by Tom Clancy
By 1975, much of the PLO had migrated to West Beirut, where they established their main base of operations, with its own system of law and order and its own taxes. This did not sit well with many Lebanese, but especially with the Christian militia (the Phalange), and soon a full-scale civil war broke out between the Palestinians and the Phalange.
An estimated 40,000 people, mostly civilians both Lebanese and Palestinian, perished during the bitter fighting, and the Lebanese Army fell apart. It virtually ceased being an effective fighting force.
At this point, the Syrians became involved.
The Syrians had had designs on Lebanon as far back as recorded history, and they entered the fray twice, first on the side of the Palestinians and then on the side of the Christian militias. Their switch was all in the interest of their larger aim—the control of Lebanon. Their participation resulted in the Syrian occupation of the Bekáa Valley, a strategic area located between Lebanon’s mountain spine and the Syrian border; they have remained there ever since, orchestrating to their advantage the large number of Shiites who migrated to that area as a result of the civil war and subsequent conflicts.
By 1978, Lebanon had become the main base of operations for the PLO. In that year, the Israelis launched a large-scale sweep of southern Lebanon against the Palestinian bases. Approximately 100,000 refugees, mainly Palestinians and Shiites, were sent fleeing to civil-war-ravaged West Beirut. By now, most of Lebanon had become a battleground, but where before it had been primarily Christian militias against the PLO, now it was just about everybody against everybody else. Long-standing hatreds, feuds, memories of atrocities, as well as ethnic and religious differences, were unleashed; each faction had its own militia—well-armed and deadly; and the various factional militias and clans began fighting each other.
The Druze occupied the Chouf Mountain region, which dominated Beirut and the primary land routes leading from Beirut to Damascus. The Druze controlled the Peoples Socialist Party, or PSP, under its leader Walid Jumblatt, and operated the most heavily armed of the Lebanese factional militias (though their numbers were not great). The PSP’s primary enemy were Christians, and their support and armament were provided by Syria, but included Soviet advisers at firing battery locations. By mid-1983, their armament consisted of approximately 420 tubes of modern Soviet artillery, including D-30 howitzers, BM-21 rocket launchers, numerous heavy mortars, air defense weapons, and thirty T- 54 Soviet-made tanks given to the PSP by Libya—all within range of Beirut and its suburbs.
The Syrian army controlled both the northeastern part of Lebanon and, more important, the Bekáa Valley and its population of Shiite Muslims.
Israel established a security zone in the south, where Christians, Palestinians, and Shiite Muslims lived together but hated each other.
Terrorism had meanwhile “advanced” to a stage of “state sponsorship.” Sponsoring states included Syria, Libya, and Iran. The most dangerous of these, Iran, developed new forms of terrorist warfare—suicide bombings and hostage-taking—aimed at spreading the Islamic revolution through subversion and terrorism. The U.S.-educated Hosein Sheikholislam, a disciple of the Ayatollah Khomeini and a veteran of the U.S. Embassy siege in Tehran and later of the TWA 847 hijacking, was the chief architect of this campaign. The militant arm formed to carry it out was called Hezbollah, “Party of God,” and consisted of fanatical fundamentalist Shiites drawn from all over the world. They were trained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in camps, then sent back to their home countries to establish revolutionary cells. These were the most dangerous of all terrorists, willing to martyr themselves for the Islamic revolution. Because Westerners, and particularly Americans, were seen as the “Great Satan, ” they became their primary targets. The main Lebanese base for Hezbollah operations (and terrorist training) was located at Baalbeckin Syrian-controlled territory in the Bekaa Valley, only an hour’s driving time from Beirut. Hezbollah operating cells were established in West Beirut.
The “Movement of the Disinherited,” known as the Amal, was headed by Nabih Berri, a lawyer, born in West Africa and educated in France, and whose family lived in the United States north of Detroit. Berri’s goal was to reduce the power of the Christian minority, and to allow the Shiites, who now outnumbered the Christians, to use their numbers to dominate Lebanese politics. Amal was supported primarily by Syria, while its two primary enemies were the Palestinians and the Israelis.
Question: Were the Syrians and Amal friends? Answer: When it was convenient. Question: Were the Druze and Amal friends? Answer: When it was convenient. Question: Were the Syrians and Iranians friends? Answer: When it was convenient.
Within Beirut itself were also several other independent militias, such as the Maurabi Toon, who claimed to represent what was called the Peoples Worker Party, but whose raison d’être was criminal: robbery, ambush, and kidnapping.
In June 1982, Israeli armed forces launched a full-scale invasion of Lebanon called Operation PEACE FOR GALILEE. Its aim was to clean out the PLO once and for all. In two weeks of fierce fighting, the Israelis drove the PLO from their strongholds near Israel’s northern border, destroyed a major part of Syria’s forces occupying the Bekáa Valley, including air defense batteries, tanks, and fighter aircraft, and pushed all the way to Beirut, where they linked up with the Christian Phalange militia and surrounded Muslim West Beirut, the center of militant Muslim activities in the capital. The PLO was now training their terrorists in West Beirut, as well as launching attacks against Israel and Jordan from there. It had also become the latest temporary refugee camp home for 175,000 Palestinians who had fled the earlier Israeli sweep in the south. Soon the Israelis were bombing West Beirut daily.
Israel’s crushing blow to the Syrian military forces seriously humiliated the Syrian President, Hafez Assad. In the coming months, Assad turned to the Soviets for assistance in rebuilding his weakened forces, with payback against Israel a primary aim.
At this point, the U.S. State Department got involved, with a long-term goal to promote Lebanese stability—an impossibility as long as the PLO was there. The more immediate goal was to stop the fighting and to get the PLO, the Syrians, and eventually the Israeli forces out of the country. To that end, the State Department proposed sending in a multinational force to provide security for the withdrawal of the PLO to whatever Arab state was willing to take them.
Though the Joint Chiefs of Staff were opposed to committing U.S. forces to this venture, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger felt that other international partners would be reluctant to join the effort unless the United States took the lead. He also felt that a U.S. military presence in Beirut was the only way to stop the Israelis from destroying the city, and to obtain their eventual withdrawal from Lebanon.
On August 25, approximately eight hundred U.S. Marines, along with contingents from France and Italy, went ashore to position themselves between the Israelis, the Syrians, and the PLO.
Meanwhile, Tunisia agreed to accept Yasir Arafat and his PLO fighters. Their evacuation was completed by September 1. Ten days later, the Marines returned to their ships, and the French and Italians also withdrew.
Part of the PLO evacuation agreement included a promise by the American and Lebanese governments, with assurances from Israel and leaders from some (but not all) of the Lebanese factions, that law-abiding Palestinian noncombatants, including the families of evacuated PLO members, could remain in Lebanon and live in peace and security.
Two weeks later, Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel, whose daughter had already been killed in an ambush meant for him, was killed by a bomb placed on top of his house (it was thought) by a Syrian agent. Gemayel, a warrior who favored military solutions to internal problems, had been the leader of the Christian Phalange militia, whose chief supporter was Israel, and the man the Israelis had counted on for a peace treaty that would best serve the interest of their security. The death of Gemayel dashed all hopes for that. It was not in Syria’s interest to see such a treaty come about,
since by now Syria viewed Lebanon as a strategic buffer against Israel.
The next day, in violation of their guarantee to protect the Palestinian noncombatants who had elected to remain behind, the Israeli army entered West Beirut. Their stated justification was to protect the refugees and to clean out PLO infrastructure and supplies left behind by Arafat.
On the night of September 16, the Israeli army allowed the Phalange militia to enter the Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila in West Beirut to search for the source of sporadic gunfire aimed at the Israelis. It’s hard to say why (local hatreds being so deeply rooted), but the Phalange went on a rampage. When the shooting was over, more than 700 unarmed Palestinians had been slaughtered.
The Lebanese government immediately requested the return of the U.S. Marines to protect the people of West Beirut.
Again, the Joint Chiefs strongly opposed it, but this time Secretary Weinberger joined the opposition. The previous Marine intervention had been a limited, short-term operation. This one looked open-ended and fuzzy—and therefore risked disaster.
President Reagan overrode their objections. He obviously felt that he had to do everything he could to prevent another massacre of Palestinians.
This time the Marine unit was close to twice the size of the one before it—a Marine Amphibious Unit (MAU) of approximately 1,500 men. The French and Italians also agreed to return. The mission the Joint Chiefs assigned the Marines was called PRESENCE—meaning they were expected to be present and visible, to keep hostiles separate by patrolling throughout the city, and to try to be friends to all factions alike. The JCS wanted the Marines to be as impartial as possible—and hoped the mission would last no longer than two months.
It was an unusual mission for a military unit, but a similar operation had worked before. The problem was that not every faction respected them or their presence. And there was another problem as well: The Marines would have liked to set up their operations on terrain that dominated the city, but all dominant terrain was already occupied by one or another of the warring factions. That meant the Marines had to settle for low, flat ground near the airport; there was nowhere else to go. The building they chose for their barracks, however, provided them with easy access to many of the locations associated with their mission, including the American Embassy; and it was one of the strongest buildings in Beirut. They felt they could defend themselves there....
ON April 18, 1983, a suicide car-bomber—probably a Hezbollah fanatic operating from the Sheikh Abdullah Barracks at Baalbeck in the Bekáa Valley—destroyed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. Sixty-three people were killed, seventeen of them Americans, including the CIA station chief and all but two of his officers. This was the first car-bomb attack against American facilities.
The bombing had serious consequences, and of these the loss of intelligence was most immediately critical. The entire U.S. HUMINT (human intelligence) mechanism (i.e., the links with local agents) was practically destroyed. For several months, gaping holes existed in the U.S. ability to know what was happening on the ground, either in Beirut or in the rest of the country. This failure later came back to haunt America.
The longer-term effects of the bombing were even more serious. There is no evidence that anyone in Washington understood the consequences in terms either of the threat to Americans abroad or of its implications to future policy. Terrorism became a form of war, which ultimately forced America out of Lebanon. The United States was not prepared to deal with it.
A month later, Secretary of State George Shultz attempted to broker an agreement (known as the 17 May Agreement) whereby all foreign forces would simultaneously withdraw from Lebanon. Lebanese President Amin Gemayel, brother of Bashir Gemayel, and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel, signed on to the agreement (on condition that the Syrians did also); but when Shultz went to Damascus to present the plan to Assad, Assad refused to withdraw from Lebanon under any circumstances. As far as Assad was concerned, he was orchestrating the situation from a position of strength.
Syria reinforced its refusal to cooperate by declaring Phillip Habib, the Presidents Mideast envoy, persona non grata.
Habib’s replacement, Robert “Bud” MacFarlane, the President’s Deputy National Security Adviser, believed that if the Syrians and the Israelis could be convinced to withdraw, then dealing directly with the leaders of the major factions might produce a solution to the Lebanese problem. Before going to Lebanon, MacFarlane met with Assad in Damascus, and left realizing that Assad was in control of the future of Lebanon—and that he was not about to relinquish that position.
MacFarlane arrived in Lebanon on August 1. Within the next couple of weeks, he recommended that Washington suspend its effort to broker a joint Syrian-Israeli withdrawal and instead concentrate on reconciling the various Lebanese factions. MacFarlane and U.S. Ambassador Reginald Bartholomew met several times with Nabih Berri and Walid Jumblatt to bring them into an accommodation with President Gemayel, but they made no progress. Both Berri and Jumblatt put the blame on Gemayel—claiming that he was more concerned with preserving the Christian presidency than with accommodating the factions. But the unspoken agenda here was that both Berri and Jumblatt were puppets of outside authority-and had little leeway to negotiate a peace agreement.
ASSIGNMENT TO LEBANON
In August 1983, then—Brigadier General Carl Stiner was the assistant division commander for operations for the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg. One day in mid-August, at four in the afternoon, he was in the field, inspecting training for the ROTC Summer Camp, which the 82nd conducted annually, when he received a call on his radio to return to headquarters immediately.
Carl Stiner continues the story:
I thought the call related to a possible brigade-size mission I’d been designated to lead aimed at preventing several thousand “peacenik demonstrators” from breaking through security fences at the Seneca Army Depot in New York State (they wanted to disrupt the shipment of nuclear weapons to Europe). The brigade had been well trained for civil disturbance operations and was standing by while civil authorities were trying to defuse the situation.
Back at Division, I learned that I’d gotten a call from the Pentagon directing me to report to General Vessey, the JCS Chairman, by nine the next morning, with fatigues packed, prepared to take a trip. Since I would probably have launched from Fort Bragg with the brigade if I was going to Seneca, I now guessed that I was most likely being sent to someplace like Honduras, since the Nicaraguans had recently been intensifying their activities in that neck of the woods.
The next morning, I caught a ride to Washington with Lieutenant General Jack MacMull, the XVIII Airborne Corps Commander. At the Pentagon, General Vessey’s people told me to go around the building for the rest of the day and learn everything I could about the U.S. program in Lebanon, because the Chairman and I would be leaving for there that night. Vessey would spend three days in the country, and then I’d remain “as the Chairman’s and the SECDEF’s man on the ground.”
For the rest of the day, I got briefings from principal staff officers of the Offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense, and learned the details about why I was going: It was taking too long for orders and information to be passed over the existing chain of command from Beirut to General Vessey and Secretary Weinberger, and the information they were receiving was so filtered through the various links in the chain that it was questionable whether it fully represented what was actually happening to the Lebanese government, the Lebanese Army, the Israeli Army, and the U.S. Marines at the airport.
The existing chain of command to Lebanon ran from Washington to NATO headquarters in Mons, Belgium, to the European command in Stuttgart, to the commander of U.S. Naval Forces Europe in Naples, to the deputy commander of U.S. Naval Forces Europe in London, to the commander of the 6th Fleet in Gaeta, Italy, to the commander of the Amphibious Task Force off the coast of Lebanon, to the commander of the Landing Force also off the coast of Lebanon
, and finally to the commander of the Marine Amphibious Unit at the Beirut airport. This chain was the normal arrangement for fighting the Cold War, and also for handling anything else that might occur in the European area of responsibility, but it was not an efficient arrangement for dealing with the fast-breaking and complex situation in Lebanon.
At 7:00 P.M. that evening, General Vessey and I departed from Andrews Air Force Base for Beirut. En route, we talked about the situation in Lebanon—the personalities involved, the U.S. assistance program, the impact of occupying powers, ongoing diplomatic initiatives, and so on—until about midnight, when we tried to get a little sleep before we hit Beirut and a full schedule of tough meetings on the U.S. military assistance program. If that had any serious shortfalls, we needed to find out about them.
We arrived in Beirut around midmorning, and went directly to the Ministry of Defense for a meeting with General Ibrahim Tannous, chief of staff of the Lebanese armed forces. Tannous was a soldiers soldier, revered by Lebanese lighting men for his bravery during a battle with the Syrians (he’d lost an eye in the process). Though the Lebanese army was then at best a marginal fighting force, he was doing everything possible to rebuild it sufficiently to take over security responsibilities for all Lebanon when the Syrian and Israeli occupying forces withdrew. Tannous was extremely pleased with U.S. military assistance, and specifically with the training and equipment Colonel Tim Fintel was providing. Fintel, an Armor officer, was chief of the Office for Military Cooperation. Most training for reraising the Lebanese armed forces was being conducted by U.S. Special Forces.
General Tannous had organized an ethnically balanced staff, which was functioning well together: Major General Hakim, a Druze, was his deputy commander; his director of personnel was a Sunni Muslim, Colonel Simon Quassis; a Maronite Christian was director of intelligence, Brigadier General Abbas Hamdan; a Shiite Muslim was director of operations; and his director of logistics was also a Sunni Muslim.