The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  All Fadila al-Oglah could remember was “a great heat in my face, like a blazing fire. Somehow I was outside the ambulance and I found a big barrel of water and started to wash my face from the heat. It was all I could think of, despite the screaming and smoke, this terrible heat. It was as if someone was holding a flame in front of my eyes.”

  Abbas Jiha was to recall how he hurled himself from the door of the ambulance just before it crashed into the house. “I was terrified. I couldn’t believe it. It was the end of my world. I knew what must have happened to my family.” Najla Abujahjah, trembling with fear, was now videotaping the terrible aftermath of the Israeli missile attack. Her tape shows Abbas Jiha, wounded in the head and foot, standing in the road beside one of his dead daughters, weeping and shrieking “God is Great” up into the sky, towards the helicopter. “I raised my fists to the pilot and cried out: ‘My God, my God, my family has gone.’”

  Abbas found his son Mehdi alive. Then he saw two-month-old Mariam lying 3 metres from the ambulance. “All her body had holes through it. Her head was full of metal.” Najla saw women and children “coming out of the back of the ambulance, cowering and screaming and hiding. One man threw himself into the orchard then came out holding two children by the arms. One was a little girl who was wounded and barefoot but she was still trying to put her scarf back on. I saw a girl lying on the road with blood coming out of the top of her head. The driver was crying out: ‘My children have died, God have mercy on us.’ I saw another girl— she was Manar—and she had blood all over her, and she kept saying: ‘My sister’s head has exploded.’ ”

  Still fearful that the helicopter would fire again—the pilot had clearly seen that his target was an ambulance—Najla Abujahjah ran towards the house to find a scene which she has said will torment her for the rest of her life. “I couldn’t get the doors open because the vehicle was wedged in the room. But there were three children inside who were clearly in the last seconds of their life. It was as if they were entombed. One of them—she was Hanin—collapsed on the broken window frame, her blood running in streams down the outside of the vehicle. In her last seconds she tried to look at me but she couldn’t because dust covered her face. Another little girl was sitting in the lap of a dead woman, wailing and crying ‘Aunty, Aunty.’ There was a third girl who had her face covered in blood; she was sitting up, turning her head from side to side. Another had a terrible wound to her head and neck and she collapsed.” As the children died one by one in front of her, Najla Abujahjah heard a strange scraping sound. “The missile had set off the windscreen wipers and they were going back and forth against the broken glass, making this terrible noise. It will haunt me for the rest of my days.”

  Abbas Jiha, overwhelmed with grief, was tearing at the ambulance with his bare hands, along with UN Fijian troops from the checkpoint. “I could see Hanin’s back—she was cut through with holes like a mosquito net,” he recalled. “Then I found my wife Mona. She was so terribly wounded, I couldn’t recognise her face. I had lost her and three of my children.” Mona Jiha, nine-year-old Zeinab, fiveyear-old Hanin and the two-month-old baby, Mariam, were all dead. So was sixty-year-old Nawkal and her eleven-year-old niece Huda. The Israeli helicopter remained in the sky over UN Checkpoint 123 for another five minutes. Then it flew away.

  Within hours, the Israelis admitted they had targeted the ambulance but made two claims: that the vehicle was owned by a Hizballah member—which was untrue—and that it was destroyed because it had been carrying a Hizballah guerrilla—likewise untrue. “If other individuals in the vehicle were hit during the attack,” an Israeli spokesman said, “they had been used by the Hizballah as a cover for Hizballah activities.” There were no apologies. Yet international law demands the safeguarding of civilian lives even in the presence of “individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians,” and the claim that the vehicle had been targeted because it was believed to be owned by the Hizballah was in some ways even more outrageous. How, the survivors asked themselves, could it be justifiable for the Israelis to slaughter the occupants of an ambulance just because they didn’t like the suspected owner of the vehicle? And what kind of missile, they also asked, could home in on an ambulance, blasting it 20 metres through the air? If the Apache helicopter was American—as it most certainly was—who made the rocket that killed Nowkal, Mona and the four children, Zeinab, Hanin, Mariam and Huda?

  For days after the killing, the smashed ambulance lay in the wreckage of the house into which it had been blasted on 13 April. I passed it myself each day as I drove the frightening coast road south of Tyre, two Apache helicopters watching my movements as they did all vehicles on the highway. Within a week, the bloodbath at Qana, in which 109 Lebanese civilian refugees were massacred by Israeli artillery, had eclipsed this particular horror, eventually bringing “Operation Grapes of Wrath” to an ignominious end—and failing to win Shimon Peres’s election. But there were many other incidents during the Israeli bombardment which bore a remarkable similarity to the ambulance attack. Close to the Jiyeh power station, south of Beirut, for example, another Israeli helicopter pilot had fired a missile at a car, killing a young woman who had just bought a sandwich from a local café. In West Beirut on 16 April, a missile decapitated a two-year-old girl. Two days later, yet another helicopter-fired missile was targeted at a block of apartments at Nabatieh, killing a family of nine, including a two-day-old baby.

  What were these terrible weapons that were now being used so promiscuously in Lebanon? Who sold them to the Israelis? And—if it was an American company which had manufactured the missile—what conditions were attached to its sale? In the village of Mansouri, Abbas Jiha spent months ruminating upon this same question. “How would the people who made this missile feel if their children were killed as mine were?” he asked me. “These things are meant to be used against armies, not civilians.” Fadila al-Oglah was more resigned. “The Americans will keep giving these weapons to the Israelis whatever we say,” she remarked to me one day in the same draughty two-room house she had fled a year before. “They don’t care about us. We will continue to suffer.” Which was perfectly true.

  Shortly after the bombardment ended, however, UN ordnance officers searching through the wreckage of the ambulance found an intriguing clue to the missile’s identity. Among fragments of shrapnel and twisted steel, a young UN liaison officer—Captain Mikael Lindval of the Swedish army—discovered a hunk of metal bearing most of a coded nameplate. It had come to rest a few inches from the bloodstained window frame where Hanin had died, and contained the logo “AGM 114C” and a manufacturer’s number, “04939.” There was also an intriguing single letter, “M.” Lindval knew AGM stood for “Air-to-Ground Missile,” and the 114C coding identified the 1.6-metre projectile as a Hellfire anti-armour missile, jointly manufactured by Rockwell International and Martin Marietta. Rockwell—now taken over by Boeing—had its missile headquarters, according to Jane’s Defence Weekly, at Satellite Boulevard, Duluth, in Georgia, about thirty minutes’ drive from Atlanta. Martin Marietta, now part of Lockheed, was making missles in Orlando, Florida. Those who made the missile that killed four Lebanese children and two women now had an address.

  I even found the manufacturer’s advertisement for the Hellfire. “All for One and One for All,” it said in the publicity literature. Could ever Alexandre Dumas’ reputation have been so traduced? What did the rallying cry of the Three Musketeers have to do with this weapon? But there was a far more important question. Now that I had identified them, how would the missile manufacturers respond to the bloodbath inside the Mansouri ambulance?

  Lindval duly handed over to me the fragment containing the codes. They were scratched and in some cases illegible, but they included a National Stock Number in a 42-34 digit sequence, “141001-1920293.” The second section of the sequence—“01”—would prove to be of vital importance. The missile’s Lot No. was “MG188J315534.” Then the Fijians found the second, unexploded Hellfire missile almost to
tally buried beside the mosque. On the undamaged fuselage, the codings were complete and it was thus possible to reconstruct some of the missing figures on the projectile which had exploded inside the ambulance.171

  Somehow, I had to get the coded missile part to America, to present it to the makers. The first question was how to get this piece of shrapnel—the vital and only proof that the ambulance had been hit by a Hellfire—from Lebanon to the United States. There were no direct flights. It was not difficult to get it aboard an international flight from Lebanon to France. Sympathetic officials at Beirut airport and in the airline brought the missile part on board my Air France flight to Paris. But explaining to American security men that I wanted to carry it all the way to Washington was going to end in journalistic disaster. I consulted the Paris station manager of another European airline. “Don’t think about hand-carrying it, Bob,” he told me, fondling the jagged metal fragment containing the Hellfire codes. “They’ll pick up explosive traces on your hands, let alone the stuff you’d be carrying in your bag.” I could see what he meant. And I could imagine the headline: “British reporter found with missile part on flight to Washington . . .” I could even guess the reporter’s by-line beneath the headline.

  The hunks of shrapnel were now no more a rocket than a piece of broken china constituted a plate, but the very word “missile” would cause palpitations to any U.S. agent in the aftermath of the recent TWA disaster off New York; in five years’ time, the whole exercise would have been impossible. In the end, Amnesty International—well aware of the ambulance killings in Lebanon—agreed to airfreight the missile parts from Paris to their Washington office. A few days later, I flew Air France to the United States; I can remember my sense of excitement as my aircraft stopped over briefly in New York. I stood with the French crew on the steps of the plane in the early afternoon, looking towards the distant skyscrapers and the tall grey towers of the World Trade Center on the warm horizon. Now at last I could confront the armourers with the consequences of their profession.

  In Washington, I picked up the Hellfire fragment in the heart of the capital whose alliance with Israel allows neither criticism not restraint. I wasn’t going to take a local flight and get caught on the metal detectors at Washington’s Ronald Reagan airport, so the Crescent, a railroad train en route to New Orleans, would take me through the night down to Georgia, where Bob Algarotti of Boeing had agreed to meet me to discuss the Hellfire at the very home of the missile. He wanted to explain its advantages, its combat-proven abilities, to a reporter who— he wrongly assumed—wanted to write a puff piece about the missile’s accuracy.

  Washington, that late spring day, was beautiful. The Capitol and the great government buildings looked like ancient Rome. And when I awoke the next bright morning in my sleeping car heading south, the neat little American towns looked like they were on a Hollywood set. The soft green countryside and the clapboard houses sailed past the window of my carriage. How neat those little gardens were with their flowers and children’s swings. Was I only 6,000 miles away from Lebanon—or on a different planet? There were Episcopalian churches and smart Georgian courthouses and towns called Cornelia and Magnolia Acres flicking past, and a gunstore—in a land where every man and woman has the right to bear arms—called Lock, Stock and Barrel. And so many flagstaffs that dawn morning I could see from my carriage window. And so many red, white and blue American flags snapping proudly from them. There hadn’t been a war in these parts, I thought, for 130 years.

  I climbed down at Gainesville station, where a taxi man with one surviving tooth took me down Interstate 85 to the Old Peachtree Road exit. We passed a sign saying Duluth and then Satellite Boulevard and then, less than 3 miles further on, we turned into a campus of discreet two-storey buildings hidden behind tall trees and manicured lawns. “Boeing Defense and Space Group,” it said on the sign at the gate.

  It was to be a disturbing afternoon. A tiny, green-painted model of the Hellfire stood on a shelf of the room in which Bob Algarotti of Boeing introduced me to two executives intimately involved in the production of the missile. They were highly intelligent men; both were former serving officers in Vietnam and both would later request anonymity—for their security, it seemed, although their concern about Boeing’s reaction to the interview appeared to outweigh any fear of Hizballah or “terrorism.”

  I explained that I was interested in writing about the abilities of the Hellfire— but also about its specific use in the Middle East. The executive to my right— whom I shall call the Colonel, for that was his rank in Vietnam—produced a glossy brochure that detailed the evolution of the Hellfire modular missile system, and placed it on the table between us. Page 2 carried a series of small illustrated cross-sections of the rocket and, following the dates 1982–89, a coding of AGM 114A, B, C. The piece of shrapnel—which, unbeknown to the Boeing men, was in my camera bag—was marked AGM 114C. So the missile that killed Abbas Jiha’s family, Nowkal and her niece was at least seven years old.

  The Colonel listed the countries which had purchased either an early or later, improved, category of the Hellfire. First on the list was Israel with both categories—“they take soldiering pretty seriously,” the Colonel said admiringly, a remark I decided to let go for the moment—but Egypt, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates were also included. Sweden and Norway had purchased an anti-ship version of the Hellfire. The British had category two. It was a popular product and the Colonel was keen to explain why. “It’s probably the most precise anti-armour weapon in the world,” he said. “You can fire it through a basketball hoop at five miles and it would do it every time.” So the women and children in the ambulance, I thought to myself, had stood no chance.

  I understood at once what this meant. The Boeing men were promoting the accuracy of their weapons as part of their humanitarian pitch: the more accurate the Hellfire, the less chance civilians would be killed by it. The problem came when the weapon was specifically aimed at a civilian target—as it had been by the Israelis in Lebanon—when the very precision of the missile ensured that civilians would be killed. So I asked what checks Boeing carried out on the use to which the Hellfire had been put by the nations that purchased it. They read the papers, both executives said. I asked about Israel. “We do not get information from the Israelis about what they’ve done,” one of the men replied. “They don’t give much information.”

  It was time to produce the missile fragment. And as I knelt to extract it from my camera bag, I felt the electricity in the air behind me. I turned round and laid the shard of iron which had helped to kill the Lebanese in the centre of the table. I told all three men the date of its use, the location, the appalling results and Israel’s explanation. The Colonel picked it up, turning it in his hand and muttering something about how it might be too small a fragment to identify. This was absurd. He could read the codes on the metal from the missile. He understood what they meant better than I did. His colleague to my left said nothing, stared at the fragment and looked at me. Bob Algarotti, the public relations man, picked it up, glanced at his colleagues, and said quietly: “Yeah, well, it’s a Hellfire, we all know that.”

  Then he said: “I’m getting a little uncomfortable.” But the Colonel was angry. “This is so far off base, it’s ridiculous,” he said. I begged to disagree. These men manufactured this missile. Did they not bear some responsibility for its use—at least to ensure that it was used responsibly by their clients? Was reading about its use in the newspapers enough? Was that the extent of their interest or care? There then followed some very uncomfortable minutes. Algarotti complained that you couldn’t blame a knife-maker if someone used the knife to murder someone else. Yes, I said, but this was not a knife. The Hellfire was an anti-personnel weapon. “It’s not!” the Colonel replied angrily. “It’s an anti-armour weapon.” And then there was silence—because, of course, if the missile was an anti-armour weapon, it most surely was not an anti-ambulance weapon.

  “Are you on some kind of
crusade?” one of the executives asked. I said I thought this an unfortunate remark.172 Algarotti interrupted quietly to agree with me. We were dealing with the death of innocent people, I repeated, including children. What was I looking for? one of the men asked. For some sign of compassion from them, I replied. One of the men in the room said: “I, as a person—sure I have feelings, but as a Boeing company employee, all we do is make missiles.” I then agreed to lay down my pen while the three men discussed how they could frame some statement of their feelings. Both executives clearly felt deeply troubled about the events that I described; they were family men and wanted to express their horror at the deaths of innocents. But they didn’t want Boeing involved and— equally obviously—they were frightened of criticising Israel. During the afternoon, one man at Boeing would be heard to say twice—in identical words, I observed in my notebook—“Whatever you do, I don’t want you to quote me as saying anything critical of Israel’s policies.”

  And here was the nub. These men, these armourers—so powerful, so overwhelmingly part of America’s defence system, so patriotic in their motives, so immutably part of the history of the U.S. armed forces in Vietnam—were frightened of offending Israel, fearful that a mere word of criticism would damage or end their careers or send them careening off into a political crisis within the aerospace company so serious that their careers would be for ever ravaged. “Whatever you do . . .” the man had said.

  Then one of the executives made up his mind. “Let me speak as a soldier, not as an employee of Boeing. No professional soldier is going to condone the killing of innocent people as targets. We’re trained to preserve the peace . . . of course, the Boeing company is troubled if its weapons are misused or targeted against, you know, innocent people. But we build weapons systems to U.S. requirements, we get permission to sell to many different countries . . . we don’t sell missiles that are intended for non-military targets . . .”