Word: buckleys
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Elizabeth Buckley...
...early 1985 the CIA was desperate to rescue William Buckley, its station chief in Beirut who had been kidnaped. An interagency group was formed, and two agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration were recruited to contact informants they had developed while tracing Middle Eastern heroin traffic. A longtime informant told them he had located the people holding Buckley and another hostage. The captors would let the two go, he said, for a $200,000 bribe...
...would not put up the money unless it got proof that the informant really was in touch with Buckley's captors. So in May, North raised the $200,000 from Perot. He then described the plan in a June 7, 1985, memo to McFarlane. The $200,000, he indicated, would only be a kind of down payment; eventually $2 million would be needed from "the donor" to rent a yacht to bring the hostages to Cyprus, to set up a safe house for them on the island and, apparently, to pay additional bribes...
Sometime later the informant made a trip to Beirut and came back with a + newspaper on which Buckley's initials were scrawled. The CIA submitted the handwriting to FBI labs for analysis and showed it to Buckley's secretary. Their conclusion: the handwriting was not Buckley's (whoever did the scribbling even got Buckley's middle initial wrong). The DEA agents have told colleagues that they then warned North the whole deal looked like a scam. Trible disputes this; he says the agents pressed ahead with the scheme. In any case, says Trible, North dispatched a messenger to pay Perot...
...October 1985, Buckley's captors announced that they had "executed" him. Even that did not discourage North; three months later he talked Perot into forking over an additional $100,000. Perot has no idea what happened to it; all he knows is that in mid-1986 North asked for $1 million more, to be handed over to someone who was supposed to bring five hostages to Cyprus by boat. A Perot courier flew to the island, sat around for a week waiting vainly for the hostages to show up, and returned with the cash. Although Perot...