The Story

by Judith Miller

  This was the Lebanon of men like Sheikh Ragheb Harb, a young Shiite mullah known for his fierce opposition to Israel’s occupation and his determination to turn Lebanon into an Islamic state. This Lebanon had none of the immaculately coiffed women of Beirut in their clinging silk blouses and high heels. Even young girls in Jibchit wore Islamic garb. There were few street or shop signs in English. The town looked more Iranian than Lebanese. Posters of Iran’s glum Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini stared down on the main square from dozens of roadside signs.4

  Sheikh Harb helped me understand more about the still-nameless suicide bomber who had attacked the marine compound. Posters featuring the bombed ruins of the compound were being prepared in the sheikh’s outer office by young men with scraggly beards who had just returned from military training in Iran. One of them shoved a headscarf into my hand, insisting that I wear it during my interview with the sheikh. “He’s with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard,” Ali whispered. “Do what he says.”

  Sheikh Harb, the first Islamic militant I would interview, was squat, with a sparse beard and a bulldog face. Lebanese Shiites considered him charismatic; his appeal eluded me. Raspy voiced and glowering, Harb (which means “war” in Arabic) explained that the marine barracks were an “appropriate” target because America supported Israel and its occupation of Lebanon. The strike was a “defensive” action. The bomber had gone straight to paradise not for having committed suicide, which is forbidden in Islam, but for having died as a holy warrior, a jihadi, a shahid, or “martyr,” to Islam. In heaven, seventy-two virgins and all of life’s sensual pleasures that he had denied himself on earth awaited him. Hence his smile.

  Israel, he lectured in a monotone, was a “cancer” that Shiites have a religious duty to destroy. A Jewish state had no place in what the holy Koran designated as the Dar al-Islam, the “Abode of Islam,” where Muslims were meant to rule. Neither he nor any other observant Muslim would ever accept the presence of a Jewish state here. Israel would have no peace, he warned me. And as long as Americans helped them, neither would we. “Mark my words carefully,” he said, ending our interview. I did.

  In village after village, Iran’s influence was unmistakable. Almost every town had a cleric who, like Sheikh Harb, was a frequent visitor to Tehran. In a village not far from the Shiite stronghold of Nabatiye, I met a kindergarten teacher, another returnee from Iran, who marched his young students up and down a hill like soldiers. Wielding wooden sticks as if they were rifles, the children were no more than five or six years old. He was training them to be “martyrs,” he boasted. They, too, might have the honor of dying for Islam.

  The Iranians were seeding the infrastructure and culture of terror in the very presence of Israel’s occupying army. Did Israel not understand the implications of its occupation?

  I posed that question to the deputy commander of Israel’s military headquarters in Tyre, near the Lebanese-Israeli border. This time Ali, my driver, had not accompanied me. Genial and accommodating until our arrival at the Israeli base, he became enraged when I asked him to drive into the compound. How could I possibly meet with them, he yelled, his country’s occupiers? How could I enter a place where Lebanese and Palestinians had been detained and, he said, tortured? He must have found my response—that journalists must interview people on all sides of a conflict—naive or disingenuous. It neither convinced nor calmed him. Dumping my luggage and me at the compound entrance, he drove off.

  I lugged my bag up the unpaved road that led to the compound’s high steel gate. Beyond was another steel fence enclosing the same rock-filled barrels and cement Delta barricades I had seen at the US Marine compound in Beirut. But here many more soldiers and Arabic-speaking paramilitary border police were on guard. The place appeared impregnable.

  Tracking down the base’s deputy commander, I got permission to interview his intelligence officer, who confirmed my fears about the growing Shiite militancy in southern Lebanon. Israel’s occupation of the south, he had repeatedly told senior officers in Tel Aviv, was jeopardizing not only Israel’s forces in Lebanon but also its broader goal of peaceful coexistence with the Shiites, Lebanon’s single largest and increasingly militant religious community. Although the Lebanese Shiites had initially welcomed Israel’s help in ridding their towns and villages of the arrogant PLO intruders, Israel was now the alien body that had to be expelled. Attacks on Israeli forces in southern Lebanon were rising. He had sent numerous warnings to his bosses, he told me. But policy makers in Jerusalem resisted his conclusions.

  Echoing Ihsan Hijazi, the Israeli intelligence officer told me that he, too, was certain that the US Marine and French army compound bombings were the work of Shiite militants from southern Lebanon, with the connivance and/or support of Iran and Syria.

  I left the Israeli post at Tyre in an Israeli army supply truck, the ride procured for me by the officer’s young female aide. A few hours later, I reached the American Colony Hotel, the favorite haunt in East Jerusalem of journalists who cover the Arab world. Dog tired, I slept badly, images of the bombing reverberating in my head. I dreamed about the sneakers I had abandoned at the Commodore Hotel in Beirut. I left them in the closet when I was unable to remove the caked-on grime and bloodstains from the bomb site.

  The sound of the muezzin at the mosque next to the American Colony interrupted my nightmare. Still groggy, I turned on the BBC. “In the wake of the suicide bombing attack at dawn today on Israel’s military headquarters in Lebanon at Tyre,” the announcer said, Israel was implementing tougher security measures throughout southern Lebanon. “At least thirty-nine people have been killed in the suicide bombing attack . . .”

  I dressed quickly, grabbed a notebook, and raced to Beit Agron, Israel’s press center in West Jerusalem. There was as yet no list of the dead from this latest attack; this, too, claimed by Islamic Jihad. Hours later, I learned that the death toll had risen to sixty. The officer who had briefed me was unhurt. But the young soldier who had helped find me the ride back to Israel was dead. She was eighteen.

  * * *

  From our bureau in Jerusalem, I sent a message to Ihsan that I was out of harm’s way. Having helped hire Ali to accompany me, Ihsan was partly responsible for my safety. Though we knew that foreign correspondents are not immune to the violence we cover, most of us did not yet consider ourselves targets. Normally, all sides, even Islamic militants, tried to use us to get out their message. “Terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead,” my friend Brian Jenkins, the Rand Corporation’s premier terrorism expert, had written before Islamists decided they wanted both.

  We all knew that reporting on Lebanon was increasingly perilous. Our safety depended on avoiding undue risks and on the eyes and ears of the Ihsans and Gamals and the Times’s other local representatives throughout the Middle East who had helped school dozens of correspondents in the ways of their region.

  While our editors in New York would occasionally remind us to be careful, reporters who took wildly unnecessary risks were rarely chastised. Getting the story first was what mattered. Bill Farrell, my predecessor in Cairo, for instance, was a fast, vivid writer who had covered Egyptian president Anwar el Sadat’s assassination in 1981. He had spent almost two weeks introducing me to his friends and sources in Cairo. One steamy night when we both had a lot to drink, he told me about having been detained and terrorized by militiamen in Lebanon. A lanky, gentle man, he described having been locked for hours in a coffin-like box—a harrowing experience for anyone, but especially for Bill, who was claustrophobic. He needed some time off and counseling after the ordeal. But in the macho style of foreign correspondents, he had insisted on returning to work immediately. The Times did not object. After a struggle with alcohol, Bill died of cancer in New York two years later in 1985. He was forty-eight.

  The surge of Islamic militancy added another challenge to Middle Eastern journalism: religious extremists and their violent movements had to be covered, but in a way that did not risk making reporters
the accidental story.

  In such a climate, the competence and loyalty of a paper’s foreign staff were critical. If our office managers, stringers, translators, or drivers were untrustworthy, we could be betrayed and our sources compromised. In authoritarian regimes, the situation is doubly complex. Several of us had long suspected that local Times staff members were forced to cooperate with their respective intelligence services. In Cairo, I would often wonder whether Gamal cooperated with the Mukhabarat, Egypt’s secret police. I never asked.

  * * *

  On December 12 the determined and now seemingly omnipresent Islamic Jihad struck again. It claimed credit for having detonated car bombs in a ninety-minute coordinated strike on six American and Arab targets in Kuwait, killing six people and injuring sixty-three. Canceling my Arabic lessons in Cairo once more, I was on a plane and back on page one covering yet another synchronized terror attack.

  In the initial strike at the American Embassy, a dump truck carrying forty-five cylinders of gasoline and plastic explosives crashed through the embassy’s flimsy sheet-metal gates and demolished the northern half of its three-story administration annex. An hour later, a car parked outside the French Embassy exploded, leaving a forty-foot hole in the embassy’s security wall but, miraculously, no casualties.

  The living quarters for employees of Raytheon Company, which was installing a new Hawk surface-to-air missile system for Kuwait, had an equally close call. So did Kuwait International Airport, where one person was killed in a car bomb explosion beneath the control tower, and another at Kuwait’s main oil refinery and its major water desalination plant. Had the refinery been hit, production from one of the world’s largest oil exporters would have been crippled. And without water, Kuwait’s estimated 1.4 million people, 600,000 of whom were expatriates, would have lasted less than a week.

  David Good, the US Embassy’s chief public affairs officer, told me that had the truck hit the chancellery building where most of the Americans work, the death toll at that site alone would have rivaled that of the Beirut bombing. Because the administration building had not collapsed for ninety minutes, security officials had time to evacuate—a miracle.

  After the devastating attacks on the US Embassy and the marine compound in Beirut, I assumed that US Embassies around the world, and surely in the Middle East, would urgently improve security. Yet in Kuwait, the perpetrators pulled off another synchronized attack with virtually identical tactics to those employed with such deadly effect in Lebanon. How was that possible?

  Although additional security measures were taken after the Lebanon attacks, others had not been because of a lack of priority or money. The State Department’s chargé d’affaires, Philip Griffin, told me that Washington had funded the embassy’s plans to move its main entry gate to the back of the compound, where it would have bordered an open field, not a public road. But the Americans were still negotiating with Kuwait about closing the road when the militants struck. Although the embassy had increased security after the Beirut bombings, neither the Kuwaiti guards outside the embassy, nor the six marines inside it, had weapons powerful enough to stop such a large, speeding truck. No shots at all had been fired. The guards had no time to react.

  If American facilities in the Middle East had failed to heed the warning of the Lebanese attacks, how would Americans in other regions or even in the United States prepare for the grave new threat we faced?

  By mid-December, I reported what we knew about the attacks in Lebanon and Kuwait in an 1,800-word analysis of the emerging militant Islamic trend that Abe Rosenthal put on the front page. Almost five years after the Islamic revolution had toppled the Shah of Iran, I wrote, “a resurgence of religious fundamentalism is unsettling the Moslem world from Africa through the Middle East and into Asia.” Quoting unnamed Western diplomats and Arab officials, I reported that Tehran was said to be training thousands of militants in facilities near the clerical city of Qom and elsewhere, and distributing diatribes against the West and corrupt Arab governments through radio broadcasts and, as Iranian militants had done under the Shah, on cassettes that were circulating widely in the region. I had collected over a dozen in my office in Cairo.

  Although the new Islamic government in Tehran drew its inspiration from Ayatollah Khomeini, a Shiite Muslim, his example had inspired many Sunni Muslims, the overwhelming majority of Arabs as well, I wrote. Islamic purists, whether Sunni or Shiite, were seeking to replace secular governments, which they saw as “corrupt” for having deviated from the “straight path of Islam.” True Islamic governments did not distinguish between church and state.

  Though the bombings in Beirut and Kuwait were the ostensible news “peg” for such a lengthy analysis, I wrote that Sunni militants had also resorted to violence: the assassination of Egypt’s Anwar Sadat two years earlier was still raw enough to be shocking, and the two-week siege of the Grand Mosque of Mecca in 1979 in conservative Saudi Arabia—the self-proclaimed protector of Islam’s two holiest shrines—had slowed Riyadh’s tentative efforts to loosen what was the strictest and the least tolerant of region’s Sunni-led governments.

  The bombings and other violence were just one weapon in the campaign to return Islamic nations to an idealized, purer past. Equally significant, if not more so, was the political pressure that nonviolent militants like the Muslim Brotherhood were putting on pro-Western Arab governments to become more “Islamic”: to ban pork and alcohol, expel Christians and other religious minorities, force women to wear the hijab, and to abandon secular legal codes in favor of sharia, or Islamic holy law.

  When I later reread that 1983 article after 9/11, I was intrigued by how early I began grappling with questions about the origins and evolution of Islamic extremism. The article suggested that many scholars who studied Islamist movements believed that this latest wave of fundamentalism had been encouraged by the effects of the oil boom of the 1970s. The tremendous wealth accumulated by a few Arab countries created envy throughout the region and charges that the money had not been spent for the Muslim good. The arrival of millions of foreigners, many of them Western, also increased resentment of the infidel.

  My friend Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a professor of sociology at the American University in Cairo, told me that this latest wave of Islamic militancy was rooted in growing political and economic frustration. Fundamentalists, he argued, tended to come not from poor but from lower- and middle-class families that were affected most adversely by inflation, limited opportunities for social mobility, and the region’s vast disparities of wealth. Those forces were strongest in cities, where foreign influence was most apparent. Saad would not have been surprised by 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta’s middle-class origins, but such arguments were unusual when I first wrote about them. Saad would be jailed in 2000 for advocating democracy and for criticizing President Hosni Mubarak.

  * * *

  When Washington announced in February 1984 that it was “repositioning” its multinational forces out of Beirut, I called Ihsan Hijazi to congratulate him for having predicted that the United States would leave. There would be no overt American military retaliation against the Hezbollah barracks in the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley, where Iran had set up a terrorist training camp. By pushing out the Americans after President Reagan had vowed to stay, the Lebanese factions aligned with Syria and Iran had won. The collapse of the Lebanese army in February gave Reagan the rationale he wanted: the multinational peacekeeping force no longer had a mission.

  Soon after the Times published my front-page analysis on the spread of Islamic militancy, the Pentagon released a high-level study of the marine compound bombing. Headed by retired admiral Robert L. J. Long, the commission concluded that major failures of command, intelligence, and policy had all contributed to what it called the “catastrophe” and “an overwhelming success” for the terrorists.5

  Although it had no mandate to investigate Washington’s decision to send the marines there, the commission supported Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger’s de
sire to withdraw them. There was an “urgent need” for a reassessment of “alternative means to achieve U.S. objectives in Lebanon” and “reduce the risk” to the marines, it concluded. Peacekeeping in Lebanon had become impossible. “No sense of national identity” united the Lebanese or “even a majority of the citizenry”; Lebanon had become a “battleground” where armed Lebanese factions manipulated and were manipulated by the foreign forces surrounding them. If Syrians and Iraqis wish to kill one another, the report said, “they do so in Lebanon.” If Israelis and Palestinians wanted to fight over the land they both claim, the venue was Lebanon. “If terrorists of any political persuasion wish to kill and maim American citizens, it is convenient for them to do so in Lebanon.”

  The Long Commission also concluded that the lack of HUMINT, or intelligence from agents and other human sources, resulted from a policy failure: specifically, from decisions by senior officials to “reduce the collection” of such information worldwide due to budgetary constraints and America’s overreliance on satellites and other technical collection methods.

  Two decades later, the 9/11 Commission would identify depressingly similar failures within what officials called the “intelligence community,” which remained a battleground among warring agencies.

  The Long Commission cited other failings: a poorly defined mission; inadequate communication among top officials; inappropriate “rules of engagement,” which, among other things, barred marines from keeping their weapons loaded and ready for use; and the command’s decision to locate most of the marines in a single building.

  But if the commission had a bottom line, it was this: America had failed to appreciate that we were at war. The report’s “most important message” was that the marine compound attack was “tantamount to an act of war using the medium of terrorism.” “Terrorist warfare sponsored by sovereign states or organized political entities to achieve political objectives” was becoming an ever-greater threat to the United States. In effect, Muslim extremists, often backed by states, had declared war against America on a worldwide, decentralized battlefield on which our traditional weapons and tactics were often useless or counterproductive. America did not yet understand the challenge.