When Iran talks about the wrongs done to it by the US, it reels off America’s support for the establishment of Israel after WWII, the coup d’etat in ‘53 that unseated the democratically elected Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, the long years backing the Shah and his ruthless Savak secret police, the assistance given by the US to Iraq in the 8-year war against it (that the US has long denied), in which over a million people were killed, and the shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655 by two missiles fired by the USS Vincennes.
The US counter-gripes center on the Iran Hostage Crisis, followed by the truck bomb that killed hundreds of its (essentially) unarmed Peacekeepers in Beirut in an unprovoked (as far as America was concerned) Iranian-sponsored attack, the subject of Part 4 of this series.
Why is this relevant to what’s happening today in the Middle East? Because October 23, 1983, is when Iran made it known to the US that it was more than capable of pulling the strings and fully intended to do so.
Last week, the US launched what it called “precision self-defense strikes” against Iranian-backed fighters in Syria that had recently attacked US installations in the area and wounded American service personnel. On October 19th, Iranian-backed Houthi separatists in Yemen began firing Iranian-made cruise missiles and drones targeting Israel. (While these were shot down by a US Navy destroyer in the Gulf, the Houthis have since stepped up their airborne attacks, and several missiles and drones have struck their mark.) Since October 17th, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah organization in Lebanon has been firing missiles (it reportedly has over 150,000 of them) over the border at Israeli positions, the tempo and frequency of these attacks increasing. And Hamas, the ruling political party in Gaza, is Iranian-backed, along with Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which also took part in the raid into Israel on October 7th, killing and maiming and taking hostages, the attack that kicked off this latest sorry tale in Israeli-Palestinian relations.
The common thread is “Iranian-backed.”
In short, Iran is up to its neck in the agony that regularly grips the region with its so-called Axis of Resistance proxy forces.
Now, as I write, the war in the region appears poised to spread. The territory it seems most likely to spread to is Lebanon. As you’ll read, we’ve been here before, folks, and it’s not pretty.
— David
PS: In previous parts of this series, I’ve avoided naming the people involved so as not to get bogged in the detail. Today, however, I’m naming names because the following events are better described using a more intimate lens.
October 23, 1983.
The sky is clear and blue when the sun finally comes up on Sunday morning, and the world has gone unusually quiet. Even the guns in the Shouf, the mountains overlooking Beirut, are silent. Birdsong is in the air.
But then the sound of a 19-ton truck, a yellow water tanker, the kind that usually carries water to the US Marines’ Battalion Landing Team (BLT) building, rises to the ears of Lance Corporal Eddie DiFranco manning Post 7 outside the BLT compound that faces the public parking lot.
Later, Cpl DiFranco will attest that he saw a similar truck circling the public parking lot around an hour earlier, which departed. Was it the same truck reconnoitering the Marines’ lightweight security arrangements?
Whether it’s the same truck or not, after circling the lot this time, this yellow truck accelerates, straightens, and crashes through the barbed wire barrier separating the parking lot from the Marines’ compound.
DiFranco is stunned. He takes a few seconds to overcome the shock of what his eyes are telling him. He sees the truck’s driver – male, heavily bearded, wearing a dark blue or green shirt. The Marine shrugs the M-16 off his shoulder, but there’s no round in the chamber in line with the Rules of Engagement (RoE) to which these United Nations Peacekeepers must adhere. He first needs to lock and load the weapon. By the time he gets this done, the truck is past him and heading through the gate in the chain link fence, barreling for the Marines Battalion Landing Team barracks (the building pictured above).
On this morning, Sergeant Steve Russell is the sergeant of the guard, a tough, 24-hour-long duty that has him manning the guard shack, a plywood box with a double sandbagged wall directly in front of the BLT barracks’ entrance.
Russel hears the truck once it has passed DiFranco as it leaps through the gate in the fence. It’s coming straight toward him at around 35 miles an hour.
Before his mind tells him to act, Russell’s legs are pumping. He turns and runs into the building. He sees a jogger and yells, “Get the fuck outta here!”
Once inside the building, he has enough time to scream, “Hit the deck! Hit the deck.”
Inside the Battalion Landing Team building and mostly sleeping are around 350 young men, the majority under 25.
When it explodes, the force of the blast, coupled with the bomb’s perfect placement in the atrium, severs the bases of the building’s supporting reinforced concrete columns and lifts the entire structure into the air several meters
Russell exits the rear of the building, turning in time to see the truck smash through the guard shack in a billowing cloud of plywood and sand. It finally comes to a stop, gently rocking on its springs inside the building itself, in the foyer beneath the atrium, a cavernous internal floor-to-ceiling open space that provides access and light to all four floors of the building.
Russell sees the driver, and the driver sees Russell. And then the driver smiles. Russell later says the truck driver gave him a “shit-eating grin.”
At that point, Sergeant Russell remembers seeing a “bright orange flash at the grill of the truck” and feeling “a wave of intense heat and a powerful concussion.” He is the only man to witness the detonation.
The truck is carrying a load the equivalent of 12,000 lbs of explosives — a military-grade bursting explosive called Pentaerythritol tetranitrate or PETN, which is wrapped around multiple canisters of pressurized butane gas. When it explodes, the force of the blast, coupled with the bomb’s perfect placement in the atrium, severs the bases of the building’s supporting reinforced concrete columns and lifts the entire structure into the air several meters. When it falls, the building collapses in on itself through the rising butane gas fireball, burying the men inside beneath tons of concrete, rebar steel, and flames.
The time is 6:22am.
Four kilometers away, set up before dawn on a hill with a clear view of the airport, a man with a camera takes a picture thirteen seconds after he hears the penetrating thud of the massive blast, capturing the atomic-bomb-like mushroom cloud that rolls into the sky above the destruction.
The Iranian bomber and the 19-ton Dodge truck are vaporized. Two hundred and twenty Marines of Battalion Landing Team (BLT) 1/8 are killed, together with eighteen sailors, three soldiers, and one Lebanese civilian. Seventy-five are injured, many seriously.
A later FBI investigation concludes that the blast is the most enormous non-nuclear explosion ever recorded. This is the deadliest single day for the Marines since the World War II battle of Iwo Jima.
A few men painfully, slowly claw their way out from under the debris. Far more are trapped beneath, compressed between concrete slabs and impaled on rebar.
Many of the men who do make it out turn back into the smoke and the choking dust to rake their bare hands in the rubble, digging for comrades whose cries and screams can be heard, muffled and suffocated, drifting up like smoke from somewhere below the tangled nests of tormented steel and chunks of concrete.
Chunks of concrete are strewn across a massive blast radius together with mangled bodies and parts of bodies. At ground zero is a rectangular crater thirty-nine feet by twenty-nine feet and eight feet eight inches deep
Marines who were not in the building but billeted elsewhere, close by at the Marines’ Services and Support Group, race to the scene, past trees stripped of branches and leaves cradling gruesome remnants of human beings.
The air is full of the distinctive stench of the PETN explosive. Initially, the consensus is that the BLT has taken a direct hit from something very big. The damage is so extensive some wonder if the USS New Jersey cruising offshore might have fired a short round.
Chunks of concrete are strewn across a massive blast radius together with mangled bodies and parts of bodies. At ground zero is a rectangular crater thirty-nine feet by twenty-nine feet and eight feet eight inches deep.
Sergeant Steve Russell, whose last memory was of flame sprouting from the yellow Dodge’ grille, slowly drifts up from unconsciousness. When he has some sense of his surroundings, he is confused, vaguely aware that something catastrophic has happened, but also in denial, in disbelief. He is covered in dust, concrete chunks, and tangled rebar. The pain in his body is intense. He glances at his leg bent at an unnatural angle, as is his foot. And there’s a lot of blood. His left hand is raw, the muscle and bones exposed, the skin flayed.
Russell doesn’t yet know it, but he has a broken left femur, a fractured ankle, and a cracked pelvis. His left leg is slit open from knee to ankle. But he is among the few who have survived.
Somewhere nearby but unseen, somewhere below, within the chaos of the wrecked building, voices are begging, “God, help me…” Others whimper for their mothers. Also beneath the rubble is the familiar pop-pop-pop of small arms ammunition cooking off.
More and more Marines arrive at the scene. Three minutes after the blast, the rescue effort begins in earnest. For the men who arrive and see a hole where a large building previously stood, it takes time for the shock to pass and reality to reassert itself.
Just three hours after the truck bomb flattens the Marines’ barracks, the last survivor, Chaplain Danny Wheeler, is pulled from the rubble.
Over at the Port of Beirut, at 6.32am, the French Paratroopers of the United Nations Multinational Force (MNF) are involved in desperate rescue attempts of their own, as their barracks has also been destroyed by a truck bomb, albeit a device half the size of the one that has leveled the Marines’ BLT building. In all, fifty-eight French paratroopers are killed, along with six civilians.
Elsewhere in Beirut, Damascus, and Tehran, there are celebrations of a significant victory. The coordinated attack, carefully planned by the joint resources of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Lebanese Shia extremists, has succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. However, the bomber of the French barracks was less effective in his mission as he was shot and killed by nervous French Paratroopers with different RoE to the Americans, his vehicle detonating before it could make contact with the building, grinding to a stop within 15 meters of it.
In Lebanon, an Arab-speaking newspaper receives an anonymous call from the group Islamic Jihad claiming responsibility for the joint attacks on the US and French forces. It is the same group that claimed responsibility for the car bombing of the US Embassy back in April (see Part 3 of this series).
In Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini is reportedly delighted. Central to his aims is an end to the Western, and especially the American, presence in Lebanon and to establish Iran's image as the leader of the world's radical, anti-Western, anti-American Muslim movement. The successful bombing of the Marines and French Peacekeepers is a tangible step toward achieving these aims. His personal decision to dispatch considerable human resources to Lebanon to incite terror is paying off.
The Ayatollah’s list of grievances against the US is long, but lately, he is furious over the Iranian intelligence assessment that has the US not just green-lighting Iraq’s invasion of Iran but, indeed, actively provoking the war which is killing hundreds of thousands of his people. The US is also frustrating Iran’s attempts in the United Nations Security Council to name Iraq as the war’s aggressor and punish the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. On top of this, Washington is extending $2.5 billion to Iraq in trade credits, freeing up capital so that Saddam can purchase even more arms and weapons with which to kill Iranians. Finally, adding insult to injury, the US is continuing to refuse to ship the weapons to Iran that were purchased by the Shah before the revolution.
CIA and Mossad, the Israeli secret service, identify the Shia Amal renegade Imad Mughniyeh — aka “Castro” — (see Part Three of this series) as having planned and directed the bombings in concert with Iranian IRGC commander Mostafa Mohammad-Najar.
Investigations by the CIA trace the movement of the yellow water truck prior to the bombing to a garage in East Beirut, where some mechanical work was undertaken before the attack was launched. From this lead, CIA agents identity the bomber: a 21-year-old Iranian national named Ismalal Ascari.
Later, the NSA will uncover a communique from IRCG in Tehran to Iran’s Ambassador to Syria, Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour. This communique, which passed days before the bombing, urged Mohtashamipour to “…take spectacular action against the American Marines.”
Later, the NSA will uncover a communique from the IRCG in Tehran to Iran’s Ambassador to Syria, Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour. This communique, which passed days before the bombing, urged Mohtashamipour to “…take spectacular action against the American Marines.”
Confirming the Damascus connection to the bombing, US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger confuses the intelligence, stating that the attack on the Marines was carried off with “the sponsorship, knowledge, and authority of the Syrian government.”
In 1987, Moshen Rafighdoost, chief of Ayatollah Khomeini’s security during the early days of the revolution and, later, one of the founding members of the IRGC, will claim that “…both the [explosives] and ideology behind the attacks that sent American officers and soldiers to hell in the US Marines command base in Beirut came from Iran.”
Two days after the bombing, the US Marines of the 22d MAU (the unit that preceded the Marines bombed in Beirut) take part in the successful invasion of Grenada. There are press claims that the invasion, more than likely on the drawing boards for a while, is a Presidential diversion from the disaster in Beirut. But what rankles the Marines in Beirut is that service in Grenada, a cakewalk, is considered combat duty, whereas service in the deadly Lebanese conflict is most definitely not.
Within two weeks of the bombing, the US Department of Defense launches an investigation (the Long Commission) into the Beirut bombing.
Replacements for the shattered BLT 1/8 begin arriving by air the day following the bombing. By mid-November, the 22d MAU will have returned from Grenada to replace the remnants of the shattered BLT 1/8, but not before one of the biggest, most concerted firefights between Marines and Shia takes place, again at the Lebanese University (see Part 3 of this series), a site of no real strategic importance. One Marine is lightly wounded in the firefight and untold numbers of Shia militiamen are killed and wounded.
In Washington, the confrontations continue between Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State George Shultz over whether there should be reprisals against the perpetrators of the bombing, Weinberger arguing forcefully against it. If any reprisals are launched against the perpetrators of the Marines’ bombing, they are never made public. The French Air Force, however, bombs a known Iranian training camp in the Bekaa Valley, obliterating it.
December 1983 rolls around, and the 22nd MAU finally receives permission from the military hierarchy, against the wishes of Shultz’s State Department, to dig in at the Beirut Airport. An extensive warren of earth and concrete bunkers are installed, along with buried Soviet shipping containers stolen from the Port of Beirut that provide the men with impromptu emergency bomb shelters. Nevertheless, 8 Marines are killed and 2 wounded when a Druse artillery battery firing from the Shouf scores a direct hit on a Marine combat post.
Walid Jumblatt, leader of the Druse says, “The Americans are here. Why are they here? They should be careful what they do, or they might be drawn in. Perhaps that’s what America wants. But they should know, Beirut is a dangerous place.”
The USS New Jersey, the world’s largest and most powerful battleship, a survivor of the Second World War, now modernized and upgraded, is called on to fire its guns for the first time in retaliation for the attack. The behemoth pumps eleven, one-ton high-explosive shells from its massive 16-inch guns at the Druse artillery positions in the Shouf, silencing them.
In the months leading up to the bombing of the barracks, there were no active patrols to demonstrate the Marines’ “presence” mission in Beirut due to the danger posed to the men. With the new bunkers installed at the Beirut Airport, there is no longer even lip service paid to the Marines’ purpose for being in Beirut, other than an attempt by the Reagan administration to head off claims in an election year that the US excursion to Lebanon has been a farce. Reagan is acutely aware of his personal capital squandered in pulling the Marines out. He knows that he’ll be accused of “cutting and running.” So he keeps the Marines in place.
December sees the release of a 140-page public version of the Long Commission (the investigation into the bombing of the barracks). It duplicates many of the findings of the Intelligence Support Activity team report that followed the bombing of the US Embassy just six months previously, most significantly that the Marines’ RoE were woefully inadequate to the task handed the Marines and that they failed to account for the threat of a terrorist attack, a type endemic in Lebanon at the time (i.e., vehicles used as bombs). The report also blames the Marines’ commanding officer, Colonel Tim Geraghty — unfairly, many believe — for billeting 350 Marines in the one structure, though the building was appropriate to the initial threat environment of indirect fire.
Other commission findings include:
Inadequate chain of command
Once the Israelis left, there was no force present to stop militias operating at will
The political environment required to maintain a viable peacekeeping mission had deteriorated to the point where it simply didn't exist
US military training was inadequate to the task of defense against asymmetrical terrorist attack
Early in January, the conflict takes a new and dangerous twist when the US conducts its first air raids on Syrian positions in the Shouf, retaliation for Syrian fire directed at US aerial reconnaissance, and two aircraft are downed. One pilot is killed, and the other is taken prisoner in an undeclared, rapidly escalating war breaking out between the US and Syria.
In January, a White House spokesman makes ambiguous remarks attempting to clarify the US role in Lebanon, which is by now clearly pointless. Meanwhile, though the Marines keep attempting to defend themselves, another Marine is killed while exiting a helicopter by an unidentified sniper.
After months of investment in a personal quest, US Senator Charles Percy announces that military authorities have been persuaded to reclassify American service fatalities in Lebanon as “combat related” rather than “non-battle” and “accidental.”
On February 3rd, the long-anticipated collapse of the minority Phalange Lebanese government occurs. It’s an event that only serves to exacerbate the violence in the city as the multitude of factions, all with their own armed militias, work towards maximum advantage and therefore leverage in any ensuing negotiations when power is divided among them.
The heaviest fighting takes place in the streets of Beirut as Phalange and Muslim militia capture most of the city. And then the inevitable happens. On February 7th, 1984, President Reagan announces that the Marines are to be redeployed to their ships, leaving behind only a small contingent to provide security for the US Embassy.
As a final hurrah, the USS New Jersey hurls 266 massive high-explosive shells at Druse positions in the hills and Syrian targets in the Bekaa Valley. Later, eyewitnesses in the Shouf will claim that not a single Druse target is hit. The same can’t be said for the Bekaa Valley, where 30 shells rain down on the Syrian command post killing the general commanding Syrian forces.
With the US gone, Lebanon President Gemayel bends to Syrian pressure and formally abolishes the landmark May 17 Agreement between Lebanon and Israel celebrated by the White House that recognizes each other’s sovereignty. It’s the agreement championed by the United States that Gemayel’s brother Bashir agreed to and was subsequently assassinated for signing.
In Damascus, Iran’s Ambassador to Syria, Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, survives an assassination attempt when he opens a book about Shia holy places, which is filled with explosives. The blast severely wounds him and blows off his right hand.
A further sixteen years of civil war lie ahead for Lebanon.
In the home of the Marines, Camp Lejeune, South Carolina, on the first anniversary of the BLT bombing, a monument is dedicated to the Marines who died.
And in Tehran, at the Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards unveil a monument in 2004 to the “Martyrs of the Islamic World” in “honor” of the terrorist attacks on the BLT and French forces.
Imad Mughniyeh and Hezbollah brag that they chased the United States out of Lebanon after beating the Marines on the ground in Beirut.
Mughniyeh makes the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, and a $5 million bounty is placed on his head. In a joint operation involving the CIA and Mossad, he is assassinated in 2008 in Damascus as he strolls unsuspecting past his Nissan Pajero, the vehicle’s spare tire packed with explosives. A CIA eyewitness to the bombing later described with some delight that the explosion “tore his body to shreds, lifting it into the air and depositing his burning torso 15 feet away on the apartment building’s lawn.”
At the time of his assassination, Mughniyeh is reporting to IRCG Chief of Al Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, who is also a personal friend of the wanted killer. Soleimani’s father represents the Lebanese “freedom fighter” at his funeral.
Soleimani is himself assassinated by a President Trump-approved US drone strike in Iraq in January 2020.
In the Middle East, it’s a brutal truth that what goes around comes around.
Next week, TORTURE, Part 5 of this series, looks at the CIA’s activities in the aftermath of the events in Beirut during 1983-’84, Mossad’s various campaigns of assassination, and the singling out of Iran by the United States for payback.
Don’t touch that dial!
— David
Thanks for that, Panda. Yes, you're absolutely on the money, as always. The other major event was the military exercise Able Archer 83, which the Soviets mistook for the prelude to a US pre-emptive strike. Fun times.
Exceptional piece. My next door neighbor in Alexandria, VA was a Navy LTCDR in Public Affairs stationed on BB-62 at the time. David's narrative tracks with what the neighbor told me when he returned from that deployment. However, nothing of this nature ever happens in a vacuum. To get a complete picture of what was going on at the time, one needs to be aware of the environment in the States. For example, the fallout from a sequence of events listed below had everyone behaving like they were over caffinated:
1. Fallout from the Iranian hostage release as those personnel returned to duty -- 20 Jan 81
2. The attempted assassination of the President which left him wounded -- 30 Mar 81
3. Near accidental launch of a Soviet retaliatory missile strike -- 26 Sept 83
4. KA 007 shootdown -- 1 Oct 83
5. Assassination attempt against president of South Korea by NK Peoples Army officers in Rangoon --
9 Oct 83 (21 dead 46 wounded including many public officials)
5. U.S. Marine Barracks, Beirut, Lebanon -- 23 Oct 83
6. US invades Grenada -- 25 Oct 83
7. US deploys cruise missiles to UK in response to deployment of Soviet SRBMs -- 14 Nov 83
As you can see Beirut was center stage only for those that were there. In fact, 1983 , it has been argued, was the most dangerous year of the Cold War.