The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  I pulled from my bag the photographs that Najla Abujahjah had taken of the victims. I laid them on the table, images of blood and torn limbs. The executive on my left looked through them with distaste. Then he said: “I don’t want these.” And he slid the pictures of the dead and wounded members of the Jiha family across the heavily polished tabletop. The Colonel looked at them and gently returned them to me. We parted with handshakes; and I felt oddly sad for these men. They were decent, hard-working, loyal employees of Rockwell—now Boeing—and they had been shocked by the story of the ambulance. They wanted to show their compassion—and did so, up to a point—but were desperately anxious to avoid any offence to Boeing or to Israel. I told them to keep the Hellfire missile fragment. I was returning it to them. And as I left the room, I heard a voice behind me say: “I don’t think we’ll put this one in the trophy room.”

  And there my story might have ended. The Review section of the London Independenton Sunday published my detailed account of the Israeli attack on the ambulance and the long journey to the south of the United States to find the men who made it. On the front cover, the paper ran a coloured photograph of the missile fragment, showing in minute detail the codings that had survived the explosion. But two days later, I received a letter from a European missile technician. He wanted anonymity. He said he wanted “some focusing of Human Rights for these people” killed in the ambulance. Then he went on:

  The vital piece of evidence, the missile fragment, says a lot more than you revealed . . . The NATO Stock Number is partially obliterated, but does give a vital clue. The NSN is made up of a 42-34 digit sequence . . . the two digit part is the Nation Code. Each NATO country . . . has an identifying nationality code—in this case, the “01” for the U.S.A is clearly visible. This shows that the weapon was originally supplied to U.S. forces . . . The Lot No. is the most significant. This would tell you exactly where and when it was made, and more importantly, where it was delivered . . . you will see that the first part of the Lot No. has been obliterated . . . It also appears to have been made by a chisel-like instrument . . . being pushed down on the plate; the other damage is all of a glancing/scraping nature. So who cut out the Lot No.? Israeli forces upon receipt of “illegally exported” U.S. weaponry? U.S. forces before delivery? . . . It is quite clear that this missile . . . was exported from U.S. government stocks and given to the Israelis covertly.

  The writer ended with a warning, telling me that I should be careful what I said on the telephone about my missile inquiries, because “all satellite transmissions are monitored by the U.S. National Security Agency at Menwith near Harrogate . . .‘Compromising NATO Security’ would be the charge [against me] so please be discreet in your handling of this letter.”

  Discreet I was. I messaged a friend in France and asked her to call the anonymous letter-writer. Minutes later she was on the line. “He called me back from a pay phone. He wants to meet you tomorrow for lunch at the Lutetia Hotel in Paris.” Next morning I boarded the first flight to Paris, the 8:05 from Beirut—the same plane I had flown with the missile fragment only a few days earlier. At Charles de Gaulle airport, I took a taxi to the 6ème arrondissement. This was an assignment, it seemed, that would turn me into the ancient mariner, the Hellfire missile my personal albatross.

  The technician had arrived in Paris with his wife. He went straight to the point. “Mr. Fisk, that missile was never sold to the Israelis. The ‘01’ shows it was sold to the U.S. armed forces. And the ‘M’ proves it was sold to the U.S. Marine Corps.” Was he sure? He pulled from his pocket NATO’s entire arms coding list. Israel’s imported NATO weapons, for example, would carry the numerals “31.” Britain’s NATO coding is “99,” Italy “15.” But the nationality code for the United States was—suitably enough—“01.” Which was the code on the missile fragment. And “M” stood for the U.S. Marines. So how, in heaven’s name, did a Marine Corps missile come to be fired by the Israelis into an ambulance in southern Lebanon? I called my then editor, Andrew Marr. “Bob,” he said, “looks like you’ll be adding up some more air miles—get back to Washington.”

  I did. I made a formal request to the Pentagon, giving them full details of the missile’s codes, asking them for “the exact provenance of this missile . . . did it pass through U.S. military hands and, if so, how did it find its way to the Israel Defence Forces? . . . What follow-up action was taken by the U.S. government after the April 13 attack?” I received no reply. Indeed, after more than thirty calls from me to the U.S. Defense Department and the State Department—faxing and hand-delivering not only the coding of this missile but the coding on the unexploded missile which had also been fired at the ambulance, from which we had established some of the figures scratched off the exploded rocket—not a single official American government spokesman, either at Defense or State, was prepared to give me any information. “Some questions come to us with a kind of jinx attached,” a Defense Department official told me during another vain call to his office. “Yours seems to have a jinx.”

  But the U.S. Marines took a different view. When I faxed them details of the missile codings and the ambulance attack, I was immediately called back by a spokeswoman for the office of the Marine Corps Commandant. “We don’t like our missiles being used to attack kids,” she told me. “Where are you staying?” I waited next day at my hotel near Dupont Circle and at 5:30 a car arrived for me. It took me to a marine base outside Washington where seven men in civilian clothes were waiting to talk to me. We sat in the officers’ mess and they examined my photographs of the missile parts and told me—at last—the story of Hellfire No. MG188J315534.

  It had been one of up to 300 shipped to the Gulf by the U.S. Marines in 1990 to be used against Saddam Hussein’s occupation army in Kuwait. Of these, 159 were fired at Iraqi forces—although the marines reported at the time that some of the Hellfires were hitting Iraqi vehicles but failing to explode on impact; just as the second missile which the Israeli pilot fired at the Lebanese ambulance failed to explode in 1996. But when the conflict was over, the marine officers told me, around 150 unused Hellfires—along with other ordnance—were dropped off at the Haifa munitions pier in Israel by a U.S. warship as part of a secret quid pro quo— a gift to Israel—for keeping out of the 1991 Gulf War when it was under Iraqi Scud missile attack.

  I called up General Gus Pagonis, who was head of U.S. military logistics during the 1991 war against Iraq; he insisted to me that “everything we took off the ships [in Saudi Arabia] I put back aboard them en route to America.” But Pagonis—who was now head of logistics for the Sears Roebuck chain of department stores—added meaningfully that “I don’t know if the ships stopped anywhere on the way.” They did. After passing through the Suez Canal, the U.S. Navy put the Hellfires and other missiles ashore in northern Israel.173

  If the missile had been sold to Israel, conditions on its use would have been attached. But this was a military transfer, straight from American stocks. The missile had been paid for by the marines but ultimately handed over to the Israelis, no questions asked, and—five years later—fired into the back of an ambulance. Thus did a U.S. Marine missile kill seven people in southern Lebanon.174

  And there in Washington my journey might have ended were it not for a message from Bob Algarotti of Boeing. It was, to say the least, confusing. His people, he said, had been studying the missile fragment which I had left with them. They thought it had been made at the Orlando factory in Florida, by Lockheed Martin— at that time a rival company. But the story wasn’t that simple. The “Fed Log” number, partly damaged in the explosion, showed the figures to be 04939. “And that—at least the last four [digits]—definitely indicated it’s either got to be us or it’s got to be Martin Marietta then.” This hardly seemed conclusive. If it was either Rockwell (now Boeing) or Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin), which of them made this killer missile? The Hellfire that the Israelis fired into the ambulance had obviously been designed and developed by Boeing in Duluth. Now it seemed
that the missile itself might have been put together by Lockheed. There was a lot of buck-passing going on here.

  Boeing—whose headquarters in Seattle refused to add to what I’d been told in Duluth—said it had not contacted Lockheed Martin about my inquiry. But when I called Al Kamhi, Lockheed’s director of communications—who, by chance, was on a business trip to London—he knew exactly what I was investigating. “You talking about what you discussed with Rockwell?” he asked sharply. “. . . I mean, I have no way of knowing what missile that was. I have no way of knowing if that missile ever came from where you say it came from . . . They [Boeing] can be as convinced as they want to be . . . as far as I’m concerned, I’m not going to start looking at missile fragments from . . . Their origin is totally unknown—I’m just not going to do that.”

  “Can I let you have them anyway?” I asked. And our conversation became almost surreal:

  KAMHI: No, I won’t accept them.

  FISK: You won’t accept them?

  KAMHI: No.

  FISK: Can you tell me why not, sir? . . . I mean, this involves the death of four children and two women in an ambulance.

  KAMHI: I don’t know that that missile has anything to do with it . . . I mean, I can’t comment on something I have no information on.

  FISK: Well, I’m offering you the information so that you can check on it, sir. Boeing does seem convinced that it was made by your people.

  KAMHI: And I’m not sure I understand—if it was or if it wasn’t—what the point is.

  I told Kamhi that I wanted to know the response of the company that manufactured the Hellfire to the events that took place when its missile was used. “I have no comment on what took place,” he replied. “I’m not even going to get into that arena . . . Our sales are made through foreign military sales . . . that’s the way it’s done, through the Pentagon.” I repeated that UN officers had found the missile in the ambulance, along with another Hellfire close by which had failed to explode. There was no doubt about their provenance. But our conversation continued in an even more bizarre manner.

  KAMHI: Well, frankly, the missile has nothing to do with the manufacturer.

  FISK: But you made it.

  KAMHI: Well, we make a lot of things, too . . . our products are sold to allied nations.

  FISK: Does that include Israel?

  KAMHI: I presume if Israel has Hellfire, then they purchase the Hellfires through legal channels and through legal means.

  FISK: But I mean, do you care about the use to which your missiles are put by those people to whom you sell them? I mean, this is a very important point, sir.

  KAMHI: I’m sorry—I’m not going to dignify that question with a response. It’s a no-win question . . . I’m just not going to respond to that . . . the question you have asked is a “Have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife?” question. No matter how I respond to that question, we all of a sudden are the bad missile manufacturer. We make missiles. We make electronics systems. We make a variety of defence systems. And it is our hope that they’re never used . . . We don’t know that the missile was misused. A missile can miss . . .

  I explained to Kamhi that the Israelis agreed the ambulance was the target. They should respond to it, he said. But then, when I suggested that the U.S. government was itself concerned about the use to which its country’s weaponry was put by clients, Kamhi changed his tone, though only fractionally. “We’re always concerned when someone is hurt,” he said. “As far as why the missile was used . . . there’s no way we can control or understand why . . . We don’t have any say in that . . . you know, every day over six hundred people are shot in America. Not once do I know that anyone has gone back and questioned the bullet-maker.”

  And so it went on, Kamhi ever more irritated. He repeated he didn’t know if the ambulance was the intended target—and again I offered him my documentation with photographs of the missile part. “I can’t make the determination,” he replied impatiently. “I wasn’t the one pulling the trigger. Lockheed Martin was not the one that was there, firing the missile. Ultimately it has to come down to the responsibility of the user . . . It is not for us, the manufacturer, to go ahead and take action in a case like this.”

  Kamhi’s replies were hopeless, pathetic. But their message was clear. If an American missile was fired into an ambulance, those who made it would fiercely deny any blame. It was for Israel to explain. And when it did—agreeing that against all the rules of war, the Hellfire had been deliberately fired into an ambulance—America was silent. The equation was complete. Israel, it seemed, could do what it wanted. And Lockheed had no intention of cooperating with our inquiry—not least, I suspect, because Lockheed was now a joint partner in missile development with the Israeli aeronautics company Raphael.

  Al Kamhi agreed to let me drop off at his London hotel a packet of news reports on the ambulance killings, along with the missile codings and my photographs of the Hellfire fragment that I had left with Boeing. So the next day, I took the Channel tunnel train from Paris to London with my package. It travelled with me through the fresh spring countryside of Kent, through my own home town of Maidstone—it had been a long journey since I left the south Lebanese village of Mansouri—and to the Britannia Hotel in London where Al Kamhi was staying. He was not in his room, so I left the package with reception, receiving a promise that it would be handed to Mr. Kamhi the moment he came back to the hotel.

  Three days later, the same package—opened but then resealed—arrived at The Independent’s foreign desk in London.

  Returned to Sender.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Even to Kings, He Comes . . .

  How shall I go in peace and without sorrow? Nay, not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city. Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls, and long were the nights of aloneness; and who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret? Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets . . . It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands.

  —Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

  MY HOME IN BEIRUT has been a time-box for thirty years, a place where time has stood still. I have sat on my balcony over the Mediterranean in the sticky, sweating summer heat and in the tornadoes of winter, watching the midnight horizon lit by a hellfire of forked lightning, the waves suddenly glistening gold as they slide menacingly below my apartment. I have woken in my bed to hear the blades of the palm trees outside slapping each other in the night, the rain smashing against the shutters until a tide of water moves beneath the French windows and into my room. I came to Lebanon in 1976, when I was just twenty-nine years old, and because I have lived here ever since—because I have been doing the same job ever since, chronicling the betrayals and treachery and deceit of Middle East history for all those years—I am still twenty-nine.

  Abed, my driver, has grown older. I notice his stoop in the mornings when he brings the newspapers, the morning dailies in Beirut and The Independent , a day late, from London. My landlord, Mustafa, who lives downstairs, is now in his seventies, lithe as an athlete and shrewder, but sometimes a little more tired than he used to be. The journalists I knew back in 1976 have moved on to become associate editors or executive editors or managing editors. They have settled into Manhattan apartments or homes in upstate New York or in Islington in London. They have married, had children; some of them have died. Sometimes, reading the newspaper obituaries—for there is nothing so satisfying as the narrative of a life that has an end as well as a beginning—I notice how the years of birth are beginning to creep nearer to my own. When I came to Beirut, the obituary columns were still recording the lives of Great War veterans like my dad. Then the years would encompass the 1920s, the 1930s, at least a comfortable ten years from my own first decade. And now the hitherto friendly “1946” is appearing at the bottom of the page. Sometimes I know these newly dead men and women, spies and soldiers and statesmen and thugs and murderers whom I have met over the
past three decades in the Middle East, Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland. Sometimes I write these obituaries myself. One cold spring day, I wrote of the life of my old friend and journalist colleague Juan Carlos Gumucio, a man of inspiring courage and deep depressions—who saved my life in war and who had sat on my own balcony so many times, dispensing wisdom and cynicism and fine wines—and who took his life, shooting himself at his home in Bolivia because the world no longer seemed a kind or gentle or worthy place for him.

  And still I am twenty-nine. I can look back over the years with nightmare memories but without dreams or pain. Lebanon has a brutal history but it has been a place of great kindness to me. It has taught me to stay alive. And amid all the memories of war, of friendships and beautiful women and books read past midnight—long into the early hours, when dawn shows the crack between the curtains—there has always been the idea that Beirut was the place one came home to. How many times have I sat on the flight deck of MEA’s old 707s—from the Gulf, from Egypt or from the Balkans or Europe—and watched the promontory of Beirut lunging out into the Mediterranean “like the head of an old sailor” and heard a metallic voice asking for permission to make a final approach on runway 18 and known that in half an hour I would be ordering a gin and tonic and smoked salmon at the Spaghetteria restaurant in Ein el-Mreisse, so close to my home that I could send Abed home and walk back to my apartment along the seafront to the smell of cardamom and coffee and corn on the cob.

  Of course, I know the truth. Sometimes when I get out of bed in the morning, I hear the bones cracking in my feet. I notice that the hair on my pillow is almost all silver. And when I go to shave, I look into the mirror and, now more than ever, the face of old Bill Fisk stares back at me. The night he died, a car collided with an iron rubbish skip outside my Beirut flat. The impact made a gong-like sound, followed by the scraping of the skip’s iron wheels on the tarmac. The car drove away without stopping, so I padded downstairs in my dressing gown and helped Mustafa push the heavy cart back to the side of the road so that no other motorists would be hurt, and then, at around 8:15 a.m., Peggy called to tell me that Bill had died in his nursing home. She wouldn’t be attending his funeral, she said. I had to arrange that. And I told her—it was the first thing that came into my head—that he was a man of his generation; it was an allusion to his infuriating Victorian obtuseness but I added that he had taught me to love books, which is true and which Peggy found herself able to agree with. So I went downstairs and told Mustafa and his family that my father was dead, and, according to Arab custom, each in turn shook hands with me—an affecting and somehow appropriate way of expressing sorrow, far more honourable than the clutching and happy-clappy hugging of so many Westerners. But I couldn’t say I was sorry. Maybe Bill had lived too long—or maybe Lebanon and the war crimes I had reported had made me somehow atavistic, as if the backlog of history that always seemed to hang over the events I witnessed had driven into me a cold and heartless regard for the present.