him to come to Cyprus to meet “Joseph,” who wanted to give both of them more business. “Joseph” was, in fact, an Arab-speaking FBI agent, and the meeting was to take place on a yacht called the Skunk Kilo in international waters.

Once US authorities had Younis in custody, the Skunk Kilo could not land on any foreign territory because that would complicate the arrest process. That is why an elaborate $20 million operation was put into effect involving numerous government agencies, an aircraft carrier, and a record-setting carrier flight using midflight refuelings.

After a night of partying by Hamdan and Younis, the elaborate CIA operation, which had already broken security through carelessness in dealing with the hotel staff, fell apart. First, to keep the operation under control, Clarridge was forced to move his target into the same hotel they were running the operations center from because the local police had begun to look for Hamdan. The authorities had put the tip from the hotel staff and the German incident together with the huge US contingent in their newest hotel.

The way the operation was supposed to work was that Hamdan and Younis would set off in a motorboat early Sunday morning, with another Hamdan brother at the helm, and arrive at the Skunk Kilo, where the arrest would be made. “The only problem was, Hamdan’s brother got lost,” Younis recalls. Clarridge, back at the Sheraton, was not happy at the news that the boat carrying his prey was lost. To make matters worse, the White House was listening in through an open secure channel. “We ended up finding the boat by accident,” Younis says.

Younis walked right into a US government trap on September 17, 1987. Once aboard the boat he raised his hands to be searched as the FBI’s hostage rescue team took control, throwing him to the deck so hard that he broke both wrists. Jamal’s brother started to drive the speedboat away, but, to protect Jamal, he, too, was put through the appearance of an arrest. As part of this charade Younis was taken in chains to the USS Sarotoga and then flown straight from the aircraft carrier to Andrews Air Force Base for arrest and trial.

Francis D. Carter, whom the late judge Barrington Parker appointed as Younis’s lawyer, says, “It was such a strange case. I was assigned to it while Younis was still en route . . . It was clear the CIA was running the show and they would never let me near Jamal Hamdan. He was too much of a scumbag to use as a witness who could be cross-examined.”

Younis became the poster boy for the Reagan administration’s war against terrorists. Documentary makers and reporters and producers were fed the story of the operation. CIA headliners like Dewey Clarridge were credited with a great success.

To protect Nabih Berri, portions of the tapes of those phone calls in which Younis mentioned Berri’s role in the hijackings to Hamdan were kept out of the trial by prosecutors, according to Carter.

The Reagan administration got its terrorist. But it became quickly apparent to the Hamdans that they had not achieved the other part of their goal: No matter what was done to Younis, he would never give up Nabih Berri. Fawaz Younis says, “I was

Lebanese Hizbullah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah (middle) placed next to Parliamentary Speaker Nabih Berri on an election sign From: http://intransigeants.wordpress.com

a soldier. I followed orders. I would never talk about Berri.” His lawyer, Francis Carter, says he could not get any information about Jamal Hamdan or the CIA operation. “I was surprised when prosecutors didn’t ask my client about Nabih Berri’s role.”

In 1990 Younis was found guilty and sentenced to thirty years in federal prison for the hijacking of the Royal Jordanian airliner. For the media that was the end of the story. What the public was never told was that Nabih Berri, the US intelligence asset, was in fact involved in both hijackings — the Royal Jordanian and TWA 847. Indeed, according to Ali Hamdan, had prosecutors pressed Younis and dug into Nabih Berri’s past, “They would have learned Berri was involved in four, not two, hijackings.” But the United States treated him as a major political figure responsible for negotiating the release of hostages rather than a mastermind of the operations. Two top CIA officials knew the truth.

And so the CIA and the Reagan administration made the decision to protect the man who had protected Hezbollah as they hijacked airliners and slaughtered hundreds of US servicemen and CIA officers. It would not be the last time the bad guys would be protected in the name of national security, and those who died and were kidnapped in Beirut would not be the last Americans to suffer from intelligence bureaucrats who made the wrong decisions.

Iran responds to American lies about the shootdown of an Iranian passenger plane.