William Francis Buckley was the CIA Chief-of-Station in Lebanon in the early 1980’s. He was kidnapped tortured and killed. The first Lexis-Nexis mention of Buckley’s predicament is interesting. It comes from an international news round-up in the New York Times from April 16, 1984. I’m including another piece of the roundup because it is historically interesting.
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan announced that he was resigning as vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The New York Democrat said he was protesting the failure of the Central Intelligence Agency to inform the committee ”properly” about the scope of United States involvement in the mining of Nicaraguan harbors. (Page A1, Column 6.)
An American was rescued from kidnappers in Lebanon by Shiite Moslem militiamen who raided a West Beirut house in which he was being held after he was seized by unidentified gunmen two months ago. The Moslems also rescued a French construction engineer who had been abducted five days after the American, Frank Regier, an engineering professor. Two Americans are still missing in Beirut. They are the United States Embassy political officer, William Buckley, who was kidnapped Mar. 16, and Jeremy Levin, the bureau chief of the Cable News Network, who disappeared Mar. 7.
Wow. I didn’t know that Moynihan resigned his intelligence chair in protest over the mining of Nicaraguan harbors. That is a nice example he set there. It’s also interesting to note that it was Shi’ite Muslims that rescued some of the hostages (presumably from other Shi’ite Muslims). You’ll also note that Buckley was identified as a political officer in the Beirut embassy. This is typical of the pathetically light official cover used by the CIA. The Washington Post first mentioned him on September 21, 1984.
After the U.S. Marines left in February, the pressure continued on American diplomats — tucked in heavily guarded apartment buildings near the old embassy.
William Buckley, a political officer at the embassy, was kidnaped by three gunmen in civilian clothes on March 16 as he was leaving his home by car in Beirut to go to the nearby embassy. His whereabouts, as well as the reasons for his kidnaping, remain uncertain.
A widely held theory in Beirut is that Buckley and two other private American citizens who have been seized are being held as hostages to prevent the execution of three condemned terrorists awaiting execution in Kuwait in connection with the bombings of the U.S. and French embassies there last December.
The first hint that Buckley might be in the CIA came on January 14, 1985. The New York Times reported:
An anonymous caller claiming to represent the group Islamic Holy War said tonight that five Americans kidnapped here in separate incidents over the last year would be put on trial as spies.
The caller also took responsibility for the deaths of two French peacekeeping observers who were killed with machine-gun fire this morning when their jeep was ambushed in the mostly Shiite Moslem shantytown suburb of Burj al Brajneh near the airport.
Last week, the deputy commander of the French troops, Lieut. Col. Claude Cuenot, was found dead with a single bullet in his head in a desolate, bombed-out area of the city. His briefcase, believed to have contained French and Lebanese currency, was missing.
The French soldiers were part of a 68-member volunteer contingent here to help enforce a shaky truce between feuding militias. Under the truce, crossing points were opened along the Green Line that divides the Christian and Moslem sectors of this capital last July.
Tension in City Increases
The shooting came on a day of increasing tension here after a week of bombings and kidnappings. The downtown streets emptied before noon, and at nightfall unusually heavy shelling broke out between the Christian suburbs in the east and Druse positions in the mountains.
The anonymous caller to two Western news agencies here said that in addition to having killed the French soldiers, the terrorist organization would try the five missing Americans as ”agents in the C.I.A.”
Last week, a caller claiming to speak for Islamic Holy War said for the first time that it was holding the five and would release them when all Americans had left Lebanon.
That caller said the latest American kidnapping victim, a 50-year-old Roman Catholic priest, the Rev. Lawrence M. Jenco, had been taken after what it called an indifferent response to the group’s ulitmatum that ”no Americans would remain on the soil of Lebanon.”
A State Department spokesman, Alan Romberg, said in Washington in reply that the United States intended to keep Americans in Lebanon. The once- large American group here, which has tried to help the Christian-dominated Government of President Amin Gemayel, has been sharply cut back in the face of reverses, including two large suicide truck-bomb attacks on American Embassy buildings and the similar attack on the United States Marine headquarters.
The Group’s Charges
”We wish to inform Alan Romberg,” the caller tonight said, that the five Americans ”are now in our custody, preliminary to trying them as spies.”
”These people are using journalism, education and religion as a cover and are in fact agents in the C.I.A.,” the caller continued. ”They have exploited the hospitality accorded to them by Islamic areas to persist in their subversive activities and will get the punishment they deserve.”
Then the Washington Post reported on a new development on January 29, 1985.
Kidnaped U.S. diplomat William Buckley surfaced yesterday in a videotape obtained by a London news agency, saying that he and two of the four other Americans believed held captive in Lebanon are “well” but urging the government to “take action for our release quickly.”
The tape did not indicate where or by whom the hostages are being held, and officials of Visnews, which showed the tape to reporters, refused to say how it was acquired.
President Reagan expressed cautious relief at the apparent confirmation that the Americans are alive, but he and other officials stuck by administration policy and would not talk about efforts to arrange the captives’ release.
“Believe me, this is very much on our minds,” Reagan said. “We haven’t forgotten they’re in captivity, but I don’t think it would be productive for us to talk about what we’re doing.”
Reagan said the 56-second tape provides the first evidence that the five are alive, “if we can take it for granted that that is recent.”
Buckley, the former political officer for the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, was shown holding a Jan. 22 copy of the Beirut French-language daily newspaper L’Orient-Le Jour. Positioned in front of a blank wall, he looked pale but well-groomed.
“Today, the 22nd of January 1985, I am well, and my friends Benjamin Weir and Jeremy Levin are also well,” Buckley said. “We ask that our government take action for our release quickly.”
On October 5, 1985, the Guardian reported Buckley was dead. They were also the first to report the accusation that Buckley was Chief of Station:
Nor has there been any trace of the American diplomat, Mr William Buckley, reportedly ‘executed’ by the Islamic Jihad on Thursday night, 18 months after he was snatched from the heart of West Beirut.
In a typewritten statement the Islamic Jihad said that the killing of Mr Buckley, ‘The head of the CIA station in Lebanon,’ avenged Israel’s attack on the headquarters of the PLO in Tunis.
Mr Buckley’s body would be placed ‘at the disposal of the families of those who died in the raid,’ – a statement that is causing much puzzlement here. By late yesterday there was no evidence of a body, and the US embassy was refusing any comment.