‘Ghost’ tells true stories of fighting terrorism

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By FRANCIS MOUL / For the Lincoln Journal Star

(“Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent” by Fred Burton, Random House, 276 pages, $26).

Few people know about the Diplomatic Security Service, or DSS, and that’s the way this agency of the U.S. Department of State likes it. It protects U.S. embassy personnel and ambassadors around the world much as the Secret Service protects top government officials from the president on down.

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But, in the mid-1980s the DSS mission changed to defending the country against terrorism as one of the foremost federal counterterrorism groups. Fred Burton was right there at the beginning of that change, and this book is about the major cases he worked on here and abroad. A former cop and rescue squad member, he had to learn a different way of battling the new bad guys, and help develop new techniques of both defense and offense against them.

That’s the interesting part of this work. Investigating the airplane crash that killed the leader of Pakistan as well as the U.S. ambassador to that country and one of our Army generals is a fascinating case study. It is little known now, and then, that DSS was able to pinpoint the probable assassins who brought down the plane: Soviet KGB agents using a sophisticated nerve gas.

Other cases include protection of the pope in America, shielding the Italian foreign minister — a Mafia mobster who met with his brethren in a New York restaurant — fighting both Hezbollah and Libyan terrorists and getting an early view of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaida thugs. Burton was in on all that early action, before the horror of Sept. 11, 2001, brought a whole new emphasis to his work.

Readers, however, must be able to separate those real-life adventures that are better than most spy thriller tales from the personal melodramatic passages that the author sprinkles throughout the book — from his political philosophy to the anguish of a DSS agent’s family life. These are a bit self-righteous, and they detract from what is otherwise an excellent review of important information on astounding front-page news of a world being torn by violent acts.

Francis Moul, Ph.D., is an environmental historian.