peace to Lebanon.'
The next day, as the
The last element of the Marines left the beach at noon on February 26. At a brief ceremony to turn the airport over to the Lebanese army, as the Marines struck the American flag, the presiding Lebanese officer grabbed his country's flag and presented it to the Marines: 'Well, you might as well take our flag, too,' he said. He then asked the Marines to drop him off by helicopter back at the Ministry of Defense; he was a Christian and could not pass through the Muslim checkpoints. After they dropped him off, the last Marine sortie proceeded on to the ships.
Within minutes, the Shiite Amal Militia began occupying their vacant positions and taking control of the airport.
The fighting between the factions continued, making the situation for the Americans who still remained even more dangerous. The only halfway-safe place for Americans was now on the Christian side of the 'Green Line' in East Beirut. Because they could no longer cross the Line, the airport had become off-limits, which meant that an Army helicopter detachment had to be brought in to Cyprus to shuttle Ambassador Bartholomew and the remaining military to Cyprus for connections elsewhere.
The remaining Muslim officers on Tannous's staff soon found themselves targets of their own factions. Though most soon paid for their loyalty with their lives, a few, like Hakim, managed to escape to other countries.
As word of the throat-cutting spread, mistrust among the remaining soldiers grew even more, and within days the army that had fought so well began to split along factional lines.
They did not fight each other during the breakup. They just slipped away with their weapons and returned to their own ethnic enclaves. The Shiites went to West Beirut and the Bekaa Valley, the Druze back to the mountains, and the Christians to East Beirut.
The 8th Brigade's losses were quickly filled by Christians, and it continued to hold the ridgeline at Souk Al Gharb. Tannous, having no other choice, quickly reorganized the army to compensate for the losses, but it was now a 'Christian force,' with far less capability, operating mainly from East Beirut and defending the Christian enclaves, the ridgeline at Souk Al Gharb, Yarze, and the seat of government.
Assad took advantage of the opportunity by moving Syrian regular units to take control of the northeastern sector of Lebanon and all major roads leading to the north and east. Now, with the Israelis controlling the buffer zone in the south, all that remained under Lebanese government control was the enclave of Beirut, but even that was mostly controlled by the Amal, which danced to Assad's tune.
Once his generals were in charge of all the trade routes — and lining their pockets — Assad began to stipulate conditions for reorganizing the government.
Of course, Tannous had to be replaced. When that time came, he relinquished command of the armed forces with respect, dignity, and pride, and quietly returned to his cement factory in East Beirut. However, his loyalty remained to Lebanon and its armed forces. The last I heard, he was still conducting advanced officer's classes on tactics in a training area/classroom that he'd established in the garden behind his house — an initiative he'd begun during the early phases of rebuilding the army in order to improve the tactical proficiency of midlevel combat arms officers.
A NEW FORM OF TERRORISM
Flushed with their bombing successes, the Islamic Jihad raised the stakes even more by introducing a new form of terrorism—'hostage-taking.'
The first American was taken hostage on February 10, 1984. By the time TWA 847 was hijacked, some fourteen months later, seven Americans had been kidnapped.
Kidnapping is not a new idea, of course, and had long been commonplace in Lebanon: In the early '80s, more than 5,000 people from all sides had been kidnapped for ransom. Islamic Jihad's new tactics, however, were aimed solely at achieving political leverage — a big difference.
Their initial motivation was to capture a stable of Americans who could be used as bargaining material with the Kuwaiti government after the Kuwaitis had rounded up the seventeen Iranian-backed terrorists responsible for a December 1983 suicide bombing spree against six targets in Kuwait, in which five people had been killed and eighty-six wounded. One of those held in Kuwait was the brother-in-law of Lebanon's most feared Shiite terrorist, Imad Mugniyah, known as the 'enforcer.' Mugniyah was the thug responsible for the Islamic Jihad hostage-taking spree.
On February 10, 1984, the day before the trial for the seventeen terrorists was to begin in Kuwait, the first American was kidnapped, Frank Regier, a professor at the American University of Beirut. The second was Jeremy Levin, a reporter for the Cable News Network, kidnapped on March 7. The third was William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, kidnapped on March 16.
I should add a personal note here: The message claiming that Buckley and I had also been killed with the Marines should have been a warning to Buckley. I had talked to him about his vulnerability as soon as we learned of it. Though I had been in the survival mode since day one in Lebanon, and advised him to do the same, he played down the danger. 'I have a pretty good intelligence network,' he told me. 'I think I'm secure.' He remained in his apartment, and traveled the same route to work every day. As for me, I checked my car for bombs before I drove, varied my routes when possible, and when 1 wasn't in the MOD with Tannous, 1 was moving every second or third night to a different location.
Sometimes bad guys commit good acts. Thus the Shiite militia, who were not especially friendly to us, but even less friendly to Islamic Jihad, found and rescued Frank Regier on April 15, 1984. The whereabouts of the remaining hostages remained unknown, however, and it was ten months later, February 14, 1985, before another emerged from captivity, when Jeremy Levin escaped from the Sheikh Abdullah Barracks at Baalbeck and made his way to a Syrian checkpoint about a mile away. He was taken to Damascus and released to the American Ambassador.
During these months of captivity, Mugniyah would from time to time force the hostages to read statements aimed at the release of the seventeen terrorists imprisoned in Kuwait. The statements were videotaped and then shown over television.
When this failed to produce results, Mugniyah and his Hezbollah terrorist friends hijacked a Kuwaiti airliner flying to Iran. This also failed to budge the Kuwaitis.
Meanwhile, Buckley's kidnapping had become a major CIA concern. Not long after his capture, his agents either vanished or were killed. It was clear that his captors had tortured him into revealing the network of agents he had established — the source for most of our intelligence on the various factions in Beirut. It's thought that the Jihad eventually killed him. The United States had once again lost its primary intelligence sources in Beirut, making it even more dangerous for the Americans remaining behind.
I left Beirut in late May 1984 and returned to an assignment in the Pentagon. Saying goodbye to General Tannous, Ambassador Bartholomew, and Ambassador Rumsfeld[21] was one of the toughest challenges I have faced. 1 respected them for their tireless work to bring peace to Beirut — but it was just not to be. For my part, I hated to leave. Though it had been a professionally rewarding experience, and I had learned much that would stay with me, it was the first challenge in my military career that I had failed to complete to my satisfaction.
As I stood on top of the hill at the helipad waiting for the Blackhawk from Cyprus, my thoughts and prayers were for those I was leaving behind.
By October 1985, when the hostages from the hijacking of TWA 847 were released in Damascus, nine Americans had been kidnapped and held hostage by Mugniyah. But of these, only six remained: Bill Buckley was
