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Chapter 1 Beirut has become synonymous with death and destruction.
—PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE EDITORIAL
April 20, 1983
The black GMC pickup truck idled alongside the curb of Beirut’s seashore drive at 12:43 p.m. on April 18, 1983. Secured in the truck bed and hidden under a canvas tarp sat enough pentaerythritol tetranitrate—a high-powered explosive favored by militaries, quarry blasters, and, of course, terrorists—to rival two thousand pounds of TNT. The hefty payload, as one witness would later tell investigators, forced the rear of the late-model pickup to sag.
The driver scanned the midday traffic that crawled through the Lebanese capital, spotting a dated green Mercedes in the oncoming lane. The German car’s headlights flashed three times, signaling the truck driver to shift into gear and ease back into traffic.
The mission was a go.
A mile away, towering over the corniche with a view of the Mediterranean’s cool blue waters, loomed the American Embassy, a rose-colored monolith that had dominated the Beirut skyline since it originally opened its doors as a hotel three decades earlier. The crescent-shaped embassy that fronted the palm-lined Avenue de Paris employed 341 people who helped overseas Americans, processed visas, and advanced diplomatic relations.
It had been a quiet Monday in Beirut, a welcome reprieve in a city battered by eight years of civil war, foreign invaders, and sectarian violence that had torched businesses, leveled apartment blocks, and claimed the lives of 100,000 men, women, and children. The arrival of American Marines six months earlier—based at the airport as part of a multinational peacekeeping force—had helped restore a semblance of calm that reminded war-weary residents of the halcyon days when the city was known as the Paris of the Middle East. Shoppers browsed stores along Hamra Street—dubbed the Fifth Avenue of Lebanon—that once again offered everything from designer jeans and caviar to the latest electronic games. Others queued up outside cinemas where Bill Murray’s comedy Stripes had proven a popular hit. “People,” as New York Times reporter Thomas Friedman observed, “were just starting to relax in Beirut, daring to believe that the presence of American troops meant the war was finally over.”
But America’s flatlining efforts to pressure Israeli and Syrian forces to withdraw from Lebanon had sparked an uptick in violence, one that reminded residents of the potential savagery that lurked beneath the veneer of peace. In the previous month, gunmen had attacked patrols of the Italian, French, and American peacekeepers, wounding fourteen, including five Marines. Only four days earlier on April 14, an assailant fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the American Embassy, which hit an empty office. The time for peace was running out.
A dusting of snow still capped Mount Lebanon, climbing nearly two miles above the capital, even as the last of the season’s cool weather threatened to give way to the oppressive heat of summer. The morning drizzle had subsided, replaced by the midday sun, which burned off the haze. Locals in search of visas lined up outside the first-floor consular offices, which assisted an average of 150 people per day. Others strolled down the scenic seaside promenade. Up on the embassy’s sixth floor, workers rolled out and installed new carpets.
The day before, many of the embassy staff had participated in the Beirut marathon, including general services officer Robert Essington, who had charged across the finish line in four hours and two minutes. The race coupled with the after-party had exhausted many, prompting Ambassador Robert Dillon to offer participants a day off to recover.
But few took him up on the deal.
Lance Corporal Robert “Bobby” McMaugh wished he could have stayed in bed rather than man Guard Post One at the embassy’s main entrance. The twenty-one-year-old Marine, who nursed a hangover, had been a star running back and kicker at Osbourn High School in Manassas, Virginia. Off the field, he proved equally as popular, a humble and warm personality who had insisted on taking his younger sister to her first high school dance because no one else was good enough. That same kindness motivated Bobby on the mornings he stood guard to present female employees with a flower. Much to his father’s frustration, Bobby had postponed college to enlist in the Marines, where he volunteered for duty in Beirut, hoping that a posting to one of the world’s hot spots might catapult his career. During his recent downtime, however, he had survived a car bombing on the streets of the capital, which, he later confided in a call to his mother, marked the first time in his life he had ever been scared.
Bobby had pushed those fears out of his mind the night before when he and a few fellow Marines feasted on spaghetti and champagne at the home of Letitia “Tish” Butler, a staffer with the U.S. Agency of International Development. He had returned to the embassy at 1 a.m. for a final beer before collapsing atop his bunk fully clothed. “I’ll give you three hundred Lebanese lira,” he pleaded with one fellow Marine, “if you stand my duty today.”
But no one would accept his offer.
Despite his hangover, Bobby stood armed with a rose when embassy secretary Dorothy Pech appeared in front of his bulletproof-glass booth Monday morning.
“How are you doing, Bob?” she asked.
“I don’t feel too good,” he confessed.
“You guys are going out too much,” she chided him.
The young Marine would have no doubt agreed.
“Well,” Pech added, “maybe today will be a short day.”
The pickup truck closed the distance.
Elsewhere in the embassy, Robert Ames of the Central Intelligence Agency huddled on the fifth floor with the embassy’s spooks. The bespectacled father of six served as the clandestine agency’s top Middle East expert, often tasked to personally brief President Ronald Reagan. At first glance, Ames appeared an unlikely intelligence officer. The forty-nine-year-old Philadelphian, who stood six feet three inches tall, had grown up the son of a Pennsylvania steelworker. A basketball scholarship had earned him an education at La Salle University, while a stint in the Army had introduced him to the world of signals intelligence. Over the years, as he pinballed between Yemen and Iran, Kuwait and Lebanon, he not only mastered Arabic but developed an unrivaled insight into the volatile region. Ames accomplished this while balancing time with his family in the Washington suburb of Reston, Virginia. He imitated Donald Duck’s voice for his children, coached youth basketball, and liked to relax in his favorite rocking chair to the tunes of the Beach Boys. “He was,” as his wife Yvonne later said, “the cornerstone of the family.”
Frustration in Washington over the president’s apparent stillborn peace initiative for the region had landed Ames back in Beirut, where he had touched down the day before. The veteran operative had attended a dinner that night with his colleagues where the intractable reality cast a shadow over the evening. Those tensions had turned contentious Monday morning as Ames met with the agency’s entire team. Station Chief Ken Haas, whose wife, Alison, brought him lunch most days, emerged from the session upset. He phoned her to pop by early, where the couple ate a sandwich. She started to peel an apple, but her husband was too distressed to eat more.
“I’ve got one more cable to write,” he said. “I don’t know how I’m going to do it; you go ahead and go home and take a nap and I’ll be home when I finish.”
Alison Haas rose and approached her husband, who grabbed her face with both of his hands and delivered a dramatic kiss, one she would remember for decades.
“See you later,” she said.
Up on the eighth floor, Ambassador Dillon seized on the break in the rain to swap his business suit for workout clothes. One of his bodyguards waited for him to change while others prepared his convoy for the trip over to the American University of Beirut. His security detail would then close the field, allowing him to jog three miles around the track. The United States took the ambassador’s safety seriously—and with good reason. During the Lebanese Civil War in 1976, assailants kidnapped and shot then ambassador Francis Meloy. Four years later, gunmen in a speeding Mercedes ambushed Ambassador John Dean, though an armored limousine saved his life. But protecting the ambassador was far easier than securing the embassy, which operated out of a leased location with no setbacks in the heart of the congested capital. America had begun construction in 1973 of a more secure compound, but Lebanon’s civil war had put that project on hold. In the meantime, the United States had invested $1.5 million to improve security, but only so much could be done to retrofit a decades-old hotel. In addition, much of the focus was on preventing a potential mob attack, similar to the 1979 seizure of the American Embassy in Iran. Workers had added tear gas ports in the walls of the lobby, installed fortified doors, and covered windows with protective Mylar to prevent shattering.
The fifty-four-year-old Dillon, who boasted a head full of silver hair, was mindful of the dangers. He had started his career in the CIA before migrating over to the foreign service. In his nearly three-decades-long career Dillon had served around the world, including posts in Venezuela, Turkey, and Egypt. That afternoon the ambassador had brushed off a call with a German banker. Dillon felt guilty as he slipped out of his clothes. His run could wait. He picked up the phone to call him back at the same time as he struggled to pull on a Marine T-shirt, which he had been given in his role as the honorary manager of the leathernecks’ softball team.
Down in the first-floor cafeteria, Anne Dammarell ate a chef’s salad in the back at a table with her colleague Bob Pearson. The forty-five-year-old Dammarell, who worked with the U.S. Agency for International Development, had served for the past two and a half years in war-torn Beirut. The experience had proven tiresome, prompting her to request a new post. She was scheduled to leave the following Monday for an assignment in Sri Lanka. Dammarell had spent that morning at her apartment meeting with two contractors to obtain quotes to ship her belongings by sea and air. An unfinished report lured her back to the embassy around noon, where she bumped into Pearson, who was planning her farewell party.
“Let’s go down to the cafeteria and get something to eat,” he suggested.
Over lunch the conversation drifted, as so many did, to the stalled efforts to secure peace. “This is either the end of the world,” Pearson said, “or the Second Coming.”
At 1:04 p.m., the driver of the GMC slowed to a crawl as he approached the intersection in front of the embassy, waiting for a lull in the oncoming traffic to cross.
Horns blared.
A brief break in the midday gridlock offered a window. The driver, who witnesses later reported wore a black leather jacket, punched the accelerator and shot across the busy avenue. He did not bother to brake, but wheeled right, pulling into the east exit of the horseshoe-shaped drive. The ambassador’s limousine was parked in front of the embassy’s main entrance, wedged between two security vans, where guards patiently waited for Dillon to finish his call with the banker. Just inside the building, Bobby McMaugh nursed his hangover, Anne Dammarell picked at her salad, and Ken Haas typed his cable, his last assignment for the day before he could head home and into the arms of his wife.
The truck blew past the Lebanese security checkpoint. Only ten yards stood between the GMC and the embassy’s front portico, a distance it covered in less than two seconds.
There was no time to raise a rifle, pick up a phone, or even run.
The vehicle rammed the embassy in front of the lead security van at 1:05 p.m. and detonated its explosive payload, sending a bright orange fireball hundreds of feet into the heavens. The explosion blew out windows as far as a mile away. American sailors aboard the amphibious assault ship Guadalcanal five miles offshore felt the shudder. The blast scorched visa applicants in the consular office, flipped cars upside down and set them ablaze, and shattered the Mylar-covered windows throughout the eight-story building. The front of the embassy’s center wing collapsed like a house of cards, burying the lobby under an avalanche of broken concrete, rebar, and splintered desks and file cabinets. The attack would prove to be not only the bloodiest assault on an American Embassy but the opening salvo in the nation’s four-decade war on terrorism. “Everything,” as one survivor recalled, “went black.”
