Witnesses and Victims Recount Bombing

Bombing of U.S. Embassy in Beirut

News article

By: Terry A. Anderson

Date: April 23, 1983

Source: The Associated Press article "Witnesses and Victims Recount Bombing of U.S. Embassy in Beirut."

About the Author: Terry A. Anderson (1947–) was a chief Middle East correspondent for The Associated Press when, in 1983, he was kidnapped by a group of Hezbollah Shiite Muslims. He was eventually held for 2,454 days before being released. After being freed, Anderson actively publicized the right for freedom of the press, taught courses at Ohio University's E.W. Scripps School of Journalism and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, appeared on various radio and television shows as guest and host, and wrote the best-selling book Den of Lions that was based on his experiences as a captive.

INTRODUCTION

The United States embassy in Beirut, Lebanon was established in 1952 due to increased U.S. military and economic interests in the region. Beginning in 1975, the functions of the U.S. embassy were reduced, however, due to security concerns from Lebanon's Civil War. By 1982, the Lebanese government asked the U.S. government to establish a military peacekeeping force in Beirut that would help control friction between Muslims and Christians after Israel's invasion into Lebanon. The Muslim side, however, regarded U.S. soldiers as their enemies and frequently attacked them.

One major incident occurred at about 1:00 p.m. on April 18, 1983. The Hezbollah Islamic terrorists, a part of the Islamic Jihad, drove a truck carrying explosives under the front entranceway of the seven-story U.S. embassy. The suicide terrorists then exploded the vehicle—killing sixty-three people and injuring hundreds of others. Among the dead were eighteen Americans including Corporal Robert V. McMaugh, an embassy guard; Janet Lee Stevens, a journalist; several U.S. State Department officials and Army trainers; and all of the Middle East members of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), including the CIA's Middle East director.

The Hezbollah (or Party of God) is an Islamist terrorist organization that was formed by Lebanese Shiite Muslims in 1982 during the Lebanese Civil War in order to counter the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and to free the areas that were militarily occupied by Israel as a result of the war. The Hezbollah expanded its numbers, primarily with military support from Syria and Iran.

The terrorists reported that their attack on the embassy was in response to the intervention of the United States into the Lebanese Civil War. Specifically, their actions were inspired by the actions of the U.S. military in trying to restore peace and establish a governing body at the Shatilla and Sabra refugee camps after Lebanese and Israeli troops killed Palestinians.

PRIMARY SOURCE

Two Lebanese men were among the first to notice it—a black pickup truck driven by a man in a leather jacket. They watched it crash through a barricade and then erupt into a thunderous explosion. A normal, routine day at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut became a nightmare of death and horror. Here is how it was before and after it happened.

The wide, pleasant promenade along the edge of the Mediterranean was quiet. A few dozen people idled along or sat on the concrete benches across from the U.S. Embassy in the grey, cool lunch hour.

Some of the Embassy's recently enlarged staff had gone to lunch in nearby coffee shops and restaurants. Others were in the basement cafeteria. But most were still in their offices, running late for lunch or eating at their desks.

As people recounted it later, Monday, April 18, seemed to be a quiet, routine day at the United States Embassy in Beirut, a city that has seen war and death almost constantly since 1976.

Two Lebanese men standing across the street, waiting for friends who were applying for U.S. visas, saw a black pickup truck and its driver in a leather jacket speeding up the Embassy driveway. It crashed through a barricade.

On the top floor of the Embassy, U.S. Ambassador Robert Dillon was busy on the telephone in his office, simultaneously trying to change into a T-shirt to take a lunch-hour jog.

Dundas McCullough, a consular officer, was behind in his schedule because of the crush of visa applicants in the first-floor visa section in the north wing. Five to ten people were still waiting.

The two men watching from across the street saw the black pickup truck careening around the arc of the Embassy driveway.

On the fifth floor, consular officer Lisa Piasik, 26, of Dover, Del., had just arrived from her first-floor office for her weekly Arabic lesson.

Political officer Ryan Crocker and his wife and secretary, Christine, of Spokane, Wash., were at their desks on the fourth floor. Ryan was editing a telegram; Christine was finishing a cheeseburger.

In the third-floor information office, press officer John Reid of Staunton, Va., was working on a report for Washington.

Marine Lance Cpl. Robert McMaugh, 21, of Manassas, Va., was on duty at the main entrance, standing in a bulletproof glass booth in the lobby, behind a waist-high counter. Armed with a pistol, he was checking people into and out of the building, logging their names in a book.

The pickup truck had reached the front overhang of the Embassy.

It was 1:05 p.m. The truck exploded in a thundering blast of fire and smoke.

The front half of the Embassy's center wing disintegrated, and parts of seven floors collapsing onto the main entrance and lobby, crushing Lance Cpl. McMaugh and others.

Front walls of the bottom offices in the east wing and some in the west wing were blown in. Windows and doors throughout the building exploded in showers of glass and shards and pieces of wood.

More than a dozen cars parked in front of the building, in a vacant lot across the street and on the boulevard were smashed and thrown aside. Some burst into flames.

The driver of a Lebanese army personnel carrier panicked or miscalculated, crashing the heavy vehicle through the guardrail along the boulevard. It fell upside down into the edge of the Mediterranean Sea.

At last count by the Embassy, 47 people were killed. Embassy officials listed 17 of them as Americans—three U.S. Army personnel, Marine Cpl. McMaugh, a visiting freelance journalist and the rest Embassy staffers. The remaining 30 were Lebanese who worked in the Embassy. The Embassy count, however, does not include pedestrians and motorists passing by. Lebanese police put the total number of dead at 52, and two more Lebanese victims' bodies were recovered Saturday.

Judging by the damage to the building, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency suffered huge material losses in addition to a human toll that included at least one known CIA official.

While senior Embassy officials refused to comment on the exact location of CIA offices in the building, U.S. sources plus a general knowledge of the building indicate most if not all offices were in the grotesque tangle of concrete and plaster that broke off the front of the building and pan caked into the floors below.

CIA offices are said to have been on the Embassy's seventh floor, flanked by the communications room and the Defense Department offices, directly under the rooms housing the Marine guards and the ambassador's office.

In the Embassy itself, most survivors said they first heard a sound like thunder and rushing wind. Then came the blast.

"I realized my chin was on the counter and there was a big flash of light in front of me," said McCullough, the 25-year-old consular officer from Berkeley, Calif., whose office was just a few dozen yards from the explosion.

"Then the wall separating the file room from the waiting room fell on me and my interpreter.

"There was complete darkness, lots of dust. I struggled to stand erect. I thought what might kill me, aside from the explosion, was suffocation," he said a few days later, his voice trembling slightly.

When the air cleared, "there just wasn't much left," McCullough said.

The front part of the east wing, where his office was, had been blown open. "I had to make sure I didn't step off the edge."

A dead woman was buried in rubble. A badly wounded man was pinned down by a filing cabinet. As McCullough helped the man up, a Marine in a gas mask appeared in the hole where the stairs had been—part of the rescue crew that was gathering. What happened to the others in McCullough's office is unknown.

Stairs were still intact, all the way to the top floors. In smoke and dust so thick they could not see the people beside them, Embassy staffers made their way down, coughing, crying and helping the injured who could not walk. Marine guards helped them out a door on the back of the building.

Ambassador Dillon was pinned beneath rubble. His aide and his deputy used the staff of an American flag to pry him out and found him unhurt except for small cuts.

Both side wings in the front of the building were a mass of flames, spewing out greasy black smoke.

Students from the American University of Beirut, which is immediately behind the Embassy, were among the first to arrive. They and others began pulling people out of the carnage. Taxi drivers on the rubble-littered corniche stopped and the wounded were loaded into their vehicles and rushed to the university's hospital.

Most of the bodies were found in these areas, in the lobby and the basement cafeteria.

The grim search began. Most of the injured were found in minutes. The last live person was dragged out of the wreckage at 5 p.m., four hours after the blast.

"He was very glad to see us," commented one Red Cross worker.

Marines in the cordon around the building picked up the American flag from the ground and raised it on the flag pole, which survived the explosion.

The bodies continued to be found—for more than four days—as the tons of debris were slowly and carefully searched.

The Crockers, who had been on the fourth floor, and Miss Piasik, on the fifth for her Arabic lesson, were not injured, except for a few small cuts from flying debris.

Press officer Reid, pinned under a wall of his office before he managed to extricate himself, escaped with dozens of small cuts and bruises.

Four days after the bombing, the 43-year-old Reid looked up at the place where his office had been and marveled that he was still alive.

"You see where the searchlight has been put on the balcony?That's Maggie and Beth's office," he said, referring to his administrative assistant, Beth Samuels, and his secretary, MaggieTin, neither of whom was seriously injured.

"Then that next balcony, just behind that is the front of my office. And the next one that's gone is the back half of my office. That's where I was."

Cpl. McMaugh's body was recovered Thursday. Fellow Marines, refusing to allow Lebanese rescue workers near it, carefully draped it in an American flag and carried it away.

SIGNIFICANCE

The suicide bombing of the United States embassy in Beirut, Lebanon—thought to be the first suicide bombing experience of the United States—was considered, at the date of its occurrence, the most fatal attack of American personnel on a U.S. diplomatic facility. The U.S. government eventually moved the embassy to Awkar, which is located north of Beirut. However, in September 1984, a second bombing occurred at the new embassy site, killing eleven people. One month later—on October 23—a terrorist bombing occurred at a U.S. Marine barrack in Beirut, causing the death of 241 Americans. The embassy was closed that same month and all U.S. personnel were evacuated.

In the 1990s, the United States began to reestablish itself in Lebanon. After the embassy was reopened in 1990, American citizens were allowed to return to Lebanon in 1997, and services and positions within the embassy were steadily expanded in 1999.

In the post-September 11th era, United States government officials consider the two events—the Beirut embassy and Marine barrack bombings—the beginning of major, concerted attacks by Islamic groups against American facilities and personnel. In addition, because of these two events, the Inman Report, a report on overseas security, was performed by the U.S. Department of State to help clarify the terrorist situation in the Middle East.

By 2002, military analysts continued to debate the effects of the pullout of American troops from Beirut in 1983. Some terrorists today still claim that United States military troops will pull out of a country rather than fight back, if enough violence and death are inflicted upon them, and refer to the past conflicts in Beirut and Somalia to substantiate their claims. For instance, manuals found in al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan frequently referred to the 1983 experiences in Beirut.

Based in large part on the American experiences in Beirut, the U.S. military altered their philosophy in the 1980s when the Weinberger Doctrine stated that the United States would dedicate troops only when essential national interests were in jeopardy. Although the doctrine was modified over the next two decades, its impact was deeply felt throughout the U.S. military.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Anderson, Terry A. Den of Lions. New York: Crown, 1993.

Web sites

CNN.com. "20 Years Later, Lebanon Bombing Haunts America's First Encounter with a Suicide Bomb." <http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/10/21/lebanon.anniv.ap/> (accessed June 7, 2005).

Embassy of the United States: Beirut, Lebanon. "About the Embassy: U.S. Embassy Beirut Memorial." <http://lebanon.usembassy.gov/lebanon/beirut_memorial.html> (accessed June 7, 2005).

Federation of American Scientists. "The Innman Report." <http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/inman/> (accessed June 7, 2005).

Reader's Companion to Military History, Houghton Mifflin. "Weinberger Doctrine." <http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/mil/html/ml_057800_weinbergerdo.htm> (accessed June 7, 2005).