A Blast Still Reverberating

[thedrifter]

A Blast Still Reverberating
25 Years Ago, a New Kind of War Began in Beirut

By David Ignatius
Thursday, April 17, 2008; A23

It is April 18, 1983, and I am visiting the American Embassy in Beirut as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

It is a coolish morning, a day to wear the winter-weight suit one last time. By the time I reach the embassy, a bright sun is beginning to cut the haze. Approaching the front entrance on the Corniche, grand and all but unguarded, I look across the shimmering Bay of Beirut to the slopes of Mount Lebanon, where there is still a trace of snow at the peak.

The moist, sweet air of Lebanon is on my face like a phantom kiss.

The good times are returning, I think. The city has been pounded by eight years of civil war, and then by the Israeli invasion, and then by the massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila. But now the United States has arrived as Lebanon's protector; U.S. Marines are at the airport in what the embassy calls a "presence mission."

My appointment is at the Office of Military Cooperation on the fifth floor. The Army officer who meets me there has an upbeat message: The United States is rebuilding the Lebanese army into a force for national reconciliation that will bring together Sunnis, Shiites and Christians. The officers are wearing real boots now, he says, not those Gucci slip-ons like in the old days.

I take notes as the Army officer talks. It's almost believable, what he says. You want to think we understand what we are doing in this country -- that those Marines really are as popular in the Shiite slums out by the airport as their officers keep telling me when I go on patrol with them . . . and see the wary, watchful eyes in the shadows.

My appointment ends around 12:30 p.m. Rebecca McCullough, the Office of Military Cooperation's administrative assistant, takes me back down to the lobby. She's wearing a summer blouse and a winter skirt, caught in between the seasons on this April day.

I pick up my passport from the Marine guard manning Post No. 1 behind a thick plexiglass screen -- shiny brass buttons, forbidding Marine physique. I climb the hill back to my hotel, wondering if there's a story in what the embassy official has told me.

At 1:03, I hear an enormous blast. The percussive force shakes my windows, nearly a mile away. I have a momentary feeling of vertigo, like fear but worse. I run back toward the Corniche.

When I reach the building, Marines are trying to form a perimeter. I look up at the remains of the embassy: The center facade has collapsed; rooms have been sheared in half; a body is visible, hideously, on an upper floor.

Sixty-three people are dead, including 17 Americans. It's the deadliest attack ever on a U.S. diplomatic mission up to that point. It takes many years to confirm that it was an Iranian operation, organized by operatives from their Revolutionary Guard.

Nobody understands it that day, but a new kind of war has begun.

Rebecca McCullough survived the bombing and plans to attend a ceremony on Friday at the State Department to mark the 25th anniversary. A version of this essay was read last September at a benefit for the PEN/Faulkner Foundation in Washington. The writer is co-host ofPostGlobal, an online discussion of international issues. His e-mail address isdavidignatius@washpost.com.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2008/04/16/PH2008041603287.jpg

Marines outside the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon after the bombing on April 18, 1983.

Photo Credit: Associated Press Photo

[Finger]

I remember that day well. My Company (Fox 2/6) was tasked to respond to the US Embassy to secure the area around it. It was a shocking sight when we got there. I never seen a blast like that yet and we saw the grusome sight of a man's body hanging from the high exposed beams.

Little history here... The platoon we left there after a few days to keep watch was our Third Platoon commanded by Lt Bill Leftwich, whose father was the famous Marine Officer from Vietnam days whom the Leftwich Trophy is named after.

More history.... When we returned October 23rd for the BLT bombing, I heard a State Department "Alpha Hotel" say "gee wizz we never thought they would do anything like this. There was no warning." No, I didn't choke the crap out of him.

S/F
Finger :flag:

[thedrifter]

BEIRUT, 25 YEARS AGO – LITTLE DID WE KNOW
CLAUDE SALHANI
Published: April 18, 2008

SPECIAL REPORT: Twenty-five years ago on this day, April 18, I was driving back from the U.S. Marine compound near Beirut International Airport where a press conference was held for the big news item of the day: a Marine guarding the perimeter was shot at. The Marine was unhurt, but the bullet went through his baggy trousers. That was the top news item of the day … until … until 1:03 p.m. That was the exact time when a suicide bomber rammed his explosives-laden van into the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. The blast was heard and felt several miles away.


At 1:03 p.m. I was less than two miles away from the embassy, driving back from the Marine compound. It was a typical Beirut day; the sun was shining and traffic was a mess. Typical until 1:03 p.m.


A jeepload of the Beirut police known as Squad 16 was directly in front of my car and we both felt the shock of the explosion. They must have received an alert on their police radio as they immediately turned on their siren to make their way through the dense traffic. I kept on their tail knowing they were most likely heading for the site of the explosion. Noticing the sign on my windshield identifying me as a journalist, the policeman in the back of the jeep motioned me to follow.


We made it to the embassy within minutes. Or maybe I should say to what was left of the embassy. The scene was apocalyptic. There were mutilated bodies littering the sidewalks. People staring at them in utter shock and disbelief. Clouds of smoke and fire was coming out from one side of the embassy building. The embassy's Marine guards, those who had survived the blast, were trying to set up a security perimeter around the blast zone, as rescue crews arrived. Documents, no doubt many of them confidential, were floating through the air, taking their own time to reach the ground. It was as though they answered to a different set of gravity laws.


Walking around the corner toward the front of the building offered a scene of additional desolation. Its multistoried front façade had collapsed like a house of cards. Trapped between two of the upper floors, part of a man's body could be seen. It took more than a day for rescue crews to get to it.


French soldiers serving with the multinational force from a nearby position arrived and assisted in setting up the security perimeter, until truckloads of Marines from the airport base arrived on the scene. Six months later the Marines became the target of another suicide bomber, but that's another story.


The man believed to be responsible for the Beirut Embassy bombing – and numerous other attacks – was Imad Mughnieh, a leader of Hezbollah suspected to have been acting on behalf of the Iranians. He was killed in February in Damascus by a bomb placed in the headrest of his car.


On this day in 1983, 25 years ago, 63 people – among them 17 Americans – died in the Beirut Embassy blast. They were the first victims in a new war being waged by an enemy working in the shadows. A war which continues to this day. But on that sunny day in Beirut, little did we know of what was to come.

--

Middle East Times editor Claude Salhani was a correspondent based in Beirut at the time of the Beirut bombing.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Victims of 1983 bombing of U.S. Embassy in Beirut recalled
Survivors, relatives and officials gather in Lebanon to honor the 63 killed in the suicide bombing, which ushered in an era of similar attacks.
By Borzou Daragahi
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

April 19, 2008

AUKAR, LEBANON — The explosion shook the earth. And it wouldn't be the last one.

Twenty-five years ago Friday, a suicide bomber drove a pickup truck full of explosives into the U.S. Embassy in downtown Beirut, killing 63 people. It heralded the rise in the Middle East of a soon-to-be common tool in the arsenal of radicals: the suicide bomb.

"I don't think we realized on April 18 the significance of the attack," said Graeme Bannerman, a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff director who shuttled between Beirut and Washington during much of the early 1980s. "It was a disaster. But most people didn't realize we had a problem with these guys until 9/11."

Bombing survivors, victims' relatives, diplomats and embassy staff gathered Friday to remember the dead at a somber ceremony on the grounds of the heavily guarded hilltop U.S. mission in Lebanon, the Mediterranean Sea spreading out below.

"We remember today and every day our colleagues, relatives and friends who died at the hands of those terrorists during Lebanon's terrible war years," said Michele J. Sison, Washington's envoy to Lebanon.

The event commemorated not only those who died and survived the bombing of the Beirut embassy, but also the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks the following year, in which 241 American military personnel died, and the Sept. 20, 1984, attack here in Aukar, in the Christian hills north of Beirut, at what was then called the U.S. Embassy annex, in which 24 people perished.

Embassy employees, tearful Lebanese survivors and a contingent of visiting Marines gathered around and laid wreaths upon the half-circular monument engraved with the names of the those who died.

"They came in peace," it said.

As a choir sang, an elderly Lebanese woman with a bent back hobbled with her cane to the monument and brushed her fingers against the name Rudaina Sahyoun, her daughter, who died in the embassy explosion three months after she began working for the Americans. She was 28.

C. David Welch, U.S. assistant secretary of State for Near East affairs, described the moment he heard about the attack as the Lebanon desk officer at the State Department.

"I will never forget receiving the call to alert me of the attack," he said at the ceremony. "It was quite a blow."

Islamic Jihad, a previously unknown group, claimed responsibility. Court rulings later pointed to Iran and the Iranian-backed Shiite militia Hezbollah as having a role in the embassy and barracks attacks.

"Since the Beirut attack, we and citizens of many countries have suffered more attacks at the hands of Hezbollah and other terrorists, backed by the regimes in Tehran and Damascus, which use terror and violence against innocent civilians," President Bush said in a statement released Friday.

Lebanon was in turmoil in the early 1980s. Civil war between Christian and Muslim militias raged. An Israeli occupation in the south continued. Politically motivated bombings were all too common. But the only suicide bombing had been one targeting the Iraqi Embassy in Beirut in 1981. It was attributed to the Shiite Muslim Islamic Dawa Party, an Iraqi exile faction backed by Iran that evolved into the group that now counts U.S.-backed Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki as a member.

Marines entered Lebanon in 1982 as part of an international peacekeeping force. As the civil war heated up again, some accused Americans of taking the Christian side -- especially after U.S. warships began shelling Druze and Muslim positions in support of the weak Christian government.

Month after month the country drifted as the Israeli and Lebanese governments tried to hammer out a peace deal. Hostility mounted toward the Americans, who originally were welcomed as a buffer against the Israelis. The influence and capacity of Iranian-backed Shiite groups grew.

It was early afternoon when the bomber struck the embassy. He apparently drove an embassy vehicle believed to have been stolen a year earlier. Among the dead was the entire CIA station, including Robert Ames, the agency's top Middle East expert.

More violence was to follow. Marine encampments in Beirut were hit by rockets throughout the summer by Druze militias led by Walid Jumblatt, now one of Washington's closest allies. To avoid rocket fire, the Marines moved to a building east of the airport. It was struck Oct. 23, 1983, by a massive truck bomb. Minutes later, another bomb struck the building housing French paratroopers, killing 58.

Two months later, suspected Shiite radicals bombed the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait, as well as a residential compound for employees of the U.S. firm Raytheon.

In September 1984, a bomb struck the U.S. Embassy annex in Aukar, now the site of the heavily fortified embassy.

"It took me a long time to get over it," said Samir, a Lebanese employee of the embassy who survived the 1984 bombing. He had ended his studies in Southern California months earlier to take care of his mother after his father was killed in the French barracks bombing. He asked that his last name not be used because he still works for the embassy.

The bombings dramatically changed the architecture of U.S. diplomatic missions abroad and American diplomats' relations with locals.

"It was the beginning of the process of building fortress America overseas," said Bannerman. "We began to isolate ourselves from the community."

daragahi@latimes.com

Ellie

[Phantom Blooper]

<TABLE style="WIDTH: 89%; mso-cellspacing: 4.5pt; mso-padding-alt: 3.0pt 3.0pt 3.0pt 3.0pt" cellSpacing=6 cellPadding=0 width="89%" border=0><TBODY><TR style="HEIGHT: 149.25pt"><TD style="PADDING-RIGHT: 3pt; PADDING-LEFT: 3pt; BORDER-LEFT-COLOR: #f0f0f0; BORDER-BOTTOM-COLOR: #f0f0f0; PADDING-BOTTOM: 3pt; WIDTH: 33%; BORDER-TOP-COLOR: #f0f0f0; PADDING-TOP: 3pt; HEIGHT: 149.25pt; BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent; BORDER-RIGHT-COLOR: #f0f0f0" width="33%">APRIL 18, 1983 - U.S. EMBASSY

Riad Abdul Massih
Abdallah Al-Halabi
Yolla Al-Hashim
Hassan Ali Yehya
Robert Ames
Mohamedain Assaran
Elias Atallah
Cesar Bathiard
Thomas Blacka
Antoine Daccache
Mounir Dandan
Rafic Eid
Naja El-Kaddoum
Farouk Fanous
Phyliss Faraci
Terry-Lee Gilden
Kenneth Haas
</TD><TD style="PADDING-RIGHT: 3pt; PADDING-LEFT: 3pt; BORDER-LEFT-COLOR: #f0f0f0; BORDER-BOTTOM-COLOR: #f0f0f0; PADDING-BOTTOM: 3pt; WIDTH: 33%; BORDER-TOP-COLOR: #f0f0f0; PADDING-TOP: 3pt; HEIGHT: 149.25pt; BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent; BORDER-RIGHT-COLOR: #f0f0f0" width="33%">Hussein Haidar-Ahmad
Mohamed Hasssan
Deborah Hixon
Mohamed Ibrahim
Raja Iskandarani
Frank Johnston
Nazih Juraydini
Ghazi Kabbout
Antoine Karam
Raymond Karkour
Edgard Khuri
Hafez Khuri
James Lewis
Monique Lewis
Amal Ma'akaroun
SSGT Ben H. Maxwell, USA
William McIntyre
CPL Robert V. McMaugh, USMC
</TD><TD style="PADDING-RIGHT: 3pt; PADDING-LEFT: 3pt; BORDER-LEFT-COLOR: #f0f0f0; BORDER-BOTTOM-COLOR: #f0f0f0; PADDING-BOTTOM: 3pt; WIDTH: 34%; BORDER-TOP-COLOR: #f0f0f0; PADDING-TOP: 3pt; HEIGHT: 149.25pt; BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent; BORDER-RIGHT-COLOR: #f0f0f0" width="34%">Mary Metni
Kamal Nahhas
Jirjis Naja
Antoine Najem
Nabih Rahhal
Darwish Ra'i
Roudayna Sahyoun
Fouad Salameh
SSGT Mark E. Salazar, USA
Suad Sarrouh
Shahe Setrakian
William Sheil
Nabih Shoubeir
Janet Stevens
SFC Richard Twine, USA
Albert Votaw
Khalil Yatim
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>May They ALL RIP!:iwo:

:evilgrin: