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Outside Magazine October 2004

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Out There
Jamboree Jihad (cont.)

OF COURSE, this being Iraq, change won't come easy. And this being Beck—a man with 33 years in the military, 23 of them in the CIA—a few sparks are likely to fly.

Beck enlisted in 1963 and served as a frogman and Navy intelligence officer in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos during the Vietnam War. Later he worked for the State Department and the CIA in hot spots worldwide, from Mauritania and Ethiopia to Sudan, El Salvador, Colombia, and Panama.

Perhaps his most difficult moment came in 1984, following a stint in Lebanon. Shortly after he left the country, his best friend and mentor, the CIA's Beirut station chief, William Buckley, was kidnapped by Islamic militants who tortured him over a 15-month period, then killed him.

Beck and Buckley had known each other since Vietnam. In the mid-1970s, they'd owned an antique store together in Manassas, Virginia. At Buckley's funeral, Beck delivered a eulogy.

"Chip did a wonderful job in helping Bill's family cope," says 69-year-old Thomas Twetten, a retired CIA deputy director and chief of clandestine operations, who was one of Beck's former bosses. "He's a man of deeply felt beliefs, and he worked hard at trying to find ways to rescue Bill."

The CIA would not let Beck return to Lebanon to pursue the search, however. "We felt he was so emotionally involved that we couldn't trust him not to do something foolish and get himself kidnapped, too," Twetten says. "He has passions, and he works full force for them."

By the 1990s, Beck had begun a successful second career as an illustrator, painter, and editorial cartoonist. His skills got him posted to the 1991 Gulf War—as a combat artist. But it was in the mid-nineties that Beck, then a special investigator for the Pentagon on POW-MIA matters, began his wildest crusade. In congressional hearings he demanded to know why, as he put it, 9,000 unrepatriated American POWs over the past 80 years had been held by communist captors or sent to Soviet gulags for use in Nazi-like experiments and other schemes.

His allies in this theory were rabid conservatives like radio-show host Robert "B-1" Dornan, the former Republican congressman from Orange County, California—a man who used terms like "lesbian spear-chucker" to describe his political foes.

Beck's detractors, meanwhile, can instantly be found on the Internet. "Beck craves to be part of some grand adventure," declares MIAFacts.org, which denounces his crusades as self-centered and self-serving. Most recently, an anti-Semitic Bahrain newspaper, Akhbar al-Khalij, accused him of being part of a "Zionist plot" to "indoctrinate Iraqi young people."

Those rantings aside, it's difficult to reconcile Beck's military career, which almost certainly required getting his hands dirty, with his near-obsessive focus on something as naively moralistic as scouting. One day I ask him straight out: Is his devotion some kind of atonement for his clandestine past?

He denies it. "If I had a chance to kill someone, I tried to wound them instead," he says. "If I could capture them without hurting them, I'd do that. I always tried to keep my humanity intact."

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