by David Crist
A few days later, Mohtashemi made a telephone call to Baalbek. Speaking with a Revolutionary Guard officer, he passed on the order to proceed with the attack. In addition to the marines, however, he wanted the French peacekeepers attacked too. France had just sold Iraq advanced attack aircraft, the Super Étendards, and even deployed a military team to train and provide tactical advice to the Iraqi pilots. The government in Iran took a dim view of this abrogation of France’s neutrality, and French troops in Lebanon were now fair game. Islamic Amal agreed, in part because French aircraft had recently bombed Muslim forces in response to mortar attacks on their troops.
The Hussein Suicide Squad outfitted at least two trucks with thousands of pounds of explosives and tanks of compressed gas to enhance the destructive power of the bomb. The detonators were connected near the steering wheel for easy access by drivers, enabling them to ignite their cargo even if wounded.
The likely man chosen for the attack on the marines was a familiar acquaintance of Sayeed Ali’s, Assi Zeineddine. His parents lived two buildings down from his, close enough that he could throw a rock to their apartment window from his balcony. Unlike Sayeed Ali, Zeineddine came from wealth. His father owned a string of small businesses and rental apartments. In school, Sayeed Ali recalled Zeineddine as a loud teenager with a funny, sarcastic sense of humor. How he was chosen remains unclear. Sayeed Ali does not recall that he was that much more devout than any of the other young men who joined Hezbollah. But as planning began for the martyrdom operations, Zeineddine’s handlers ensured that he stayed segregated from the other soldiers.33
American intelligence picked up on the conversations between the Iranian embassy in Damascus and the home office in Tehran. On September 27, the NSA issued a message that outlined the impending attack, a message that included the Iranian ambassador’s own damning words of “take a spectacular action against the U.S. Marines.” Unfortunately, the message never made it outside of a very limited intelligence channel, and those who did not have a “need to know” included Colonel Geraghty and those up the marine’s chain of command. On October 25, the director of naval intelligence raced up to the office of the chief of naval operations carrying the late September NSA message that outlined the impending attack. Unfortunately, this happened to be two days after the Hussein Suicide Squad had carried out its mission.34
It began as a typical Beirut morning. The sunrise dawned bright and beautiful. Since it was Sunday, the marines surrounding the airport had a more leisurely day scheduled. They remained a bit longer in their sleeping bags, grabbing an extra half hour of rest, and the normal six a.m. staff meeting at the battalion headquarters had been canceled. The day before, on October 22, 1983, a country-western band had entertained the marines and pizza had been flown in from a navy ship off the Lebanese coast. The marines occupied three buildings just off the main four-lane road leading to the Beirut airport terminal. The band played in front of the large four-story building that housed the infantry battalion headquarters. Elevated off the ground floor by large columns, with an open atrium, the building had originally held the office for the Lebanese aviation administration. Now a bombed-out shell, the large plate-glass windows that had adorned the upper floors had been replaced by plastic sheets and plywood and reinforced by thousands of sandbags. But the concrete and steel structure remained solid and provided a modicum of protection against gunfire and mortars, and the senior marine commander, Colonel Timothy Geraghty, agreed to allow his subordinate battalion to concentrate his large administrative support unit in this one structure. Now some 350 marines slept in its dusty rooms beneath a large overhanging roof that protected them from the rain and the Mediterranean sun.
The previous night, stray bullets had impacted the concert side of the building and a few rockets landed close by. The marines went to a higher level of alert, but it was a quiet night for a country in the middle of a civil war. And, undeterred, one marine went for a jog that morning, earning a rebuke from the sergeant of the guard, Steven Russell.
Around five in the morning on October 23, a yellow Mercedes stake-bed truck with no lights on pulled into the large open public parking lot south of the headquarters building and just east of the main thoroughfare to the Beirut airport terminal. A single three-foot-high fence of circular concertina wire separated the parking lot and the city at large from the battalion headquarters building. The truck circled once and then left. Lance Corporal Eddie DiFranco noticed it from his guard post, but these trucks were common enough around the airport that he paid it no further attention and did not believe it warranted reporting to Sergeant Russell. An hour later, another sentry noticed a white Mercedes car drive by. The driver reached across the passenger seat and snapped a photograph of the marine compound.
At 6:22 a.m., DiFranco heard the sound of a revving engine. He looked over to the parking lot just as a speeding yellow Mercedes truck swerved abruptly and crashed through the concertina wire fence, accelerating as it headed directly toward the battalion headquarters seventy yards away. To avoid accidental discharges, Colonel Geraghty had forbidden the sentries from carrying loaded rifles. Realizing what was about to occur, DiFranco struggled to unsling his rifle from his shoulder and load a magazine into his M-16. There just wasn’t time. The large truck barreled past him; the driver, a Caucasian with a bushy mustache and his hands gripping the steering wheel, looked down at DiFranco with a wild smile across his face. The truck went through an open gate in a chain-link fence and through an eight-foot gap between two large black sewer pipes placed on the ground.35
In his small sandbagged booth at the entrance to the headquarters building, Sergeant Russell had his back turned, talking with the wayward jogger and with the static hiss of multiple radios next to his ear. He heard a crackling or popping sound as the truck ran over the concertina wire. When he heard the growing noise of a loud diesel engine, he turned around to see the front of a large truck headed straight for him.36
Russell ran through the open courtyard, repeatedly yelling: “Hit the deck! Hit the deck!” He glanced over his shoulder just as the yellow Mercedes smashed through his guard shack, scattering sandbags and wood into the lobby. The truck came to rest in the middle of the atrium, its front windshield smashed in. For several long seconds everything was quiet. Still running and telling marines to “get down,” Russell looked back at the truck to see a bright orange-yellow flash at the front of the vehicle as the equivalent of twenty thousand pounds of high explosives, enhanced by canisters of flammable gas, detonated.37 A massive wave of heat and the powerful concussion blew him fifteen feet into the air, searing his flesh and twisting him around like a rag doll.
The explosion traveled straight up the open center of the building, forming an inverted V shape in the roof as it forced the entire building up off its foundation. The structure then collapsed in on itself like an accordion, reducing all four floors to a single level in a massive mushroom cloud visible across the city. The FBI later determined the type of explosives used when residue was found on a piece of underwear—all that remained of a marine who happened to be exercising in a small gym near where the truck stopped.38
A few lucky marines survived. Some sleeping on the roof managed to stay alive by riding down on top of the collapsing building. The battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Howard Gerlach, was blown out of his office and came to on the ground next to the heap of rubble that had been his headquarters. A fine powder of gray dust of pulverized concrete covered everything. Chunks of human flesh were scattered around the marine compound. One body, still in its sleeping bag, had been tossed into a tree. One marine rescuer nearly threw up when his boot kicked something spongy.39 He looked down to see a severed hand, palm up with a wedding ring still on its finger. Paper—letters, technical manuals, pornography—slowly rained down around the ruins as the dazed survivors and Lebanese rescuers struggled to pull the injured from the rubble.
Geraghty was in his second-floor office a short distance away, just across a wooded outc
rop. The blast blew out all the windows of his building, sending fragments flying about the offices. He rushed downstairs and went around behind his headquarters. He looked in the direction of his subordinate battalion’s headquarters. As the fog of dust and debris cleared, Geraghty saw that the entire building had disappeared. He immediately got on a secure phone and called the Sixth Fleet commander. Losses were going to be heavy, he advised.40
Simultaneously, another truck bomb hit the nearby French military headquarters. The French paratroopers had only recently moved into a nine-story headquarters building along the seaside in West Beirut, which they’d hoped would afford better protection. French sentries opened fire on the approaching truck, perhaps wounding the driver before his deadly cargo detonated.41 In that one morning, 241 American servicemen and 58 French paratroopers died. For the U.S. Marine Corps, it was the worst loss of life in a single day since Iwo Jima in 1945.
After October 23, no one ever again saw Assi Zeineddine. His family refused to talk about their son’s whereabouts or his involvement. But within his close-knit neighborhood, no one doubted who had caused the explosions that rocked Beirut that Sunday morning. His parents suddenly traveled frequently to Iran, where officials treated them as honored guests. This included an audience with Ayatollah Khomeini.
Eight
THE AMERICAN HAMLET
At two in the morning of October 23, 1983, Robert McFarlane’s secure phone rang. On the other end, a military officer in the White House Situation Room passed on news of the attack on the marines in Beirut to the new national security adviser. Reagan, George Shultz, and Robert McFarlane were in Augusta, Georgia, with the president staying at the Eisenhower cottage on the grounds of the venerable country club that is home to the Masters golf tournament. Reagan intended for this to be a relaxing weekend away from Washington. It had been anything but. The night before, he had stayed up late discussing a military intervention in the tiny Caribbean nation of Grenada. Even his golf outing had been disrupted at the sixteenth hole when a deranged man took several hostages in the clubhouse and demanded to speak with the president. Reagan obliged, only to have the man hang up on him. Fortunately, the drama ended with the man apprehended and no one injured.
McFarlane dressed and went over to the Eisenhower cottage, where the president greeted him dressed in his pajamas, covered in a bathrobe, and wearing open-toed slippers. McFarlane went over the scant details. First reports confirmed at least seventy marines killed and another hundred wounded. These numbers would certainly rise, he told both the president and Shultz. The president looked shocked and then angry. “Those sons of bitches. Let’s find a way to go after them.”1 The presidential entourage packed up and immediately flew back to Washington.
At nine the next morning, Reagan met with his senior advisers in the Situation Room. Caspar Weinberger gave a quick update. “A truck drove into the building kamikaze style. Casualties were now 111 dead and 115 wounded; these numbers would certainly rise.” Secretary Weinberger continued explaining that another truck hit the French; their losses stood then at 75 killed and wounded.2
“The Iranians probably were behind it,” added CIA Deputy Director John McMahon, who was filling in for William Casey. “They had bombed the embassy in April.”
“Can’t we do anything to Iran?” queried the president.
Shultz responded, “We need a big intelligence effort to find out who was behind it.”
But Weinberger cautioned that they needed to make sure of the right target before they started bombing. “It might make us all feel better,” he said, “but that would not punish those responsible.” He then recommended again that the marines be withdrawn to ships offshore to reduce their vulnerability.
Shultz strongly objected. “To withdraw now would undermine our entire policy,” he argued. “It would be disastrous for American prestige.” He recommended a new presidential-led diplomatic effort for Lebanon.
The president and his advisers reconvened back in the Situation Room in the White House basement at four p.m. This time, McMahon produced hard evidence of Iranian culpability. Someone had called a news agency in Beirut claiming that the attack had been conducted by an Amal splinter group with close ties to Iran, headed by Hussein al-Musawi, McMahon said. He then offered a detailed narrative of the timeline leading up to the attack, provided to the CIA by a Lebanese security official with close ties to al-Musawi. His information was impressive, detailing their movements from Baalbek to Beirut and their preparations for the attack. The agent had even witnessed three pickup trucks loaded with explosives in front of al-Musawi’s office in south Beirut. McMahon continued by laying out for the president a string of communications intercepts from Iran to its embassy in Damascus directing it to “destroy U.S. targets.” All pointed to direct Iranian involvement with al-Musawi. McMahon closed his brief by adding that French intelligence sources reported that the Iranians had evacuated their Beirut consulate immediately after the bombing, anticipating a reprisal attack. McMahon’s information was as close to conclusive evidence as you were ever going to find in the murky world of intelligence.
“We need to show resolve,” Shultz stated empathically after McMahon’s presentation. “We need to take action against those who committed this atrocity and strengthen the Lebanese government.”
Weinberger again cautioned that they should not take military action just for revenge. “It must be directed at those who perpetrated the act,” he countered.
After listening to the two antagonists squabble, Reagan told the Joint Chiefs to plan for a retaliatory air strike. Clearly moved by the enormity of the calamity, the president added, “We must show that the cause was worth dying for.” Reagan directed Marine Commandant P. X. Kelley to go to Beirut to see what further steps needed to be taken to protect the marines. As Kelley got up from the table to leave the Situation Room, Reagan put his arm around the general’s broad shoulders and said warmly, “Vaya con Dios—Go with God.”3
With 241 American servicemen dead, military retaliation should have been a foregone conclusion. But sharp divisions emerged within the administration on this issue from that first meeting in the White House. McFarlane had wanted military intervention even before the attack. Now he and his deputy, Vice Admiral John Poindexter, pressed for military action. Ronald Reagan clearly favored a response. In a nationally televised address on October 27, he looked into the camera and told the nation: “We have strong circumstantial evidence that the attack on the marines was directed by terrorists who used the same method to destroy our embassy in Beirut. Those who directed this atrocity must be dealt justice, and they will be.”4 The next day, he minced no words in his written order to Secretary Weinberger and the military: “Subject to reasonable confirmation of the locations of suitable targets used by elements responsible for the October 23 bombing; attack those targets decisively, if possible, in coordination with the French.”5
But across the river at the Pentagon, those charged with carrying out the president’s order were less enthusiastic about using force. Both Weinberger and General John Vessey had opposed the deployment of the marines, and now with Lebanon deteriorating and no diplomatic solution forthcoming, they wanted the marines out of the quagmire. Vessey, a decorated soldier who’d come up through the ranks as an enlisted man, had seen his share of killing, and he had little use for McFarlane, who seemed overeager to drag the United States into the Lebanese war. Weinberger agreed. “It is easy to kill people, and that might make some people feel good, but military force must have a purpose, to achieve some end,” Weinberger said in 1994. “We never had the fidelity on who perpetrated that horrendous act.”6
“Weinberger and Vessey were charter members of the Vietnam never again club,” recalled Poindexter. “It was not just Lebanon; they opposed every military operation during that time. Cap wanted a strong military, but never wanted to use it.” Both Poindexter and McFarlane objected to the numerous excuses offered by Weinberger and Vessey: there was no smoking gun; Sheik Abdull
ah Barracks sat too close to some of the most important Roman ruins, and they might get hit by mistake; if they used cruise missiles one might be a dud and then fall into Syrian hands and compromise its highly classified guidance system. “There was always a reason why we should not do something,” recalled Poindexter.7
While Vessey unenthusiastically prepared a military plan for reprisal, an admiral within the U.S. Navy pressed forward with his own bombing scheme for Lebanon. The developer of this secretive plan was the imaginative surface warfare officer Vice Admiral James “Ace” Lyons. Stout, with thinning hair, Lyons lacked tact and voiced his opinions frequently and stridently, especially when dealing with superiors he viewed as fools. Lyons wanted to clobber Baalbek. He had been handed the NSA intercept that linked Iran to the attack on the marines just two days after the bombing. “If there ever was a 24-karat gold document, this was it,” he said later. “This was not something from the third cousin of the fourth wife of Muhammad the taxicab driver.”8
A few days after the bombing, Lyons went out to Langley and had lunch with CIA Deputy Director John McMahon and the head intelligence analyst, Robert Gates. Lyons had developed surreptitious relationships with Casey and Poindexter at the National Security Council. Both men shared Lyons’s in-your-face approach to dealing with the Soviet military, and the navy admiral was certainly not part of the “Vietnam never again” crowd.
That afternoon, the CIA passed to Lyons the intelligence it had amassed that clearly linked Iranian agents at Sheik Abdullah Barracks with those who’d attacked the marines. “Whatever I give you,” one of the men told Lyons, “you can’t give it to the Joint Staff, because I don’t want to read about it in the Post.” That suited Lyons just fine, as he had no intention of working through Vessey or the Joint Staff.