by Robert Fisk
Two years later, just after the massacre of Palestinians by Israeli-supported Phalangist militiamen, Spence was watching Israeli troops unearthing PLO arms supplies from tunnels beneath the Palestinian camps in West Beirut. “There were our own ‘Interarms’ markings on some of the boxes,” Spence claimed. “They were all fake. Someone had been using our name.” Like Mertins, Spence was scornful of the American arms deal with Iran. “The CIA have a unique ability to get everything screwed up,” he said. Yet Spence’s boss, Sam Cummings, the chairman and principal shareholder in Interarms, had himself worked for the CIA. He described the arms business as “founded on human folly,” a trade in which all weapons are defensive and all spare parts non-lethal.
Yet Spence displayed contempt for those who would attack him as a merchant of death. “I was at a party some time ago and a young girl came up to me and accused me of selling weapons for people to kill each other. I said: ‘Nonsense. You’re paying taxes, you are paying part of your salary every month to pay for nuclear weapons. How can you accuse me?’ ” Spence did not feel ashamed. He and Cummings had as their company motto “ Esse quam videri”—“To be, rather than to seem to be”—and their Manchester workshops stood next to a fine, grey-stone Victorian church, the gods of love and war in intimate relationship with each other. “Not quite,” Spence told me. “The church was built to commemorate the battle of Waterloo.” He might also have added that while Interarms remained open for business, the church had been closed down some years before.
Israel’s own arms industry could be forgiven for adopting Cummings’s company motto for its own role in the Middle East arms market—although its attempts at secrecy are often as serious as a strip-tease artist’s attempts at modesty. Companies that produce the Merkava tank and have become masters of upgrading and transforming outdated munitions need to advertise themselves as much as they need to maintain their privacy. Glossy Israeli military magazines have extolled the virtues of battlefield surveillance radar, towed assault bridges, tank-fire control systems, aircraft bomb-ejection racks and the mini-Uzi sub-machine gun.
By the mid-Eighties, the Israeli electronics manufacturer Tadiran had moved into electronic warfare technology with the development of a frequency-hopping VHF radio system. Elbit Computers was advertising its weapons delivery and navigation systems. Israeli Military Industries—its weapons “subjected to the extensive operational testing of actual combat”—employed 14,000 workers and exported to the United States and several NATO countries. Israel even began buying, quite legally, avionics systems from the United States, upgrading them, installing them on Israeli aircraft and then sharing the newly modernised equipment and new technical knowledge with the Americans. In this way, Israeli technology turned up in U.S. equipment sold to Saudi Arabia, a country whose American arms imports are always opposed by Israel’s lobby in Washington and— usually—by the Israeli government.
Much less legal, however, was a secret operation—much of it still undisclosed in Israel itself—in which Israeli military technicians were sent to Beijing throughout the mid-Eighties to re-fit and modernise hundreds of Soviet-made tanks and heavy artillery for the Chinese People’s Army. The Israeli personnel, many of them working for commercial weapons companies inside Israel, flew to Beijing with the tacit permission of the Israeli government, upgrading the Russian tanks with new fire-control systems, laser range-finders and—in some cases—new guns, many of which contained sensitive instruments of American manufacture. Israeli technicians flew to Beijing via Copenhagen and Bangkok—always using Scandinavian Airlines and choosing the one route to China which passed over friendly territory all the way. They worked in three-month shifts in Chinese ordnance depots, their equipment sent by sea from the Israeli port of Eilat.
Although I wrote extensively about this illicit trade in The Times in May 1987, only the Associated Press followed up the story. Neither the Pentagon nor the White House would make any comment, working on the assumption that American journalists would not touch so sensitive a subject without “confirmation” from U.S. authorities—confirmation they were not prepared to give. Their assumption was correct. Only when the CIA informed the Senate Government Affairs Committee in October 1993 that Israel had been providing China for over a decade with “several billion dollars’ ” worth of advanced military technology did the story become kosher for U.S. journalists. Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister, then admitted that Israel had sold arms to China.
Israel’s ability to upgrade Soviet military hardware was well established. Israeli technicians revolutionised a process to “Westernise” T-54 and T-55 battle tanks after capturing hundreds of them in wars with the Russian-equipped Arab armies. The Israelis replace the tank’s 100-mm cannon with 105-mm guns and add their own fire-control system, which enables the gun to remain pointed at its target in rough country. Thermal sleeves were fitted to tank barrels to prevent heat warp while other innovations allowed tank commanders to predict weather conditions.166
Israel was also exporting hardware to Latin America, to the Somoza regime and then to the Contras in Nicaragua,167 to apartheid South Africa and to Pinochet’s Chile. But what infuriated the Americans was that the Chinese were receiving U.S. technology for their tanks via Israel—technology that was specifically banned from export to communist countries, including China. More critical still was the arrival of some of these same upgraded Russian tanks in Iran, purchased by Iranian arms-buyers while on extended visits to Beijing. Israel could not have been unaware of these deals—Iran operated a daily flight to Beijing during the eight-year war with Iraq, specifically to gain access to the Chinese arms market. The U.S. authorities only realised that the Israelis had been using U.S. instruments during the Beijing operations when a visiting Egyptian arms delegation inspected a newly modernised Russian T-62 tank, only to find U.S. and Israeli technology— with instructions in both English and Hebrew—inside.
The guerrilla armies of the Middle East—particularly in Lebanon during the county’s 1975–90 civil war—sought arms in less ambitious ways. The Hizballah in Lebanon acquired their Katyusha and anti-tank rockets from Iran via Syria—a spectacularly successful alliance, since it used low-grade weaponry ultimately to drive Israel’s occupation army and its Lebanese surrogates from southern Lebanon in May 2000. The Christian Phalangists acquired weapons, including wire-guided missiles, from Israel and from South Africa, the latter provoking a government inquiry in Johannesburg after the end of the apartheid regime.168
IT WAS INEVITABLE, I suppose, that Lebanon, the land in which I have lived for half my life, should eventually provide me with that one unique and terrible connection which I had sought for so long to understand, between the armourers and their ultimate victims, between the respectable weapons manufacturers and the innocents whom their weapons kill. For many years in the Middle East, I had pondered the morality of those who made the guns that killed the people around me. What long-dead Soviet worker in Stalin’s or Khrushchev’s Russia had manufactured the Katyusha rocket to be fired, decades later, by the Palestinians and the Hizballah at the Israelis—either inside Israel or against Israel’s occupation troops in southern Lebanon? What technician in the United States had put together the cluster bombs that Israel rained down on civilian areas of West Beirut in 1982?
What manufacturer, what developers—decent, patriotic, God-fearing Americans, no doubt—had built the Hellfire missile which an Israeli pilot fired into a Lebanese ambulance on 13 April 1996, killing two women and four children? Five years later, in Abu Dhabi, John Hurst of Lockheed would tell me he had no knowledge of this frightful little bloodbath. But then Mikhail Kalashnikov told me he felt no regrets about the carnage caused by the rifle he had designed; he had invented the AK-47 not to kill the innocent but to protect his country—the refrain of every armourer.
Yet the events of 13 April 1996 would allow me to challenge this mantra, to take the evidence of savagery back to the men in the United States who created the instrument of death for
six poor Lebanese civilians whose only guilt lay in their nationality, in the location of their dirt-poor village and in the cynicism of the conflict which had been fought in that part of their country for twenty-one years. In all, 150,000 men, women and children were killed in the Lebanese civil war, tens of thousands of them victims of American munitions. These six civilians were to die long after that war had officially ended—victims of a constantly renewable conflict between Israel’s occupation army and the Lebanese Hizballah guerrillas who eventually drove their enemies out of almost all of Lebanon.169 In the months to come, I would interview all the survivors, all the witnesses—UN soldiers and Lebanese civilians—and the American arms manufacturers involved in this dreadful affair, which I still regard as a crime against humanity.
The Lebanese Shia Muslim village of Mansouri lay scarcely 8 kilometres from the Lebanese–Israeli frontier, and all that morning of Saturday, 13 April, the Israelis had shelled the area. Thirty-two-year-old Fadila al-Oglah had spent the night with her aunt Nowkal, cowering in the barn close to the villagers’ donkeys and cows. But that Saturday she came out of hiding because there was no more bread in the village and the Israeli artillery rounds were now landing between the grimy concrete houses. Abbas Jiha, a farmer who acted as volunteer ambulance-driver for the Shia Muslim village, had spent the night with his twenty-seven-year-old wife, Mona, their three small daughters—Zeinab, Hanin and baby Mariam—and their six-year-old son, Mehdi, in the family’s one-room hut above an olive grove, listening to the threats broadcast by the Voice of Hope radio station which was run by Israel in the 10 per cent of Lebanese territory it occupied north of its border. “The Israelis kept saying over the radio that the people of the villages must flee their homes,” Abbas Jiha recalled for me. “They named Mansouri as one of those villages. They were telling us to escape. They were saying that they wouldn’t attack the cars that were leaving the villages. And when I opened the door, I saw that the shelling was coming into Mansouri.”
Across all of southern Lebanon on that spring morning, towering clouds of black and grey smoke drifted towards the Mediterranean as thousands of Israeli shells poured into the hill villages. The sky was alive with the sound of supersonic F-16 fighter-bombers, while several hundred metres above the hamlets and laneways hovered the latest and most ferocious addition to Israel’s armoury—the American-made Apache helicopters whose firepower had proved so deadly to the retreating Iraqi army in Kuwait five years before. Just four days earlier, a fourteen-year-old Lebanese boy had been torn to pieces by a booby-trap bomb disguised as a rock near the village of Bradchit; the pro-Iranian Hizballah militia, accusing Israel of responsibility, sought revenge by firing Katyusha rockets across the border into Israel, wounding several civilians. In response, Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres—vainly seeking re-election by portraying himself as a soldier-statesman at war with Hizballah “terrorism”—ordered the mass bombardment of southern Lebanon from the air, sea and land.170
The United States meekly called for both sides to “exercise restraint” but publicly sympathised with Israel. The Hizballah, according to the U.S. State Department, were ultimately to blame for the death of all those civilians—there were to be almost 200 within the next three weeks—killed by Israeli fire. Although Washington was—as usual—officially neutral, the Lebanese found it difficult to dissociate their latest war from the United States. The Voice of Hope radio station ordering them to flee their homes was partly funded by right-wing American evangelists. The 155-mm artillery shells hissing over their villages were made in America. So were the F-16 jets and the Apache helicopters hovering like wasps in the pale blue skies above them. Even the name chosen by Shimon Peres for Israel’s latest adventure in Lebanon—“Operation Grapes of Wrath”—appeared to be influenced by America. If it did not come from the Book of Deuteronomy, then it was inspired by Julia Ward Howe’s nineteenth-century “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—where the Lord is seen “trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored”—or by the best-selling novel of the American writer John Steinbeck, who once described Arabs as “the dirtiest people in the world and among the smelliest.”
The fruits of the operation could already be seen in Mansouri. Shortly after dawn on 13 April, a shell had struck a house on the edge of the village, wounding Abdulaziz Mohsen, a twenty-three-year-old farmer and former Lebanese army conscript. Despite the gunfire, Abbas Jiha ran from his home to ask for the keys of the Mansouri ambulance from the village mukhtar, or mayor. The battered, white-painted Volvo—a gift to the people of Mansouri from villagers who had made money after emigrating to West Africa—had two empty stretchers lying on the back floor and Jiha pushed Mohsen into the vehicle, setting off through the shellfire to the city of Tyre, up the Mediterranean coast to the north-west. There he bought sacks of flat Arabic bread for the marooned villagers of Mansouri. He arrived back by nine in the morning, and was handing out the bread when another shell hit a laneway, wounding a two-month-old baby called Ali Modehi. Back drove Abbas Jiha once more in the old village ambulance, its blue light flashing on the roof, until he had safely delivered Ali to the Tyre hospital. He bought yet more bread for the families of Mansouri, then set off again for the village.
As he did so, Najla Abujahjah, a young Reuters camerawoman, was on an equally dangerous mission, driving through the foothills east of Mansouri in an attempt to film the Israeli air attacks for the British news agency. Unwilling to leave the battlezone, Abujahjah—a resourceful and brave woman who would never forget the terrible event she was shortly to witness—headed west to a road near Mansouri where she caught sight of two more Apaches that appeared to be watching something, “almost stationary in the sky but moving a few metres backwards and then a few metres forwards.”
Abbas Jiha was now back in the centre of Mansouri, enveloped in a scene of mass panic. “Many people had already fled their homes but a few were left, including my own family, and the shells were falling all over the place. A jet came and dropped a bomb on the edge of the village. So I said the people could get into the ambulance and I’d take them to safety. I got Mona and our children.” Abbas Jiha said that just as he put nine-year-old Zeinab, five-year-old Hanin and two-month-old Mariam, along with their brother Mehdi, into the back of the ambulance, he saw two helicopters. “They were low and the pilots seemed to be watching us,” he told me.
Fadila al-Oglah bought two bags of bread from Abbas but was herself now fearful of the planes. “Although the Israelis said we would not be attacked if we fled our houses, the Apaches were strafing the roads with bullets, and shells were bursting around our homes,” she was to tell me later. “My brothers had left in a pick-up and other people had escaped in farm tractors. My parents told me: ‘Leave and follow your brothers.’ I went down to the village to look for another pick-up but then I saw Abbas Jiha driving the village ambulance with his wife and family inside. I asked if he would take me and he said: ‘No problem.’”
By the time Abbas Jiha left Mansouri, he had thirteen terrified passengers crammed into the vehicle. There was his wife, Mona, and their four children, Fadila and her aunt Nowkal, Mohamed Hisham, a window repairman, and five members of the al-Khaled family—twenty-two-year-old Nadia, who was Nowkal’s daughter, and her four nieces, Sahar, aged three, Aida, seven, Huda, eleven, and thirteen-year-old Manar. Abbas and Mohamed Hisham, the only male adults, sat in the front of the ambulance along with six-year-old Mehdi; the rest sat pressed together in the back. “Can you imagine what it was like with fourteen people in the vehicle?” Fadila asked me when I interviewed her later. Abbas Jiha remembers that part of the village was now on fire, the smoke curling over the fields. “We left in a convoy of tractors and cars and headed for Amriyeh where there was a UN post with Fijian soldiers on the main coast road to Tyre. The shells were falling all round us in the fields.”
Najla Abujahjah was herself now standing in front of the Fijian position—UN Checkpoint 123—taking still pictures of refugee traffic on the road, h
er friend holding her video-camera. “There were two helicopters in the sky, watching the checkpoint,” she told me. “I was worried about those helicopters, about what they were doing there. I saw an ambulance coming down the road and thought it must have wounded on board but then I saw it was full of women and children. There was another car moving in the opposite direction and the ambulance driver was waving with his hand, telling it to turn back.” The videotape record of those moments shows the ambulance passing the unmanned UN checkpoint—the Fijian soldiers were not on the road, but in their protective bunkers—and Abbas Jiha’s hand appears at the window of his vehicle, urging the other car to stop.
It was then that Abbas Jiha heard the women in the back of his ambulance shouting at him. “One of them was crying out to me: ‘The helicopter is coming close to us—it’s chasing us.’ I looked out of the window and I could see the Apache getting closer. I told them all: ‘Don’t be afraid—just say Allahu akbar, God is Great, and the name of the Imam Ali.’ I had told them not to be afraid but I was very frightened.”
Najla Abujahjah saw the same helicopter. “It was getting lower and nearer, and I’ve learnt that this means the pilot is going to fire. I felt he was going to fire a missile but I didn’t imagine the target would be so close to me. I heard a sound like ‘puff-puff,’ a very small sound. And I saw a missile flying from the Apache with a trail of smoke behind it.” In fact, the Israeli helicopter pilot fired two missiles; one was later discovered unexploded beside a neighbouring mosque, its steel cylinder, fins and nameplate still intact. Najla Abujahjah’s videotape recorded what happened to the other rocket. Milliseconds after the ambulance cleared UN Checkpoint 123, the missile exploded through the back door, engulfing the vehicle in fire and smoke and hurling it 20 metres through the air into the living room of a house.
