by David Crist
One marine lieutenant, caked with dirt from months living in the mud of his bunker, looked down at the city below as he flew out on a helicopter and thought of those he knew who he had seen dead and mangled in the rubble of his battalion headquarters. “For all the sacrifice,” he thought to himself, “I hope we accomplished something.” In the end, 269 marines, sailors, and soldiers had died; Lebanon remained unchanged.
Although the marines had left, the infighting within the administration continued. The animosity boiled over during an early morning breakfast meeting on April 5, attended by McFarlane, Shultz, and Noel Koch, a senior civilian at Defense. Koch made a statement that the United States used the term “terrorism” very selectively: “When our friends engaged in this behavior it was always diplomatically inconvenient to refer to it as state-supported terrorism.” The problem, he added, was not Iran, but that the United States backed one faction in the war. “If we retaliate against Iran with overt military forces, we will provide what Iran will see as cause for a justified counter-retaliation.”
A visibly angry Shultz, his eyes squinting, looked straight at Koch. “I couldn’t disagree more. We could not permit what happened in Beirut to go unpunished.” He accused Koch of being a statistician. “The unpleasant truth is that the bombings in Lebanon changed the Middle East by creating a public reaction which forced the withdrawal of the marines from Lebanon.” Our lack of will would only encourage Iran and other terrorists, he added.
The Israelis provided some bit of revenge to the United States and the killing of the marines. In 1984, they mailed a book of Shia holy places to Iran’s ambassador in Syria. When Ali Akbar Mohtashemi opened the package, it exploded, blowing off several fingers and part of one hand.19
If the United States was in retreat, Iran and its Lebanese allies were on the offensive. The string of vehicle-borne suicide bombings against the West had succeeded beyond their expectations. Israel was reeling, and the American and European forces were out of Lebanon. In September 1984, they struck again at the American embassy annex in the Christian suburbs of East Beirut. The six-story building had just been completed and was protected by a low wall surrounding the building and serpentine barriers erected along the main road leading to the entrance. U.S. Marines had been providing security around its perimeter, but, under pressure from the Pentagon to reduce the military footprint in Lebanon, this duty had recently been handed over to contract Lebanese except for the normal small contingent of embassy marines guarding the building itself.
Shia militants in nearby hills surveyed the embassy building. With Tehran’s approval, relayed again through its ambassador in Damascus, they built near Sheik Abdullah Barracks a mock-up using barrels to outline the streets leading to the annex. The bomber repeatedly rehearsed his approach, each time increasing his speed through the zigzag barriers. On September 20, he drove the real route. As he approached the annex, he pressed on the accelerator. As two contract guards opened fire, he swerved in and out of the barricades designed to halt him and detonated his bomb outside the wall, only twenty feet from the annex’s north corridor. Two American servicemen working at their desks died instantly as part of the building collapsed. The blast slightly injured the American ambassador.20 For the second time in as many years, the Iranian-backed militia had devastated the U.S. diplomatic mission in Lebanon.21
After being woken with the news of the attack, Reagan flew on to political rallies in Iowa and Michigan. When asked by a student about this latest attack in Lebanon, Reagan disingenuously blamed his predecessor and the “near destruction of our intelligence capability” during Carter’s presidency. Fortunately for the president, no one asked about his own culpability for the disastrous foreign policy regarding Lebanon.22
Two days later, Reagan met with his staff in the Situation Room. McFarlane and Poindexter brought images taken by a spy satellite over Baalbek. The picture revealed an odd racetrack, with barrels arranged in a distinct pattern and tire tracks around each where a driver had repeatedly taken each turn at high speed. An observant analyst had married that image up with the approach to the embassy annex; the two overlapped exactly. Again intelligence placed the occupants at Baalbek at the center of an attack against the United States.23
The discussions fell along now familiar lines. Weinberger and Vessey expressed caution. Innocent family members of the fighters lived there, they said. Meanwhile McFarlane and Shultz pressed for military action. Casey chimed in that his information showed no women or children at Sheik Abdullah Barracks, but he could not be certain that three American hostages held by pro-Iranian Lebanese were not at those barracks. The president said he did not object to military response, provided it actually prevented future attacks, but he worried that the attack would be seen as revenge, as if that were somehow beneath the dignity of the United States. McFarlane countered that the only way you were going to dissuade future attacks was by punishing those responsible.
President Reagan again erred on the side of caution. After telling Shultz to issue a stern message to Syria for its tacit support of the terrorists, the president spent the rest of the day drafting a speech to be given at the United Nations and planning for an upcoming meeting with the Soviet foreign minister.24
Secretary of State Shultz became increasingly vocal at the lack of a willingness to respond to direct attacks on the United States. He agreed with McFarlane that striking back would cause Iran and Syria to think twice about repeating their terrorist undertakings. On October 25, Shultz gave a public speech in New York in which he cautioned, “We may never have the kind of evidence that can stand up in an American court of law, but we cannot allow ourselves to become the Hamlet of nations, worrying endlessly over whether and how to respond.” Speaking before a predominantly Jewish audience, Shultz praised the Israeli way of “swift and sure measures” against terrorists. As the New York Times reported, “Mr. Shultz, almost alone of senior officials, has been waging virtually a one-man campaign since last spring for a policy of force toward terrorists.”25
In the end, Reagan became the American Hamlet. The debate over responding to terrorist attacks continued week after week in the White House until, eventually, the attacks faded from the public’s memory. While Reagan basked in his electoral landslide that November, his indecision and misguided Lebanon policy had been the policy equivalent of a fighter dropping his guard, and Iran landed a blow squarely on the Gipper’s chin. None of this had been preordained. A shortsighted Israeli policy and American Cold War naïveté opened the door for Iran in Lebanon. Israel’s myopic obsession with destroying the Palestinian resistance spawned a far more dangerous enemy, while an American government equally fixated on halting Soviet influence in the Middle East had led to misguided meddling in a Lebanese quarrel that Washington barely understood. In the process, Hezbollah’s success emboldened Iran on the value of terrorism and the poor man’s precision weapon—the truck bomb—as instruments for successfully beating a superpower.
In the meantime, Lebanon spawned a new crisis, one that would nearly consume the Reagan administration. On July 4, 1982, Iran’s military attaché, Revolutionary Guard officer Colonel Ahmad Motevaselian, and two other Iranian diplomats were returning to Beirut when Christian Phalange soldiers stopped them at a checkpoint in the seaside town of Borbara, thirty miles north of the capital. The militia pulled the three men from their car; it was the last anyone ever saw of them. The Phalange executed all of them shortly after their abduction. The taking of the Iranian diplomats, including their senior Revolutionary Guard commander, infuriated Tehran.26 In response, Iran ordered the taking of their own hostages, hoping to use them as barter. On July 19, 1982, masked gunmen kidnapped the acting president of the American University of Beirut, David Dodge, as he strode on his customary afternoon walk. A longtime resident of Beirut and the great-grandson of the founder of the university, Dodge had been born in Beirut and lived for years in Lebanon, including service in the region during the Second World War. Dodge was bound and taken to Dam
ascus, where an Iranian aircraft flew him to a prison near Tehran. American intelligence intercepted the Iranian communications about Dodge’s transfer to Iran, and the international outcry about the abduction and Iran’s complicity in his kidnapping forced his release exactly one year later. The Dodge kidnapping had been a major blunder by the Revolutionary Guard. By taking Dodge to Iran, it implicated the Iranian government and exposed its operations in Lebanon. The guard made a calculated decision: they would provide resources and tradecraft training, but hostage taking would be left to the Lebanese. The Iranian government needed to stay out of the limelight and not be directly tied to the abductions.27
Hostage taking was a time-honored tradition in the Levant, with every party engaging in it. And in the 1980s, taking Westerners became the fad for Iran’s surrogates. The arrest of the Dawa Party members in Kuwait and hundreds of Shia held in Israeli prisons launched a wave of hostage taking to serve as barters for their release. In 1984, two Americans and a French citizen were snatched off the streets. This included a professor at American University and CNN bureau chief Jeremy Levin. Over the course of the next few years, the hostage-taking frenzy snatched nearly a hundred foreigners off the Lebanese streets, chiefly persons from America (twenty-five in all) and Europe.
Iran’s biggest prize occurred on March 16, 1984. CIA station chief William Buckley had been personally sent to Beirut by William Casey to rebuild the agency’s operations following the April 1983 embassy bombing. But he failed to heed those who wisely cautioned him about varying his daily routine for his own safety. As he left home at his regular time, a group led by Imad Mugniyah overpowered him and stuffed him in the trunk of an old Renault. A marine operating a signal collection station in the embassy tracked Buckley’s abductors as they drugged and spirited him out of Beirut in a coffin. In Buckley’s pocket, his abductors discovered a sheet of paper listing every CIA officer in the country, and the exposure of all its operatives led to yet another neutering of American intelligence in Lebanon.
Where Mugniyah took Buckley remains unknown. At the time, some in U.S. intelligence believed he had been flown to Iran for interrogation. CIA operative Bob Baer wrote that he and many other hostages had been taken to a building at Sheik Abdullah Barracks identified by a wooden sign as “married officers’ quarters.” Unlike the other hostages, Buckley was savagely beaten by his captors. They forced him to write a lengthy manuscript about his spy activities. To the Iranians’ great annoyance, his Lebanese captors allowed him to die of pneumonia in June or July 1985. When news of his death reached one senior guard commander, Ali Saleh Shamkhani, he reportedly flew into a rage, screaming at his subordinates at a meeting in Tehran of the senseless death of such a valuable hostage. He apparently ordered a doctor sent to Lebanon to look after the well-being of other sick hostages.28
The kidnappings were not very organized. Once started, the craze took on a life of its own, as anyone who knew of an American could gather some friends and snatch him. After Buckley’s death, Imad Mugniyah played a key role in trying to get all the hostages under one central control. One of the hostage takers, a man named Farouk, owned several car dealerships. While traveling south to Sidon to beat up a dealer who had not paid him his money, Mugniyah intercepted his car, and the two men got out on the side to talk. Mugniyah ordered Farouk to turn his two hostages over, much to Farouk’s annoyance.
Mugniyah also played a major role in Hezbollah’s infamous hijacking of a TWA Boeing 727 en route from Athens to Rome, which had been intended to secure the release of the Dawa members in Kuwait. During two tense weeks in June 1985, the drama unfolded in Beirut. The two hijackers, Mohammed Ali Hamadi and Hasan Izz al-Din, brutally beat a U.S. Navy diver, Robert Stethem, who happened to be on the flight and traveling with his military ID card. They then shot him and dumped his body on the Beirut airport tarmac.
Sayeed Ali did not know about the hijacking in advance, but when he heard of the TWA jet in Beirut, he joined other Hezbollah members in guarding the plane and passengers in case of a U.S. rescue mission. Amal leader Nabih Berri interceded and took control of the passengers and crew, demanding for their exchange Lebanese prisoners being held in Israel, some of whom were also being held as bargaining chips.29 The speaker of the Iranian parliament, Hashemi Rafsanjani, was flying back from Libya and stopped in Damascus to meet with al-Assad. Rafsanjani had been critical of taking the jetliner. In a meeting that included Iran’s ever present ambassador Mohtashemi, they struck the deal to release the remaining TWA hostages in exchange for prisoners held in Israel. By the end of June, Israel released 766 Lebanese prisoners, and all the 150-odd hostages on the plane came home—all except Seaman Stethem.
In January 1985, Casey had asked Charles Allen to be the national intelligence officer for counterterrorism. Tall and thin, with a terse, businesslike persona, the self-described workaholic had been running a still sensitive program at the Pentagon. While there, he had witnessed firsthand the growing strength of Hezbollah. What impressed him was the sheer number of weapons flowing to Hezbollah fighters from Tehran via the Damascus airport. Weekly scheduled flights of large Russian-made Il-76s arrived in the Syrian capital, where they were unloaded and moved via truck to the Bekaa Valley. “It was a very different organization than any other terrorist organization the U.S. faced,” Allen said.
The fate of the Western hostages weighed heavily on Reagan. “He was an extraordinarily kind man,” Allen observed. “The plight of the hostages and their families appealed to him emotionally. He became obsessed with releasing the Lebanese hostages, to the point that it distorted his aperture by concern for their welfare.”30
Allen focused on both penetrating Hezbollah and developing intelligence to support a military rescue mission. West Beirut was effectively a denied area for the CIA, and though they tried to get some sources into it, they were never able to really penetrate Hezbollah, settling instead for sources with secondhand access. After a meeting at the White House, Reagan signed a presidential finding to create a Lebanese counterterrorist team run by the army’s intelligence organization. Robert Oakley, then the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, and the CIA’s head of the directorate of operations, Clair George, supported the idea as a means of countering the Shia militants who had attacked the marines and the embassy. “We wanted to be sure that the Lebanese team was properly trained and disciplined; we certainly did not want another ‘loose cannon’ roaming the streets of Beirut,” Oakley later said. The agency’s paramilitary special activities branch headed the effort, but found the group wanting, and it never materialized into a useful agent for the CIA.31
In 1986, Casey and his deputy, Robert Gates, asked Allen to head up the agency’s hostage-location task force, which he did for the next fourteen months. Allen sent officers and agents and other collection means across the Green Line into West Beirut trying to find the hostages. Working with Carl Stiner and Delta, they developed a support network within Lebanon and Cyprus to undertake a rescue mission. But the military wanted its own guys to have eyes on the target and did not trust the tactical judgment of either a CIA officer or one of the agency’s Lebanese agents. However, the likelihood of getting a military officer covertly near Sheik Abdullah Barracks or West Beirut was nearly zero, severely limiting any chances of undertaking a rescue. Stiner’s men assembled a few times in Cyprus on an intelligence tip about the whereabouts of one of the hostages, but the information never seemed firm and a frustrated group of special forces and SEALs never got a chance to ply their craft and exact some revenge.
At various points either the CIA or the Israeli Mossad tried to even the score. One of their prime targets was Imad Mugniyah. On one occasion, the CIA suspected him to be in Paris. Casey proposed kidnapping him off the streets without telling the French. Robert Oakley heard about the CIA’s idea from an FBI associate. He immediately went to see Shultz in his seventh-floor office to raise his objection. How could the United States criticize others for kidnapping and engage in the same co
nduct? This unilateral action would destroy our cooperation with the French on other terrorism or sensitive issues, Oakley told the secretary.32
As Oakley made his case, Bud McFarlane called Shultz. “The president has approved Director of Central Intelligence Casey’s recommendation to kidnap Mugniyah off the streets of Paris,” McFarlane said. That started a three-day running battle in the White House Situation Room, with Justice, FBI, and Oakley objecting, but McFarlane and the CIA concurring. The debate ended when the report turned out to be spurious.
Two weeks later, another Mugniyah sighting placed him again in Paris. The United States reported this to the French. Casey dispatched Duane “Dewey” Clarridge—heading the CIA’s European Division—to coordinate with Paris on apprehending him. French police raided a hotel room in which the CIA believed he was staying. Instead of a twenty-five-year-old Lebanese terrorist, they found a fifty-year-old Spanish tourist. However, a French intelligence officer passed to Clarridge a photo of the wanted man taken in the airport on his way back to Beirut.33
CIA Director Casey placed Sheik Fadlallah in his crosshairs. Accounts differ on how Casey decided to remove the Lebanese. But Christian Phalange members trained and equipped by the United States parked a car packed full of explosives near Sheik Fadlallah’s home and the mosque where he preached. On March 5, 1985, it exploded just as Friday services let out. Eighty people died and more than two hundred were injured, but the attack missed its target, and Fadlallah was not injured.34
After the failed attempt on his life, the Iranians approached Fadlallah again with great esteem, hoping to patch up their differences. “Anyone who irritated the Americans so much that they would try and kill him was okay with Tehran,” Fadlallah’s close adviser Hani Addallah recalled with some amusement.