The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict With Iran

by David Crist

  In his offices in the Pentagon, Lyons developed a navy-only plan. Eight aircraft bombers would pulverize Sheik Abdullah Barracks. As Lyons suspected the Soviets had broken the navy’s communications code (which they had, thanks to the Walker spy ring), he had his plan hand couriered out to a naval task force off Lebanon. In doing so, Lyons bypassed the normal chain of command, which ran through Army General Bernie Rodgers at European Command and his deputy who handled Lebanon operations, Air Force General Richard Lawson.

  In the deep blue waters off the coast of Lebanon, Rear Admiral Jerry O. Tuttle commanded the carrier battle group poised to strike back at al-Musawi and Iran. In his naval carrier, Tuttle won the deserved reputation as an aggressive, imaginative, and profane commander. He referred to himself as “S.L.U.F.—short little ugly fucker.”9 He was also smart and brought computers into the navy’s command system, including implementing the first global position locator that displayed every ship’s location in near real time, called JOTS, which stood for joint operational tactical system, but everyone in the service simply called it “Jerry O. Tuttle’s system.” Tuttle refined Lyons’s plan, adding a few more planes as insurance. As his pilots went into high alert planning the attack, Tuttle’s boss in Stuttgart remained unaware of the unilateral action, although Lyons claimed to have sent a briefing team to talk with Lawson.

  With his plan in the hands of Tuttle, the chief of naval operations, Admiral Jim Watkins, told Lyons to go down and brief General Vessey. The chairman was livid at Lyons’s end run around Rodgers and ordered Lyons to turn over all the information he’d received from the CIA to the Joint Staff and the DIA.

  “I can’t do that because of the agreement I made with CIA,” Lyons replied. This response did not go over well with Vessey or, later, Weinberger.

  On Sunday, November 6, General Vessey appeared on Meet the Press. When pushed about who had been behind the attack and his view on retaliation, the chairman demurred despite knowing that the intelligence reports pointed to Iran and its Lebanese allies. “I really don’t know who did it. I wish I did,” he told New York Times correspondent Richard Halloran. On retaliation, he refused to be pinned down about any plans for it, other than to say, “When American servicemen are killed and killed in any numbers, my gut reaction is to retaliate.”10

  The next day, Reagan met again with Vessey and other senior officers about a military response. The president was leaving the following day for a week in Asia, and they needed to decide whether to strike before or after his return. Vessey briefed the president that European Command, the unified command that had responsibility for Lebanon, had developed a list of sixteen targets, all demonstrably hostile to the multinational force. This included every actor but the Christians: Iranian, Syrian, Druze, Palestinian, and Shia. The targets included Baalbek and several other Iranian surrogate bases, referred to by Weinberger on the three-by-five sheets of paper that he scribbled his notes on as “Syrian terrorist camps.” The president seemed convinced by the evidence about who had attacked the marines and French paratroopers, but he agreed to meet again the next day just before boarding the plane.

  That afternoon, a flurry of calls ensued among all the principals: McFarlane called Weinberger advocating bombing now; Vessey called Weinberger expressing doubts about the intelligence linking Baalbek with the perpetrators; Weinberger told McMahon at the CIA about the chairman’s concerns. The CIA had no reservations about who had been behind the attack.

  On November 8, Reagan met yet again with his advisers before leaving for Asia. Gathering in the Red Room of the White House, both Vessey and Weinberger suggested they hold off until the president returned, which would allow them to collect more information on Baalbek. Reagan agreed to take up the issue upon his return from Japan and South Korea. But the president seemed perplexed by Weinberger’s reticence. After giving a farewell speech in the East Room, Reagan turned to the secretary. “Cap, I thought you were planning on bombing the camp?” There is no record of Weinberger’s response.

  With the president gone, meetings continued in Washington on the retaliatory strike. Vessey updated the proposed targets in the Bekaa Valley and agreed to cooperate with the French military on any reprisals. Weinberger continued to balk at any reprisal: “Need better intelligence on enemy targets,” he wrote in his notes after one White House meeting.

  This mantra continued after Reagan returned on November 14. The military was ready, Vessey told the president, but it risked losing aircraft to Syrian antiaircraft batteries, and retaliating against them risked expanding the conflict, with the marines at the airport likely to bear the brunt of Syrian retaliation. Weinberger again pressed that they needed better intelligence before attacking. Once again any strike was placed on hold. “We have some additional intelligence,” Reagan wrote in his diary, “but still not enough to order a strike.”

  The next day, Reagan met again with his military advisers. This time, the gruff CIA director, William Casey, tried to undercut Weinberger’s hand-wringing by presenting strong evidence of the role of Sheik Abdullah Barracks as a base for the planning and the attack on the marines. He also linked the operatives with another nearby base in the Bekaa Valley three miles from the Syrian border at the town of Nabi Chit. Weinberger responded by adding a new wrinkle: there might be some Lebanese army soldiers still at Sheik Abdullah Barracks. They needed to make certain they were gone before bombing.

  While Reagan’s gut reaction had been a military strike, now Vessey and Weinberger’s qualms came out of the president’s mouth. He told the assemblage that he wanted to make sure that they could link the target directly to those responsible. A mistake could exacerbate the Lebanese crisis. Once again, nothing was decided; Casey agreed to look again at the CIA’s sources and brief them again the next day.

  That evening the Israelis rendered one target moot when its aircraft pounded the Shia base at Nabi Chit. Begin had no reservations about its links to those who had attacked them. Less than two weeks earlier, a green Chevrolet truck driven by a twenty-year-old Shia had crashed through the main gate of the Israeli headquarters in Tyre. “He looked like a nice boy,” said one Israeli soldier on duty near the entrance. Unlike the American marines, the Israeli sentries had loaded weapons; they opened fire, wounding the driver. He detonated eight hundred to one thousand pounds of explosives, collapsing the building and killing thirty-nine soldiers. For the third time in less than two weeks, the Islamic Amal and its deadly Hussein Suicide Squad had used the ultimate precision-guided weapon to deal a deadly blow to its enemies. Unlike Washington, Israel did not deliberate endlessly on the wisdom of responding. Four warplanes swooped down on the base at Nabi Chit. They bombed three buildings in the training camp and a nearby ammunition dump. Perhaps thirty Shia fighters died, with fifty more injured, including five Iranian advisers.11 Hussein al-Musawi nearly found himself in this statistic. He had left the camp just two days earlier to see his parents in Beirut.

  A routine rotation of aircraft carriers in the eastern Mediterranean meant that Tuttle now had two of these mighty symbols of American military power with more than 150 planes to avenge the marines. Tuttle expanded his plan, now using twelve attack aircraft to bomb Sheik Abdullah Barracks and two other bases, supported by electric jammers and fighter interceptors. On November 15, his French counterpart, who commanded the much smaller carrier Clemenceau, flew over to see him, carrying a letter authorizing him to conduct a joint strike with the Americans. Tuttle agreed, and the two staffs developed a plan to divide up the targets around Baalbek, with the heavier load falling to the more capable American aviators. The French wanted to carry out the attack in forty-eight hours, on November 17. Tuttle wished the United States showed the same bloodlust for revenge as the Israelis, but he cautioned the French admiral that he had yet to receive any order to attack. His hands were tied until the Pentagon cleared his pilots hot.

  On November 16, Reagan and his advisers reconvened in the Oval Office. After going over intelligence about the Israeli air attack
, Casey rebuffed Weinberger’s concerns about Sheik Abdullah Barracks. Since the marine barracks bombing, the CIA had doubled its staff at the Beirut embassy to twenty-two. They now had a source within the compound, and he confirmed it was an exclusively Iranian military site with no civilians. Casey recommended hitting it. Weinberger still remained unconvinced.

  What President Reagan decided that day remains mired in controversy. McFarlane left the Oval Office convinced that the president had authorized the attack in conjunction with the French. He later regretted not getting the order in writing, but he had no doubt about the president’s intentions agreeing with Casey’s and McFarlane’s recommendation. But Weinberger recalled the meeting ending differently; he received no such directive from Reagan. His note from that meeting confirms his recollection: “Concluded we should get more intelligence.”12 It was not the first time people had left a meeting with the president uncertain of how Reagan had ruled. Reagan hated personal confrontations, and passions were growing heated with each delay in the air strikes.

  What is known is that, later that day, Vessey met with Weinberger and said that “they were going final with the Lebanon targets,” meaning that the U.S. military was ready to strike. The defense secretary also received a call from his French counterpart, who expressed Paris’s eagerness to conduct a joint attack with the Americans. If Reagan did order the attack and Weinberger wanted it reversed, the defense secretary never spoke with the president after the NSC meeting to express his reservations.13 Despite the advance readiness of the U.S. military, no execute order for Admiral Tuttle ever left the Pentagon.

  Early the next morning, November 17, McFarlane called the National Military Command Center to find out how the air attack had gone, which he assumed had been carried out at first light in Lebanon. “The secretary ordered a stand-down,” the military officer on the other end said.

  McFarlane was livid. He called Weinberger and asked, “Why didn’t they execute the attack?” According to McFarlane, the defense secretary replied, “I did not think the time was right to strike.” After Reagan arrived in the Oval Office, McFarlane walked in and told the president that Secretary Weinberger had not ordered the attack. Reagan was visibly angry, McFarlane recalled. He pounded his fist on the massive oak desk.

  “You need to do something, Mr. President. You can’t have a cabinet official disregarding your orders!” McFarlane added empathically.

  As Weinberger headed to the Pentagon that morning, his military assistant, Major General Colin Powell, called him in his car, letting him know French defense minister Charles Hernu wanted to talk to him immediately regarding the air strike in Lebanon. When he arrived at his office, Weinberger conferred with General Vessey, who told the secretary that the French intended to strike within an hour, but the original plan called for a joint U.S.-French strike. Without U.S. aircraft, they could hit only two targets at Baalbek.

  Weinberger then called Hernu in Paris. The French minister said his forces were ready to strike. “We could delay for sixty-five minutes,” he said, “if the Americans wanted to join us.” According to Weinberger’s notes of the conversation, the secretary answered, “The president has not made a decision; he is still considering it.” Weinberger said that he had no orders from the president to launch the American portion of the joint operation. “Unfortunately, it is a bit too late for us to join you in this one,” he added, wishing the French good luck.14

  Weinberger called McFarlane and told him about his conversation with Hernu and the impending French attack. Hoping to salvage the joint attack, McFarlane immediately sent a message to the French that the United States still “might join them in an attack, but they could not do it that morning.” There was just not enough time, he said.

  But France would not delay its air attack. Without any American support, fourteen Super Étendard fighter jets took off from the aircraft carrier Clemenceau. They swooped over the Sheik Abdullah Barracks with the afternoon sun at their backs. Aiming for the headquarters building of Islamic Amal militia leader Hussein al-Musawi, they dropped a few bombs and fired some rockets, most of which landed in the town of Baalbek or hit harmlessly in the hillsides. The French attack was an abject failure, and the Parisian press pounced on President François Mitterrand for the anemic military response. Privately, the French government fumed at their supposed ally’s refusal to respond to the attack on the multinational force.15

  “The French never forgave us for not backing them in the attack,” recalled John Poindexter. They believed the United States had betrayed them by pulling out of the joint attack. Weinberger’s refusal to commit was seen as an act of betrayal to an ally. The French exacted their revenge three years later. In April 1986, intelligence implicated Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi in the bombing of a disco in Berlin that killed two American servicemen. It was now Paris’s turn to thwart an American air strike. They refused to allow American warplanes taking off from England to overfly its airspace, forcing a seventeen-hour round-trip flight around Europe. While the American public expressed outrage at France’s action, no one except a handful in the government realized the reason behind their refusal to cooperate.

  In the end, President Reagan did nothing. Weinberger sent a memo to the commander in chief that in light of the French and Israeli air strikes on Baalbek, there was no reason for the United States to do its own attack. McFarlane strenuously disagreed, but Reagan sided with Weinberger. Dutifully, McFarlane wrote to Weinberger of the president’s decision on November 22: “We should discontinue current plans and associated readiness to execute preemptive attacks in response to the October 23 tragedy.” Despite his repeated public statements promising to punish those who had perpetrated the attack, Reagan had quietly decided to do nothing in response to an attack that killed more servicemen in a single day than any other since the Second World War.

  Reagan ordered one Pyrrhic air strike unrelated to the barracks bombing. It turned into a fiasco. Syria launched a missile at a U.S. reconnaissance plane that overflew its military positions in eastern Lebanon. This time Vessey made sure there was no “navy-only” plan and that European Command ran the military operation. The command in Stuttgart assigned thirteen separate targets to Tuttle, requiring nearly forty aircraft from both carriers to carry out the reprisal. Tuttle had intended to launch the strike so the planes would arrive over the positions at high noon and the sun would be in the face of the Syrian gunners and the visibility would allow for easy identification. At five in the morning, an aide woke Tuttle, informing him that a message arrived instructing him to hit the Syrians at seven thirty a.m., only two and a half hours away.

  “It is not possible,” he told his fleet commander. “It will take four hours just to get the ammo on the planes. I need a delay of at least two hours.”

  Tuttle’s request went back to General Lawson at European Command, who twice asked the Joint Staff for a delay. It was denied. Why remains unclear, but apparently Vessey had made a remark to the defense attachés from Britain, France, and Italy about a first-light strike at seven thirty a.m. This became set in stone as far as the operations officer within the Joint Staff was concerned, even though Vessey had never intended this.

  Planes and pilots were hastily sent aloft. Only twenty-eight of the planned thirty-eight jets were launched, and only one had its full bomb load. Syrian gunners shot down two aircraft. One two-seater A-6 piloted by twenty-six-year-old Mark Lange was shot as it dove down from two thousand feet. “I remember the plane being jostled,” said Lange’s weapons officer, Lieutenant Robert Goodman, “and instead of looking at the sky, I was looking at the ground.” Both pilots ejected just before hitting the ground, but Lange’s chute failed to deploy and he died of his injuries shortly after being captured by Syrian troops. Goodman survived with three broken ribs and was taken to Damascus and held in a basement cell watching old John Wayne movies and the TV comedy Gimme a Break!16 To the embarrassment of the administration, the preacher-turned-negotiator Jesse Jackson traveled to Damascus and se
cured the pilot’s release. It led to an awkward ceremony at the Rose Garden with Reagan welcoming Goodman and thanking Democratic presidential hopeful Jesse Jackson.

  Tension grew between Weinberger and McFarlane and the two men wrote dueling memos to the president. The national security adviser bitterly resented Weinberger’s refusal to respond to the attack on the marines and remained unwilling to admit that the U.S. policy he advocated in Lebanon had failed. McFarlane wrote to Reagan urging him to stay the course in Beirut. “There has been progress, and the trends suggest more progress is in the offing,” he said about the growing strength of the Lebanese army. “That said,” McFarlane added, “the U.S. cannot yield to state-sponsored terrorism.”17

  Weinberger countered in his memos that the presence mission assigned to the marines had been flawed and had led to the disaster. It was impossible to be passive peacekeepers in the midst of a civil war. In light of the size of the bomb, more bunkers and trenching would not “prevent continuing significant attrition to the force,” Weinberger wrote to Reagan. The political situation had deteriorated to the point where he and the chairman again urgently recommended pulling out the marines.18

  In early 1984, the facade of a multiconfessional Lebanese government and army collapsed. After fighting between the pro-Iranian militias and the Lebanese army, Sheik Fadlallah issued a fatwa for the Shia to leave the army. Overnight, one entire Lebanese brigade defected. Within days the army shattered along sectarian lines. America’s effort to rebuild Lebanon in a way pleasing to Washington lay in ruins. With a presidential election looming, the Reagan administration cut its losses, and on February 26, 1984, the last marines withdrew from the airport to their ships off the coast.