The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (51 page)

Downstairs in the first-floor cafeteria, Anne Dammarell and Bob Pearson were having lunch together. Both were USAID officials. Anne ordered a chef’s salad. She was scheduled to rotate out of Beirut in a week for a new posting in Sri Lanka. Pearson wanted to talk to her about whom to invite to her farewell party. They ordered lunch and sat down in the back of the cafeteria, behind a supporting pillar.

Sitting at another table closer to the front of the cafeteria was William McIntyre, the director of USAID’s Beirut operations. He was having lunch with Janet Lee Stevens, the freelance American reporter who, despite being pregnant, was immersed in an investigation of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Two days earlier, she’d told a friend, Franklin Lamb, that she was working hard to unearth evidence to convict Gen. Ariel Sharon of war crimes. At lunch that day she intended to urge USAID director McIntyre to funnel some development assistance into the camps. She’d arrived at the embassy around 12:45
P.M.
and was scheduled the next day to fly to Cyprus to see her friend the author John le Carré.

Another reporter was in the embassy late that morning. David Ignatius was the son of Paul Ignatius, a former secretary of the navy and president of the Washington Post Corporation. David was then working for the
Wall Street Journal
. He was a good reporter and had developed a wide range of sources. On April 18 he had an interview on the sixth floor with a U.S. Army officer with the Office of Military Cooperation. Ignatius wanted to learn more about the U.S. government’s efforts to
rebuild and modernize the Lebanese army. The officer gave him an upbeat briefing, claiming that the program was turning the Lebanese army into “a force for national reconciliation that will bring together Sunnis, Shi’ites and Christians.” As he took notes, Ignatius thought,
It’s almost believable. Maybe the good times are returning.… 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
. The interview ended and Ignatius was escorted down to the first floor by Rebecca J. McCullough, twenty-four, a newly married embassy secretary. Ignatius retrieved his American passport at the marine desk, Guard Post One. He noticed Cpl. Bobby McMaugh’s imposing physique and the shiny brass buttons on his dress blues—the dark-blue pants with the long red stripes. And then he walked out of the embassy and up the hill, toward his hotel in Ras Beirut.

Corporal McMaugh had just returned at about 12:55
P.M.
to Guard Post One after a short lunch break. He’d tried to talk Corporal Massengill into taking his duty for the rest of the afternoon. Massengill declined, saying he was too tired, and took the elevator up to his room on the sixth floor. Rebecca McCullough, the secretary who’d escorted Ignatius, lingered at the marine desk and joked with Bobby. She teasingly warned him that she was going to tell her husband that the corporal was flirting with her. They laughed, and then McCullough suddenly thought she should get back to work. It was almost 1:00
P.M.
She said good-bye to Bobby and took the elevator back up to the sixth floor.

At that moment, a weathered black GMC pickup truck was passing by the pockmarked ruins of the St. George Hotel on Beirut’s waterfront corniche. The young Shi’ite Lebanese man at the wheel was driving slowly. He wore a black leather jacket. The truck’s tarpaulin-covered cargo, weighing two thousand pounds, made the vehicle run low on its springs and its tires bulge beneath the weight.
A green Mercedes sedan was parked two blocks away from the embassy. As the truck
passed by, the driver in the Mercedes flashed its headlights, a signal to proceed. Moments later, the driver of the heavy truck slowed and then suddenly turned sharply into the exit of the embassy’s crescent-shaped driveway. The driver gunned the engine and swerved wildly around the ambassador’s parked black armored limousine. Implausibly, the truck then bounced up six or seven steps and crashed through the embassy’s glass front doors and sped partly into the building’s central lobby, immediately adjacent to Guard Post One. At exactly 1:04
P.M.
the driver detonated his cargo and an enormous explosion ripped through the salmon-colored building.

Ambassador Robert S. Dillon was standing beside his desk on the eighth floor, talking on the phone to a German banker about some J.P. Morgan investments. As he listened to the banker, Dillon was simultaneously trying to pull a thick red U.S. Marines sweatshirt over his head. He’d been intending to go out for a jog along the corniche. Just as he pulled the sweatshirt over his face, the Mylar-covered glass window abruptly flashed toward him. He never heard the explosion. The sweatshirt probably saved his face from cuts. But the next thing he knew, Dillon found himself flat on his back, half buried under bricks and debris from the ceiling. He began swearing to himself in between fits of coughing. The room was filling with smoke, dust, and the whiff of tear gas. Dillon thought to himself that a rocket-propelled grenade must have hit his office. “Damn it,” he muttered, “they missed us four days ago, but this time they really got us.” For a moment, Dillon thought he’d lost his legs.

The ambassador’s deputy, Robert Pugh, experienced much the same thing in the adjoining room. The windows had blown in—but he and the ambassador’s secretary hadn’t been buried in rubble. Within a minute or two, Pugh stumbled into Dillon’s office and found that one wall had collapsed on the ambassador. Ironically, he was draped in the American flag that had stood ceremoniously next to his desk. Pugh grabbed the flagpole and used it to leverage off the largest piece of debris from the ambassador’s legs. Only then did Dillon realize that his legs were whole and he was even able to stand upright. He was still
bruised and scratched and bloody. But he knew he was alive. Everyone then began retching from a cloud of tear gas that quickly enveloped the room—tear gas from canisters stored by the marines in their quarters. Finally, a breeze from the blown-out windows cleared the room and they were able to see and breathe. At first they tried to make their way out to the elevator in the center of the embassy, but they quickly saw it was simply gone. So they turned around and found an open stairwell at one end of the embassy’s crescent-shaped building. Only when they managed to get down to the second floor did they realize how much damage had been inflicted on the building. Dillon stepped out onto the second floor and saw Mary Lee McIntyre, the wife of the acting chief of the USAID mission. She had such a bad cut over her tearing eyes that she couldn’t see anything. Dillon lifted her into his arms and carried her to a window, where he could see someone was standing on a ladder. Dillon gently handed Mary Lee out to the stranger.

He then turned around and someone whispered into his ear, “My God, Bill McIntyre’s dead. I’ve just seen the body.” Only then did Dillon realize there were fatalities. McIntyre had been killed while eating lunch with the journalist Janet Lee Stevens.
She died with him.
^*3
When Ambassador Dillon finally made his way around to the front of the embassy, he was stunned by what he saw: the entire center wing of the building had pancaked. Dillon knew there must be many dead, and some people were probably still alive, trapped under the rubble.
It would be five hours before the last living person came out of the ruined embassy.

Anne Dammarell thought she was dead. The USAID official who’d been having lunch with Bob Pearson just remembered hearing a huge
noise and feeling intense heat. And then there was just silence. Anne thought she’d been struck by lightning. “I thought—well, I’m dead. So I’m going to lean over and tell Bob that I’m dead.” But she had no voice and she couldn’t move. She felt as if an elephant had stepped on her. The next thing she knew Anne found herself lying on a stretcher, being carried outside. She heard voices yelling in Arabic, “
Yallah! Yallah!
”—“Go! Go!”
Ambassador Dillon saw her being loaded hastily into an ambulance and thought, “
She looks like a piece of hamburger
.” He turned away, thinking that she wasn’t going to make it. X-rays taken at the American University of Beirut hospital showed she had nineteen broken bones, including her pelvic bone, both arms, several fingers, and her collarbone. Shredded glass was embedded in her neck and arms. But Anne survived.

Staff Sgt. Charles Light had just left Cpl. Bobby McMaugh at Guard Post One and returned to his office on the first floor when the explosion blew him through a cinder-block wall into the adjoining room. He came to six or seven minutes later and heard ammunition rounds “cooking off” from the intense heat. He glanced to where his solid-oak desk had stood between him and the blast and saw that there was nothing left. “There wasn’t a piece of wood on it as big as a match or a toothpick.” When he got to his feet he noticed that his boots had been blown off. As Sergeant Light stumbled toward the front lobby, he heard a woman screaming. The blast had peeled off part of her face and she was bleeding profusely. Light wrapped his arms around the poor woman and tried to comfort her. At first, he wasn’t sure how to get out. But as the smoke and debris cleared, he spotted a slice of daylight from a V-shaped opening through the collapsed floors. Because he could also see flames coming from this opening, Sergeant Light left the woman for a moment and went to see if they could safely escape the wreckage through this two-foot hole. Peering out into what was the circular driveway to the embassy, Light could see a severed human leg lying in the driveway. Beside it was a car in flames.

Sergeant Light ran back to the woman and guided her over to a place in the back of the lobby where water was gushing down from
the upper floors. They stood under the water and thoroughly drenched their clothing. Only then did Light think it would be safe enough to crawl through the hole and out onto the driveway so near a burning car.

After squeezing through, Sergeant Light stood up and peered into the car, which he recognized as the black Suburban “chase” vehicle that always trailed behind the ambassador’s limousine. The human leg on the asphalt belonged to Staff Sgt. Mark “Cesar” Salazar, a member of the Foreign Service National Guard. Salazar was one of the ambassador’s bodyguards, and Sergeant Light could see him sitting in the Suburban engulfed in flames. “And just as I looked at him,” Sergeant Light later testified, “his eyes popped out of his head.” As Sergeant Light looked on in horror, Salazar’s best friend, a senior Lebanese security guard named Mohammed al-Kurdi, was trying to pry Salazar out of the car with a long metal rod that had a little crook at one end. But every time Al-Kurdi tried to touch Salazar with the rod, a piece of flesh would drop off. Salazar was probably already dead, but just to be certain Mohammed pulled out his pistol and shot Salazar between the eyes.

Sergeant Light turned back to the injured woman he’d dragged out of the embassy. She was a Lebanese employee of the consular section. He helped her out onto the street in front of the embassy and waved down a Mercedes taxicab that happened to be driving by. Seeing the devastation, the taxi driver stopped and started to back out. Light had to draw his sidearm and point it at the driver before the cabbie stopped. He got the woman into the backseat, threw some money on the seat, and told the driver, “
Mustashfa
,” meaning “hospital.”