The lives of American Marines are being wasted in a foreign country that couldn’t care less.
—ROBERT GUILFORD, LETTER TO THE EDITOR
October 31, 1983
America zeroed in on the attackers.
Intelligence pointed to Hussein al-Musawi’s terror group Islamic Amal, which was based in Baalbek and formed part of Hezbollah, and the Husayni Suicide Forces. More than a half dozen intercepts showed officials in Tehran and Damascus urging the Lebanese terrorists to attack American and French targets. The most damning of these was a September 22 message in which Iranian ambassador Mohtashemi in Damascus stated he had ordered Musawi to “undertake an extraordinary attack against the U.S. Marines.”
Shultz, McFarlane, and the National Security Council staff urged the president to retaliate, only to run into interference from Weinberger and Vessey. While an air strike would no doubt assuage the anger felt by many, it risked pulling America deeper into a war in the Middle East at precisely the time the defense secretary was looking for an exit.
“Weinberger and Vessey opposed striking back at terrorists,” recalled Howard Teicher. “Weinberger repeatedly argued with Shultz against retaliation unless the evidence was absolute. It seemed he would agree only if culpability could be proved in an American court of law.”
But Reagan disagreed.
“Let’s go after it,” the president ordered. “Let’s plan the mission, get ready and quick, and if possible do it with the French. But do it.”
On October 28—the day after his Oval Office speech—Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive No. 111, which laid the groundwork for such an operation. “Subject to reasonable confirmation of locations of suitable targets,” the president ordered, “attack those targets decisively, if possible in coordination with the French.”
The National Security Council staff took it upon themselves to plan the mission. Philip Dur, who served as the director of political military affairs, flew to Paris to meet with General Jean Saulnier, the military advisor to French president Mitterrand. Dur confided in the general that the president had authorized the National Security Council to explore a retaliatory attack on the Sheikh Abdullah Barracks. “We believe that a joint strike with the French,” Dur explained, “would be most desirable from both political and military points of view.”
Did America’s military leaders support this strike?
“Bien sûr,” Dur said. “Of course. The military would obey the president’s orders.”
Who on the American side would plan the mission?
The Pentagon, Dur confessed, had not been formally tasked to do so. The National Security Council was working with the Navy. Saulnier said he would run it up the French ladder. “I left that meeting,” Dur recalled, “optimistic that the French would join us.”
Dur returned to Washington and met with Vice Admiral James “Ace” Lyons, the deputy chief of naval operations for plans and policy. A colorful and outspoken admiral, whose tendency for blunt talk would later cost him his career, Lyons reviewed the Iranian intercepts. “If there ever was a 24-karat gold document, this was it,” he later said. “This was not something from the third cousin of the fourth wife of Muhammad the taxicab driver.”
In his office at the Pentagon, Lyons drafted a plan for an eight-plane air strike. He then sent it by courier to Rear Admiral Jerry Tuttle, the commander of the naval task force off Lebanon. A former carrier pilot, Tuttle proved an equally polarizing commander, who referred to himself as Sluf, which stood for “short little ugly fucker.” Tuttle revised Lyon’s plan, increasing it to a twelve-plane strike force. Reagan welcomed the news. “We believe we have a fix on a headquarters of the radical Iranian Shiites who blew up our Marines,” he wrote in his diary on November 7. “We can take out the target with an airstrike & no risk to civilians. We’ll meet at 7 a.m. tomorrow as to whether we order the strike now or while I’m away.”
As the plan came together, so, too, did the opposition, which broke along the same fault lines that had handicapped the administration for months in Lebanon. Weinberger led the charge against the strike. “I’m not an eye-for-an-eye man. You’ve got to have a purpose, and if your purpose is just to kill a lot of people, that’s easy enough to do,” he said. “But we didn’t have the conclusive kind of target information that I think is essential.”
Reagan met the following morning with his advisors in the Red Room, moments before he was scheduled to depart for a weeklong trip to Japan and South Korea. Weinberger and Vessey advocated the president hold off on a decision until his return, a move that would allow them more time to gather intelligence. Reagan recounted the session in his diary. “Began the day,” he wrote, “with a short meeting re a possible air strike in Beirut against those who murdered our Marines. Decided we don’t have enough intelligence info as yet.”
For proponents of the strike, Reagan’s departure that morning signaled defeat, robbing them of the momentum. Passions would die down and America would lose interest.
“I knew,” recalled Undersecretary of State Eagleburger, “that was the end of it.”
Reagan returned from Asia and regrouped with his advisors on November 14, but participants came away with contradictory interpretations of what transpired, which was not uncommon given the president’s tendency to withdraw from fights. McFarlane was convinced Reagan had ordered the joint strike to take place in a few days. “It was,” he recalled, “a direct, unambiguous decision.” But others disagreed, including Weinberger, who fell back on the lack of decisive intel. Reagan’s diary shows he was still unconvinced. “We have some additional intelligence,” the president wrote, “but still not enough to order a strike.”
On board the carrier John F. Kennedy, which steamed off the coast of Lebanon, tensions soared over the anticipated mission. “Several times crews were awakened from a sound sleep, ordered to dress in their flight and survival gear, briefed on the strike and ordered to the roof to man up the airplanes,” observed Washington Post reporter George Wilson, who was embedded with the crew. “Higher Authority each time called off the raid at the last minute.”
Admiral Tuttle was visited by his French counterpart, who brought a letter requesting America assist in an air strike on Baalbek on November 17. Tuttle agreed, but he needed permission from Washington, which once again never came.
Accounts differ on precisely what happened next. According to McFarlane, the national security advisor rolled into the White House when he received a call from Weinberger. He relayed to him that French defense minister Charles Hernu had reached out that morning to request America join the raid, but that Weinberger refused.
“I don’t understand, Cap,” McFarlane protested. “What went wrong?”
“I just don’t think it was the right thing to do,” he replied.
McFarlane was furious. “It was outrageous,” he wrote. “Weinberger had directly violated a presidential order. Whatever his feelings about our role in Lebanon, whatever his disagreement with our policy, the fact was that a presidential decision had been made and an order given and that should have been that.” McFarlane hustled to see Reagan. “There is no excuse for it, Mr. President,” he stammered. “You approved this operation, and Cap decided not to carry it out. The credibility of the United States in Damascus just went to zero.”
“Gosh, that’s really disappointing,” Reagan said, according to McFarlane. “We should have blown the daylights out of them. I just don’t understand.”
Weinberger relates a different story, characterizing McFarlane’s accusation that he disobeyed a presidential order as “absurd.” The defense secretary kept notes of his conversation with Hernu, who advised that the French could hold off for sixty-five minutes, if the Americans wanted to join. “The president has not made a decision; he is still considering it,” Weinberger replied. “Unfortunately, it is a bit too late for us to join you in this one.”
France went ahead with the strike, which followed one day after Israeli fighters targeted another Islamic Amal training camp in the Bekaa Valley in retaliation for the bombing in Tyre. Israel’s strike, which killed or wounded as many as eighty Shia fighters, proved far more successful than the French operation. A handful of craters was all France had to show for a mission best described by historian David Crist as an “abject failure.”
The media zeroed in on the missing player in the back-to-back attacks. “Today’s air raids,” as Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times, “left the Americans as the only force in Lebanon that has not retaliated in any way for the recent suicide truck-bomb attacks.” The smoke had barely cleared when administration officials began to tamp down any speculation that America might also strike back. “There are still contingency plans all over town,” one unnamed official told the Washington Post, “but I think the window has been closed.”
That was confirmed in a top-secret memo from McFarlane to Shultz, Weinberger, Vessey, and CIA director William Casey. “In view of the Israeli and French Actions of November 16 and 17, it is your recommendation to the President that a U.S. attack at this time is not appropriate. The President agrees with your judgment,” the national security advisor wrote on November 22, 1983. “Accordingly, we should discontinue current plans and associated readiness to execute preemptive attacks in response to the October 23 tragedy.”
The aborted mission infuriated members of the National Security Council staff. “I was despondent,” Dur later wrote. So, too, was Teicher. Despite Reagan’s apparent frustration with the missed opportunity, McFarlane realized it was largely an act for his sake. Reagan would never reprimand Weinberger. McFarlane had been outplayed. “Weinberger, for his part,” he said, “had won a decisive battle in his now all-out effort to pull us out of Lebanon.”
The aircrews on the Kennedy were equally as miffed to read about the lackluster French strike in photocopies of the International Herald Tribune passed around the air wing.
“They woke up the gardener,” one officer huffed.
In the end, America would never retaliate. The deaths of 220 Marines, eighteen sailors, and three soldiers would go unavenged; America’s only response would be to designate Iran as a state sponsor of terror in 1984.
In his memoir, Reagan took responsibility for the aborted air strike. “Our intelligence experts found it difficult to establish conclusively who was responsible for the attack on the barracks,” the president wrote. “Although several air strikes were planned against possible culprits, I canceled them because our experts said they were not absolutely sure they were the right targets. I didn’t want to kill innocent people.”