The first Mercedes overtook the Renault on the driver's side, speeding past and blocking it off at an angle.

The second Mercedes swung in from behind and blocked off any chance of escape.

The American lived in a cul-de-sac and was now completely boxed in. He glanced

at his attache case. With AK-47s held at the ready, the masked man approached his car,

barking orders in Arabic. They had rehearsed this before. It took all of a handful of seconds

in the blink of an eye, and with the barrel end of a Kalashnikov to his temple, the American vanished into a Mercedes.

I was assigned to the hostage location task force at the CIA. There were primarily three of us, and it was a full-time job to try to locate the hostages.

But make no bones about it, President Reagan and others said, find Bill Buckley.

If you can locate Bill Buckley, you can locate the other Americans and the Westerners that were held.

It was one of those moments very similar to when Ambassador Stevens was missing

in Benghazi, when there's a sense of dread that just overtakes the entire nation and the entire

intelligence community and grinds everything to a halt.

Welcome to the Global Recon Podcast. I'm your host, John Hendricks. I have a very special guest on with me for this podcast. Mr. Fred Burton. How's it going?

Hey, John. Thanks for having me on the podcast.

Thank you for coming on. So you've been working in the world of counterterrorism for a long time,

but you started working for the State Department. Can we kind of talk about it from the beginning?

And then after talking about your career in the government, just kind of walk through

what you've been up to since then?

Be happy to.

I was a police officer first outside of Washington, D.C., in Montgomery County, Maryland.

And then we used to have the Secretary of State that lived in our district.

And so I knew the State Department had these agents that weren't like the Secret Service,

...