Intel on Beirut Marine Barracks Bombing Posted by Ilan Goldenberg

Yesterday was the 25 year anniversary of the Beirut Marine barracks bombing.  Via, Jeff Stein we get this sad piece of news.

"Unknown to us at the time, the National Security Agency had made a diplomatic communications intercept on 26 September ...  in which the Iranian Intelligence Service provided explicit instructions to the Iranian ambassador in Damascus (a known terrorist) to attack the Marines at Beirut International Airport," says Marine Col. Colonel Timothy J. Geraghty, writing in the latest issue of Proceedings, a publication of the U.S. Naval Institute.

"The suicide attackers struck us 28 days later, with word of the intercept stuck in the intelligence pipeline until days after the attack."

Of course, it's always easier to see these things in retrospect.  And gathering and analyzing signal intelligence really is a needle in the haystack operation.  It turns out that after just about every surprise attack, whether it be 9/11 or Pearl Harbor, there was information sitting in the intelligence stovepipe that could have stopped it.  But it's hard to find that information and piece it together.

Still, one has to wonder.  The marine barracks attack was one of the first modern acts of massive suicide terrorism.  It put Hezbollah on the map.  It acted as a blueprint for future Al Qaeda attacks such as the embassy bombing in Kenya and Tanzinia.  One has to wonder how things would have turned out if the plot had been stopped.

Comments

[David McCorkhill]

Ilan,

No needle-in-a-haystack guessing was required here. No second-guessing the bad decisions need be done.

Please go and read (or re-read) the Gray Commission Report. While it is a very flawed document, it will make it totally clear what the import of this revelation means: The Reagan Administration and its neocons were directly responsible for the deaths of those Marines.

Every one of the dead Marines knew they were likely to die. They knew exactly how the attack which killed them would take place. They knew precisely how it could have been prevented. And their commanders explicitly requested the changes that WOULD have prevented their deaths.

Their pleas were ignored. (OK, it's hard to call a Marine using the f-word five times in a single sentence a "plea," but that's what it was.) All they asked was that they be allowed to load their weapons and that their rules of engagement be changed so that they could fire on a truck bomb speeding towards them. Washington refused this request.

The improbable conclusion of the Gray Commission was that the highest ranks of the U.S. Marine Corps refused this request (for political reasons that did not bear directly on those high officers, but did bear on the civilians as the top of the Pentagon's org chart) without passing the requests any higher. Never a very likely scenario, this endorsement of high-ranking Marines' attempt to fall on their own swords to protect the Reagan administration is blown out of the water by this intercept.

This scenario requires that no one outside the Marine Corp itself ever heard about the threat to the Marines nor ever heard about what the Marines themselves had requested be done about that threat. Even before this particular revelation, there were two prominent facts which argued against it:

1) The Commander-in-Chief, Forces in Europe (the man who was in charge of all our troops in NATO and the in the Middle East) was outside the Marine chain of command, but directly responsible for the military mission in Beirut. Because he was wearing an additional hat (CINCNAVEUR, Commander-in-Chief, Naval Forces in Europe) he had direct operational responsibilities over the operation in Beirut. "Naval forces in Europe" included the Marines (which are technically part of the Navy) and his entire staff paid a visit to take a look at the operation in Beirut. The idea that this visit could have taken place (while the Marines were begging their superiors in Washington to be allowed to put bullets in their guns) without any mention of the rules-of-engagement problem beggars the imagination. It is particularly difficult to believe when you consider that the rules of engagement (which those Marines believed were very likely to cause their deaths) were written by CINCNAVEUR lawyers (I don't know this from personal knowledge, but I have a first-hand report from one of the lawyers).

2) Shortly before the barracks bombing, there was a bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut (also guarded by Marines under identical rules of engagement) which used virtually identical tactics (a truck bomb driven by a suicide bomber). Following that bombing, the rules of engagement were changed so that the Marines stationed at the embassy could have loaded weapons and could fire on heavily laden trucks careening through the barricades towards them. But the same countermeasures were EXPLICITLY PROHIBITED at the Marine barracks. Many of us find it impossible to believe that such a distinction could be made without the knowledge of those outside the Marine Corps. Remember, the embassy bombing was big news, and it immediately made the security of the Marines big news as well.

We have to start with a thoroughgoing understanding of the situation in Lebanon. The country was occupied by the Israelis. Palestinian refugee camps, surrounded by Israeli soldiers, had been the victims of genocidal attacks. These attacks did not come from the Israelis, but have been attributed to roving bands associated with Christian militias. The international community became concerned that the Israelis could not be trusted to protect the Palestinians (their mortal enemies, whose liberation movement had been the target of their invasion in the first place).

So an American-French peacekeeping force was devised. Each country contributed about 500 troops. Because the Marines do not usually operate on independent command in forces smaller than around 1,000, a detached brigade (essentially a brigade with the officer complement more appropriate to a regiment) was deployed.

Mission creep set in.

Within a few months, the hawks in the administration (people we would today call "neocons") had allied with the Christian militias in Lebanon and with the Likud faction in Israel. By default, U.S. policy became associated with Phalangism and with Sharonism (particularly by the people of Beirut). The rules of engagement for the Marines were written to prohibit the Marines from firing first. Indeed, even after taking fire, they were not allowed to return fire until they had first contacted the Lebanese Army and requested that the Lebanese deal with the problem. If the Lebanese refused to take action, the Marines were allowed to load their weapons and return fire. (Remember, in the context of a truck bomb, by the time you have taken "fire" you have already lost.)

In effect, the Marines were required to operate under rules of engagement designed for a very passive peacekeeping role (why were Marines chosen for such a mission, anyway?) even though the highest levels of the Reagan administration had quietly sided with one side in a multi-sided conflict. To make things even more confusing, the Lebanese Army of this period had many connections to some of the Christian militias. Thus, in a sorta obtuse sense, we had become allied with the groups whose atrocities we had been sent in to prevent.

In this context, the hawks in the Reagan administration had a strong motivation not to acknowledge the change in our mission. Thus a change in our rules of engagement which reflected that surreptitious change in mission could potentially "out" the mission creep they had engineered.

A broader context is relevant here as well: Beirut was the first military mission in a combat zone since the Vietnam War. Our forces were eager to show that Vietnam was not the defining moment for the American military. One of Reagan's undeniable accomplishments was the restoration of pride which he had been able to bring about in our armed forces.

A rare opportunity in a military which had seen very little opportunity to prove what it could. Dog-and-pony shows were commonplace. Every senior officer who could get his name associated with the operation in Beirut (before that operation went sour) wanted to have a reference in his record to an actual combat zone -- something a competitor for promotion might not have. That was, in part, the reason for the CinC, Forces in Europe's visit.

One Marine asked a question on that visit: "They won't ****ing let me put any ****ing bullet in ****ing rifle; what am I ****ing supposed to ****ing do when they ****ing drive a ****ing truck bomb at my ****ing post?"

That question has not been answered adequately to this day. But this intercept proves that people outside the Marine chain of command knew of his plight. Maybe now we can ask them why they didn't do anything about it, especially when it is so relevant to their failures in Iraq (where again the successes of American forces have been grotesquely undermined by the failures of American politicians).

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