"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."