The Great War for Civilisation (160 page)

But the U.S. Marines took a different view. When I faxed them details of the missile codings and the ambulance attack, I was immediately called back by a spokeswoman for the office of the Marine Corps Commandant. “We don't like our missiles being used to attack kids,” she told me. “Where are you staying?” I waited next day at my hotel near Dupont Circle and at 5:30 a car arrived for me. It took me to a marine base outside Washington where seven men in civilian clothes were waiting to talk to me. We sat in the officers' mess and they examined my photographs of the missile parts and told me—at last—the story of Hellfire No. MG188J315534.

It had been one of up to 300 shipped to the Gulf by the U.S. Marines in 1990 to be used against Saddam Hussein's occupation army in Kuwait. Of these, 159 were fired at Iraqi forces—although the marines reported at the time that some of the Hellfires were hitting Iraqi vehicles but failing to explode on impact; just as the second missile which the Israeli pilot fired at the Lebanese ambulance failed to explode in 1996. But when the conflict was over, the marine officers told me, around 150 unused Hellfires—along with other ordnance—were dropped off at the Haifa munitions pier in Israel by a U.S. warship as part of a secret quid pro quo— a gift to Israel—for keeping out of the 1991 Gulf War when it was under Iraqi Scud missile attack.

I called up General Gus Pagonis, who was head of U.S. military logistics during the 1991 war against Iraq; he insisted to me that “everything we took off the ships [in Saudi Arabia] I put back aboard them en route to America.” But Pagonis—who was now head of logistics for the Sears Roebuck chain of department stores—added meaningfully that “I don't know if the ships stopped anywhere on the way.” They did. After passing through the Suez Canal, the U.S. Navy put the Hellfires and other missiles ashore in northern Israel.
¹⁷³

If the missile had been
sold
to Israel, conditions on its use would have been attached. But this was a military transfer, straight from American stocks. The missile had been paid for by the marines but ultimately handed over to the Israelis, no questions asked, and—five years later—fired into the back of an ambulance. Thus did a U.S. Marine missile kill seven people in southern Lebanon.
¹⁷⁴

And there in Washington my journey might have ended were it not for a message from Bob Algarotti of Boeing. It was, to say the least, confusing. His people, he said, had been studying the missile fragment which I had left with them. They thought it had been made at the Orlando factory in Florida, by Lockheed Martin— at that time a rival company. But the story wasn't that simple. The “Fed Log” number, partly damaged in the explosion, showed the figures to be 04939. “And that—at least the last four [digits]—definitely indicated it's either got to be us or it's got to be Martin Marietta then.” This hardly seemed conclusive. If it was either Rockwell (now Boeing) or Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin), which of them made this killer missile? The Hellfire that the Israelis fired into the ambulance had obviously been designed and developed by Boeing in Duluth. Now it seemed that the missile itself might have been put together by Lockheed. There was a lot of buck-passing going on here.

Boeing—whose headquarters in Seattle refused to add to what I'd been told in Duluth—said it had not contacted Lockheed Martin about my inquiry. But when I called Al Kamhi, Lockheed's director of communications—who, by chance, was on a business trip to London—he knew exactly what I was investigating. “You talking about what you discussed with Rockwell?” he asked sharply. “. . . I mean, I have no way of knowing what missile that was. I have no way of knowing if that missile ever came from where you say it came from . . . They [Boeing] can be as convinced as they want to be . . . as far as I'm concerned, I'm not going to start looking at missile fragments from . . . Their origin is totally unknown—I'm just not going to do that.”

“Can I let you have them anyway?” I asked. And our conversation became almost surreal:

KAMHI: No, I won't accept them.

FISK: You won't accept them?

KAMHI: No.

FISK: Can you tell me why not, sir? . . . I mean, this involves the death of four children and two women in an ambulance.

KAMHI: I don't know that that missile has anything to do with it . . . I mean, I can't comment on something I have no information on.

FISK: Well, I'm offering you the information so that you can check on it, sir. Boeing does seem convinced that it was made by your people.

KAMHI: And I'm not sure I understand—if it was or if it wasn't—what the point is.

I told Kamhi that I wanted to know the response of the company that manufactured the Hellfire to the events that took place when its missile was used. “I have no comment on what took place,” he replied. “I'm not even going to get into that arena . . . Our sales are made through foreign military sales . . . that's the way it's done, through the Pentagon.” I repeated that UN officers had found the missile in the ambulance, along with another Hellfire close by which had failed to explode. There was no doubt about their provenance. But our conversation continued in an even more bizarre manner.

KAMHI: Well, frankly, the missile has nothing to do with the manufacturer.

FISK: But you made it.

KAMHI: Well, we make a lot of things, too . . . our products are sold to allied nations.

FISK: Does that include Israel?

KAMHI: I presume if Israel has Hellfire, then they purchase the Hellfires through legal channels and through legal means.

FISK: But I mean, do you care about the use to which your missiles are put by those people to whom you sell them? I mean, this is a very important point, sir.

KAMHI: I'm sorry—I'm not going to dignify that question with a response. It's a no-win question . . . I'm just not going to respond to that . . . the question you have asked is a “Have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife?” question. No matter how I respond to that question, we all of a sudden are the bad missile manufacturer. We make missiles. We make electronics systems. We make a variety of defence systems. And it is our hope that they're never used . . . We don't know that the missile was misused. A missile can miss . . .

I explained to Kamhi that the Israelis agreed the ambulance was the target. They should respond to it, he said. But then, when I suggested that the U.S. government was itself concerned about the use to which its country's weaponry was put by clients, Kamhi changed his tone, though only fractionally. “We're always concerned when someone is hurt,” he said. “As far as why the missile was used . . . there's no way we can control or understand why . . . We don't have any say in that . . . you know, every day over six hundred people are shot in America. Not once do I know that anyone has gone back and questioned the bullet-maker.”

And so it went on, Kamhi ever more irritated. He repeated he didn't know if the ambulance was the intended target—and again I offered him my documentation with photographs of the missile part. “I can't make the determination,” he replied impatiently. “I wasn't the one pulling the trigger. Lockheed Martin was not the one that was there, firing the missile. Ultimately it has to come down to the responsibility of the user . . . It is not for us, the manufacturer, to go ahead and take action in a case like this.”

Kamhi's replies were hopeless, pathetic. But their message was clear. If an American missile was fired into an ambulance, those who made it would fiercely deny any blame. It was for Israel to explain. And when it did—agreeing that against all the rules of war, the Hellfire had been deliberately fired into an ambulance—America was silent. The equation was complete. Israel, it seemed, could do what it wanted. And Lockheed had no intention of cooperating with our inquiry—not least, I suspect, because Lockheed was now a joint partner in missile development with the Israeli aeronautics company Raphael.

Al Kamhi agreed to let me drop off at his London hotel a packet of news reports on the ambulance killings, along with the missile codings and my photographs of the Hellfire fragment that I had left with Boeing. So the next day, I took the Channel tunnel train from Paris to London with my package. It travelled with me through the fresh spring countryside of Kent, through my own home town of Maidstone—it had been a long journey since I left the south Lebanese village of Mansouri—and to the Britannia Hotel in London where Al Kamhi was staying. He was not in his room, so I left the package with reception, receiving a promise that it would be handed to Mr. Kamhi the moment he came back to the hotel.

Three days later, the same package—opened but then resealed—arrived at
The
Independent
's foreign desk in London.

Returned to Sender.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Even to Kings, He Comes . . .

How shall I go in peace and without sorrow?
Nay, not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city.
Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls, and
long were the nights of aloneness; and who can depart from his
pain and his aloneness without regret?
Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets . . .
It is not a garment I cast off this day,
but a skin that I tear with my own hands.

—Kahlil Gibran,
The Prophet

MY HOME IN BEIRUT has been a time-box for thirty years, a place where time has stood still. I have sat on my balcony over the Mediterranean in the sticky, sweating summer heat and in the tornadoes of winter, watching the midnight horizon lit by a hellfire of forked lightning, the waves suddenly glistening gold as they slide menacingly below my apartment. I have woken in my bed to hear the blades of the palm trees outside slapping each other in the night, the rain smashing against the shutters until a tide of water moves beneath the French windows and into my room. I came to Lebanon in 1976, when I was just twenty-nine years old, and because I have lived here ever since—because I have been doing the same job ever since, chronicling the betrayals and treachery and deceit of Middle East history for all those years—I am still twenty-nine.

Abed, my driver, has grown older. I notice his stoop in the mornings when he brings the newspapers, the morning dailies in Beirut and
The Independent
, a day late, from London. My landlord, Mustafa, who lives downstairs, is now in his seventies, lithe as an athlete and shrewder, but sometimes a little more tired than he used to be. The journalists I knew back in 1976 have moved on to become associate editors or executive editors or managing editors. They have settled into Manhattan apartments or homes in upstate New York or in Islington in London. They have married, had children; some of them have died. Sometimes, reading the newspaper obituaries—for there is nothing so satisfying as the narrative of a life that has an end as well as a beginning—I notice how the years of birth are beginning to creep nearer to my own. When I came to Beirut, the obituary columns were still recording the lives of Great War veterans like my dad. Then the years would encompass the 1920s, the 1930s, at least a comfortable ten years from my own first decade. And now the hitherto friendly “1946” is appearing at the bottom of the page. Sometimes I know these newly dead men and women, spies and soldiers and statesmen and thugs and murderers whom I have met over the past three decades in the Middle East, Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland. Sometimes I write these obituaries myself. One cold spring day, I wrote of the life of my old friend and journalist colleague Juan Carlos Gumucio, a man of inspiring courage and deep depressions—who saved my life in war and who had sat on my own balcony so many times, dispensing wisdom and cynicism and fine wines—and who took his life, shooting himself at his home in Bolivia because the world no longer seemed a kind or gentle or worthy place for him.

And still I am twenty-nine. I can look back over the years with nightmare memories but without dreams or pain. Lebanon has a brutal history but it has been a place of great kindness to me. It has taught me to stay alive. And amid all the memories of war, of friendships and beautiful women and books read past midnight—long into the early hours, when dawn shows the crack between the curtains—there has always been the idea that Beirut was the place one came home to. How many times have I sat on the flight deck of MEA's old 707s—from the Gulf, from Egypt or from the Balkans or Europe—and watched the promontory of Beirut lunging out into the Mediterranean “like the head of an old sailor” and heard a metallic voice asking for permission to make a final approach on runway 18 and known that in half an hour I would be ordering a gin and tonic and smoked salmon at the Spaghetteria restaurant in Ein el-Mreisse, so close to my home that I could send Abed home and walk back to my apartment along the seafront to the smell of cardamom and coffee and corn on the cob.

Of course, I know the truth. Sometimes when I get out of bed in the morning, I hear the bones cracking in my feet. I notice that the hair on my pillow is almost all silver. And when I go to shave, I look into the mirror and, now more than ever, the face of old Bill Fisk stares back at me. The night he died, a car collided with an iron rubbish skip outside my Beirut flat. The impact made a gong-like sound, followed by the scraping of the skip's iron wheels on the tarmac. The car drove away without stopping, so I padded downstairs in my dressing gown and helped Mustafa push the heavy cart back to the side of the road so that no other motorists would be hurt, and then, at around 8:15 a.m., Peggy called to tell me that Bill had died in his nursing home. She wouldn't be attending his funeral, she said. I had to arrange that. And I told her—it was the first thing that came into my head—that he was a man of his generation; it was an allusion to his infuriating Victorian obtuseness but I added that he had taught me to love books, which is true and which Peggy found herself able to agree with. So I went downstairs and told Mustafa and his family that my father was dead, and, according to Arab custom, each in turn shook hands with me—an affecting and somehow appropriate way of expressing sorrow, far more honourable than the clutching and happy-clappy hugging of so many Westerners. But I couldn't say I was sorry. Maybe Bill had lived too long—or maybe Lebanon and the war crimes I had reported had made me somehow atavistic, as if the backlog of history that always seemed to hang over the events I witnessed had driven into me a cold and heartless regard for the present.

The knights of the First Crusade, after massacring the entire population of Beirut, had moved along the very edge of the Mediterranean towards Jerusalem to avoid the arrows of Arab archers; and I often reflected that they must have travelled over the very Lebanese rocks around which the sea frothed and gurgled opposite my balcony. I have photographs on my apartment walls of the French fleet off Beirut in 1918 and the arrival of General Henri Gouraud, the first French mandate governor, who travelled to Damascus and stood at that most green-draped of tombs in the Umayyad mosque and, in what must be one of the most inflammatory statements in modern Middle East history, told the tomb: “Saladin, we have returned.” Lara Marlowe gave me an antique pair of French naval binoculars of the mandate period—they may well have hung around the neck of a French officer serving in Lebanon—and in the evenings I would use them to watch the Israeli gunboats silhouetted on the horizon or the NATO warships sliding into Beirut port. When the multinational force had arrived here in 1982 to escort Yassir Arafat's Palestinian fighters from Lebanon—and then returned to protect the Palestinian survivors of the Sabra and Chatila camps massacre—I counted twenty-eight NATO vessels off my apartment. From one of them, the Americans fired their first shells into Lebanon. And one night, I saw a strange white luminosity moving above the neighbouring apartment blocks and only after a minute realised that they were the lights of an American battleship towering over the city.

Iranians I meet often believe that Beirut is populated by CIA agents; Americans are convinced that Beirut is packed with bearded Iranian intelligence men. Sometimes I suspect they are both right. For in a sense, Beirut continues the tradition of postwar Vienna, an axis for the world's opponents to look at each other and wonder what common bond or hatred keeps them on this earth together. I recall that an American ambassador in Beirut once described how Lebanon was a beacon of democracy in the Arab world—in the very same week that Sayed Mohamed Hussein Fadlallah announced that Lebanon was “a lung through which Iran breathes.”

Those were the days, in October 1983, when Vice President George Bush could announce—after the killing of 241 U.S. servicemen at the Beirut U.S. Marine barracks—that “we are not going to let a bunch of insidious terrorist cowards shake the foreign policy of the United States. Foreign policy is not going to be dictated or changed by terror.” How archaic those words seem now, how lost in time. By 1998, we had found a new focus for what was to become “war on terror.” Al-Qaeda's bombs were striking at the American jugular, at embassies and barracks. President Bill Clinton bombed Sudan—an innocent pharmaceuticals factory, despite Washington's initial lies to the contrary—and then sent a swarm of cruise missiles into Osama bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan. Where was this going to end?

Against such history, what did Bill's death matter? It was easy to forget, sitting on my Beirut balcony, that General Gouraud had arrived in Lebanon as a result of the Sykes–Picot agreement and the Anglo–French victory in the 1914–18 war, that even before the official collapse of the Ottoman empire, the French were deposing the Arab king, Feisal, who had taken Damascus. France would rule Syria and carve Lebanon out of its body and give it to a thin Christian Maronite majority that would soon be a minority amid the Muslims of the new and artificial French-created Lebanese state. Lebanon's existence, like much of the future Middle East, was contingent upon the victory of the British, French and Americans, and was made possible by the peace that followed the armistice of 11 November 1918—on the evening of which Second Lieutenant Bill Fisk had marched to his billets in Louvencourt.

I have in my Beirut home volumes of works on the French Mandate—most of them published in Paris in 1921, recording the reconstruction of the country, the restructuring of the Ottoman system of justice, the new currency and banks and railway renovation, all part of France's supposed mission of civilisation to the Middle East. The French brought to the Lebanese–Syrian railway system a set of modern steam locomotives for use between Tripoli and Homs, big 08-0s which had been awarded to them under the Treaty of Versailles as wartime reparations from the Kaiser's Germany.

With a schoolboy enthusiasm for steam locos that my father understood all too well, I went up to look at them in the aftermath of Lebanon's civil war. They still stood on their tracks, these great steamers, their boilers cut open by shells, their eight driving wheels chipped by bullets—they had formed part of the Palestinian front line against Syrian troops around Tripoli's port in 1983—and their oil continuing to bleed from their gaskets, a railway junkyard of early nineteenth-century state-of-the-art technology. For when I wrote down the engine serial numbers and returned to Beirut and called that renowned expert of Middle East steam, Rabbi Walter Rothschild of Leeds, he informed me that they had indeed belonged to the Reich railway system. These behemoths, it transpired, had once pulled the middle classes of Germany from Berlin to Danzig. And I remembered how once, long ago or so it seems to me now—it was in 1991—a woman friend whom I treasured wrote me a poem in which she said that she loved “the little boy in you who wanted to drive steam trains.”

And I did. I loved railways. Peggy's French holiday scrapbook shows me loco-spotting at Creil, and one of Peggy's first colour films shows me watching the red-and-cream Trans-Europe express pulling into Freiburg station in Germany. Once in Lebanon, I found that the government had temporarily restored the old track between Beirut and Byblos, and I sat with the driver as he steered his massive Polish diesel loco and its single, tiny wooden carriage—brought across from British India after the First World War—so slowly that Abed would travel alongside the train and wave at me as the engine-driver tooted cars out of our way.

And then there came a day, of course, when it was my mother's turn to die. Peggy had suffered from Parkinson's disease since before Bill's death, but she had carried on living in the home I grew up in at Maidstone, where three kindly ladies looked after her. She wanted to die at home and so in September 1998 there was another call from Maidstone and this time one of the women who cared for Peggy said she thought my mother had only a few more days to live. I still had time to reach England. Years before her death, Peggy told me there must be no black ties at her funeral. “Everyone must wear bright clothes,” she said. And so in the beautiful little Anglo-Saxon church at Barming outside Maidstone, she had the funeral she asked for. There were mountains of flowers, not a black tie in sight—even the bearers wore casual suits—and the congregation sang “All things bright and beautiful.” But my mother's death was not as she would have wished. And it was certainly not a death she deserved.

Like Bill, she was a patriotic soul, though with none of Bill's bombast. In the Second World War, during the Battle of Britain, she joined the Royal Air Force, repairing radio sets in war-damaged Spitfires; her sister Bibby trained air gunners in radio navigation. Peggy became a flame of optimism over my young life. “Everything will work out all right in the end,” she used to say to me. And when I once asked what was the point of struggling with my homework when we were all going to die one day, she replied: “By the time you grow up, they may have found a cure for that.” In a way, my mother did believe in immortality, and I took her incurable optimism with me thousands of miles from Kent—to Afghanistan, through the terrible battles of the Iran–Iraq War and to the conflict in Lebanon.

But there was another side to Peggy. As Father fretted in retirement, she became a magistrate. I recall how one day, gently arguing with my father—whose views on criminal justice might have commended themselves to Judge Jeffreys— Peggy said, quite sharply: “The accused often tell the truth—and I don't always trust policemen.” When I was a small boy, the first book she urged me to read on my own was
The Diary of Anne Frank
—because she wanted me to understand the nature of good and evil. During the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982, she discovered a rare telephone line into the Lebanese capital and used it to tell me how she deplored the cruelty visited upon the Palestinians. She asked me repeatedly why governments spent so much money on guns.