The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (27 page)

“The French never forgave us for not backing them in the attack,” recalled John Poindexter. They believed the United States had betrayed them by pulling out of the joint attack. Weinberger’s refusal to commit was seen as an act of betrayal to an ally. The French exacted their revenge three years later. In April 1986, intelligence implicated Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi in the bombing of a disco in Berlin that killed two American servicemen. It was now Paris’s turn to thwart an American air strike. They refused to allow American warplanes taking off from England to overfly its airspace, forcing a seventeen-hour round-trip flight around Europe. While the American public expressed outrage at France’s action, no one except a handful in the government realized the reason behind their refusal to cooperate.

In the end, President Reagan did nothing. Weinberger sent a memo to the commander in chief that in light of the French and Israeli air strikes on Baalbek, there was no reason for the United States to do its own attack. McFarlane strenuously disagreed, but Reagan sided with Weinberger. Dutifully, McFarlane wrote to Weinberger of the president’s decision on November 22: “We should discontinue current plans and associated readiness to execute preemptive attacks in response to the October 23 tragedy.” Despite his repeated public statements promising to punish those who had perpetrated the attack, Reagan had quietly decided to do nothing in response to an attack that killed more servicemen in a single day than any other since the Second World War.

Reagan ordered one Pyrrhic air strike unrelated to the barracks bombing. It turned into a fiasco. Syria launched a missile at a U.S. reconnaissance plane that overflew its military positions in eastern Lebanon. This time Vessey
made sure there was no “navy-only” plan and that European Command ran the military operation. The command in Stuttgart assigned thirteen separate targets to Tuttle, requiring nearly forty aircraft from both carriers to carry out the reprisal. Tuttle had intended to launch the strike so the planes would arrive over the positions at high noon and the sun would be in the face of the Syrian gunners and the visibility would allow for easy identification. At five in the morning, an aide woke Tuttle, informing him that a message arrived instructing him to hit the Syrians at seven thirty a.m., only two and a half hours away.

“It is not possible,” he told his fleet commander. “It will take four hours just to get the ammo on the planes. I need a delay of at least two hours.”

Tuttle’s request went back to General Lawson at European Command, who twice asked the Joint Staff for a delay. It was denied. Why remains unclear, but apparently Vessey had made a remark to the defense attachés from Britain, France, and Italy about a first-light strike at seven thirty a.m. This became set in stone as far as the operations officer within the Joint Staff was concerned, even though Vessey had never intended this.

Planes and pilots were hastily sent aloft. Only twenty-eight of the planned thirty-eight jets were launched, and only one had its full bomb load. Syrian gunners shot down two aircraft. One two-seater A-6 piloted by twenty-six-year-old Mark Lange was shot as it dove down from two thousand feet. “I remember the plane being jostled,” said Lange’s weapons officer, Lieutenant Robert Goodman, “and instead of looking at the sky, I was looking at the ground.” Both pilots ejected just before hitting the ground, but Lange’s chute failed to deploy and he died of his injuries shortly after being captured by Syrian troops. Goodman survived with three broken ribs and was taken to Damascus and held in a basement cell watching old John Wayne movies and the TV comedy
Gimme a Break!
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To the embarrassment of the administration, the preacher-turned-negotiator Jesse Jackson traveled to Damascus and secured the pilot’s release. It led to an awkward ceremony at the Rose Garden with Reagan welcoming Goodman and thanking Democratic presidential hopeful Jesse Jackson.

Tension grew between Weinberger and McFarlane and the two men wrote dueling memos to the president. The national security adviser bitterly resented Weinberger’s refusal to respond to the attack on the marines and remained unwilling to admit that the U.S. policy he advocated in Lebanon had failed. McFarlane wrote to Reagan urging him to stay the course in
Beirut. “There has been progress, and the trends suggest more progress is in the offing,” he said about the growing strength of the Lebanese army. “That said,” McFarlane added, “the U.S. cannot yield to state-sponsored terrorism.”
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Weinberger countered in his memos that the presence mission assigned to the marines had been flawed and had led to the disaster. It was impossible to be passive peacekeepers in the midst of a civil war. In light of the size of the bomb, more bunkers and trenching would not “prevent continuing significant attrition to the force,” Weinberger wrote to Reagan. The political situation had deteriorated to the point where he and the chairman again urgently recommended pulling out the marines.
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In early 1984, the facade of a multiconfessional Lebanese government and army collapsed. After fighting between the pro-Iranian militias and the Lebanese army, Sheik Fadlallah issued a fatwa for the Shia to leave the army. Overnight, one entire Lebanese brigade defected. Within days the army shattered along sectarian lines. America’s effort to rebuild Lebanon in a way pleasing to Washington lay in ruins. With a presidential election looming, the Reagan administration cut its losses, and on February 26, 1984, the last marines withdrew from the airport to their ships off the coast.

One marine lieutenant, caked with dirt from months living in the mud of his bunker, looked down at the city below as he flew out on a helicopter and thought of those he knew who he had seen dead and mangled in the rubble of his battalion headquarters. “For all the sacrifice,” he thought to himself, “I hope we accomplished something.” In the end, 269 marines, sailors, and soldiers had died; Lebanon remained unchanged.

Although the marines had left, the infighting within the administration continued. The animosity boiled over during an early morning breakfast meeting on April 5, attended by McFarlane, Shultz, and Noel Koch, a senior civilian at Defense. Koch made a statement that the United States used the term “terrorism” very selectively: “When our friends engaged in this behavior it was always diplomatically inconvenient to refer to it as state-supported terrorism.” The problem, he added, was not Iran, but that the United States backed one faction in the war. “If we retaliate against Iran with overt military forces, we will provide what Iran will see as cause for a justified counter-retaliation.”

A visibly angry Shultz, his eyes squinting, looked straight at Koch. “I couldn’t disagree more. We could not permit what happened in Beirut to go
unpunished.” He accused Koch of being a statistician. “The unpleasant truth is that the bombings in Lebanon changed the Middle East by creating a public reaction which forced the withdrawal of the marines from Lebanon.” Our lack of will would only encourage Iran and other terrorists, he added.

The Israelis provided some bit of revenge to the United States and the killing of the marines. In 1984, they mailed a book of Shia holy places to Iran’s ambassador in Syria. When Ali Akbar Mohtashemi opened the package, it exploded, blowing off several fingers and part of one hand.
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I
f the United States was in retreat, Iran and its Lebanese allies were on the offensive. The string of vehicle-borne suicide bombings against the West had succeeded beyond their expectations. Israel was reeling, and the American and European forces were out of Lebanon. In September 1984, they struck again at the American embassy annex in the Christian suburbs of East Beirut. The six-story building had just been completed and was protected by a low wall surrounding the building and serpentine barriers erected along the main road leading to the entrance. U.S. Marines had been providing security around its perimeter, but, under pressure from the Pentagon to reduce the military footprint in Lebanon, this duty had recently been handed over to contract Lebanese except for the normal small contingent of embassy marines guarding the building itself.

Shia militants in nearby hills surveyed the embassy building. With Tehran’s approval, relayed again through its ambassador in Damascus, they built near Sheik Abdullah Barracks a mock-up using barrels to outline the streets leading to the annex. The bomber repeatedly rehearsed his approach, each time increasing his speed through the zigzag barriers. On September 20, he drove the real route. As he approached the annex, he pressed on the accelerator. As two contract guards opened fire, he swerved in and out of the barricades designed to halt him and detonated his bomb outside the wall, only twenty feet from the annex’s north corridor. Two American servicemen working at their desks died instantly as part of the building collapsed. The blast slightly injured the American ambassador.
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For the second time in as many years, the Iranian-backed militia had devastated the U.S. diplomatic mission in Lebanon.
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After being woken with the news of the attack, Reagan flew on to
political rallies in Iowa and Michigan. When asked by a student about this latest attack in Lebanon, Reagan disingenuously blamed his predecessor and the “near destruction of our intelligence capability” during Carter’s presidency. Fortunately for the president, no one asked about his own culpability for the disastrous foreign policy regarding Lebanon.
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Two days later, Reagan met with his staff in the Situation Room. McFarlane and Poindexter brought images taken by a spy satellite over Baalbek. The picture revealed an odd racetrack, with barrels arranged in a distinct pattern and tire tracks around each where a driver had repeatedly taken each turn at high speed. An observant analyst had married that image up with the approach to the embassy annex; the two overlapped exactly. Again intelligence placed the occupants at Baalbek at the center of an attack against the United States.
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The discussions fell along now familiar lines. Weinberger and Vessey expressed caution. Innocent family members of the fighters lived there, they said. Meanwhile McFarlane and Shultz pressed for military action. Casey chimed in that his information showed no women or children at Sheik Abdullah Barracks, but he could not be certain that three American hostages held by pro-Iranian Lebanese were not at those barracks. The president said he did not object to military response, provided it actually prevented future attacks, but he worried that the attack would be seen as revenge, as if that were somehow beneath the dignity of the United States. McFarlane countered that the only way you were going to dissuade future attacks was by punishing those responsible.

President Reagan again erred on the side of caution. After telling Shultz to issue a stern message to Syria for its tacit support of the terrorists, the president spent the rest of the day drafting a speech to be given at the United Nations and planning for an upcoming meeting with the Soviet foreign minister.
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Secretary of State Shultz became increasingly vocal at the lack of a willingness to respond to direct attacks on the United States. He agreed with McFarlane that striking back would cause Iran and Syria to think twice about repeating their terrorist undertakings. On October 25, Shultz gave a public speech in New York in which he cautioned, “We may never have the kind of evidence that can stand up in an American court of law, but we cannot allow ourselves to become the Hamlet of nations, worrying endlessly over whether
and how to respond.” Speaking before a predominantly Jewish audience, Shultz praised the Israeli way of “swift and sure measures” against terrorists. As the
New York Times
reported, “Mr. Shultz, almost alone of senior officials, has been waging virtually a one-man campaign since last spring for a policy of force toward terrorists.”
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In the end, Reagan became the American Hamlet. The debate over responding to terrorist attacks continued week after week in the White House until, eventually, the attacks faded from the public’s memory. While Reagan basked in his electoral landslide that November, his indecision and misguided Lebanon policy had been the policy equivalent of a fighter dropping his guard, and Iran landed a blow squarely on the Gipper’s chin. None of this had been preordained. A shortsighted Israeli policy and American Cold War naïveté opened the door for Iran in Lebanon. Israel’s myopic obsession with destroying the Palestinian resistance spawned a far more dangerous enemy, while an American government equally fixated on halting Soviet influence in the Middle East had led to misguided meddling in a Lebanese quarrel that Washington barely understood. In the process, Hezbollah’s success emboldened Iran on the value of terrorism and the poor man’s precision weapon—the truck bomb—as instruments for successfully beating a superpower.

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n the meantime, Lebanon spawned a new crisis, one that would nearly consume the Reagan administration. On July 4, 1982, Iran’s military attaché, Revolutionary Guard officer Colonel Ahmad Motevaselian, and two other Iranian diplomats were returning to Beirut when Christian Phalange soldiers stopped them at a checkpoint in the seaside town of Borbara, thirty miles north of the capital. The militia pulled the three men from their car; it was the last anyone ever saw of them. The Phalange executed all of them shortly after their abduction. The taking of the Iranian diplomats, including their senior Revolutionary Guard commander, infuriated Tehran.
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In response, Iran ordered the taking of their own hostages, hoping to use them as barter. On July 19, 1982, masked gunmen kidnapped the acting president of the American University of Beirut, David Dodge, as he strode on his customary afternoon walk. A longtime resident of Beirut and the great-grandson of the founder of the university, Dodge had been born in Beirut and lived for years
in Lebanon, including service in the region during the Second World War. Dodge was bound and taken to Damascus, where an Iranian aircraft flew him to a prison near Tehran. American intelligence intercepted the Iranian communications about Dodge’s transfer to Iran, and the international outcry about the abduction and Iran’s complicity in his kidnapping forced his release exactly one year later. The Dodge kidnapping had been a major blunder by the Revolutionary Guard. By taking Dodge to Iran, it implicated the Iranian government and exposed its operations in Lebanon. The guard made a calculated decision: they would provide resources and tradecraft training, but hostage taking would be left to the Lebanese. The Iranian government needed to stay out of the limelight and not be directly tied to the abductions.
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