A cloud of anguish descended on 241 homes across the United States on Sunday morning October 23, 1983. In Alexandria, Virginia, Deborah Peterson was awakened by her hysterical father, telling her, “Debbie, our worst nightmare has been realized.” She turned on the television and saw the smoking ruins of the Marine barracks in Beirut. Her brother, Lance Corporal James Knipple, was there somewhere.
Word of his fate seemed delayed forever. “We watched the television, we got every newspaper, photograph, magazine we could. We looked for his face among the survivors. We even thought we saw him a couple of times.” Two weeks later there was a phone call. “They wanted dental information and identifying marks and my father told them about a scar on his forearm,” Peterson said. “The next day they told us that he was identified.”
A Marine casualty officer came to the house. It was official. Jim was dead. The officer sat next to her father. Both were quiet while the weeping and moaning of family and friends filled the room. When the house emptied, her father went downstairs. “He started to scream Jim’s name over and over and over again at the top of his lungs,” Peterson said. “We brought him home on the ninth, on his twenty-first birthday, and we buried him on the tenth, the Marine Corps birthday.”
Eighteen years later, Deborah Peterson recounted her grief in the US District Court in Washington, DC. She had instituted a civil action against the Islamic Republic of Iran. After a two-day bench trial in 2003, Judge Royce Lamberth found the Tehran government guilty of the October 24, 1983, Marine attack. Lamberth imposed a $2 billion penalty, a fine simply brushed off by the Iranian government. But almost 1,000 family members affected by the decision persuaded Congress to pass legislation allowing them to seize frozen assets in Bank Markazi (Iran’s central bank) in New York. The Supreme Court in 2016 upheld Lamberth’s $2 billion penalty in a 6–2 vote. Still, no one has collected a nickel.
Ronald Reagan had vanished into a fog of Alzheimer’s by the time of Lamberth’s verdict in 2001, yet his presidency was under the microscope throughout the proceedings. Witnesses offered a glimpse into the shadowy war between the United States and Iran that never ends. At the trial, if the evidence presented that Iran staged the attack on the Marines was so certain, why didn’t Reagan use unstoppable military power to punish the reckless ayatollahs of Tehran?
Sworn testimony from retired Central Intelligence Agency officers and experts on Iran convinced Lamberth that the president of Iran authorized the bombing of the Marine barracks in 1983. Reagan had vowed to use American power to punish the perpetrators. “We have strong circumstantial evidence that the attack on the Marines was directed by terrorists who used the same method to destroy our embassy in Beirut,” Reagan said in a broadcast to the nation. “Those who directed this atrocity must be dealt justice, and they will be.”
They never were. Reagan’s inaction grated on his generals, American diplomats, and those who paid the price in Beirut. One was retired Lieutenant Colonel Howard Gerlach, Geraghty’s deputy. The bomb broke his neck and left the hulking Marine a paraplegic. In sworn testimony from his motorized wheelchair, Gerlach touched on the results that flow from a feckless United States.
“I guess there’s three words,” said Gerlach in the organized way of Marine officers. “Accountability, deterrence and justice. And they are interrelated. The accountability, and I swear it was on Sunday, I was listening to a rerun of one of the TV—I don’t know, Meet the Press or whatever, but Vice President [Dick] Cheney was talking and he was saying that they, the terrorists, feel they can do things with impunity, and he said ever since the Marines in ’83. Yes, there hasn’t been any accountability.”
Declassified records at the Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, show Reagan was ready to exert some accountability the day after the Marine barracks were destroyed in 1983. There was an edge to Reagan’s words during the trans-Atlantic telephone call to President François Mitterrand of France. The American president wanted France to join in a combined attack on those who killed 241 Americans and 58 French soldiers the day before in Beirut. “We’re not going to let this terrorist act drive us out of Lebanon and I hope you share that feeling,” Reagan said. Mitterrand agreed. Within 24 hours, American intelligence had pinpointed the killers. “We have a great deal of circumstantial evidence that does suggest that the act was actually performed by a group of Iranian radicals, the same ones that destroyed our embassy last April,” Reagan said. In a phone call the same day to Prime Minister Thatcher, Reagan was more blunt. “Margaret, the Iranians did it and they are the same ones who blew up our embassy,” Reagan said.
Reagan’s certainty enabled what the Navy called “a 24-karat gold document” that traced the Iranian suicide driver’s orders back to Tehran, which meant to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, speaker of the Iranian parliament and the second-most powerful person in the government. A month earlier, the US National Security Agency had intercepted a message from Tehran to Damascus. It was from the Ministry of Information Services, which had replaced the secret police force of the deposed shah of Iran. The ministry needed approval from Iran’s Supreme National Security Council to send the message, a council controlled by Khomeini and Rafsanjani. In Judge Lamberth’s court, Dr. Patrick Clawson, an academic who routinely advised the federal government about Iran, spelled out the link between Tehran and the Marine massacre.
The evidence produced an inescapable conclusion for Judge Lamberth. “The approval of both the Ayatollah Khomeini and President [as of 1989] Rafsanjani was absolutely necessary to carry out the continuing economic commitment of Iran to Hezbollah and to execute the October attack,” Lamberth said. “Given their positions of authority, any act of these two officials must be deemed an act of the government of Iran.”
Tehran’s order was delivered to Iran’s ambassador to Syria, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi-Pur. The message from the Tehran leadership directed Mohtashemi-Pur to contact an agent “to take a spectacular action against the United States Marines.” The Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Baalbek got the message. And Imad Mughniyeh, the Lebanese engineering student who was enraged by the siege of Beirut, arranged the delivery of the largest nonnuclear bomb in world history. Admiral James Lyons carried the intercept to the secretary of the Navy and the chief of naval operations—two days after the Marine massacre. National Security Agency satellites and computers compiled so much information that it routinely overwhelmed analysts sorting the wheat from the chaff. Although too late to warn Geraghty’s Marines, the intercept served as a direct link to the Iranian leadership. More evidence came from remnants of explosives used to destroy both the US embassy and the Marine barracks. It was identified as a non-Western pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN), a bulk explosive known to be produced in Iran. And the PETN could not have been shipped to Syria without the approval of the Iranian leadership.
The Joint Chiefs drew up a contingency plan for bombing the Revolutionary Guards headquarters in Tehran. There were plenty of potential military targets, including the massive refinery complex at Abadan, just a few miles inland from the Persian Gulf. There was the network of oil pipelines that shipped 69 percent of the oil that accounted for more than 80 percent of government income. Few Iranians would be killed by blasting the oil facilities, which could be rebuilt. More valuable would be the economic disruption. It could even trigger a revolution that would oust the ayatollahs who had insanely chosen war with the United States. After the Marine massacre, there would be worldwide support for US reprisals. Iran was already seen as a source of terrorism throughout the world.
Of course, such an attack would disrupt the world supply of oil just as prices had begun to stabilize, even decline. Reagan was boasting about the drop at the pump. “You don’t have to go any further than the nearest filling station to see that prices have gone down, not up, since decontrol, just as we promised they would,” Reagan said in a broadcast to the nation on February 26, 1983.
Soaring prices for Arab oil that had fueled runaway inflation in the United States, along with double-digit interest rates, had ruined Presidents Ford’s and Carter’s reelection bids. A wrecked US economy and Iran’s defiant capture of US embassy staff in Tehran had helped pave the way for Reagan’s election. By 1983, Iran had become the second-largest producer and exporter among the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Nowhere in the files of Reagan’s Presidential Library is a document showing any concern about Iran’s oil and a reprisal by the United States. Crucial cables and White House documents dealing with that period are still classified secret by the government. Even so, the political explosiveness of Iran’s impact on oil prices was almost certain to be considered. Oil figured in almost every Mideast thought and political decision. Suddenly soaring energy prices would have a big impact on Reagan’s reelection campaign, which would start in five months. He was off to a bad start with the loss of 241 Americans in the Beirut barracks.
US reprisal contingencies quickly shrank to targets in Lebanon, an ineffective wrist slap. Pinpointed were the quarters for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Baalbek, specifically the four-star Al Shams Hotel and the Sheikh Abdullah Barracks. A joint strike was planned to be launched from US and French carriers offshore from Beirut. French and American planners fretted over the ancient Roman ruins close to targets. The soaring Temple of Mercury was near the Al Shams.
“The President gave his approval for a retaliatory strike to be conducted on November 16,” according to Robert McFarlane, Reagan’s national security adviser. “It was a direct, unambiguous decision.” The regional US Navy commander said he was ready and asked for the required authority to launch at first light. But that authority from the Department of Defense was never sent.
Not long after McFarlane got to the White House at 6 a.m. on November 16, he recalled, Cap Weinberger called.
“Bud,” he said, “I had a request [to strike] but I denied it.”
McFarlane remembered being “dumbfounded.” “What went wrong?” he asked.
After some vague comments, Weinberger was blunt. “I just don’t think it was the right thing to do,” the defense chief said.
Outrageous, McFarlane thought. A direct violation of a presidential order! Such insubordination made the ex-Marine fume. The president would be upset, he told Weinberger. “I’d be glad to talk to him,” Weinberger replied. McFarlane immediately took the issue to the Oval Office.
“I don’t understand,” Reagan said. “Why didn’t they do it?”
“There is no excuse for it,” McFarlane said. “You approved this operation, and Cap decided not to carry it out. The credibility of the United States in Damascus just went to zero. There’s no justification. The secretary of defense was wrong, and you ought to make clear to him how you feel.”
“Gosh, that’s really disappointing,” Reagan said. “That’s terrible.”
McFarlane understood Reagan’s muttered misgivings as a show for his benefit. Reagan was really happy to put the crucial presidential authority to make war in the hands of Weinberger, a friend since Reagan had decided to run for governor of California 16 years earlier. To McFarlane, it was another instance where Reagan could not cope with conflicting opinions. The first duty of the chief executive was making complex decisions with ramifications that strained the mind. Reagan wanted others to make those choices. Weinberger understood that better than McFarlane. As for reprisals, the defense chief thought they did little good. The November 16 French strike on Baalbek missed all targets, according to photo reconnaissance. “The French accomplished nothing,” Weinberger told reporters. “They probably made some people feel good.”
Despite all of the Marine deaths, Weinberger was not channeling the hawkish inclinations of Silver Screen Six. “I’m not an eye-for-an-eye man,” Weinberger said. Army General John Vessey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, also favored inaction, saying, “It is beneath our dignity to retaliate against the terrorist who blew up the Marine barracks.” In noisy disagreement with the center of US military strength was Secretary of State George Shultz. “We cannot opt out of every contest,” Shultz said. “We cannot wait for absolute certainty and clarity. If we do, the world’s future will be determined by others—most likely by those who are the most brutal, the most unscrupulous and the most hostile to everything we believe in.” Within Oval Office debates, Shultz told Reagan that the Pentagon was encouraging more terrorism. Without reprisals, Shultz said Reagan was showing that “terrorism works.”
On February 4, 1984, Reagan once more vowed to keep Marines in Beirut in order to support the government of Lebanon. “Yes, the situation in Lebanon is difficult, frustrating, and dangerous,” he said. “But that is no reason to turn our backs on friends and to cut and run. If we do, we’ll be sending one signal to terrorists everywhere: They can gain by waging war against innocent people.”
Three weeks later, the president decided to cut and run. Despite promising to remain in Lebanon, Reagan ordered a withdrawal three months after the Marine massacre. The final units pulled away from Green Beach at 12:47 p.m. on February 27—with the shattered barracks at their back. Some were bitter. “You have any good friends?” Lance Corporal Shawn Lamb asked one reporter. “How would you like to have them blown up in their sleep a thousand miles from home in a foreign country—for nothing?” An artillery unit staged a dawn ceremony. No bugle could be found. A small tape recorder played a scratchy cassette of the Marine Hymn. The unit’s American flag was lowered and folded into a neat triangle. “Let’s have a Hoo-Rah,” Captain Brad Gates shouted. “Hoo-Rah,” yelled the men of H Battery. In the battered Marine compound, in what had once been the commissary, a blackboard had a chalked memorial:
WELCOME TO THE “HOTEL CALIFORNIA”
You can check out, but
You can NEVER leave!!
From the looming Shuf Mountains, Druse artillery rounds landed near the Marine positions at Beirut International Airport. Most Marines were already gone, leaving at least a million green sandbags at abandoned positions. For the first time, the World War II battleship USS New Jersey fired its 16-inch guns at the Druse positions. A stream of fire from the gun’s muzzle followed each of the 250 shells, each carrying 1,900 pounds of high explosive. Reporters and the departing Marines watched the offshore battlewagon’s low-slung prow steam along in the blue Mediterranean, covering the horizon with black smoke and fire. The destroyer USS Caron joined in with 300 5-inch shells. There were no postbombardment reports except a Marine statement that the targets were in “Syrian-controlled Lebanon.” Presumed dead but not mentioned were civilian victims of naval gunfire without forward observers. It was more of the acceptable violence common to Beirut. When the last amphibious personnel carrier was loaded, Staff Sergeant Jerry Elokonich was on top with his hands clasped overhead. “You see that surf, I’m going in it,” he told reporters. “We did our job, I’ll put it that way. Goodbye, folks.”
Druse and Shiite Amal militia soldiers carrying their weapons showed up to watch the Marines pull away. With the Marines gone, the Amal soldiers started enforcing the Muslim edicts against alcohol at West Beirut establishments. In anticipation of their arrival the bartender at the hotel where I was staying—the Commodore—stocked the shelves with bottled water and sodas. Even so, the marauding Amal found the hidden hard stuff and smashed the bottles with their rifles. This was the bar where I met frequently with Terry Anderson, the redheaded bureau chief of the Associated Press. His office was just across the side street from the Commodore. As a former wire service reporter, I would talk with him about AP and United Press International. Terry would drink beer from a cold bottle. In almost every conversation, the ex-Marine who served two tours in Vietnam would rank Beirut number one on the chaos list. “This is a nut house,” Terry said. He played tennis almost every morning, so it was easy for Imad Mughniyeh and his Hezbollah militia henchmen to track Anderson. On March 16, 1985, they snatched Anderson leaving the court and dumped him in the trunk of a car. For the next six years, Anderson was never sure where he was being held prisoner. At one point, he thought he heard the last gasps of William Buckley, the Central Intelligence Agency officer Mughniyeh had also grabbed off the streets of Beirut. He shared hovels with six other American hostages. Most of the hostages of the Iranian-backed Mughniyeh were held in inhumane conditions, chained to radiators and taken outside only when moved to different locations.
With the Marines dead and gone, Iran’s Shiite militia in Baalbek became Reagan’s recurring nightmare. In addition to the collection of American, French, and British hostages, Mughniyeh’s Hezbollah gunmen continued to flout American interests. On orders from Iran, Mughniyeh hijacked Trans World Airlines (TWA) Flight 847 in Athens on June 14, 1985. The hijackers, Hassan Izz-al-Din and Muhammad Ali Hamadi, began searching the American plane for US servicemen. They soon discovered a group of Navy divers, including Robert Stethem, 23, from Waterbury, Connecticut. One of the hijackers shot Stethem through the temple. During the 17-day ordeal televised around the world, the hijackers flew to Beirut, Algiers, and then back to Beirut. In front of the media cameras, the hijackers threw Stethem’s dead body from the plane and shot him again. Reagan seemed helpless in the face of reporters’ questions.
Q: What’s the plan?
The President: You know that I couldn’t answer that question or tell you. I don’t think we could make things like that public.
Q: Are you ruling out military deterrence, sir?
The President: Yes.
Reagan was starting to appear more pliable with the terrorists than the man he castigated for weakness almost daily in 1980—Jimmy Carter. The headline on one critical editorial read “Jimmy Reagan.”
A brazen Mughniyeh himself joined the hijackers in the TWA jetliner in Beirut, proof to US intelligence that Tehran was in control of events. An engine failed on landing in Beirut, forcing Mughniyeh to cancel plans to take the plane and its passengers to Tehran. Meanwhile, Reagan secretly agreed to one demand by Mughniyeh: Israel must release 700 Shiites seized in Lebanon. It was a backroom deal worked out with Israeli prime minister Yitzak Rabin by Secretary of State George Shultz. Reagan sought to portray Syrian president Hafez al-Assad as the man behind the TWA hijacking and kidnapping of passengers. Washington was negotiating the passengers’ fate with the more moderate Shiite militia, Amal, headed by Nabih Berri. When passengers were removed from the plane they were moved to Damascus, four were taken by Mughniyeh’s Hezbolla. Suddenly, the release of the hostages Reagan was hoping for was unsettled. Assad sought a solution by inviting Hashemi Rafsanjani, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, to Damascus for negotiations. Under pressure from Assad, the Iranians released the four passengers. Although American diplomats and intelligence officials knew of Iran’s dominant role in the TWA hijacking, Reagan made no mention of Tehran’s participation. Instead, he sought to make the Syrian president the bad guy.
What was to be a diplomatic thank-you for having the TWA passengers released in Damascus turned into a one-sided tirade. Reagan fired insults at Assad during the phone call. Assad knew where the hijackers were—it was plain murder, Reagan said. He didn’t want to hear how the hijackers vanished in Beirut.
Every time Assad tried to speak, Reagan cut him off. Reagan demanded Assad produce Terry Anderson and the six other hostages under control of Iran’s Hezbollah militia and Imad Mughniyeh. Assad never got a chance to answer. Reagan slammed down the White House phone.
Reagan had a far more civil tone when his government started asking the ayatollahs of Iran to return the seven hostages.