Beirut Rules: The Murder of a CIA Station Chief and Hezbollah's War Against America - Hardcover

Burton, Fred; Katz, Samuel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1101987464 ISBN 13: 9781101987469

Publisher: Berkley, 2018

Synopsis

From the New York Times bestselling coauthors of Under Fire--the riveting story of the kidnapping and murder of CIA Station Chief William Buckley.

After a deadly terrorist bombing at the American embassy in Lebanon in 1983, only one man inside the CIA possessed the courage and skills to rebuild the networks destroyed in the blast: William Buckley. But the new Beirut station chief quickly became the target of a young terrorist named Imad Mughniyeh.

Beirut Rules is the pulse-by-pulse account of Buckley's abduction, torture, and murder at the hands of Hezbollah terrorists. Drawing on never-before-seen government documents as well as interviews with Buckley's co-workers, friends and family, Burton and Katz reveal how the relentless search for Buckley in the wake of his kidnapping ignited a war against terror that continues to shape the Middle East to this day.

About this title

About the Author

Fred Burton is the author of Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent and coauthor with Samuel M. Katz of the New York Times bestseller Under Fire: The Untold Story of the Attack in Benghazi.

Samuel M. Katz is coauthor with Fred Burton of the New York Times bestseller Under Fire: The Untold Story of the Attack in Benghazi. He is also the author of The Ghost Warriors: Inside Israel's Undercover War Against Suicide Terrorism; Relentless Pursuit: The DSS and the Manhunt for the Al-Qaeda Terrorists; and The Hunt for the Engineer: How Israeli Agents Tracked the Hamas Master Bomber.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

 

The Preamble to Disaster

 

The shahada [martyrs] are the candles of society. They burn themselves out and illuminate society.

 

If they do not shed their light, no organization can shine.

 

-Iranian Ayatollah Morteza Mutaharri

 

The Israeli military headquarters in Tyre was a seven-story high-rise situated inland from the sea and controlled most of Israel's security and intelligence operations in southern Lebanon. The building was the administrative nerve center for Israel Defense Forces units operating in the area, and it housed two companies of Border Guard policemen as well. The Border Guards, Israel's paramilitary police arm, were in Lebanon to maintain law and order in the towns and villages of southern Lebanon. The policemen represented the mosaic of Israeli society and included Jews, Druzes, Bedouins, and Circassians. Many of the Border Guard personnel spoke Arabic, and many had spent careers policing a hostile population in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The building was more than just a military garrison. The Tyre facility was the Israeli intelligence hub in southern Lebanon. A'man, Israeli military intelligence, ran many of its human intelligence (HUMINT) operations. Handlers from the ultrasecretive Unit 504, the military intelligence unit that ran agents behind enemy lines, used the regional headquarters as a safe and comfortable location where assets could be debriefed and espionage endeavors coordinated.

 

The Shin Bet, Israel's domestic counterintelligence and counterterrorist agency, was also based inside the building. The Shin Bet was responsible for all counterterrorist investigations in southern Lebanon and for rounding up the last vestiges of Arafat's legions in southern Lebanon.

 

Business was booming for the Shin Bet. The basement holding cells were full of Lebanese and Palestinian men suspected of belonging to one popular front or another. The detained were often a remarkable source of information.

 

Many of the men serving inside the headquarters building were reservists-from Israel's citizen army, doing their annual thirty-day stint of call-up service. The reservists were a mixture of middle-aged men happy to have a few weeks away from wives and kids, and men young enough still to be in school, still trying to save enough to get married, and still holding on to dreams of lives out of uniform. Captain Dubi Eichnold, the commander of the Military Police investigative unit at the base, was preparing a small party for some of the officers that evening, November 11, 1982; it was to be a celebration to mark the halfway point of the reservist stint for him and his team. A small feast, including snacks and soft drinks, was being readied for the party. Everyone was itching to go home.

 

Captain Eichnold was already sitting with a few of his fellow officers in the mess hall at 7:00 that Thursday morning. The officers were in full kit, battle rattle at their sides. An electric space heater failed to mitigate the bone-numbing cold and the officers wore their olive green winter parkas as they guzzled cup after cup of army-issue rocket-fuel-grade coffee. Upstairs, the Border Guard's morning garrison was getting ready for morning roll call. Downstairs, the prisoners in the holding cell had already eaten. Some were in the middle of morning prayers.

 

The military policeman standing guard outside next to a small embankment of sand bags could hear the clanking of metal forks scraping plastic plates and he smelled the eggs cooking. He hoped that someone would bring him a cup of coffee soon. A white Peugeot 504 appeared from the west, speeding toward the headquarters building. The rain had intensified. The sky darkened.

 

 

At 7:15 on the morning of November 11, 1982, the Israeli military headquarters in Tyre collapsed in a blinding flash of light, the seven stories reduced to rubble beneath a rising plume of black smoke. At the time, more than a hundred Israeli soldiers, policemen, and spies had been inside the building; many of those not killed instantly became trapped inside tiny air pockets, their bodies bloodied by the explosion and debris. The Israel Defense Forces had little experience in pulling survivors out of a building hit by a catastrophic blast-there had never been a need; a terrorist might throw a hand grenade into a crowded cinema, but he didnÕt demolish a building. Rescues were done painstakingly by hand. Combat engineers were flown in, and helicopters shuttled the wounded to awaiting trauma care thirty-five miles away at the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa. The dead were removed, the shattered bodies covered with coarse, olive-colored blankets. Rain created puddles that formed cement-like patches of caked-together blood and dust. By nightfall, the magnitude of the calamity was apparent: sixty-seven IDF and Border Guard personnel were dead, along with nine Shin Bet agents and fifteen local detainees. November 11, 1982, was one of the deadliest days in Israeli military history.

 

Few understood it yet, but the attack represented a new struggle for Lebanon's soul-and one that would be pursued with a new tactic, suicide bombing. The man responsible for the destruction wasn't even a man yet. Ahmed Qasir was a fifteen-year-old boy when he drove the explosive-laden Peugeot 504 that destroyed the Israeli military headquarters. He had lived an unexceptional existence in the Shiite village of Dir Qanoun an-Nahr, located in the foothills ten miles north of Tyre-a setting more akin to the last century but beset by the horrors of twentieth-century destruction. He attended the local mosque, but left school after the fifth grade to work at his father's vegetable stall in the village market. According to reports, Ahmed was never a shooter-someone who took up arms against the Palestinians or the Israelis-but he did associate with local young men who carried their AK-47s openly, and he began to embrace the Khomeini-brand fanaticism-laced Shiite Islam.

 

Young and impressionable, Ahmed Qasir was obviously infatuated by the powerful and indomitable men in camouflage fatigues and Ray-Ban sunglasses. He felt a sense of pride and privilege being in their company, and a sense of duty when they asked him to carry out small-scale reconnaissance sorties in and around Beirut, smuggling armaments and monitoring the movements of Israeli patrols. Qasir soon began to borrow his father's truck for daylong assignments. He never had a driver's license and his feet barely reached the pedals. His father never knew where he was going, or what he was doing. On the morning of November 11, Qasir disappeared-never to be heard from again. His parents were certain that he had been kidnapped-possibly killed-by Christian militiamen.

 

Qasir's martyrdom should have been celebrated in Dir Qanoun an-Nahr. The old women of the village would have brought pots of food; the men, including village elders and the local imam, would have been huddled in the living room, drinking sweet tea with mint leaves and chain-smoking cigarettes while proudly gazing at a framed portrait of Ahmed Qasir displayed on a chair with red velvet cushions. But the notion of the boy's martyrdom had yet to be publicly revealed. The men who sent Ahmed Qasir on his mission, the men who purchased the Peugeot and wired it with explosives-including several members of Syrian intelligence and a few senior men who spoke Farsi-were able to convince the teenager that by blowing himself up, he would be reenacting the sacrifice of Imam Hussein, the core of the Shiite faith, and that as a result he would secure his spot in paradise. Yet the facilitators of this new brand of terror wanted to keep the Tyre operation a secret. Ahmed's parents wouldn't learn of their son's fate until two and a half years later, when a shrine to the martyr was built in Ba'albek. They did not know what would have motivated the youngster to perpetrate such an act.

 

Tehran's emissaries tasked with introducing to Lebanon the cult of the suicide bomber, a tactic that had become a common weapon in the Iran-Iraq War, were determined to redraw the map of the Middle East, a region engulfed in the flames of fundamentalist Islamic fervor. Ahmed Qasir would be the first of what was to be a legion of martyrs fighting both Israel and the United States. November 11, 1982, would be known as the Day of Martyrs.

 

 

There werenÕt supposed to be any martyrs, of course. Israel had never intended to be at war with LebanonÕs Shiites. On the morning of June 6, 1982, five months before the attack on the HQ in Tyre, sixty thousand Israeli troops crossed into Lebanon in a three-pronged invasion to remove the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure that threatened the residents of northern Israel. The objective of the incursion, claimed Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon, was to push Palestinian forces twenty-five miles to the north of the Israeli frontier. The Israeli operation was dubbed ÒPeace for Galilee.Ó

 

The war had erupted like many Middle Eastern bloodbaths-with a spark: pro-Iraqi terrorists from the Abu Nidal faction shot and almost killed Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador to London. In retaliation, Israeli warplanes attacked Palestinian terror targets throughout Lebanon; the Palestinians then launched rocket barrages against the towns and cities of Israel's north. The war to secure Galilee commenced.

 

The assassination attempt on the ambassador in London was nothing more than a pretext. For years Israeli intelligence had been working with Lebanon's Maronite Christians to initiate a new regime in Beirut that would rid the country of the Palestinian terrorist presence and launch a new Jewish-Christian alliance to reshape the Middle East for generations. And now, with bullets fired by an Abu Nidal gunman, Israel had the instigation it needed to invade Lebanon.

 

Full-scale wars in the Middle East never ended the way the politicians and generals intended. Syria's president Hafez al-Assad considered Lebanon to be a province of Greater Syria, and had permanently garrisoned thirty thousand of his troops inside the country. During Lebanon's civil war, the Syrians had protected their interests with brutal and cunning force, intervening to help the Palestinians and the Christians when Syrian concerns were threatened. Now war in Lebanon meant that Israel and Syria would engage in open conflict.

 

The campaign was hard fought and bloody, yet the Israel Defense Forces advanced quickly and decisively. Palestinian forces that stood to fight were overwhelmed by the mechanized might of the Israeli military; Syrian forces-even with the latest and greatest armor, missile systems, and aircraft that the Soviet Union could provide-proved no match for Israel's technological superiority. The Syrians were humbled in open warfare, and the Israelis reached the outskirts of Beirut in a matter of weeks. In the attempt to rid the country once and for all of the armed Palestinian presence, the IDF laid siege to Beirut, trapping some fourteen thousand of Arafat's men in the western-Muslim-half of the city. American-led international diplomacy worked out a deal wherein international peacekeepers-Italian naval infantrymen, French paratroopers, and US marines-secured the evacuation of Palestinian forces from Beirut. The heavily armed Palestinians were forced to board ships destined for Algeria, Tunisia, Iraq, Yemen, and the Sudan. Israeli officers looked on from the hills above the city.

 

On August 23, 1982, Bashir Gemayel, the military commander and political leader of the Lebanese Phalange Party, was elected the country's new president. Even though he was the only candidate, Gemayel's election gave many in the West high hopes for Lebanon. Perhaps, American and European diplomats wished, the Lebanese people would be offered a brief respite from the endless cycle of violence. The international peacekeepers withdrew from Beirut on September 10, having completed their mission efficiently, and without incident or casualty.

 

Hope can be a fleeting currency in the Middle East-especially in a nation repeatedly torn apart by religious enmity and outside manipulation. No plan, no matter how cunning or virtuous, ever works in the Middle East without an insurmountable toll of bodies and generations' worth of misery that would have to be avenged. Israel's grand scheme for its troubled northern neighbor soon imploded with extensive-and unstoppable-collateral damage.

 

 

On September 14, the Lebanese president-elect was in the middle of an address to followers in his Beirut headquarters when the room-along with much of the building-was decimated by nearly a quarter ton of high explosives. Three weeks after his election, Bashir Gemayel was dead. A Christian operative working at the behest of Syrian intelligence agents had placed the bomb in an apartment directly above the central meeting hall where Gemayel was speaking. The blast, as one Christian woman would later state, did not kill a man but murdered a country.

 

Rumors soon spread that the Palestinians had been responsible for Gemayel's murder, and rumors were enough to sound calls for vengeance. Retribution came fast and with untold carnage. Christian militiamen from Beirut and southern Lebanon converged on the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps and in two days of butchery killed between 760 and 3,500 men, women, and children in cold blood. The international peacekeepers, still on ships off the Lebanese coast, were forced to return to Beirut, this time to protect the Palestinian and Muslim residents and to try-impossibly-to initiate law and order in a city that had seen neither since civil war had erupted seven years earlier. US marines were responsible for the southern tip of Beirut, including the international airport and the Shiite slums; the French and Italians patrolled West Beirut. Israeli forces, faced with the onset of an inescapable quagmire, withdrew to the hills outside the city.

 

For several years the United States had feared that the situation in Lebanon could easily escalate into a full-scale Arab-Israeli war. War had nearly broken out in April 1981 when the Syrian military introduced Soviet-made surface-to-air batteries into Lebanon's Beka'a Valley; only tense shuttle diplomacy, spearheaded by US special envoy Philip Habib, stopped Israel from responding militarily. When Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982, the Reagan administration was divided on the war. Some, such as Secretary of State Alexander Haig, the former commander of NATO, understood that the conflict in Lebanon was an extension of the Cold War-Israel was a client of the West, while both Syria and Palestine were allies of the Warsaw Pact-and he supported Israel's push to eradicate the Palestinian terrorist base in Lebanon, as well as to rid the area of the Syrian military. Others, like Vice President George H. W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, pressed President Reagan to force the Israelis to halt their offensive and to impose sanctions if they didn...

Edition details

• Publisher: Berkley
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1101987464
• ISBN 13: 9781101987469
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400