There was a time when everyone came to Baalbek and its fabulous Roman ruins. The guest book at the Palmyra Hotel showed the signatures of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Charles de Gaulle, all dated before World War II. A French count left an extravagant signature below his claim of being heir to a family that made France great. A few pages later, a Kuwaiti prince gave the sense that he was part of the royal family who ruined Kuwait. The ancient Lebanese city between Beirut and Damascus was on the Grand Tour. They came for the monuments, for the Great Rift Valley scallions, radishes, and nuts spread over pink tablecloths, for perfectly grilled spring chicken with a crimson wine, for the jazz festivals on the steps on the Temple of Bacchus and for some of the Bekaa Valley’s famous hashish.
All these attractions began to fade in the summer of 1982. Hafez el-Assad, president of Syria, had controlled the city since 1976. Some of his 35,000 Syrian troops in Lebanon bivouacked in Baalbek. You could see the Lebanese resentment. Waiters at a wedding party spit as they passed behind the groom, a Syrian captain. Things got worse with the arrival in July 1982 of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Tehran’s Islamic Shiite strictures ruined the ambience of the ancient town. The Guards took over the four-star al-Khayyam Hotel and renamed a floor the Ayatollah Khomeini Hospital. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had transformed a pro-Western Iran with a Shiite Islamic revolution in 1978–79; in the US presidential election year of 1980, revolutionaries seized the American staff at the US embassy in Tehran. The fate of the hostages undermined President Jimmy Carter and boosted chances for Ronald Reagan. Now, President Reagan’s intelligence community was almost totally unaware of Baalbek’s new frontline role in attacking the United States. Years later, the RAND Corporation and other think tanks would highlight Beirut during seminars such as “The Challenge for Democracies Facing Asymmetric Conflicts.” Behind the gobbledygook was a basic question: How do zealots on a shoestring budget humiliate the world’s most powerful nation?
One answer was in Baalbek in the spring of 1982, where the tourist and drug trades died in the face of Iranian standards of morality. “Death to America” posters were pasted everywhere.
Until 1982, Assad refused any Iranian presence in Lebanon. Assad lifted the tollgate for Iran in July after Israel used American warplanes and technology to destroy 85 Syrian warplanes in two days. The loss of his air force was not only a national humiliation for a Soviet-trained jet fighter pilot who commanded the Syrian air force before becoming president, but also a personal wound. Syria welcomed the elite Iranian soldiers determined to kill Americans. They papered the ruins as well as the police station with posters of Iran’s spiritual leader, the black-turbaned Ayatollah Khomeini.
The Iranians set up in the Sheikh Abdullah barracks in Baalbek. They were soon joined by the Party of God, Beirut Shiite Muslims organized and financed by Iran. Shiites in Lebanon were poor and conservative. They were dominated by Sunni Muslims, who were more moderate in religious beliefs, wealthy, and in political control. With Iran’s backing, the Beirut Shiites became the foundation of Hezbollah, which one day would dominate Lebanese politics and become a formidable opponent of Israel.
A tall, slim, and handsome college engineering student arrived in Baalbek that summer of 1982. Nineteen-year-old Imad Fayez Mughniyeh took the number-two spot in Hezbollah and became the liaison with the Guards. He was from the southern Lebanon town of Tyre and had served in the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Amal, the more moderate Shiite militia in his home region. He attended the American University of Beirut, headed by Acting President David Dodge, probably the second most prestigious American post after the US ambassador. On July 19, 1982, Mughniyeh helped stage the kidnapping of Dodge, who was knocked unconscious and bundled into a car in Beirut. Taken to Baalbek by the Hezbollah leader, Dodge was turned over to the Iranian Guards, who later shipped him to Tehran. As a news event, the kidnapping was lost in the midst of Israel’s bombardment of Beirut. Dodge’s release was the result of negotiations between Secretary of State George Shultz and Syrian president Assad.
In the spring of 1983, Tehran gave the Baalbek crew a bigger target. The Guards provided explosives, the detonators, and the technology. Mughniyeh provided the Beirut end of the operation: the old van, the driver, the inside informant. To enhance the explosion, bottles of butane gas—easily available for cooking, and pioneered as a bomb enhancer by the Irish Republican Army—were mixed in on the floor of the van with 2,000 pounds of high explosive of a type known to be produced in Iran.
The overloaded van pulled up near the US embassy that overlooked Beirut’s glorious corniche and the blue Mediterranean. A Syrian army officer wired the explosives to the detonator in the driver’s hands. In the bright sunshine on April 18, the van driver waited for a signal from inside the embassy that American ambassador Robert Dillon had returned from running the three-mile outdoor track at the American University of Beirut.
With the signal, the van driver gunned his engine. The van splintered the single-pole Lebanese police barricade and roared past US Marine guards, up the steps and into the entrance of the seven-story concrete structure. When the driver embraced Allah and his reward of seven virgins, the building pancaked into rubble.
In the ambassador’s top-floor office, a sweaty Dillon was struggling out of a Marine T-shirt. He recalled the moment:
All of a sudden, the window blew in. I was very lucky, because I had my arm and the T-shirt in front of my face, which protected me from the flying glass. I ended up flat on my back. I never heard the explosion. Others said that it was the loudest explosion they ever heard. It was heard from a long distance away.
As I lay on the floor on my back, the brick wall behind my desk blew out. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. The wall fell on my legs; I could not feel them. I thought they were gone. The office filled with smoke, dust, and tear gas. What happened was that the blast first blew in the window and then traveled up an air shaft from the first floor to behind my desk. We had had tear gas canisters on the first floor. The blast set them off so that the air rush that came up through the shaft brought the tear gas with it and also collapsed the wall.
We didn’t know what had happened. The central stairway was gone, but the building had another stairway, which we used to make our way down, picking our way through the rubble. We were astounded to see the damage below us. I didn’t realize that the entire bay of the building below my office had been destroyed. I hadn’t grasped that yet. I remember speculating that some people had undoubtedly been hurt. As we descended, we saw people hurt. Everybody had this funny white look because they were all covered with dust. They were staggering around.
We got to the second floor, still not fully cognizant of how bad it was, although I recognized that major damage had been done. With each second, the magnitude of the explosion became clearer. I saw Marylee [McIntyre] standing; she couldn’t see because her face had been cut and her eyes were full of blood. I picked her up and took her over to a window and gave her to someone.
The bombing killed 63, including 17 Americans. That included most of the Mideast leadership of the Central Intelligence Agency, who were in Beirut for a conference. The body of the CIA Beirut bureau chief dangled from the upper floors of the wreckage. The regional boss, Robert Ames, a CIA superstar, was also dead. The embassy overlooked Beirut harbor, and Ames’s hand was found floating there. It was identified by his wedding ring.
Reagan told reporters it was “a vicious terrorist bombing.” But the prevailing Washington view was one of surprise and confusion. Army General John Vessey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was consternated, saying in retrospect, “Although it was a great tragedy, it seemed like an inexplicable aberration.” Not so in the Arab world still seething over American support for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the 56-day siege of Beirut. There, the US embassy bombing was very pertinent revenge.
CIA outrage led to a particularly ruthless investigation that resulted in the firing of an agency officer who participated in the beatings of four suspects. They did not make a Baalbek connection. That came from combing through routine intercepts by the US National Security Agency of Tehran radio traffic with Damascus. In the spring of 1983 SIGINT—signal intelligence—snatched from the ether a message from Tehran to its embassy in Damascus: Permission to carry out the operation and $25,000 will be transferred to the embassy. No target, no date, no type of attack. What could it mean? Perhaps the attack was orchestrated by Syrian president Assad. Damascus’s vigorous denial brought into focus the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Baalbek—and a new, hard-nosed Shiite militia called Hezbollah.
For Imad Mughniyeh, destruction of the embassy was the start of a career that would lead to the FBI’s Most Wanted List and a global reputation as a killer of the most Americans until Osama bin Laden’s 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.
Only a handful of American experts understood the depth of the threat being mounted in the ancient tourist town in the Bekaa Valley. One was William Corbett, an Army Special Forces colonel and security expert dispatched to Beirut for an assessment from US Army European headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany. He dismissed as “nonsensical” the perception that the embassy bombing was a random act. Terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah have long-range goals.
“More applicable,” Colonel Corbett warned his superiors in Stuttgart, “would be a series of terrorist acts, each, if possible, more spectacular and costly than the previous. U.S. military forces represent the most defined and logical terrorist target.”
It was one of many clear warnings that never made it to the commander of the lightly defended US Marine force at Beirut International Airport.