There is a crimson muffler wrapped around the collar of her flannel shirt brown suede clogs peek out from the bell bottoms of her blue jeans. Her hair is swept back in a long, tawny braid that falls past the small of her back, and she dresses like a hip earth mother, in an antique tuxedo jacket with a rhinestone-and-pearl brooch pinned like a military honor over her heart. "Ĭandace Hammond is 5 feet 1 inch of sturdy, curvy energy. Take care of yourself and keep the home fires burning. I am aging and weakening fast on this assignment. Or play with other toys if they are available and I am still able. It is a great and impossibly complex adventure, and I will therefore be very pleased if I get a break one day which will permit me to visit Farmer burn all the wood in sight, have magnificent breakfasts, dinner at the steakhouse and of course, an opportunity to play around in the antique market. "Unfortunately the sidewalk leading to that corner keeps slipping away, and we never really nail down much with the multiple idiots and factions with whom we have to deal. "Beirut is its usual wild self with peace and our 'real' cease fire just around the corner," it read in part. The day after she learned of his kidnaping on the morning news, Hammond received a long letter from Buckley, written a few weeks earlier, thanking her for a box of valentine gifts:
WHO WROTE THE PLAY THE HOSTAGE FREE
And his apparent death in mid-1985, after prolonged interrogation, torture and medical neglect, reportedly redoubled administration efforts to find and free the remaining American hostages, whatever the cost.īut that was all far in the future.
WHO WROTE THE PLAY THE HOSTAGE SERIES
His kidnaping is thought to have helped set in motion the series of events that led the Reagan administration to countermand U.S. Casey to approve what have been called "extraordinary measures" to obtain Buckley's release. His capture by an Iranian terrorist group calling itself Islamic Jihad reportedly had caused great anguish at CIA headquarters and had prompted agency Director William J. Embassy left several agency employes dead. intelligence operations after the bombing of the U.S. He had been sent to Beirut the previous summer to rebuild U.S. Much later it was reported that Buckley had been CIA station chief in Beirut, an expert on terrorism with extensive knowledge of CIA operations throughout the Middle East. He said he knew who had bombed his apartment and he had telephoned them and told them he knew they had done it, and he would get them."Ī month later, as he left for work on the morning of March 16, 1984, Buckley was forced out of his car at gunpoint and kidnaped.Įarly news accounts of the abduction described him as first secretary of the embassy's political section. "He said his apartment had been bombed - not his apartment, but near enough to break all the glass in his windows," Hammond says. Then he told her of another event, one that never made the news but was, in the clear vision of hindsight, her first clue that Buckley had been playing a more dangerous game. "He said, 'Did you see me on television? I was helping people on the beach.' " He wanted to know if she'd seen him on the news, helping in the evacuation of American civilians from Beirut. She was sound asleep when the phone rang. Embassy in Lebanon, and hoping to come home soon. As far as she knew, he was working for the State Department at the U.S. Candy-belle, as Buckley sometimes addressed her in his letters, had long since stopped wondering exactly what it was that Buckley did for a living. In February 1984, one month before he was taken hostage in Beirut, William Buckley placed an overseas telephone call to his longtime friend, Candace Hammond, at her house in this tiny hamlet in the rolling hills of Carolina.
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