The Story (11 page)

I arrived in Beirut on a cool October morning just before dawn. Giant strobe lights lit what was left of the four-story marine compound. Huge slabs of concrete were perched precariously like dominos. Seabees were still using picks, shovels, and their hands to remove bodies from the smoldering rubble.

An FBI agent at the site told me that it was the most powerful nonnuclear bomb anyone on his team had ever seen. The force of the explosion had lifted the building off its foundation, and then it collapsed in on itself, crushing many of those inside.
¹
Had such a bombing occurred in the United States or Europe, the crime scene would have been cordoned off long ago. But this was Lebanon. So I wandered at will, unescorted, along the periphery of the blast and the stew of concrete, twisted metal pipes, shards of glass, chairs, bunks, clothes, scattered letters, birthday cards, and
photographs—pictures of the marines and sailors with their girlfriends and families—all ash colored, crumbled.

Nothing in my relatively sheltered life had prepared me for such carnage. While I had written from Washington about “terrorism” and “Islamic militancy,” they were abstractions. I had never seen them. Now I had.

One dust-covered marine who had been digging through the rubble suddenly froze atop a mound of concrete. He plucked something out of the debris, cradled it in his arms, and began rocking back and forth. As I got closer, I saw that it was a dented, blood-smeared helmet—his best friend's.

I stayed at the site for much of the day, interviewing soldiers, officers, military chaplains, bystanders—anyone who would talk to me—and taking notes on the largely futile rescue operation. Tom Friedman was writing a news analysis about why the attack had occurred and the mysterious group, Islamic Jihad, that had by then claimed credit for it, leaving me to report the bombing.

I saw courage and strength that day, as soldiers and civilians battled horror and fatigue to save anyone who might be alive under the rubble. I saw that not all the volunteer rescue workers were humanitarians. Toward dusk, one removed a wedding ring from a dead marine's finger and stuffed it into his pocket.

I did not mention the theft or the marine in my dry account of the bombing that night, my first front-page, above-the-fold appearance as a foreign correspondent—a grisly debut.
²
But I wrote that the timing of the attack was complicating efforts to identify the bodies. Because so many of the marines had been asleep or taking showers, they were not wearing their dog tags when the Mercedes truck rammed through the poorly defended compound's southern perimeter and into the building's lobby. By the day's end, the military estimated the death toll at 193. It would rise to 299—58 soldiers at the French compound two miles away and 241 American marines, sailors, and soldiers—the deadliest attack on Americans overseas since World War II.

Exhausted and shaken, I returned to the site later that night after filing my story. I still hoped, illogically, that more marines might be found alive. I managed to interview one who had been guarding the entry post with an
unloaded weapon as his “rules of engagement” required when the attack occurred. The Mercedes truck was large and yellow, he recalled; its driver had an intense, thin face, a black beard. And he was smiling.
³

Though I didn't realize it at the time, that five-ton truck loaded with dynamite that the marine guard saw heading toward him in Beirut that awful morning was the future. The synchronized twin bombings marked the beginning of the age of asymmetrical mass terrorism by militant Islamists. The suicide attack—and the earlier strike in April against the US Embassy in Beirut—marked the de facto start of a war against America that would continue straight through to 9/11 and beyond. Lebanon was where it had all begun. I was present at the creation.

Ihsan Hijazi, the
Times
's veteran local reporter, briefed me the next morning over coffee at the Commodore Hotel, where Friedman was staying after his own apartment was blown up. He predicted that we would find Iranian and Syrian fingerprints on the truck and its suicidal driver.

Syria had long controlled its neighbor Lebanon. Its forty thousand troops had occupied much of Lebanon's territory since 1976, when Damascus was invited to help end Lebanon's civil war, then in its second year. Syria opposed the May 17 agreement among America, Israel, and Lebanon's Maronite-led government, which was intended to end the war. Lebanon had agreed to normalize relations with Israel, which had invaded that country in 1982 partly in response to repeated pleas from Lebanese Christians for help in the civil war and to oust the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had used Lebanon as its base.

The UN-blessed multinational peacekeeping force of American, French, Italian, and British soldiers had arrived in Lebanon in the summer of 1982, soon after the May agreement was signed, to oversee the PLO's withdrawal from Lebanon and to bolster the Christian-led government. Damascus had not been asked to participate in the May 17 talks and would not accept its terms. The rejection of the accord by Syrian president Hafiz al-Assad, in turn, prompted Israel to ignore its commitment to withdraw, since its removal of troops was contingent on the withdrawal of Syrian
forces. Without Syrian participation, the May agreement was worthless, Ihsan told me. But the Americans refused to acknowledge this reality. Iran, too, wanted to see the United States, the “Great Satan,” humbled in Lebanon, and these events had brought Tehran and Damascus together in a vengeful embrace.

Ihsan, a Palestinian Sunni Muslim and Lebanese citizen since 1958, loved his adopted homeland but had few illusions about the region's violent politics. He knew Washington almost as well. Syria would not abandon Lebanon, but the Americans would leave, he predicted.

He did not criticize me for having quoted President Reagan's vow to stay in Beirut in the lead of my story. After all, our tough-talking president had declared that terror would “never” force the United States to abandon its peacekeeping mission in Lebanon.

Ihsan smiled wearily. Words were cheap, coffins expensive, especially as the 1984 US presidential election approached. America would leave Lebanon. The West's peacekeeping role had been doomed from its creation: there was no peace to keep.

Shiite Muslims had long ago become the country's largest sect; Sunni Muslims were second, and Maronite Christians a distant third. The civil war that erupted in 1975 had obliterated Lebanon's fragile cohesion. The dynamic, prosperous country I first visited in 1971 as a graduate student at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School and aspiring reporter was no more. By 1983, Beirut was a physical and political wreck.

Ihsan urged me to report outside the “city-state” of Beirut. Lebanon's future was being written beyond Beirut's mutilated borders. Demography could not be denied forever. The country's Shia Muslim majority was being mobilized throughout southern Lebanon. “Their day is coming,” he said.

In Jibchit, then a town of fourteen thousand, their day had already come. Fewer than forty miles southwest of Beirut, Jibchit was a planet away. As Ali, the Shiite driver Ihsan had hired for me, steered his battered yellow taxi deeper into southern Lebanon, I saw that Ihsan was right. In Jibchit, the idea that a country as secular, materialistic, and religiously diverse as Lebanon could ever become a theocratic state of any kind, much less an Islamic republic like Iran, seemed less preposterous.

This was the Lebanon of men like Sheikh Ragheb Harb, a young Shiite mullah known for his fierce opposition to Israel's occupation and his determination to turn Lebanon into an Islamic state. This Lebanon had none of the immaculately coiffed women of Beirut in their clinging silk blouses and high heels. Even young girls in Jibchit wore Islamic garb. There were few street or shop signs in English. The town looked more Iranian than Lebanese. Posters of Iran's glum Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini stared down on the main square from dozens of roadside signs.
⁴

Sheikh Harb helped me understand more about the still-nameless suicide bomber who had attacked the marine compound. Posters featuring the bombed ruins of the compound were being prepared in the sheikh's outer office by young men with scraggly beards who had just returned from military training in Iran. One of them shoved a headscarf into my hand, insisting that I wear it during my interview with the sheikh. “He's with Iran's Revolutionary Guard,” Ali whispered. “Do what he says.”

Sheikh Harb, the first Islamic militant I would interview, was squat, with a sparse beard and a bulldog face. Lebanese Shiites considered him charismatic; his appeal eluded me. Raspy voiced and glowering, Harb (which means “war” in Arabic) explained that the marine barracks were an “appropriate” target because America supported Israel and its occupation of Lebanon. The strike was a “defensive” action. The bomber had gone straight to paradise not for having committed suicide, which is forbidden in Islam, but for having died as a holy warrior, a
jihadi
, a
shahid
, or “martyr,” to Islam. In heaven, seventy-two virgins and all of life's sensual pleasures that he had denied himself on earth awaited him. Hence his smile.

Israel, he lectured in a monotone, was a “cancer” that Shiites have a religious duty to destroy. A Jewish state had no place in what the holy Koran designated as the
Dar al-Islam
, the “Abode of Islam,” where Muslims were meant to rule. Neither he nor any other observant Muslim would ever accept the presence of a Jewish state here. Israel would have no peace, he warned me. And as long as Americans helped them, neither would we. “Mark my words carefully,” he said, ending our interview. I did.

In village after village, Iran's influence was unmistakable. Almost every town had a cleric who, like Sheikh Harb, was a frequent visitor to Tehran.
In a village not far from the Shiite stronghold of Nabatiye, I met a kindergarten teacher, another returnee from Iran, who marched his young students up and down a hill like soldiers. Wielding wooden sticks as if they were rifles, the children were no more than five or six years old. He was training them to be “martyrs,” he boasted. They, too, might have the honor of dying for Islam.

The Iranians were seeding the infrastructure and culture of terror in the very presence of Israel's occupying army. Did Israel not understand the implications of its occupation?

I posed that question to the deputy commander of Israel's military headquarters in Tyre, near the Lebanese-Israeli border. This time Ali, my driver, had not accompanied me. Genial and accommodating until our arrival at the Israeli base, he became enraged when I asked him to drive into the compound. How could I possibly meet with
them
, he yelled, his country's occupiers? How could I enter a place where Lebanese and Palestinians had been detained and, he said, tortured? He must have found my response—that journalists must interview people on all sides of a conflict—naive or disingenuous. It neither convinced nor calmed him. Dumping my luggage and me at the compound entrance, he drove off.

I lugged my bag up the unpaved road that led to the compound's high steel gate. Beyond was another steel fence enclosing the same rock-filled barrels and cement Delta barricades I had seen at the US Marine compound in Beirut. But here many more soldiers and Arabic-speaking paramilitary border police were on guard. The place appeared impregnable.

Tracking down the base's deputy commander, I got permission to interview his intelligence officer, who confirmed my fears about the growing Shiite militancy in southern Lebanon. Israel's occupation of the south, he had repeatedly told senior officers in Tel Aviv, was jeopardizing not only Israel's forces in Lebanon but also its broader goal of peaceful coexistence with the Shiites, Lebanon's single largest and increasingly militant religious community. Although the Lebanese Shiites had initially welcomed Israel's help in ridding their towns and villages of the arrogant PLO intruders, Israel was now the alien body that had to be expelled. Attacks on Israeli forces in southern Lebanon were rising. He had sent numerous warnings
to his bosses, he told me. But policy makers in Jerusalem resisted his conclusions.

Echoing Ihsan Hijazi, the Israeli intelligence officer told me that he, too, was certain that the US Marine and French army compound bombings were the work of Shiite militants from southern Lebanon, with the connivance and/or support of Iran and Syria.

I left the Israeli post at Tyre in an Israeli army supply truck, the ride procured for me by the officer's young female aide. A few hours later, I reached the American Colony Hotel, the favorite haunt in East Jerusalem of journalists who cover the Arab world. Dog tired, I slept badly, images of the bombing reverberating in my head. I dreamed about the sneakers I had abandoned at the Commodore Hotel in Beirut. I left them in the closet when I was unable to remove the caked-on grime and bloodstains from the bomb site.

The sound of the muezzin at the mosque next to the American Colony interrupted my nightmare. Still groggy, I turned on the BBC. “In the wake of the suicide bombing attack at dawn today on Israel's military headquarters in Lebanon at Tyre,” the announcer said, Israel was implementing tougher security measures throughout southern Lebanon. “At least thirty-nine people have been killed in the suicide bombing attack . . .”

I dressed quickly, grabbed a notebook, and raced to Beit Agron, Israel's press center in West Jerusalem. There was as yet no list of the dead from this latest attack; this, too, claimed by Islamic Jihad. Hours later, I learned that the death toll had risen to sixty. The officer who had briefed me was unhurt. But the young soldier who had helped find me the ride back to Israel was dead. She was eighteen.

From our bureau in Jerusalem, I sent a message to Ihsan that I was out of harm's way. Having helped hire Ali to accompany me, Ihsan was partly responsible for my safety. Though we knew that foreign correspondents are not immune to the violence we cover, most of us did not yet consider ourselves targets. Normally, all sides, even Islamic militants, tried to use us to get out their message. “Terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot
of people dead,” my friend Brian Jenkins, the Rand Corporation's premier terrorism expert, had written before Islamists decided they wanted both.