The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (24 page)

To Iran, Mugniyah became more than an ally; he served as a partner. Iran commissioned him an officer in the Revolutionary Guard and many of his Iranian comrades genuinely mourned his death when a car bomb in Damascus sent him on into the afterworld in 2008. As Hezbollah’s chief military commander for over two decades, Mugniyah took on a mythical persona. Israel and the United States seemed to attribute every guerrilla attack or act of terrorism to him, and his hand guided many even in his tender years. Few knew him; he hid his true identity even from his only son, Mustafa. The head of Hamas’s operations in Lebanon, Osama Hamdan, met him masquerading as a stone salesman.
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Iran tried to morph these disparate supporters into a cohesive force. It formed the Council of Lebanon, a five-member committee of senior Lebanese
and Iranian clerics to coordinate the religious, political, and military activities of the radical pro-Iranian Shia groups. The Revolutionary Guard centralized all military training at Baalbek. On June 27, 1983, the two main groups—al-Musawi’s Islamic Amal and Mugniyah’s Islamic Jihad Organization—were both placed under the direct control of Iranian officers. By 1984, American intelligence began reporting a new umbrella name for the pro-Iranian militias: Hezbollah, or Party of God.

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ran’s growing role in Lebanon did not escape the attention of the United States. The head of America’s top eavesdropping agency, the National Security Agency, William Odom, made a swing through the Middle East in early April 1983, which included a stop in Beirut to talk to the CIA station chief and the marines at the airport. A gunnery sergeant assigned to small signal collection from the marines’ radio reconnaissance company gave Odom some of the communications they had intercepted between Sheik Abdullah Barracks and the Iranian consulate in Beirut. “The Iranian presence was growing,” Odom recalled of these messages. “They were actually struggling to find enough Arabic speakers to meet their requirements.”
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Odom did not share the Reagan administration’s optimism about Lebanon. He came away from Beirut deeply disturbed. The rising attacks on the marines and the growing influence of Iran among the Shia population did not bode well for America, he thought. “The mere fact that terrorists have made attempts against the Marines is a bad sign to come,” he wrote to Army Chief of Staff Edward Meyer upon his return to Washington.
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Just days after Odom’s visit, on April 17, 1983, a green Mercedes swerved in and out of the congested Beirut traffic, barely missing a dump truck and a mother and her two children. The driver accelerated, then quickly turned up a driveway, passing nonplussed guards, and headed straight toward the front of the seven-story American embassy. The car jumped up the front stoop and smashed into the front door of the lobby and exploded.
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The blast sheered off the entire front of the building, vaporizing eleven Lebanese bodyguards and their leader, Sergeant First Class Terry Gilden of the U.S. Army Special Forces, who happened to be milling about under the front portico waiting to take the ambassador to an appointment.
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Marines arrived from the airport to provide security for rescue workers digging through the rubble to recover the
dead and wounded. The final tally stood at sixty-three dead, including seventeen Americans.
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Most alarming, the bomber had cleaned out America’s entire spy operation within Lebanon. Seven of those killed had been CIA employees, including the chief of station, his deputy, and the head of all the agency’s Middle East operations, Robert Ames, who happened to be visiting the embassy and having an ill-timed lunch meeting with the CIA’s staff when the bomb went off. Few intelligence officers knew as much about the Middle East as did Ames. Both William Casey and the White House held him in high regard. “If there ever was someone irreplaceable, it was Bob,” said one retired CIA agent who knew Ames well.

Odom’s NSA pored over intercepted communications trying to find the culprits. A few nuggets between the Iranian foreign ministry and its embassies in Beirut and Damascus had indicated a vague goal of striking at American interests in Lebanon. While highly circumstantial, NSA analysts concluded it could only have referred to the embassy attack.
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Odom agreed. “It seemed the logical conclusion.”

The CIA rushed a new batch of case officers to the embassy. This included one of the few Arabic-speaking women, deploying to Beirut on her first assignment with the agency. The new chief of station was a thin, glum-looking case officer with limited field experience who had spent much of his career in headquarters, William Buckley. Casey had pressured the reticent Buckley into taking the assignment. The director liked Buckley, and the bench of senior CIA officers with Middle East expertise was not that deep. The marine officers had a mixed view of him. Colonel Geraghty thought highly of him, and the two developed a good rapport, but many junior officers found the CIA officer conceited. Buckley did have one serious flaw for an intelligence officer: he could not remember people’s names. As an aide-mémoire, he kept a list of all the CIA officers who worked for him in his shirt pocket.

In early August 1983, the marines went on full alert after intercepted radio communications and a Shia human source both confirmed an imminent attack by militias loyal to Iran.
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As the fighting intensified around Suq al-Gharb, marines repeatedly intercepted tactical discussions in Farsi. To help translate, one of the five Persian linguists in the entire marine corps arrived in Lebanon to help decipher the chatter.

Robert McFarlane reported Iran’s involvement back to the White House on September 9. The attacks on Aoun’s 8th Brigade, he said, were not the work of Lebanese, but of a nefarious combination of Iranian and Syrian forces.
The United States could not stand by while these countries sent in troops to interfere and oppose the legitimate Lebanese government. McFarlane noticed the irony in his stand. The United States too stood guilty of much the same offense: an outside country with military forces backing one faction in the civil war.

While hardly the external invasion McFarlane perceived, the Syrian army did provide an umbrella for the polyglot of opponents of the Phalange-backed government. Druze, Shia, and Palestinians all battled General Aoun’s forces in the hills around Suq al-Gharb. The Revolutionary Guard lurked in the background, offering advice for their allies. With the United States actively aiding the Lebanese army, the visible symbol of the U.S. military, the U.S. Marines, found themselves the target of all those opposing Gemayel and the Israelis.

In Ayatollah Khomeini’s mind, America continued to spearhead the assault against the revolution. If America aided Iraq, he saw no reason why American marines in Lebanon should be immune from retaliation. It was all intertwined, each a battle in the larger struggle between the Islamic Republic and the United States: righteousness versus wickedness. While the Druze shelled the marines, the Iranian militia turned to their poor man’s precision-guided weapon.

On September 1, 1983, a Revolutionary Guard officer met with Hussein al-Musawi at Sheik Abdullah Barracks. Al-Musawi wanted to blow something up—“special targets,” as he phrased it. He remained undecided about just exactly what should be destroyed, but he leaned toward Christian Phalange sites in East Beirut. The Iranian dutifully reported this back to Ambassador Mohtashemi in Damascus, who in turn relayed it back to Tehran. As the fighting raged around Suq al-Gharb, and McFarlane and Stiner pressed Geraghty for air strikes, al-Musawi approached the Iranians again. This time he wanted help in obtaining an eye-popping thirty tons of TNT and plastic explosives.

This got Mohtashemi’s attention. He asked al-Musawi to come to Damascus and explain what he intended to do with all that lethality. On September 22, an al-Musawi relative, Sayed, and the brother of the head of the Hussein Suicide Squad, Abu Haydan Musawi, drove to the Syrian capital and met with the ambassador in his office at the Iranian embassy. The Lebanese explained that while they had no specific target in mind, they wanted to undertake a dramatic attack against their enemies—the Americans, the Phalange, or the Lebanese army.

Mohtashemi listened intently. “Yes, you should certainly concentrate your operations as much as possible on the U.S. forces, Phalange, or the Lebanese army,” he replied. Then the Iranian ambassador offered up a suggestion: “You should undertake an extraordinary operation against the U.S. Marines.”

Sayed liked the idea. It had not occurred to him, but a blow against the marines would undermine the entire American and Israeli designs in Lebanon. Mohtashemi instructed him to make sure that he coordinated his actions with Hezbollah, which meant Imad Mugniyah.

“Perhaps when this great mission is over, we could come to Iran,” Sayed asked excitedly. “Maybe we could even meet with Ayatollah Khomeini?”
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“You would be most welcome,” Mohtashemi said, rising to shake Sayed’s hand as he bid him good luck. “But the Iranian government cannot officially invite you. It is best we keep our distance publicly.”

Two days later, Ambassador Mohtashemi called Tehran and reported his meeting to the Iranian foreign minister. Al-Musawi’s proposal was debated by the senior official and Ayatollah Khomeini likely gave final approval for the attack.

The word came back to Mohtashemi approving “a spectacular action against the U.S. Marines.”

On October 18, Abu Haydan Musawi and twenty members of the Hussein Suicide Squad arrived in Beirut from Baalbek. Iran failed to provide enough explosives, so Abu Haydan Musawi met with a Palestinian contact about obtaining four thousand more pounds of explosives. The day following, three trucks showed up in front of the Islamic Amal office in Beirut loaded with his requisition. This amount of explosives far exceeded what could be packed inside a Lebanese car bomb, and the Musawi clan seemed ready to make good on its promise of a spectacular show.

A few days later, Mohtashemi made a telephone call to Baalbek. Speaking with a Revolutionary Guard officer, he passed on the order to proceed with the attack. In addition to the marines, however, he wanted the French peacekeepers attacked too. France had just sold Iraq advanced attack aircraft, the Super Étendards, and even deployed a military team to train and provide tactical advice to the Iraqi pilots. The government in Iran took a dim view of this abrogation of France’s neutrality, and French troops in Lebanon were now fair game. Islamic Amal agreed, in part because French aircraft had recently bombed Muslim forces in response to mortar attacks on their troops.

The Hussein Suicide Squad outfitted at least two trucks with thousands
of pounds of explosives and tanks of compressed gas to enhance the destructive power of the bomb. The detonators were connected near the steering wheel for easy access by drivers, enabling them to ignite their cargo even if wounded.

The likely man chosen for the attack on the marines was a familiar acquaintance of Sayeed Ali’s, Assi Zeineddine. His parents lived two buildings down from his, close enough that he could throw a rock to their apartment window from his balcony. Unlike Sayeed Ali, Zeineddine came from wealth. His father owned a string of small businesses and rental apartments. In school, Sayeed Ali recalled Zeineddine as a loud teenager with a funny, sarcastic sense of humor. How he was chosen remains unclear. Sayeed Ali does not recall that he was that much more devout than any of the other young men who joined Hezbollah. But as planning began for the martyrdom operations, Zeineddine’s handlers ensured that he stayed segregated from the other soldiers.
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American intelligence picked up on the conversations between the Iranian embassy in Damascus and the home office in Tehran. On September 27, the NSA issued a message that outlined the impending attack, a message that included the Iranian ambassador’s own damning words of “take a spectacular action against the U.S. Marines.” Unfortunately, the message never made it outside of a very limited intelligence channel, and those who did not have a “need to know” included Colonel Geraghty and those up the marine’s chain of command. On October 25, the director of naval intelligence raced up to the office of the chief of naval operations carrying the late September NSA message that outlined the impending attack. Unfortunately, this happened to be two days after the Hussein Suicide Squad had carried out its mission.
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I
t began as a typical Beirut morning. The sunrise dawned bright and beautiful. Since it was Sunday, the marines surrounding the airport had a more leisurely day scheduled. They remained a bit longer in their sleeping bags, grabbing an extra half hour of rest, and the normal six a.m. staff meeting at the battalion headquarters had been canceled. The day before, on October 22, 1983, a country-western band had entertained the marines and pizza had been flown in from a navy ship off the Lebanese coast. The marines occupied three buildings just off the main four-lane road leading to the Beirut airport
terminal. The band played in front of the large four-story building that housed the infantry battalion headquarters. Elevated off the ground floor by large columns, with an open atrium, the building had originally held the office for the Lebanese aviation administration. Now a bombed-out shell, the large plate-glass windows that had adorned the upper floors had been replaced by plastic sheets and plywood and reinforced by thousands of sandbags. But the concrete and steel structure remained solid and provided a modicum of protection against gunfire and mortars, and the senior marine commander, Colonel Timothy Geraghty, agreed to allow his subordinate battalion to concentrate his large administrative support unit in this one structure. Now some 350 marines slept in its dusty rooms beneath a large overhanging roof that protected them from the rain and the Mediterranean sun.