TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/081489/08148900.041

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 2KB | 33 lines

NATION, Page 19

"A Stupid Posting"


    When Marine Lieut. Colonel William Higgins became the
top-ranking American officer in the United Nations' observer group
in Lebanon in June 1987, he had just completed a two-year stint as
one of two military assistants to Defense Secretary Caspar
Weinberger. He had been able to see almost every classified
document that crossed Weinberger's desk. U.S. officials think
Higgins was kidnaped simply because he was an American and not
because of his background. But the fact that he had so recently
served in a sensitive Pentagon job clearly increased the danger to
Higgins once he fell into unfriendly hands. "He knew a great deal,"
says Weinberger. "He went with me to meetings on the progress of
new weapons, meetings with foreign Ministers of Defense."

    By 1987, when the posting in Lebanon opened, Higgins was
anxious to get back to the field. No rule barred an officer with
Higgins' top clearances from taking the job. But eight months after
his arrival in Lebanon, he was kidnaped by Hizballah gunmen near
the port city of Tyre. His captors, who quickly found out that he
had worked for Weinberger, charged him with being a spy. In a
videotape released a week after the kidnaping, Higgins appeared to
have been physically abused.

    Even as Higgins was being interrogated, however, the CIA and
the Defense Intelligence Agency were preparing a damage assessment
that concluded that information Higgins could give Hizballah was
unlikely to harm U.S. security. He did not, for example, know the
names of secret agents in the Middle East. No U.S. operations were
changed as a result of the kidnaping. "The main danger was to
Higgins," says an official familiar with the report. "It was a
stupid posting."