An Accidental American: A Novel (35 page)

But to be there, to be engulfed by those great wings, is something else entirely.

I am grateful every day for Nicole’s safety.
How many times had my mother written this? How many versions of the same prayer? How could I possibly understand what it meant, how I had informed her every decision? From the beginning she had known something we hadn’t. The price of war, perhaps, or something else.

The city was so quiet that for a while I was convinced nothing would happen. Then the first Tomahawk hit, and the television screen exploded into a fluorescent glare. The blast echoed across Baghdad, the thunderous force of the concussion followed by a moment of profound silence. And then, from somewhere in the distance, came the sound of sirens, the wail plaintive and powerless.

The author wishes to thank the following people for their invaluable help, counsel, and encouragement: Simon Lipskar, Mark Tavani, Jane Wood, Jack Macrae, and Dan Conaway. The debts owed can never possibly be fully repaid. Thanks also to all the talented people involved in the production and design of this book, especially Beth Thomas for her superhuman skills as a copy editor, and to the author’s family for their extraordinary patience.

O
N APRIL 18, 1983
,
at one o’clock in the afternoon, a van carrying two thousand pounds of explosives blew up outside the American embassy in Beirut, killing sixty-three people. Among the victims were seventeen Americans, eight of whom represented the Central Intelligence Agency’s entire Middle East contingent. In the years preceding the bombing, an increasing number of attacks on Western and Israeli interests had been carried out by Palestinian and Muslim extremists, but the Beirut bombing was widely seen as a watershed event for American policies in the region. With the exception of the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran four years earlier, an act that was carried out within the framework of Iran’s Islamic revolution, the embassy bombing represented the first time America had been so directly and bloodily targeted by Islamic terrorists for its military involvement in the Middle East.

It’s impossible to see why the United States was such an unwelcome force without an understanding of the history of Lebanon and the surrounding region, and of American and Western involvement in the politics of the Middle East in general. Though Lebanon has existed in one form or another since the ninth century B.C., the modern country of Lebanon was not established until 1920, when it was granted to the French as part of a system of mandates established for the administration of former Turkish and German territories following World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In fact, almost all of what we think of as the modern Middle East was shaped by these mandates.

America’s first direct intervention in Lebanese politics came in 1946. During World War II, Lebanon had been declared a free state in order to liberate it from Vichy control. But when, after the war, Lebanon eventually moved toward full independence, the French balked, and the United States, Britain, and several Arab governments stepped in to support Lebanese independence. It was at this time that Lebanon’s system of political power sharing was devised. Well aware of the country’s shaky precolonial past and determined to keep Lebanon intact, the fledgling nationalist government agreed to split power along sectarian lines, based on the numbers of the 1932 census. It was a well-intentioned plan, but one that inadvertently set the stage for decades of strife and civil war.

The power-sharing government’s first major stumbling block came with the partitioning of the British Mandate of Palestine in the wake of World War II, and the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that followed. The ensuing influx of some 100,000 Palestinian refugees into Lebanon proved a strain on the carefully crafted power-sharing system. Tensions were further exacerbated in 1956, when Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, provoking the United States, along with Britain, France, and Israel, to respond with military force. While Lebanese Muslims wanted the government to back the newly created United Arab Republic, Christians fought to keep the nation allied with the West. In 1958, with the country teetering on the brink of civil war, the United States sent marines into Lebanon to support the government of President Camille Chamoun, thus inextricably linking itself with Christian forces.

It was an alliance that would be tested when, nearly two decades later, sectarian rivalries finally erupted into full-scale civil war. While Lebanon had enjoyed a period of relative peace and prosperity, tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, and between the United States and Iran, had escalated significantly, as had tensions between the Israelis and the Palestinians. By the spring of 1975— when gunmen from the Christian Phalange militia attacked a bus in the suburbs of Beirut and massacred twenty-seven Palestinians on board in what is widely agreed to have been the first act of the civil war— the forces at work in Lebanon were not merely internal ones. The Cold War, as well as the larger Arab-Israeli conflict, were both being played out in Lebanon, and would be throughout the course of the war, as international players funneled weapons and money to the various Christian, Muslim, and Druze militias.

The United States was a major player in the civil war from the beginning, providing mainly covert support for the Christian government, with whom it had traditionally been allied. But it wasn’t until 1982, after the Israeli siege of Beirut, the assassination of Phalange leader Bachir Gemayel, and the horrific massacres at the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, that U.S. troops, along with other members of a multinational peacekeeping force, formally intervened in the conflict. The United Nations–backed coalition was meant as a neutral presence, but the complications of Cold War allegiances and the United States’ traditionally close ties to Israel and Lebanon’s Christian government meant that the Americans were inevitably viewed by Muslim and Druze factions as anything but impartial. It was in this environment, less than six months after the Americans arrived as peacekeepers, that the embassy bombing took place.

There can be no doubt that the main goal of the bombing was to intimidate the United States into pulling its forces from Lebanon. But there were other, less obvious but no less significant reasons behind the attack. Responsibility for the bombing, and the subsequent bombing of the marine barracks, was claimed by a radical wing of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah. In the years leading up to these attacks, Iran had taken an increasingly aggressive role in its support of Lebanese Muslim militias, most of which were traditionally Shiite, transforming what had once been a mainly political fight into a religious and moral one. Not only did Muslim radicals want American troops gone, but they wanted to rid the country of Western cultural influence— which they saw as mainly American— as well. In the bloody years to follow, the American University of Beirut, as well as American and Western journalists, would be targets of a concerted campaign of kidnapping and intimidation.

Under any other circumstances, the Islamicizing of the conflict might have been yet another disturbing development in an already wildly fractured situation. But in the hothouse of the Lebanese civil war, Hezbollah’s fierce brand of anti-Americanism became not just a Shia or Iranian cause but a Palestinian and therefore pan-Arab cause as well. In the years since the embassy bombing, the cause has taken on many faces, including that of the vast al-Qaeda network, but the anger remains undiluted. Not only is anti-American thinking still prevalent today in the Middle East, but it has become the uniting force for radical Muslims the world over.

Former high-ranking members of the Reagan administration have confirmed that how to respond to the embassy bombing and the bombing of the marine barracks was a subject of debate at the time. There was a clear split within the White House between those who believed that force was the best response and those who argued that the use of military power would only add to the problem by antagonizing America’s remaining friends in the Arab world. The lessons of Vietnam, along with the horrific loss of life in both attacks, no doubt helped cement the decision to follow a policy of disengagement. In the end, the choice was made to pull all American troops out of Lebanon.

It’s no coincidence that I chose to make the 1983 bombing of the American embassy in Beirut central to the plot of
An Accidental American.
This is a novel about U.S. involvement in the politics of the Middle East, and the embassy bombing has shaped American policy in that region as few other events have. Disengagement is no longer the United States’ response of choice when dealing with Islamic extremism. In light of the September 11 attacks, it comes as no surprise that American foreign policy leans heavily on the swift use of military might. But the effects of the decisions made in the wake of the Beirut bombings are also at the root of this powerful policy shift. Those in Washington who argue in favor of unilateral military action can point to the message that the earlier withdrawal sent: namely, that the United States could be intimidated by terrorists.

Writing about events in which real people lost their lives is always a delicate undertaking. Sixty-three people were killed in the embassy bombing, and it is not my intention to dishonor them. While I do aim for historical accuracy, my main focus as a writer is on my characters. Truthfulness for me means looking back on the events of history through the flawed lens of human perception. This means creating characters who are as real as possible, and whose motives are often less than pure and always complicated. I strongly believe that I can best respect the real inhabitants of history by struggling to portray my fictional inhabitants as honestly as possible.

Most of my fictionalization of the embassy bombing in
An Accidental American
adheres closely to the facts. The van used to transport the explosives to the embassy had, in fact, been stolen from the embassy pool the summer before the bombing. It is universally acknowledged that the Syrians, as well as the Iranians under the guise of Hezbollah, were behind the attacks. Among the people killed that day were the CIA’s chief Middle East analyst, Robert C. Ames, and station chief Kenneth Haas. Both Ames and Haas were brilliant men and rising stars, and the consequences of their deaths are still being felt within the intelligence community. But the idea that a rogue CIA official was actually behind the bombing is entirely fabricated, as are all the characters involved.

In recent years, there seems to be a growing uncertainty concerning what, exactly, separates fiction from nonfiction. The meteoric rise of the memoir and other forms of “creative nonfiction” has further blurred an already fuzzy line between minor embellishment and outright fabrication— while the popularity of a certain kind of fiction, which claims to illuminate long-concealed truths, has led readers to confuse clever fabrication with fact. In the wake of this uncertainty has come outrage and even anger. I have to admit, I don’t see what all the fuss is about. Stories are meant to transport— at its best, historical fiction can even offer us a wise perspective on our own condition— and if readers are denied the joy of suspending their disbelief, they might as well not read at all.