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A Massive Explosion

On Sunday morning, 23 October 1983, I awoke as usual at dawn, dressed, and went below to the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit's Combat Operations Center to check the overnight communications traffic. I roamed outside my headquarters at Beirut International Airport to view the dawn, struck by the quiet of the morning. I saw Marines going about their duties and greeted others preparing for a workout. Being Sunday, we were on a modified routine that pushed reveille back an hour to 0630, with Sunday brunch served between 0800 and 1000.

I returned to my office, which I shared with my executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Harry Slacum, to review the daily schedule. Little did we know that this morning would be anything but quiet and routine. At 0622, a massive explosion rocked our headquarters, followed by enormous shock waves. Shards of glass from the blown out windows, equipment, manuals, and papers flew across the room. The office entry door, located on the far side away from the explosion, was blown off its hinges, the frame bent and the reinforced concrete foundation of the building cracked.

I ran outside to find myself engulfed in a dense, gray fog of ash, with debris still raining down. I felt sickened as I stumbled around to the rear of my headquarters, thinking we had taken a direct hit from a Scud missile or heavy artillery. As the acrid fog began lifting, my logistics officer, Major Bob Melton, gasped, "My God, the BLT building is gone!" A knot tightened in my gut.

After an instant of disbelief, I quickly realized we had suffered heavy casualties. I later learned that a suicide driver penetrated our southern perimeter and rammed a 19-ton truck bomb into the lobby of the Marine Battalion Landing Team (BLT) building and detonated it. Forensics and intelligence later estimated the compressed-gas-enhanced device to have an explosive equivalent in excess of 20,000 pounds of TNT. Minutes later, a similar truck bomb struck the French paratrooper headquarters at Ramlet-El-Baida, bringing down a nine-story building and killing 58 French peacekeepers.

This started the longest and most miserable day of my life. The death toll eventually reached 241 Marines, Sailors, and Soldiers, the highest loss of life in a single day since D-Day on Iwo Jima in 1945. The coordinated dual suicide attacks, supported, planned, organized, and financed by Iran and Syria using Shiite proxies, achieved their strategic goal: the withdrawal of the multinational force from Lebanon and a dramatic change in U.S. national policy. The synchronized attacks that morning killed 299 U.S. and French peacekeepers and wounded scores more. The cost to the Iranian/Syrian-supported operation was two suicide bombers dead.

The introduction of suicide truck bombs as a tactic in Beirut in 1983 proved to be an effective if heinous tool. The bottom line is that they worked, and recent history has confirmed their cruel efficiency and huge cost in innocent lives. These attacks were cynically planned to ensure success for the terrorists and cause massive casualties.

Retaliation For The Beirut Bombing U.S. President Ronald Reagan called the attack a "despicable act" and pledged to keep a military force in Lebanon. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who had privately advised the administration against ever having stationed U.S. Marines in Lebanon, said there would be no change in the U.S.'s Lebanon policy. On October 24 French President François Mitterrand visited the French bomb site. It was not an official visit, and he only stayed for a few hours, but he did declare: "We will stay." U.S. Vice President George H. W. Bush toured the Marine bombing site on October 26 and said the U.S. "would not be cowed by terrorists." In retaliation for the attacks, France launched an airstrike in the Beqaa Valley against alleged Islamic Revolutionary Guards positions. President Reagan assembled his national security team and planned to target the Sheik Abdullah barracks in Baalbek, Lebanon, which housed Iranian Revolutionary Guards believed to be training Hezbollah fighters. A joint American-French air assault on the camp where the bombing was planned was also approved by Reagan and Mitterrand. Defense Secretary Weinberger, however, lobbied successfully against the missions. Besides a few shellings, there was no serious retaliation for the Beirut bombing from the Americans. In December 1983, U.S. aircraft attacked Syrian targets in Lebanon, but this was in response to Syrian missile attacks on planes, not the barracks bombing. In the meantime, the attack gave a boost to the growth of the Shi'ite organization Hezbollah. Hezbollah denied involvement in the attacks but was seen by Lebanese as involved nonetheless as it praised the "two martyr mujahideen" who "set out to inflict upon the U.S. Administration an utter defeat not experienced since Vietnam ..." Hezbollah was now seen by many as "the spearhead of the sacred Muslim struggle against foreign occupation". Amal militia leader Nabih Berri, who had previously supported U.S. mediation efforts, asked the U.S. and France to leave Lebanon and accused the U.S. and France of seeking to commit 'massacres' against the Lebanese and creating a "climate of racism" against the Shia. Islamic Jihad phoned in new threats against the MNF "pledging that 'the earth would tremble' unless the MNF withdrew by New Year's Day 1984.

The post-bombing investigation conducted by FBI Special Agent Danny Deffenbaugh revealed computations and technical assessment of the device (bomb) and the high explosive used-pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN). Deffenbaugh also identified canisters of compressed butane gas contained in the bed of the truck with the PETN. This enhancement of the explosive, also found at the earlier U.S. embassy attack, indicated the Iranians were trying to create a fuel-air explosive. This creates a shocking effect with a propagation wave that produces additional heat and takes away the oxygen twice as fast. An explosives expert stated that this effect verified the anti-personnel purpose of the attack. It also explained the reason why so many dead and wounded suffered severe burns.

In describing the destructive strength of the bomb, Deffenbaugh verified publicly what was briefed to us privately by the FBI and others-that the immensity of the bomb precluded the necessity of the truck bomb reaching the building. I was informed that the truck did not even have to leave the airport access road adjacent to the western side of the BLT building to have comparable devastation and casualties. The suicide bomb that killed the French paratroopers did not reach their headquarters before it detonated but still caused the collapse of the nine-story structure.

More telling was the successful suicide attack on Israeli headquarters in Tyre, Lebanon, on 4 November 1983, just ten days after the attack on U.S. and French peacekeepers. Even though the Israelis had none of the restrictions of a presence mission and nothing that would hinder their extensive intelligence capabilities, they were struck with a carbon-copy attack ten days after our attack. It should be noted that the Israelis had many of the defenses the Marines were criticized for not having at Beirut International Airport. Still, the terrorist attack was successfully carried out-killing 60 and injuring 30 more-even though the suicide truck was halted well short of the target.

Members of the intelligence community compiled an all-sources damage assessment after the Marine barracks bombing. In it, they studied signals, overhead, and human intelligence and concluded the evidence was overpowering that Iran had been behind it. An intelligence expert close to the final assessment stated he did not know anyone who studied the information and drew any other conclusion.

Beyond carnage, suicide bombings provide grand theater by way of international press coverage. Since their genesis in Beirut, such attacks have grown to becoming a weapon of choice for Shia and Sunni alike. This tactic carries a profound psychological message of fear and intimidation. I believe reasonable observers agree that such attacks are very difficult to deter, and their increased usage and success reflect the terrorists' desire for the spectacular hysteria and chaos created by such attacks.

The Multinational Peacekeeping Force presence in Lebanon in 1982-83 undoubtedly contributed to the stability of the government of Lebanon and saved lives. Our successes, albeit limited, were obviously worrisome enough to the primary powerbrokers in Tehran and Damascus to compel them to launch the suicide truck bombing operations against us. The timing, locations, and targets of the bombings were no more coincidental than were the sophisticated planning, magnitude, and execution of the attacks.

The choice of 23 October was significant because National Reconciliation Talks among all key factions within the government of Lebanon were scheduled to be held in Geneva, beginning on the 31st. Preliminary talks were set to begin on the 24th at Beirut International Airport, where the U.S. Multi-National Peacekeeping Force had been located for more than a year.

The airport site was supposed to be one of the most secure areas in Lebanon. The Marine and the French headquarters were targeted primarily because of who we were and what we represented. The passive nature of the peacekeeping mission provided attractive targets that Iran and Syria were not about to pass up. It is noteworthy that the United States provided direct naval gunfire support-which I strongly opposed for a week-to the Lebanese Army at a mountain village called Suq-al-Garb on 19 September and that the French conducted an air strike on 23 September in the Bekaa Valley. American support removed any lingering doubts of our neutrality, and I stated to my staff at the time that we were going to pay in blood for this decision.

Unknown to us at the time, the National Security Agency had made a diplomatic communications intercept on 26 September (the same date as the cease-fire ending the September War) 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. The suicide attackers struck us 28 days later, with word of the intercept stuck in the intelligence pipeline until days after the attack.

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