The Story (12 page)

We all knew that reporting on Lebanon was increasingly perilous. Our safety depended on avoiding undue risks and on the eyes and ears of the Ihsans and Gamals and the
Times
's other local representatives throughout the Middle East who had helped school dozens of correspondents in the ways of their region.

While our editors in New York would occasionally remind us to be careful, reporters who took wildly unnecessary risks were rarely chastised. Getting the story first was what mattered. Bill Farrell, my predecessor in Cairo, for instance, was a fast, vivid writer who had covered Egyptian president Anwar el Sadat's assassination in 1981. He had spent almost two weeks introducing me to his friends and sources in Cairo. One steamy night when we both had a lot to drink, he told me about having been detained and terrorized by militiamen in Lebanon. A lanky, gentle man, he described having been locked for hours in a coffin-like box—a harrowing experience for anyone, but especially for Bill, who was claustrophobic. He needed some time off and counseling after the ordeal. But in the macho style of foreign correspondents, he had insisted on returning to work immediately. The
Times
did not object. After a struggle with alcohol, Bill died of cancer in New York two years later in 1985. He was forty-eight.

The surge of Islamic militancy added another challenge to Middle Eastern journalism: religious extremists and their violent movements had to be covered, but in a way that did not risk making reporters the accidental story.

In such a climate, the competence and loyalty of a paper's foreign staff were critical. If our office managers, stringers, translators, or drivers were untrustworthy, we could be betrayed and our sources compromised. In authoritarian regimes, the situation is doubly complex. Several of us had long suspected that local
Times
staff members were forced to cooperate with their respective intelligence services. In Cairo, I would often wonder whether Gamal cooperated with the Mukhabarat, Egypt's secret police. I never asked.

On December 12 the determined and now seemingly omnipresent Islamic Jihad struck again. It claimed credit for having detonated car bombs in a ninety-minute coordinated strike on six American and Arab targets in Kuwait, killing six people and injuring sixty-three. Canceling my Arabic lessons in Cairo once more, I was on a plane and back on page one covering yet another synchronized terror attack.

In the initial strike at the American Embassy, a dump truck carrying forty-five cylinders of gasoline and plastic explosives crashed through the embassy's flimsy sheet-metal gates and demolished the northern half of its three-story administration annex. An hour later, a car parked outside the French Embassy exploded, leaving a forty-foot hole in the embassy's security wall but, miraculously, no casualties.

The living quarters for employees of Raytheon Company, which was installing a new Hawk surface-to-air missile system for Kuwait, had an equally close call. So did Kuwait International Airport, where one person was killed in a car bomb explosion beneath the control tower, and another at Kuwait's main oil refinery and its major water desalination plant. Had the refinery been hit, production from one of the world's largest oil exporters would have been crippled. And without water, Kuwait's estimated 1.4 million people, 600,000 of whom were expatriates, would have lasted less than a week.

David Good, the US Embassy's chief public affairs officer, told me that had the truck hit the chancellery building where most of the Americans work, the death toll at that site alone would have rivaled that of the Beirut bombing. Because the administration building had not collapsed for ninety minutes, security officials had time to evacuate—a miracle.

After the devastating attacks on the US Embassy and the marine compound in Beirut, I assumed that US Embassies around the world, and surely in the Middle East, would urgently improve security. Yet in Kuwait, the perpetrators pulled off another synchronized attack with virtually identical tactics to those employed with such deadly effect in Lebanon. How was that possible?

Although additional security measures were taken after the Lebanon attacks, others had not been because of a lack of priority or money. The
State Department's chargé d'affaires, Philip Griffin, told me that Washington had funded the embassy's plans to move its main entry gate to the back of the compound, where it would have bordered an open field, not a public road. But the Americans were still negotiating with Kuwait about closing the road when the militants struck. Although the embassy had increased security after the Beirut bombings, neither the Kuwaiti guards outside the embassy, nor the six marines inside it, had weapons powerful enough to stop such a large, speeding truck. No shots at all had been fired. The guards had no time to react.

If American facilities in the Middle East had failed to heed the warning of the Lebanese attacks, how would Americans in other regions or even in the United States prepare for the grave new threat we faced?

By mid-December, I reported what we knew about the attacks in Lebanon and Kuwait in an 1,800-word analysis of the emerging militant Islamic trend that Abe Rosenthal put on the front page. Almost five years after the Islamic revolution had toppled the Shah of Iran, I wrote, “a resurgence of religious fundamentalism is unsettling the Moslem world from Africa through the Middle East and into Asia.” Quoting unnamed Western diplomats and Arab officials, I reported that Tehran was said to be training thousands of militants in facilities near the clerical city of Qom and elsewhere, and distributing diatribes against the West and corrupt Arab governments through radio broadcasts and, as Iranian militants had done under the Shah, on cassettes that were circulating widely in the region. I had collected over a dozen in my office in Cairo.

Although the new Islamic government in Tehran drew its inspiration from Ayatollah Khomeini, a Shiite Muslim, his example had inspired many Sunni Muslims, the overwhelming majority of Arabs as well, I wrote. Islamic purists, whether Sunni or Shiite, were seeking to replace secular governments, which they saw as “corrupt” for having deviated from the “straight path of Islam.” True Islamic governments did not distinguish between church and state.

Though the bombings in Beirut and Kuwait were the ostensible news “peg” for such a lengthy analysis, I wrote that Sunni militants had also resorted to violence: the assassination of Egypt's Anwar Sadat two years
earlier was still raw enough to be shocking, and the two-week siege of the Grand Mosque of Mecca in 1979 in conservative Saudi Arabia—the self-proclaimed protector of Islam's two holiest shrines—had slowed Riyadh's tentative efforts to loosen what was the strictest and the least tolerant of region's Sunni-led governments.

The bombings and other violence were just one weapon in the campaign to return Islamic nations to an idealized, purer past. Equally significant, if not more so, was the political pressure that nonviolent militants like the Muslim Brotherhood were putting on pro-Western Arab governments to become more “Islamic”: to ban pork and alcohol, expel Christians and other religious minorities, force women to wear the
hijab
, and to abandon secular legal codes in favor of sharia, or Islamic holy law.

When I later reread that 1983 article after 9/11, I was intrigued by how early I began grappling with questions about the origins and evolution of Islamic extremism. The article suggested that many scholars who studied Islamist movements believed that this latest wave of fundamentalism had been encouraged by the effects of the oil boom of the 1970s. The tremendous wealth accumulated by a few Arab countries created envy throughout the region and charges that the money had not been spent for the Muslim good. The arrival of millions of foreigners, many of them Western, also increased resentment of the infidel.

My friend Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a professor of sociology at the American University in Cairo, told me that this latest wave of Islamic militancy was rooted in growing political and economic frustration. Fundamentalists, he argued, tended to come not from poor but from lower- and middle-class families that were affected most adversely by inflation, limited opportunities for social mobility, and the region's vast disparities of wealth. Those forces were strongest in cities, where foreign influence was most apparent. Saad would not have been surprised by 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta's middle-class origins, but such arguments were unusual when I first wrote about them. Saad would be jailed in 2000 for advocating democracy and for criticizing President Hosni Mubarak.

When Washington announced in February 1984 that it was “repositioning” its multinational forces out of Beirut, I called Ihsan Hijazi to congratulate him for having predicted that the United States would leave. There would be no overt American military retaliation against the Hezbollah barracks in the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley, where Iran had set up a terrorist training camp. By pushing out the Americans after President Reagan had vowed to stay, the Lebanese factions aligned with Syria and Iran had won. The collapse of the Lebanese army in February gave Reagan the rationale he wanted: the multinational peacekeeping force no longer had a mission.

Soon after the
Times
published my front-page analysis on the spread of Islamic militancy, the Pentagon released a high-level study of the marine compound bombing. Headed by retired admiral Robert L. J. Long, the commission concluded that major failures of command, intelligence, and policy had all contributed to what it called the “catastrophe” and “an overwhelming success” for the terrorists.
⁵

Although it had no mandate to investigate Washington's decision to send the marines there, the commission supported Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger's desire to withdraw them. There was an “urgent need” for a reassessment of “alternative means to achieve U.S. objectives in Lebanon” and “reduce the risk” to the marines, it concluded. Peacekeeping in Lebanon had become impossible. “No sense of national identity” united the Lebanese or “even a majority of the citizenry”; Lebanon had become a “battleground” where armed Lebanese factions manipulated and were manipulated by the foreign forces surrounding them. If Syrians and Iraqis wish to kill one another, the report said, “they do so in Lebanon.” If Israelis and Palestinians wanted to fight over the land they both claim, the venue was Lebanon. “If terrorists of any political persuasion wish to kill and maim American citizens, it is convenient for them to do so in Lebanon.”

The Long Commission also concluded that the lack of HUMINT, or intelligence from agents and other human sources, resulted from a policy failure: specifically, from decisions by senior officials to “reduce the collection” of such information worldwide due to budgetary constraints and America's overreliance on satellites and other technical collection methods.

Two decades later, the 9/11 Commission would identify depressingly
similar failures within what officials called the “intelligence community,” which remained a battleground among warring agencies.

The Long Commission cited other failings: a poorly defined mission; inadequate communication among top officials; inappropriate “rules of engagement,” which, among other things, barred marines from keeping their weapons loaded and ready for use; and the command's decision to locate most of the marines in a single building.

But if the commission had a bottom line, it was this: America had failed to appreciate that we were at war. The report's “most important message” was that the marine compound attack was “tantamount to an act of war using the medium of terrorism.” “Terrorist warfare sponsored by sovereign states or organized political entities to achieve political objectives” was becoming an ever-greater threat to the United States. In effect, Muslim extremists, often backed by states, had declared war against America on a worldwide, decentralized battlefield on which our traditional weapons and tactics were often useless or counterproductive. America did not yet understand the challenge.

“Paris!”

Abe was calling me in Cairo from his office in New York. The connection was poor. “I'm sending you to Paris—as correspondent.”

“Gosh, Abe,” I said, momentarily speechless. Then I thanked him for rewarding my tour in Cairo with a promotion.

“You don't sound thrilled.”

“I'm delighted,” I replied too quickly. “But there's no news in Paris.”

Correspondents would kill for this job, he replied curtly. I could feel his anger. He was offering me the number two slot in Paris, a big step up in the
Times
hierarchy. Why did I hesitate?

Then he chuckled. “You are the only woman in the world who would rather stay in Cairo than spend the next three years in the world's most romantic city.”

Abe loved delivering good news, a rare enough event in 1986, the finale of his brilliant if tumultuous reign as executive editor. My lack of enthusiasm had spoiled the moment for him.

“I'm really grateful for the new job,” I lied.

What I didn't say—at least, not then—was that I feared I might find
France a letdown after Egypt. Richard Bernstein, my shy friend and a gifted writer, was the Paris bureau chief who would cover the big stories. I would be left with the rest.

Cairo had been a thrilling initial assignment. In just over three years, I had reported from seventeen countries and was more or less my own boss, driven by my own definition of the beat. As Abe had predicted, I was drawn most to the rise of what was slowly beginning to be called “Islamic fundamentalism” and would later be known as “militant Islam”—a trend within Islam as old as Islam itself which was slowly taking hold yet again, this time as a postcolonial response to the dictatorships that ruled in the name of Arab nationalism and independence.

I discovered much about the Arabs, and even more about myself, during that initial tour. For one, while the competition for a story in Washington is exhilarating, being a foreign correspondent is far more so. There had been so many magical moments: sunset sails on the Nile; wandering through the Damascus bazaar with its exotic scents, colors, and sounds; and walking alongside a riverbank on the outskirts of Khartoum, Sudan, as fishermen scrambled ashore from an old wooden trawler at sunset, falling on their knees, bowing toward Mecca.