He had met the crooner during one of his spells at Langley when he had spent a weekend at Las Vegas. One of Martin’s songs also had a more personal memory for Buckley. It was a reminder of the one woman he had established a personal relationship with. Her name was Candace Hammond and she lived in the small hamlet of Farmer in North Carolina. He had spoken to her on the phone a few days ago. He’d ended the call by saying he hoped to be home soon and then she could cook him “good old-fashioned Southern-fried chicken,” Candace would recall.

Listening to Martin singing Return to Me, Buckley prepared sandwiches, something he had done every morning in Beirut. He disliked the food at the embassy canteen almost as much as the curious stares he attracted from other diplomatic staff. He suspected they regarded him as a dinosaur, an old workhorse heading for retirement. Let them think that. With his direct communication to William Casey he was only a step away from the Oval Office. Casey had said as much. “Anything you turn up, Bill, goes straight on to the president’s desk,” was how the director had put it.

Sandwich-making over, Buckley returned to the living room. It contained the only clues to his personal life. On one wall was a framed copy of a French World War I victory poster. Candace had given it to him. They had met when he had returned from Vietnam and quickly became lovers. Over the years, she had written him scores of letters. Sunday was her day for writing. He had seldom written back, preferring to make phone calls from various parts of the world. Proof of her love was the inscription she had written across the framed portrait of her on a table in the living room: “To Bill. My fearless warrior and wonderful lover. Candace.”

In a few months he would be 58 years old. But Candace had been the only woman he had ever come close to loving. To demonstrate that, he insisted on taking with him everywhere the ever-growing bundle of letters Candace had written.

They went into the bottom of the briefcase he fetched from the safe in his bedroom. Known as a “burn bag,” it was intended at a twist of the key clockwise, the usual way of opening or closing a bag, to incinerate the contents by triggering flames from a ring of gas jets built into the base. after the letters, Buckley placed a number of files marked “Top Secret,” “Secret” or “Confidential” in the bag. The sandwiches went on top.

Buckley locked the case by turning the key anti-clockwise, then attached the bag to his wrist by a bracelet fixed to a steel chain secured to the bag’s handle.

He dead-locked the apartment door behind him and walked across the hall to the elevator. It stopped at a floor below. A man entered. He was young, well dressed and carried a leather briefcase. A few floors further down the elevator paused again. This time a woman tenant whom Buckley knew joined them. He exchanged polite greetings with her. The man did not speak.

At the ground floor the woman stepped out, wishing Buckley to “have a nice day,” no doubt proud of her grasp of American idiom. The two men rode down to the basement garage where Buckley kept his car. Normally his embassy driver would have been waiting but this morning Buckley had decided to drive himself to his appointments. He had told no one at the embassy of this violation of security; it was an unbreakable rule that no American official nowadays traveled alone in the city.

As he walked toward his car, Buckley’s first inkling of trouble may well have been the fierce blow from the man’s briefcase to the back of his head, powerful enough to leave traces of blood and hair on the hide. The attacker dropped his bag. When it was later recovered, it was found to contain several rocks. From somewhere inside the garage a white Renault drove up. There were two men in the car, the driver and his companion in the rear. He may well have assisted Buckley’s assailant to get him and the burn bag into the back of the car. With Buckley half-sprawled on the floor and the other two men squatting on top, the Renault roared out of the garage, its rear door flapping open dangerously.

The woman who had exchanged pleasantries with the CIA station chief moments before was standing at a bus stop near the garage exit. She glimpsed what had happened and started to scream for help.

Bill Buckley was not only an important and totally reliable source for me in the intelligence world, but also became a good and trusted friend. The idea of having a friend who operates in the nether regions of our society does not always sit well with the purists of our world. They regard men like Bill Buckley as belonging to a world they want no part of.

Bill was highly educated and articulate and was a gifted host. He could easily have found himself a secure place on Wall Street or some other niche in the East Coast establishment. Instead he chose to work for the Central Intelligence Agency. He saw it as a real opportunity to satisfy two powerful driving forces in his psyche, a need to serve his country in a way that would satisfy that second force by giving him a life of excitement and the essential sense of danger that permeated so much of what he did. He was an authentic man’s man who regularly managed to seduce women with his old-fashioned charm and a style that the Great Gatsby would have admired.

Physically he was not exactly handsome. The angles of his face did not quite coalesce to provide a striking whole. His chin would jut at unexpected moments and his eyes were a little too close set, giving him a look of theatrical menace. To really appreciate his best physical side you had to catch him in motion, crumbling a roll for his soup or using his finger to make a point.

As I came to know him, I realized that Bill cultivated his little eccentricities and displayed them like badges of honor. He liked ties whose patterns never seemed to match his shirt or jacket. There was the long leather topcoat he wore for a while so that he looked like an extra in a wartime movie. His greatest concern was to ensure his shoes always gleamed. He could not pass a shoeshine stand without stopping for an application of further gloss.

We began to meet on a regular basis. Usually Bill would turn up with two or three staff from the embassy. The conversation was as good as the food. One night he arrived with William Colby, a quiet and self-contained man with the inquisitorial manner of a foot soldier in the Society of Jesus. He asked few questions but listened a great deal. Later Bill told me that Colby had parachuted into German-occupied France in 1944. after the war he had gone on fighting the fascists in Italy as an early member of the CIA.

Bill had a Waspish way with words. He once said the only real way to write about intelligence matters was to listen for “the murmurs in the mush.” It was his shorthand for learning about a deadly skirmish in an alley with no name; the collective hold-your-breath when an agent or network is blown; a covert operation that could have undone years of overt political bridge-building; a snippet of mundane information that completed a particular intelligence jigsaw. Later, as we came to know one another better, he convinced me that secret intelligence is the key to fully understanding international relations, global politics and terrorism.

Eventually I came to know a great deal about Bill and his own life and times.

William Buckley was kidnapped shortly after 8 o’clock in the morning, Beirut time, on March 16, 1984. Several hours passed before senior embassy officials concluded he had been abducted.

A priority signal was sent to the State Department and the Central Intelligence agency. It was still early morning in Washington.

At State, news of what had happened was given to Chip Beck who had served with Buckley in Beirut. He was “too stunned to take it in. I was having a hard time emotionally,” he said later.

The specialists tried to estimate the level of anxiety in Buckley’s voice. It was clear he could no longer confront the sheer terror of his situation. Its magnitude had overwhelmed him. For hours the specialists considered whether his words showed “true guilt” or “neurotic guilt.” They used a language no outsider could readily comprehend as they tried to make distinctions over how much in his case “the human order of being is disturbed,” and how far he might have experienced “existential guilt arising from a specific act,” in his case revealing secrets to his captors. They returned to consider whether Buckley not only accepted but yearned for the inevitability of death.

William Buckley’s kidnapping was into its second year by the spring of 1985.

The CIA consensus was that he would be blindfolded and chained at the ankles and wrists and kept in a cell little bigger than a coffin.

He would, if he was lucky, be fed twice a day: early in the morning and some time after dark. He would not know the time because his watch, like all his personal belongings, would have been taken from him.

From close study of the video other clues had emerged. His loss of weight was marked between the first and last tape, perhaps as much as 30 pounds. His drugging was evident.

How had he spent those long, dreadful hours in isolation? One way could have been to try and remember some of his training exercises, designed to help him if captured. There was the one where he had to try and recall as many passages as possible from the Bible, from his favorite books, or dialogue from a film. Anything at all to link him with the past, to remind him there was a world to return to, his psychologist/instructor had said.

Had Buckley managed to do this? Had he been able to decipher time, the passing of an hour, a half day, a day, a week, a month even?

In training he had shown himself able to calculate the hours. But a week? A month? Had he learned to cope with silence in the stifling darkness of his cell-coffin? Again, there was a way. He had been taught to recall conversations and play back in his mind both sides, his and the person he had spoken to. Again he had shown a certain aptitude for that in training. But no matter how realistic that was, it would still not match the reality of captivity.

Over the past two years, speculation had died—just as some people in Langley thought it would be best if Buckley was dead rather than he should have to go on enduring.

When his name was mentioned and his fate speculated upon, colleagues reminded each other that everything possible had been done to retrieve him. “Short of sending in the Marines to fight their way street-by-street through West Beirut, there was nothing else we could have done,” was a commonly held view.

Only in William Casey’s suite on the seventh floor of Langley had hope refused to be extinguished. He had rejected the proposal made a year after Buckley had been kidnapped that his name should be officially added to the list of CIA agents killed or missing on duty. Their fate was commemorated by small stars carved into the marble walls in the CIA main lobby. Before Buckley had vanished, there had been over 50 such stars, each representing an officer who had lost his or her life in the service of the agency. Since then a further half dozen had been added. But Casey had mumbled it was too soon to include Buckley among the display.

The director stubbornly clung to the hope that Buckley was being kept alive for a trade-off. The idea had taken root in his mind when the Israeli ambassador in Washington had told Casey that a number of Israel’s own prisoners, who had been captured in various wars with its Arab neighbors, were being kept alive in Syria and Iran as barter for future exchanges.

Encouraged, Casey had sat, often late into the night, at his desk going over all the reports on the hunt for Buckley. Reading the files, it had not been hard for Casey to imagine Buckley chained in some dungeon deep beneath the rubble of West Beirut. No satellite camera, however powerful, would be able to penetrate that far down. By now Buckley would be emaciated and probably kept in total darkness.

The focus of the search had remained on Lebanon. But in Friday prayers the priests in the mosques had given up referring to Buck-lee. His name, once on the lips of almost everyone in West Beirut, was now rarely heard.

Reports from foreign diplomats in the city all said the same thing: While the other Beirut hostages still clung to life in the bowels of the infamous “Beirut Hilton”—a series of cells scooped out deep beneath the rubble of West Beirut—of Buckley there was not even a whisper.

There had been a rumor that Buckley had been transferred to a Hezbollah redoubt out in the Bekaa Valley. another rumor said he had been secretly flown to Tehran for interrogation.

Finally there were no more rumors to track down. Even the newspapers, which had once routinely recycled old stories about the kidnapping, had no new spin to put on it.

Yet William Casey still would not allow himself to give up. Everything that made him what he was—his quality of mind, his healthy skepticism and detachment—convinced him that Buckley was better off alive than dead for his captors. as long as he lived, Buckley had a value for them.

By April 1985, Casey became increasingly attracted to the idea of using Israel to recover William Buckley. It had been done before, notably after the 1965 Suez War. Mossad’s chief, Meir Amit, had written to Egypt’s then president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, asking him to exchange two Israeli spies in return for hundreds of Egyptian prisoners-of-war captured in the Six-Day War. Initially Nasser had refused. Finally he had asked that the POWs be freed first. Amit had agreed. The Egyptians were taken by trucks to the edge of the Sinai Desert where they were transferred to Egyptian buses. Two days later the two Israeli spies were back in Tel aviv.

Casey knew there had been other occasions when similar swaps had been organized by Mossad chiefs. and none of them was more astute than Mossad’s present director general, Nahum Admoni.

While Casey knew that Admoni had a deep-seated suspicion of U.S. intentions in the Middle East, his own personal relationship with the Mossad chief was cordial.

Late in April 1985, Casey flew to Tel aviv. Admoni was at the airport to meet him.

Once Casey had settled into his Tel Aviv seafront hotel, he told Admoni the purpose of his visit: to see if Israel would go along with a deal to swap Buckley for Arab prisoners held in Israeli prisons.

Casey was to recall Admoni said it was a “no go area.” With that avenue firmly closed, Casey had asked if it was possible for Mossad to find out if Buckley was dead?