The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

by Kai Bird

  The speech was well received in every quarter but one. Begin was furious. He wrote an angry letter to Reagan: “A friend does not weaken his friend; an ally does not put his ally in jeopardy.” Begin flatly rejected the Reagan peace initiative. Shultz, however, was unfazed. He knew that what Reagan had announced “must be shattering for Begin and the group around him.… As they see it, we have suddenly pulled the rug out from under them.” Shultz’s aide Ray Seitz told him, “Everything is going according to plan: the Israelis are very negative, the Arabs are very fuzzy, and we have a good strong defensible position.” But not for long.

  Bloody events would soon throw Shultz’s finely tuned plan off course. Late in August 1982 the Phalangist warlord Bashir Gemayel was narrowly elected president of Lebanon. He was the only candidate. And everyone knew that he was Israel’s candidate—but also America’s. The State Department actually discussed drawing on its contingency budget for funds to give Bashir “in case he needs it to buy votes.” The CIA thought this would not be necessary, but in any event the American ambassador Robert Dillon cajoled a couple of crucial Sunni Muslim members of parliament to cast their votes for Gemayel at the last minute. “We covertly supported the election of Bashir,” Dillon later said, “because of all the realistic presidents who could emerge, Bashir was the best.… I used to see a lot of him. He was a young man. He would stop by my house late in the evenings, and we would spend hours talking.”

  The Americans believed the thirty-four-year-old Gemayel had matured and was the only Christian leader capable of working out a deal with the country’s Sunni, Shi’ite, and Druze factions. The Israelis thought Bashir would restore Maronite supremacy in Lebanon and sign a full-fledged peace treaty with Israel. Just a week after his election, Prime Minister Begin demanded to see Bashir. An Israeli helicopter was sent to Beirut and ferried Bashir to the seaside resort town of Nahariya, just across Lebanon’s southern border. Bashir found Begin in a rage. He berated Bashir for his ingratitude and demanded that he agree to sign a peace treaty as soon as he was inaugurated as president. Bashir emerged from the meeting shaken and angry. He told his associates that Begin wanted to turn Lebanon into a “puppet state.”

  Bashir returned to Beirut, determined to distance himself from the Israelis. The Americans encouraged him, believing that he could not acquire the credibility necessary to rule effectively if he was seen in the Arab world as a puppet. But by then Syria’s dictator, Hafez Assad, had clearly decided that Bashir’s ascendency had to be blocked because the young Maronite Christian warlord was too allied with the Israelis. On September 14, 1982, an agent of Syrian intelligence planted a massive suitcase bomb in the Phalangist party headquarters. When Bashir arrived for his regular Tuesday party meeting, the assassin detonated the bomb. Bashir and twenty-six other Phalangists were crushed to death.

  By then, the U.S. Marines and the rest of the multinational peacekeepers had been pulled out of Beirut. Reagan’s defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, didn’t think they were needed—even though the Reagan administration had promised Arafat that they would remain for a decent interval to protect Palestinian civilians after the departure of the PLO militia. So on the morning after Bashir Gemayel’s assassination Israeli forces moved in and seized key checkpoints in West Beirut. Begin told Morris Draper, a high-ranking U.S. envoy, that Israeli forces were moving in “with the object of keeping things quiet and ensuring that there were no incidents to mar the peace.” But when Draper arrived in Beirut three hours later to attend Gemayel’s funeral, he could see that “the city was in flames.” Israeli tank and artillery fire was decimating parts of West Beirut. Draper rushed to the Israeli army’s headquarters outside Beirut, where he was told blandly, “Everything is fine.”

  “Begin told me as a representative of the United States government that the Israelis were not going to move into the heart of Beirut,” Draper later said. “And within hours they were inside the heart of Beirut. He told a straight-out, 100 percent, bald-faced lie to the United States government.” The next day Draper confronted Sharon and demanded to know why he’d violated the cease-fire agreement. Sharon said, “Circumstances changed, sir.” He argued that the PLO had left 2,500 “terrorists” in the camps. Draper disputed this. A transcript of Draper’s meeting with Sharon shows the two men arguing heatedly. Sharon insisted, “We went in because of the 2,000–3,000 terrorists who remained there. We even have their names!”

  “I asked for those names,” Draper responded, “and you said there was an enormous list, but what you came up with is a miniscule one.… The Lebanese will take care of those who have remained behind.”

  “You know the Lebanese,” Sharon said dismissively. “We’ll tend to our own affairs.”

  At this point, Gen. Rafael Eitan, the Israeli army’s chief of staff, interrupted: “May I say something? They [the Lebanese army] are not up to it. Lebanon is at a point of exploding into a frenzy of revenge. No one can stop them. Yesterday we spoke with the Phalange about their plans. They don’t have a strong command.… They’re obsessed with the idea of revenge. You have to know the Arabs well to sense something like that.… I’m telling you that some of their commanders visited me, and I could see in their eyes that it’s going to be a relentless slaughter. A number of incidents already happened today, and it’s a good thing we were there, rather than the Lebanese army, to prevent it from going further.”

  Draper was shocked to learn that the Israelis were going to let the Phalangist militia into the camps. Even General Eitan seemed to understand what that could mean: “relentless slaughter.” Draper thought it was pointless. The Israeli army should not be in West Beirut; it should not be surrounding the camps. There was no threat to the Israelis. “There were a few armed men in the camps,” he later said. “But they were all men sixty or seventy years old. They may have had old shotguns, but they were not a threat. Essentially, the camps were disarmed.”

  Even as Draper and Sharon were arguing, at 6:00 P.M. on Thursday, September 16, a squad of 150 Phalangist fighters was entering the Sabra and Shatila camps. They were under the command of Elie Hobeika, the chief of Phalange intelligence. Hobeika had served as Bashir Gemayel’s personal bodyguard. He had a reputation for brutality. Ambassador Bob Dillon once described him as a “pathological killer.” Hobeika supervised the operation from the Israeli forward command post, across from the Kuwaiti embassy. At 7:00 P.M. Hobeika received a radio communication from one of his officers inside the camp. An Israeli officer overheard the conversation: the Phalangist officer asked Hobeika what he should do with fifty women and children whom his men had detained. “That’s the last time you’re going to ask me,” Hobeika yelled. “You know what to do.” The Israeli officer immediately told his commander, Brig. Gen. Amos Yaron—who did nothing.

  Over the next two days and nights Hobeika’s men slaughtered somewhere between 1,000 and 2,500 people, mostly women, children, and elderly men.* Israeli troops guarded the perimeters surrounding Sabra and Shatila. Floodlights were set up by the Israelis to provide some light for the Phalangists as they did their work. Occasionally, the Israelis shot flares into the sky to illuminate the camps. Anne Dammarell was watching the light show from the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Yarzi, a mountain village just southeast of Beirut. Dammarell, age forty-four, worked for USAID and had been in Beirut for two years. That evening she stood outside and watched the tracer firings. “A large number of flares were sent up,” she wrote in a letter, “giving off their particular yellow lamination.… I stared and stared, fascinated by the strange beauty. Why it charmed me so I did not know. I was mesmerized.” Only later did she realize what she’d been watching. “That was the night that the Palestinian camp, Shatila, was invaded by Christian militia while Israeli troops guarded the entrances. Hundreds were murdered. Perhaps thousands. Killed just for being who they were. Unarmed. Vulnerable. Poor. Women and children.… Nothing justifies this revenge.”

  Robert Fisk of the London Times stood on his balcony in West Beirut the foll
owing evening, when the flares again lit up the evening sky. “It was bright daylight, silvery yellow,” he later wrote. “I could read a book on my balcony by the light. The flares sprayed down slowly, almost all of them over the Sabra-Shatila district.… Dawn at midnight.”

  Fisk had been based in Beirut since 1976. That Friday evening he’d run into Loren Jenkins, the Washington Post’s correspondent. “Fisky,” said Jenkins, “something’s going on in the camps. The Israelis have brought the fucking Phalangists with them.” Jenkins and Fisk agreed they would investigate the rumors the next morning. Karsten Tveit of Norwegian radio joined them that Saturday morning, September 18, and they walked into the camps.

  What they saw shocked these seasoned reporters. Corpses were strewn down every alleyway. They also came across hastily dug mass graves. Bulldozers had been used to bury the bodies. But hundreds of the dead were lying openly in the streets. As the three reporters stumbled in a daze through this dreadful scene, they could see Israeli soldiers watching them through binoculars from a tower block to the west. Jenkins cursed, “Sharon! That fucker Sharon!”

  Ryan Crocker, the U.S. embassy’s thirty-four-year-old political counselor, went into the camps with a handheld radio transmitter. As he walked around he spoke into the transmitter, describing to his colleagues in the embassy what he was seeing. He counted at least fifty bodies.

  Later that day, Janet Lee Stevens, the American freelance reporter, also came to the camps. “I saw dead women in their houses with their skirts up to their waists and their legs apart,” wrote Stevens. “Dozens of young men [had been] shot after being lined up against an alley wall; children with their throats slit, a pregnant woman with her stomach chopped open, her eyes still wide open, her blackened face silently screaming in horror; countless babies and toddlers who had been stabbed or ripped apart and who had been thrown into garbage piles.” Stevens stood stunned and sickened as Red Crescent volunteers worked to bury hundreds of bodies in a mass grave.

  Stevens was outraged, and she would spend the rest of her short life investigating the massacre and trying to help the survivors. She wasn’t afraid to confront those whom she blamed for the murders. A few weeks later, she happened to see Joseph Haddad, a well-known Phalangist officer, outside his party headquarters in East Beirut. Stevens walked up to Haddad and screamed at him, “Butcher!” Haddad looked straight into the eyes of the young American and made the sign of the cross. Janet was, as John le Carré observed, “irrepressible.”

  The USAID worker Anne Dammarell also visited the camps the day after the massacre. She was walking around Sabra and Shatila taking pictures when she came across a wailing woman who had survived the massacre. Later, Dammarell wrote her family back in America, “I’ve spent the past four days working in and out of the Shatila camp to get the dead buried. After all of the visible bodies were taken care of [the] work stopped. The dead rotting under large slabs of cement had to stay put until the rubble was removed.… I think I’ll become a Quaker and reject all violence. Love, Anne.” Dammarell lobbied the embassy and Lebanese authorities to dig up the common grave where bulldozers had dumped many bodies. “It was clear that this was a mass grave,” Dammarell said. “We wanted to know how many people had been killed.” The Lebanese government denied her request. The authorities did not want an accounting.

  Sharon would be blamed. But so too would America. When Arafat was shown a videotape of the massacre, he angrily told reporters that Phil Habib had personally signed a paper pledging to protect the Palestinians living in the refugee camps. “What Arafat said is absolutely true,” Habib said. “I signed this paper which guaranteed that these people in West Beirut would not be harmed. I got specific guarantees on this from Bashir and from the Israelis—from Sharon.”

  Secretary of State Shultz concurred. “The brutal fact is,” said Shultz, “we are partially responsible.” Shultz was stunned and angry. That morning he briefed President Reagan, who asked Shultz if he’d made a mistake in withdrawing the U.S. Marines. The two men were uncertain what should be done, but, as Reagan put it, “If we show ourselves unable to respond to this situation, what can the Middle East parties expect of us in the Arab-Israeli peace process?”

  Shultz also went to see Bob Ames, who’d learned the news early Saturday morning Washington time and had rushed to Langley headquarters. There he found his colleagues deeply shaken and angry. Some were in tears. Carolyn Kovar was an analyst who was on weekend duty that day when the news came in of the massacres. She worked for Ames on Lebanese affairs. “I started phoning people to come in that morning,” recalled Kovar. “And then I was crying, the reports were that bad. I heard a lot of anger directed at the Israelis that day. We also thought it showed that the Christian warlords were just destroying their country.”

  Ames told Shultz, “We need action quickly.” If the administration didn’t react strongly to this outrage, he argued, Washington would lose all support in the Arab world for the new peace initiative. “After Sabra and Shatila,” said the NSC’s Geoffrey Kemp, “everyone was saying, ‘My God, we have to do something.’ ”

  Reagan’s defense secretary, Cap Weinberger, objected to sending the marines back, arguing, “A limited Beirut mission is too risky.” But on Monday, September 20, 1982, Reagan announced that he was sending the marines back to Beirut as part of a multinational force. They arrived four days later and stationed themselves in a barracks near the airport. “It soon became clear,” said Geoff Kemp, “that the marines were caught in the middle of the Lebanese morass.”

  The Israeli invasion of Lebanon was a disaster for all parties. Lebanon became Sharon’s war. And Sabra and Shatila was Sharon’s massacre, even though no Israelis murdered anyone in the course of those three terrible days. But as President Reagan noted in his diary, “The Israelis did nothing to prevent or halt it.” Prime Minister Begin denied any responsibility for the massacre. But three hundred thousand Israelis rallied in the streets of Tel Aviv to protest the massacre. The protests forced Begin’s government to accede to the creation of an independent investigative commission. Four months later, in February 1983, the Kahan Commission concluded: “The decision on the entry of the Phalangists into the refugee camps was taken without consideration of the danger—which the makers and executors of the decision were obligated to foresee as probable—the Phalangists would commit massacres and pogroms against the inhabitants of the camps.” The Kahan Commission blamed Sharon for this decision and concluded that he “bears personal responsibility.” The commission recommended that Begin “consider” firing the defense minister. Sharon initially refused to resign as defense minister. Eventually he was forced to, but Begin allowed him to remain in the cabinet without a specific portfolio. Nineteen years later, he would become Israel’s prime minister.

  The Sabra and Shatila massacre was by definition an event of tragic proportions. But it also became a historical marker, a turning point. It would come to symbolize everything that was wrongheaded about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, an invasion that would turn into an eighteen-year occupation. The Israelis would not completely withdraw from South Lebanon until the year 2000. Sharon never achieved his goal of establishing a pro-Israeli Maronite regime in Lebanon. Instead, Lebanon became Israel’s Vietnam War. More than 675 Israeli soldiers would die over the years. Nearly eighteen thousand Lebanese were killed in 1982 alone. And when the Israelis were forced to withdraw from central Lebanon in 1985, a new round in Lebanon’s civil war resulted in the defeat of Maronite Christian forces. Lebanon would never sign a peace treaty with Israel. To be sure, the invasion expelled the PLO to Tunis. But that only served to create a new and in some ways far more deadly enemy in Lebanon. The Israeli invasion—and the camp massacre—created a new political force called Islamic Amal, an organization that later morphed into what we know today as Hezbollah, the Party of God. “The Israelis had assumed that they could invade Lebanon, restore Maronite supremacy, and throughout it all the Shi’ites would remain passive,” recalled Bruce Riedel. �
�But in actuality, the Israeli invasion unleashed the Shi’ites.”

  Hezbollah’s current secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, has said that he doesn’t believe his party would exist today had the Israelis not invaded Lebanon in 1982. “I don’t know whether something called Hezbollah would have been born,” Nasrallah said. “I doubt it.” The Shi’ites of South Lebanon had initially welcomed the Israelis, but the Israeli occupation was heavy-handed, and their indiscriminate use of tank and artillery fire led to many civilian deaths. And then many Shi’ites were killed in the Sabra and Shatila massacre. “I don’t think there was any real understanding of what was going on in southern Lebanon,” said Lindsay Sherwin. “We were focused on the Palestinians and the Maronites. But I remember thinking at the time, the Shi’a are a growing influence. It is hard to think ahead strategically. But it is even harder to get people to listen to you. No one wanted to hear about how unhappy the Shi’a were.”