While in Beirut, I spent a lot of time in an apartment near the headquarters of Fadi Hayek’s G-5.

Always a gracious host, his hospitality in this strange and dangerous land was not only welcome but essential, because most of us were broke. Short on ceremony, Fadi was a convivial entertainer who could drag a bottle of Château Lafite-Rothschild out of somebody’s cellar in an instant and like a prestidigitator of old, produce the best pate de foie gras from what passed as the local gourmet store.

Living in Fadi’s shadow, as it were, served two purposes. He could keep an eye on us, ostensibly friends of the Christian Forces but who could just as easily have been enemy. Also, by then all Christian hotels in East Beirut had become targets for a proliferating number of carbombers. With so much activity, their job was easy.²

Not long before I arrived, Jihad bombers had destroyed the US Marine barracks at Beirut Airport. Only years afterwards we were to discover that this was one of the first acts of a new brand of Islamism that called itself Hizbollah, the same Pasdaran who, by then, had entrenched themselves in South Lebanon and whom I encountered while moving about from the UN Headquarters base at Naqoura.

The Hizbollah, or Pasdaran, strike on the airport base was uncompromisingly brutal. More than 300 American servicemen were killed in that attack, and it was followed soon after by two suicide bombs, one at the entrance of the American Embassy that killed many of the top CIA officers in the Middle East, who were at a conference at the time. The other hit the French diplomatic mission, a few streets down. After the Israeli invasion, similar tactics were used in the destruction of an IDF military headquarters in Tyre, in the south of the country.

At about that time, another, less conventional type of fighter started to arrive in Lebanon. Mostly of European extraction, with quite a few Germans in their ranks, these radicals were sharpshooters, the majority extremely well trained. From what I gathered, quite a few had psychopathic tendencies, which might have been expected since their role was to target purposely those less fortunate than the rest. The poor souls who came into their sights included the old, the very young and, in particular, people who had been incapacitated. Those in wheelchairs and the decrepit appeared to attract inordinate attention.