32 AMERICAN SPYIt was nothing personal. In the Iranian’s eyes, I was a high-payoff target
of opportunity. It’s not every day that a lone, enemy CIA officer shows up
and declares himself in true name to a security service controlled by Iran.
As Los Angeles Times journalist James Risen would later report, by July 1995
the Bosnian interior ministry was under the control of the Iranian intel-
ligence service.^4
After I learned of this very personalized threat to my life and most if
not all of my limbs, my whole perception of danger in Sarajevo was turned
upside down. I was now focused more on not being snatched off the streets
than avoiding the random barrage of mortars and sniper fire. I vowed not
to make it easy for the Iranians to take me. Since I was alone behind enemy
lines, I knew that brains, not firepower, would be my only chance of sur-
vival in this situation.
My mind immediately flashed back to the horrific kidnapping, torture,
and murder of my colleague William Buckley, our COS in Beirut, by
Iranian-backed terrorists ten years earlier. A savage act of terror the CIA
avenged over twenty years later when, according to the Washington Post, the
CIA and Mossad killed Hezbollah mastermind Imad Mughniyeh with a
targeted car bomb in Syria.^5 The headrest bomb vaporized Mughniyeh’s
head, and part of his face was found fifty yards away from his vehicle.^6 I
knew from the Buckley case that a CIA officer captured by the Iranians
would never be traded or released, since the MOIS would never allow
their deadly hand to be exposed. Capture by Iran meant certain torture
and death.
The next morning, I conferred, via a secure satellite phone, with my
CIA superiors in Washington. We agreed that the prudent thing to do
would be to get out of Sarajevo as quickly as possible. Just getting back
out under “normal” wartime conditions without being killed by the Serbs
would be challenge enough. But now I also had to come up with an exfil-
tration plan for getting John and myself out without falling into the hands
of the Iranians or their Bosnian collaborators.
In devising my exfiltration plan, I had to consider what I knew and
didn’t know about the situation. I also had to plan my escape based on a
worst-case scenario. I knew that the Iranians were planning an operation
against me. I now knew that Marko and his Bosnian interior ministry col-
leagues followed orders given by the Iranian intelligence service. The Bos-