by Tom Clancy
At the MOD, where I'd been staying ever since the heavy fighting had started, Tannous confirmed all this: In his view, Aoun was unstable. Without fire support, the 8th Brigade risked being routed.
I relayed this information to Geraghty, and at 9:45 A.M., Gatanas, who was still on the ridge, received permission to call in naval gunfire. Shortly thereafter, the cruiser Virginia opened fire. During the course of the day, the Virginia and other naval ships fired a total of 360 rounds on the Souk al Gharb ridgeline. Though the psychological effect of all this firepower was probably greater than any tactical results, the brigade held and was able to resupply.
In retaliation for the American intervention, shells started falling on the Ambassador's residence at Yarze later that day, forcing its evacuation. Only the Marine guard force and the radio operators remained.
On September 23, Robert MacFarlane went to Damascus for another meeting with Assad. He was once again about to come away empty-handed when he dropped news on Assad that caught the Syrian president's attention: "President Reagan wants you to know," MacFarlane told Assad, "that the battleship New Jersey will be arriving off the coast of Lebanon in two days."
This escalation of resolve and firepower caught the attention of the Lebanese factions as well.
The next day, all sides agreed to a cease-fire.
Soon the airport and the Port of Beirut were reopened. Although much of the city had been reduced to rubble, it began to come alive again. Crews were out cleaning up the streets and restoring power and water. The banks began to reopen, and people began to go about their business. The city remained divided along factional lines, however. It wasn't safe for people to leave their own areas.
Still, the resiliency of the Lebanese people was amazing.
MacFarlane returned to Washington in early October, hoping the cease-fire would hold.
It lasted only a couple of weeks.
During this lull, I left Beirut and traveled first to Stuttgart to brief General Lawson, the Deputy CINC for Europe, and then on to Washington to brief the Joint Chiefs.
In the meantime, the training of the Lebanese army continued. A supply ship carrying military equipment, supplies, and ammunition, bought and paid for by the Lebanese government as part of the military assistance program, finally showed up after a two-week delay (it had crashed into a pier in Italy). It was very welcome.
Later in October, the shelling of the 8th Brigade resumed from Druze militia batteries located ten to fifteen kilometers west of the ridgeline. The firing this time was much less intense than in September, and now had a discernible pattern: There was firing in the morning, and then again later in the afternoon. This turned out to be a convenient modus operandi for the Druze, many of whom kept a mortar in their backyard or in their houses (they'd drag it out and quickly set it up to fire). They dropped a few rounds in the tube before going to work and again in the afternoon as they returned.
The 8th Brigade continued to hold the ridgeline. But ominously, almost every night they could see headlights of convoys resupplying Syrian artillery positions in the Chouf.
The shelling of the Ambassador's residence at Yarze and the Ministry of Defense also resumed, but also at a reduced rate, which meant that people were more or less able to conduct business as usual. You couldn't say that people were leading "normal" lives, but chances of immediate, violent death were much lessened.
Soon the Shiites in West Beirut began ambushing people traveling the coastal road — an ironic setting, since it was hardly more than rock-throwing distance from the fleet of twenty-eight American warships, including a battleship and two aircraft carriers. People were killing each other and burning the bodies in clear view of many of the ships, and nothing could be done about it.
Though I encouraged Tannous to have the Lebanese army brigade responsible for the area put a stop to it, little was done, because the brigade commander and most of the brigade were Shiites.
Meanwhile, the Navy continued its daily reconnaissance flights over the Chouf Mountains and the Bekaa Valley. Soon they were drawing antiaircraft fire from SA-7 missiles and 37mm twin-barrel antiaircraft guns.
THE NEW THREAT
As October dragged on, we began to receive credible intelligence reports of possible car bomb attacks, sometimes even giving the make and the color of the car. One of these messages indicated that a spectacular act now being planned would make the ground shake underneath the foreign forces.
A Lebanese intelligence official believed that this act could be perpetrated in one of the many sea caves that snaked underneath Beirut. Some of these caves were large enough for passage by small boats, and the PLO had already used them as ammunition storage areas during their occupation of West Beirut.
A meeting held between Tannous and the commanders of the multinational forces (who were, understandably, deeply concerned) decided to search the tunnels and use well-drilling and seismic detection equipment to determine if any of the caves ran under the multinational force positions. The seismic detection equipment was brought in from the United States and Europe; the well-drilling equipment was already present in Lebanon.
A Lebanese navy search found nothing suspicious within the known caves, while seismic detection and well-drilling failed to locate any previously unknown caverns.
During all this activity, of course, everybody was doing everything possible to determine the nature of the target, and the method and timing of the attack.
At 6:30 Sunday morning, October 23, 1983, Tannous and I were sitting over coffee in his MOD office, discussing the training activities of the Lebanese army and future employment plans. The office had a large plateglass window, providing a panoramic view of Beirut.
WHAM!
We heard a tremendous explosion. Shortly afterward, the shock wave rocked the building. A huge black column of smoke topped by a white, rapidly spinning smoke ring — like an atomic explosion — was rapidly rising from an area approximately two miles away, near the airport.
"God willing," Tannous said, part in exclamation, part in prayer — he was a devout Christian, "I hope it's not the Marines!"
He jumped up from his desk. "Let's go," he said. "We've got to get there. We'll take my car" — instead of a military vehicle—"and go straight through West Beirut to the airport. That's the shortest route."
Before we reached the car — WHAM! — another huge explosion. And we could see a similar cloud rising over the area where the French compound was located.
The explosions had shocked West Beirut to life. As we went through town, making at least seventy miles an hour, people were already on balconies and the tops of buildings trying to see what was going on.
As Tannous had feared, the Marines' compound had been truck-bombed. When we arrived, there was almost indescribable devastation. I have never seen anything like it. Fires were burning everywhere, people were torn apart, and the building had just collapsed on top of itself. The survivors were all in a daze.
When the blast occurred, Colonel Geraghty had been working in his office about a hundred yards away. He was now doing everything possible to bring order.
"Whatever you need, you've got," Tannous told him. "We'll bring every emergency crew in Lebanon to bear on this, and I'll get you heavy construction equipment in here immediately to lift some of these layers off these people."
One of Beirut's largest construction companies, with a contract to clean up rubble from previous fighting, was quickly ordered in to help. Tannous also immediately ordered one of his army brigades to move into the airport area to provide security for the Marines.
Tannous and I spent no more than ten minutes at what was left of the Marine compound before heading to the French compound only a couple of miles away, where we found similar, but somewhat lesser, devastation. "It was a truck bomb," the French commander reported. "We have at least twenty-five dead." The number would eventually reach fifty-nine.
Tannous offered the French the same assistance he'd given the Marines, and ordered
in a Lebanese army battalion to secure their area.
We returned to the Marine compound. By this time, two guards who had witnessed the bombing reported that a yellow Mercedes-Benz stake bed truck, about the size of a dump truck, had rammed through the gates and the concertina wire, smashed over the guard shack, and plunged straight into the lobby of the four-story building, where some 350 Marines were sleeping. Once inside, the driver had detonated the bomb, killing himself and 241 Marines.
It was obvious that both the Marine and the French bombs had been planned to go off simultaneously, but for some reason there had been a two-to three-minute delay. Forensic experts from the FBI later concluded that the bomb under the Marine barracks contained the equivalent of 12,000 pounds of TNT. It dug an eight-foot crater through a seven-inch floor of reinforced concrete. One of the strongest buildings in Beirut was now reduced to a pile of pancaked rubble; the heavy reinforcing steel rods in the concrete had all been sheared like straws.
Within minutes, the intelligence community intercepted this unattributed message: "We were able to perform the spectacular act, making the ground shake underneath the feet of the infidels. We also got that Army brigadier general and the CIA station chief [Bill Buckley] in the process."
It was not so, thank God, but it was the first indication that Buckley and I were on the "hit list."
Later that afternoon, a previously unknown group called "Islamic Jihad" (meaning "Islamic Holy War," a group of fanatics supported, we learned later, by Hezbollah) telephoned the following to the Beirut newspaper: "We are soldiers of God and we crave death. Violence will remain our only path if the foreigners do not leave our country. We are ready to turn Lebanon into another Vietnam. We are not Iranians or Syrians or Palestinians. We are Lebanese Muslims who follow the dicta of the Koran."
The next day, picture-posters of both "martyred" truck drivers were pasted up throughout the Shiite south suburbs of Beirut.
Soon the Hezbollah connection began to come clear: According to Lebanese intelligence, the suicide drivers had been blessed by Sheikh Fadlallah, the spiritual leader of Hezbollah, before they launched their suicide missions. And a couple of days later, we learned that messages had been intercepted from the Iranian Foreign Ministry to Mohammed Mohtashamipur, the Iranian ambassador in Damascus, urging a major attack against the Americans. We also learned that Hosein Sheikholislam, the chief Iranian terrorist, had checked into the Sheraton Hotel in Damascus. He checked out on October 22, the day before the bombing. And Lebanese intelligence officials reported that the Iranian embassy in Damascus had been evacuated early on Sunday morning, just before the bombing.
Two weeks later, a young woman on an explosive-laden mule rode into an Israeli outpost at the edge of the southern buffer zone and detonated herself, killing fifteen Israelis. Shortly thereafter, her picture-poster went up in Beirut, Damascus, and Tehran alongside those of the two suicide truck bombers.
The four bombings — the U.S. Embassy, the U.S. Marine unit, the French unit, and the mule incident — gave clear evidence that the United States was not prepared to deal with this form of terrorist warfare. Nor did our intelligence community have the capability to penetrate fanatical religious-based organizations in order to provide adequate warning to U.S. forces and agencies around the world. Thus appropriate defensive measures or preemptive action could not be taken.
Both the U.S. and the French began planning to retaliate for the truck bombings by sending air strikes against Hezbollah headquarters in Lebanon at the Sheikh Abdullah barracks in Baalbeck. Both nations attempted to coordinate the strikes to occur on the sixteenth of November, but it did not happen that way.
The French launched from their battle group flotilla on the afternoon of November 16, as planned, but to no effect. Reconnaissance photos revealed they had missed the barracks complex completely. The U.S. attack did not take place until December 4.
Jerry Tuttle, the commander of the U.S. naval forces, preferred the time of the attack to be at midday so the sun would be directly overhead and his pilots would be better able to see more clearly the Syrian radar sites and artillery gun positions, which he had targeted (and the Joint Chiefs had approved). But for political reasons, the Joint Chiefs preferred an early-morning attack time, around 7:30 A.M. on December 4. Either there was a screwup in the conversion between Washington time and Lebanese time, and/or the order was garbled as it passed over the convoluted chain of command between Washington and Tuttle, but General Lawson, now the new deputy commander of the U.S. European Command, received a call at 5:33 A.M. on December 4, ordering the strike to occur at 7:30 A.M.
When Tuttle was wakened, he was already five hours behind the curve. Planes had not been loaded with bombs, and the pilots would be flying directly into the rising early-morning sun.
Twenty-three planes — Navy A-6s and A-7s — were launched. As soon as they entered the Chouf Mountain area headed for Baalbeck, they began to draw surface-to-air missile fire. Two planes were lost, with one pilot killed and his bombardier captured by the Syrians. As with the French strike, the raid had little effect: Two Syrian gun emplacements were knocked out and a radar site was damaged. All were back in operation within a week.
EFFORTS TO FIND A SOLUTION
Meanwhile, efforts continued on two fronts to find a solution to the disaster in Lebanon:
Inside Lebanon, General Tannous continued his heroic efforts to rebuild the army and provide stability to government-controlled areas — at that time only parts of Beirut and the ridgeline to the south that dominated the capital were considered stable. Concurrently, Ambassador Bartholomew was working with the factional leaders to reach a power-sharing agreement that would be acceptable to President Gemayel and everyone else concerned.
Outside Lebanon, President Reagan's new special envoy, Ambassador Donald Rumsfeld, was visiting the leaders of the modern Arab nations in southwest Asia, looking both for support and for suggestions that might lead to peace in Lebanon. He visited, at least monthly: Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and even Iraq (the United States was supporting Iraq in its then-ongoing war with Iran). These efforts forged a consensus for peace among all but one of these nations. Tragically, the one exception, Syria, could exercise an effective veto. It was obvious that Assad wanted the multinational forces out of Beirut in order to secure his own political objectives in Lebanon.
"Lebanon has always been a part of Syria," he once commented. "Read your Bible."
I have never seen a man more dedicated to his mission than Ambassador Rumsfeld, but success was just not in the cards. There were too many factors he could not influence — especially Syria, the two of three major factions that Syria controlled, and the Iran-influenced Hezbollah and its new form of terrorist warfare.
The time I spent with Ambassador Rumsfeld, like my time with Bud MacFarlane, proved very beneficial to me. It gave me a chance to get to know the key leadership of the modern Arab nations, and I was able to put this experience to effective use in my next assignment as the Commander of the Joint Special Operations Command.
Meanwhile, support in the United States for the administration's policy in Lebanon was eroding rapidly, both in Congress and at the Pentagon.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff had never favored the Marines' reentry into Lebanon in 1982. To them it was a "no-win" situation, though they did not want to give the appearance of abandoning an ally by "cutting and running." During the decision-making process, they gave this advice to the civilian leadership. As always, once the decision was made, they saluted and complied.
Even before the Marines were bombed in October, Congress had only very reluctantly authorized a continued Marine presence in Beirut for another eighteen months, but only if the administration did not try to expand their role, relocate them, or otherwise change the mission without congressional approval. As Congress returned to work in January 1984, the majority Democrats pressed for resolutions to withdraw the Marines. B
ut, for the sake of our allies and our own self-esteem, President Reagan rejected that course. In his weekly radio address on February 4, 1984, he maintained (hopefully) that "our efforts to strengthen the Lebanese army are making sure and steady progress."
AT the same time — January 1984—the Shiite mullahs and Nabih Berri, no doubt prompted by Assad, devised a plan to bring about the disintegration of the Lebanese army, now sixty percent Muslim. In the eyes of Berri and the mullahs, the army had been used by Gemayel to keep the Christian minority in power. They now called on the Shiites in the army to stop acting as pawns of the Christians and lay down their arms and return to their barracks.
The commander of the predominantly Shiite Lebanese 6th Brigade, which had been keeping the peace in West Beirut, immediately complied by pulling his forces out of the city and back to their barracks. The Muslim militia quickly took over the streets. At the same time, the mullahs began broadcasting from the mosques that the Shiite soldiers should return to their barracks and no longer fight for a government that did not represent their interests.
Soon afterward, the Druze deputy commander, Major General Hakim, defected to the Druze PSP in the Chouf Mountains.
The evening after his defection, a Lebanese army battalion commander operating south of Beirut took three of his Christian lieutenants out on a reconnaissance. They didn't return. The next morning, a patrol sent out to locate the battalion commander found the three lieutenants with their throats cut — and no battalion commander; he had defected. Two other Christian soldiers were later found in their foxholes, also with their throats cut.
