Is vengeance a dish best served cold? Maybe so.
Seeing Hezbollah and Iranian operatives—responsible for CIA station chief Bill Buckley's kidnapping, the Beirut and Kuwait embassy bombings, and the Marine barracks massacre—finally taken out feels overdue. At my age, I never expected justice.
The 1980s marked several of America's worst counterterrorism failures. Hezbollah's asymmetric hits on our people and assets caught us flat-footed. The lessons came hard, paid in blood. As a young special agent, I pored over the 1979 Tehran embassy files and debriefed freed hostages to hunt Bill Buckley from the Hostage Location Task Force. We pieced it together too late— the perpetrators were Hezbollah operatives, backed by Iran.
While co-authoring Beirut Rules with Sam Katz, I apologized to Bill's family for not doing more. His sister and companion have recently passed. A Green Beret from Vietnam's jungles, Bill knew the risks in Beirut, but we as a nation failed him. Loose ends linger: Who was the Iranian spook debriefing him? Shipped to Tehran for worse? How long was he tracked before the kidnap? With many of the perpetrators already dead or killed in the current conflict, some answers may be buried forever.
Over the years, I’ve talked a lot about Iran, Hezbollah, and our efforts to get justice for the victims of their terror. If you’d like to read and see more background on the current conflicts with Iran and Hezbollah, check out some of these resources.
If you haven’t already read Beirut Rules, I highly recommend it as a starting point. The story is a retelling of actual events, but at times, it reads more like fiction. Even though we weren’t able to bring Bill’s captors to justice back then, I hope you’ll remember his story as this fight continues.
No story about Hezbollah and Iran could be complete without looking at Carlos the Jackal, one of the people we tried hardest to find and stop in the 1970s and 1980s. I talk more about him and his legacy in this piece.
This is a podcast interview I did with Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute. Matt is a scholar and one of the world’s foremost experts on Hezbollah. The talk is a great primer for anyone interested in the group and its connections to Iran.
For students of counterterrorism, I also authored a chapter in The Routledge Companion to Terrorism Studies: New Perspectives and Topics, edited by Max Abrams, detailing the history of the Black September Organization (BSO). The textbook is an excellent resource for anyone interested in the field.