02.16.2007

Anjalisa — Mike Davis — A History of the Car Bomb (Part 1)

Comments Off on Anjalisa — Mike Davis — A History of the Car Bomb (Part 1)

The Poor Man’s Air Force
A History of the Car Bomb (Part 1)
By Mike Davis
Buda’s Wagon (1920)
You have shown no pity to us! We will do likewise. We will dynamite you!
— Anarchist warning (1919)
On a warm September day in 1920, a few months after the arrest of his
comrades Sacco and Vanzetti, a vengeful Italian anarchist named Mario
Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon near the corner of Wall and Broad
Streets, directly across from J. P. Morgan Company. He nonchalantly
climbed down and disappeared, unnoticed, into the lunchtime crowd. A
few blocks away, a startled postal worker found strange leaflets
warning: “Free the Political Prisoners or it will be Sure Death for
All of You!” They were signed: “American Anarchist Fighters.” The
bells of nearby Trinity Church began to toll at noon. When they
stopped, the wagon — packed with dynamite and iron slugs — exploded
in a fireball of shrapnel.
“The horse and wagon were blown to bits,” writes Paul Avrich, the
celebrated historian of American anarchism who uncovered the true
story. “Glass showered down from office windows, and awnings twelve
stories above the street burst into flames. People fled in terror as a
great cloud of dust enveloped the area. In Morgan’s offices, Thomas
Joyce of the securities department fell dead on his desk amid a rubble
of plaster and walls. Outside scores of bodies littered the streets.”
Buda was undoubtedly disappointed when he learned that J.P. Morgan
himself was not among the 40 dead and more than 200 wounded — the
great robber baron was away in Scotland at his hunting lodge.
Nonetheless, a poor immigrant with some stolen dynamite, a pile of
scrap metal, and an old horse had managed to bring unprecedented
terror to the inner sanctum of American capitalism.
His Wall Street bomb was the culmination of a half-century of
anarchist fantasies about avenging angels made of dynamite; but it was
also an invention, like Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, far ahead
of the imagination of its time. Only after the barbarism of strategic
bombing had become commonplace, and when air forces routinely pursued
insurgents into the labyrinths of poor cities, would the truly radical
potential of Buda’s “infernal machine” be fully realized.
Buda’s wagon was, in essence, the prototype car bomb: the first use of
an inconspicuous vehicle, anonymous in almost any urban setting, to
transport large quantities of high explosive into precise range of a
high-value target. It was not replicated, as far as I have been able
to determine, until January 12, 1947 when the Stern Gang drove a
truckload of explosives into a British police station in Haifa,
Palestine, killing 4 and injuring 140. The Stern Gang (a pro-fascist
splinter group led by Avraham Stern that broke away from the
right-wing Zionist paramilitary Irgun) would soon use truck and car
bombs to kill Palestinians as well: a creative atrocity immediately
reciprocated by British deserters fighting on the side of Palestinian
nationalists.
Vehicle bombs thereafter were used sporadically — producing notable
massacres in Saigon (1952), Algiers (1962), and Palermo (1963) — but
the gates of hell were only truly opened in 1972, when the Provisional
Irish Republican Army (IRA) accidentally, so the legend goes,
improvised the first ammonium nitrate-fuel oil (ANFO) car bomb. These
new-generation bombs, requiring only ordinary industrial ingredients
and synthetic fertilizer, were cheap to fabricate and astonishingly
powerful: they elevated urban terrorism from the artisanal to the
industrial level, and made possible sustained blitzes against entire
city centers as well as the complete destruction of ferro-concrete
skyscrapers and residential blocks.
The car bomb, in other words, suddenly became a semi-strategic weapon
that, under certain circumstances, was comparable to airpower in its
ability to knock out critical urban nodes and headquarters as well as
terrorize the populations of entire cities. Indeed, the suicide truck
bombs that devastated the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut
in 1983 prevailed — at least in a geopolitical sense — over the
combined firepower of the fighter-bombers and battleships of the U.S.
Sixth Fleet and forced the Reagan administration to retreat from Lebanon.
Hezbollah’s ruthless and brilliant use of car bombs in Lebanon in the
1980s to counter the advanced military technology of the United
States, France, and Israel soon emboldened a dozen other groups to
bring their insurgencies and jihads home to the metropolis. Some of
the new-generation car bombers were graduates of terrorism schools set
up by the CIA and Pakistani intelligence (the ISI), with Saudi
financing, in the mid-1980s to train mujahedin to terrorize the
Russians then occupying Kabul. Between 1992 and 1998, 16 major vehicle
bomb attacks in 13 different cities killed 1,050 people and wounded
nearly 12,000. More importantly from a geopolitical standpoint, the
IRA and Gama’a al-Islamiyya inflicted billions of dollars of damage on
the two leading control-centers of the world economy — the City of
London (1992, 1993, and 1996) and lower Manhattan (1993) — and forced
a reorganization of the global reinsurance industry.
In the new millennium, 85 years after that first massacre on Wall
Street, car bombs have become almost as generically global as iPods
and HIV-AIDS, cratering the streets of cities from Bogota to Bali.
Suicide truck bombs, once the distinctive signature of Hezbollah, have
been franchised to Sri Lanka, Chechnya/Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Kuwait,
and Indonesia. On any graph of urban terrorism, the curve representing
car bombs is rising steeply, almost exponentially. U.S.-occupied Iraq,
of course, is a relentless inferno with more than 9,000 casualties —
mainly civilian — attributed to vehicle bombs in the two-year period
between July 2003 and June 2005. Since then, the frequency of car-bomb
attacks has dramatically increased: 140 per month in the fall of 2005,
13 in Baghdad on New Year’s Day 2006 alone. If roadside bombs or IEDs
are the most effective device against American armored vehicles, car
bombs are the weapon of choice for slaughtering Shiite civilians in
front of mosques and markets and instigating an apocalyptic sectarian war.
Under siege from weapons indistinguishable from ordinary traffic, the
apparatuses of administration and finance are retreating inside “rings
of steel” and “green zones,” but the larger challenge of the car bomb
seems intractable. Stolen nukes, Sarin gas, and anthrax may be the
“sum of our fears,” but the car bomb is the quotidian workhorse of
urban terrorism. Before considering its genealogy, however, it may be
helpful to summarize those characteristics that make Buda’s wagon such
a formidable and undoubtedly permanent source of urban insecurity.
First, vehicle bombs are stealth weapons of surprising power and
destructive efficiency. Trucks, vans, or even SUVs can easily
transport the equivalent of several conventional 1,000-pound bombs to
the doorstep of a prime target. Moreover, their destructive power is
still evolving, thanks to the constant tinkering of ingenious
bomb-makers. We have yet to face the full horror of semi-trailer-sized
explosions with a lethal blast range of 200 yards or of dirty bombs
sheathed in enough nuclear waste to render mid-Manhattan radioactive
for generations.
Second, they are extraordinarily cheap: 40 or 50 people can be
massacred with a stolen car and maybe $400 of fertilizer and
bootlegged electronics. Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993
attack on the World Trade Center, bragged that his most expensive
outlay was in long-distance phone calls. The explosive itself (one
half ton of urea) cost $3,615 plus the $59 per day rental for a
ten-foot-long Ryder van. In contrast, the cruise missiles that have
become the classic American riposte to overseas terrorist attacks cost
$1.1 million each.
Third, car bombings are operationally simple to organize. Although
some still refuse to believe that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols
didn’t have secret assistance from a government or dark entity, two
men in the proverbial phone booth — a security-guard and a farmer —
successfully planned and executed the horrendous Oklahoma City bombing
with instructional books and information acquired from the gun-show
circuit.
Fourth, like even the `smartest’ of aerial bombs, car bombs are
inherently indiscriminate: “Collateral damage” is virtually
inevitable. If the logic of an attack is to slaughter innocents and
sow panic in the widest circle, to operate a “strategy of tension,” or
just demoralize a society, car bombs are ideal. But they are equally
effective at destroying the moral credibility of a cause and
alienating its mass base of support, as both the IRA and the ETA in
Spain have independently discovered. The car bomb is an inherently
fascist weapon.
Fifth, car bombs are highly anonymous and leave minimal forensic
evidence. Buda quietly went home to Italy, leaving William Burns, J.
Edgar Hoover, and the Bureau of Investigation (later, to be renamed
the FBI) to make fools of themselves as they chased one false lead
after another for a decade. Most of Buda’s descendants have also
escaped identification and arrest. Anonymity, in addition, greatly
recommends car bombs to those who like to disguise their handiwork,
including the CIA, the Israeli Mossad, the Syrian GSD, the Iranian
Pasdaran, and the Pakistani ISI — all of whom have caused unspeakable
carnage with such devices.
Preliminary Detonations (1948-63)
“Reds’ Time Bombs Rip Saigon Center”
— New York Times’ headline (January 10,. 1952)
The members of the Stern Gang were ardent students of violence,
self-declared Jewish admirers of Mussolini who steeped themselves in
the terrorist traditions of the pre-1917 Russian
Socialist-Revolutionary Party, the Macedonian IMRO, and the Italian
Blackshirts. As the most extreme wing of the Zionist movement in
Palestine — “fascists” to the Haganah and “terrorists” to the British
— they were morally and tactically unfettered by considerations of
diplomacy or world opinion. They had a fierce and well-deserved
reputation for the originality of their operations and the
unexpectedness of their attacks. On January 12, 1947, as part of their
campaign to prevent any compromise between mainstream Zionism and the
British Labor government, they exploded a powerful truck bomb in the
central police station in Haifa, resulting in 144 casualties. Three
months later, they repeated the tactic in Tel Aviv, blowing up the
Sarona police barracks (5 dead) with a stolen postal truck filled with
dynamite.
In December 1947, following the UN vote to partition Palestine,
full-scale fighting broke out between Jewish and Arab communities from
Haifa to Gaza. The Stern Gang, which rejected anything less than the
restoration of a biblical Israel, now gave the truck bomb its debut as
a weapon of mass terror. On January 4, 1948, two men in Arab dress
drove a truck ostensibly loaded with oranges into the center of Jaffa
and parked it next to the New Seray Building, which housed the
Palestinian municipal government as well as a soup-kitchen for poor
children. They cooly lingered for coffee at a nearby café before
leaving a few minutes ahead of the detonation.
“A thunderous explosion,” writes Adam LeBor in his history of Jaffa,
“then shook the city. Broken glass and shattered masonry blew out
across Clock Tower Square. The New Seray’s centre and side walls
collapsed in a pile of rubble and twisted beams. Only the
neo-classical façade survived. After a moment of silence, the screams
began, 26 were killed, hundreds injured. Most were civilians,
including many children eating at the charity kitchen.” The bomb
missed the local Palestinian leadership who had moved to another
building, but the atrocity was highly successful in terrifying
residents and setting the stage for their eventual flight.
It also provoked the Palestinians to cruel repayment in kind. The Arab
High Committee had its own secret weapon — blond-haired British
deserters, fighting on the side of the Palestinians. Nine days after
the Jaffa bombing, some of these deserters, led by Eddie Brown, a
former police corporal whose brother had been murdered by the Irgun,
commandeered a postal delivery truck which they packed with explosives
and detonated in the center of Haifa’s Jewish quarter, injuring 50
people. Two weeks later, Brown, driving a stolen car and followed by a
five-ton truck driven by a Palestinian in a police uniform,
successfully passed through British and Haganah checkpoints and
entered Jerusalem’s New City. The driver parked in front of the
Palestine Post, lit the fuse, and then escaped with Brown in his car.
The newspaper headquarters was devastated with 1 dead and 20 wounded.
According to a chronicler of the episode, Abdel Kader el-Husseini, the
military leader of the Arab Higher Committee, was so impressed by the
success of these operations — inadvertently inspired by the Stern
Gang — that he authorized an ambitious sequel employing six British
deserters. “This time three trucks were used, escorted by a stolen
British armored car with a young blond man in police uniform standing
in the turret.” Again, the convoy easily passed through checkpoints
and drove to the Atlantic Hotel on Ben Yehuda Street. A curious night
watchman was murdered when he confronted the gang, who then drove off
in the armored car after setting charges in the three trucks. The
explosion was huge and the toll accordingly grim: 46 dead and 130 wounded.
The window of opportunity for such attacks — the possibility of
passing from one zone to another — was rapidly closing as
Palestinians and Jews braced for all-out warfare, but a final attack
prefigured the car bomb’s brilliant future as a tool of assassination.
On March 11, the official limousine of the American consul-general,
flying the stars and stripes and driven by the usual chauffeur, was
admitted to the courtyard of the heavily-guarded Jewish Agency
compound. The driver, a Christian Palestinian named Abu Yussef, hoped
to kill Zionist leader David Ben Gurion, but the limousine was moved
just before it exploded; nonetheless, 13 officials of the Jewish
Foundation Fund died and 40 were injured.
This brief but furious exchange of car bombs between Arabs and Jews
would enter into the collective memory of their conflict, but would
not be resumed on a large scale until Israel and its Phalangist allies
began to terrorize West Beirut with bombings in 1981: a provocation
that would awake a Shiite sleeping dragon. Meanwhile, the real sequel
was played out in Saigon: a series of car and motorcycle bomb
atrocities in 1952-53 that Graham Greene incorporated into the plot of
his novel, The Quiet American, and which he portrayed as secretly
orchestrated by his CIA operative Alden Pyle, who is conspiring to
substitute a pro-American party for both the Viet-Minh (upon whom the
actual bombings would be blamed) and the French (who are unable to
guarantee public safety).
The real-life Quiet American was the counterinsurgency expert Colonel
Edward Lansdale (fresh from victories against peasant Communists in
the Philippines), and the real leader of the `Third Force’ was his
protégé, General Trinh Minh The of the Cao Dai religious sect. There
is no doubt, writes The’s biographer, that the general “instigated
many terrorist outrages in Saigon, using clockwork plastic charges
loaded into vehicles, or hidden inside bicycle frames with charges.
Notably, the Li An Minh [The’s army] blew up cars in front of the
Opera House in Saigon in 1952. These `time-bombs’ were reportedly made
of 50-kg ordnance, used by the French air force, unexploded and
collected by the Li An Minh.”
Lansdale was dispatched to Saigon by Allen Dulles of the CIA some
months after the Opera atrocity (hideously immortalized in a Life
photographer’s image of the upright corpse of a rickshaw driver with
both legs blown off), which was officially blamed on Ho Chi Minh.
Although Lansdale was well aware of General The’s authorship of these
sophisticated attacks (the explosives were hidden in false
compartments next to car gas tanks), he nonetheless championed the Cao
Dai warlord as a patriot in the mould of Washington and Jefferson.
After either French agents or Vietminh cadre assassinated The,
Landsdale eulogized him to a journalist as “a good man. He was
moderate, he was a pretty good general, he was on our side, and he
cost twenty-five thousand dollars.”
Whether by emulation or reinvention, car bombs showed up next in
another war-torn French colony — Algiers during the last days of the
pied noirs or French colonial settlers. Some of the embittered French
officers in Saigon in 1952-53 would also become cadres of the
Organisation de l’Armé Secrete (OAS), led by General Raoul Salan. In
April 1961, after the failure of its uprising against French President
Charles de Gaulle, who was prepared to negotiate a settlement with the
Algerian rebels, the OAS turned to terrorism — a veritable festival
de plastique — with all the formidable experience of its veteran
paratroopers and legionnaires. Its declared enemies included De Gaulle
himself, French security forces, communists, peace activists
(including philosopher and activist Jean-Paul Sartre), and especially
Algerian civilians. The most deadly of their car bombs killed 62
Moslem stevedores lining up for work at the docks in Algiers in May
1962, but succeeded only in bolstering the Algerian resolve to drive
all the pied-noirs into the sea.
The next destination for the car bomb was Palermo, Sicily. Angelo La
Barbera, the Mafia capo of Palermo-Center, undoubtedly paid careful
attention to the Algerian bombings and may even have borrowed some OAS
expertise when he launched his devastating attack on his Mafia rival,
“Little Bird” Greco, in February 1963. Greco’s bastion was the town of
Ciaculli outside Palermo where he was protected by an army of
henchmen. La Barbera surmounted this obstacle with the aid of the Alfa
Romeo Giulietta. “This dainty four-door family saloon,” writes John
Dickie in his history of the Cosa Nostra, “was one of the symbols of
Italy’s economic miracle — `svelte, practical, comfortable, safe and
convenient,’ as the adverts proclaimed.” The first explosive-packed
Giulietta destroyed Greco’s house; the second, a few weeks later,
killed one of his key allies. Greco’s gunmen retaliated, wounding La
Barbera in Milan in May; in response, La Barbera’s ambitious
lieutenants Pietro Torreta and Tommaso Buscetta (later to become the
most famous of all Mafia pentiti) unleashed more deadly Giuliettas.
On June 30, 1963, “the umpteenth Giulietta stuffed with TNT” was left
in one of the tangerine groves that surround Ciaculli. A tank of
butane with a fuse was clearly visible in the back seat. A Giulietta
had already exploded that morning in a nearby town, killing two
people, so the carabinieri were cautious and summoned army engineers
for assistance. “Two hours later two bomb disposal experts arrived,
cut the fuse, and pronounced the vehicle safe to approach. But when
Lt. Mario Malausa made to inspect the contents of the boot, he
detonated the huge quantity of TNT it contained. He and six other men
were blown to pieces by an explosion that scorched and stripped the
tangerine trees for hundreds of metres around.” (The site is today
marked by one of the several monuments to bomb victims in the Palermo
region.)
Before this “First Mafia War” ended in 1964, the Sicilian population
had learned to tremble at the very sight of a Giulietta and car
bombings had become a permanent part of the Mafia repertoire. They
were employed again during an even bloodier second Mafia war or
Matanza in 1981-83, then turned against the Italian public in the
early 1990s after the conviction of Cosa Nostra leaders in a series of
sensational “maxi-trials.” The most notorious of these blind-rage car
bombings — presumably organized by `Tractor’ Provenzano and his
notorious Corleonese gang — was the explosion in May 1993 that
damaged the world-famous Uffizi Gallery in the heart of Florence and
killed 5 pedestrians, injuring 40 others.
“The Black Stuff”
“We could feel the rattle where we stood. Then we knew we were onto
something, and it took off from there.”
— IRA veteran talking about the first ANFO car bomb
The first-generation car bombs — Jaffa-Jerusalem, Saigon, Algiers,
and Palermo — were deadly enough (with a maximum yield usually equal
to several hundred pounds of TNT), but required access to stolen
industrial or military explosives. Journeymen bomb-makers, however,
were aware of a homemade alternative – notoriously dangerous to
concoct, but offering almost unlimited vistas of destruction at a low
cost. Ammonium nitrate is a universally available synthetic fertilizer
and industrial ingredient with extraordinary explosive properties, as
witnessed by such accidental cataclysms as an explosion at a chemical
plant in Oppau, Germany in 1921 — the shock waves were felt 150 miles
away and only a vast crater remained where the plant had been — and a
Texas City disaster in 1947 (600 dead and 90% of the town structurally
damaged). Ammonium nitrate is sold in half-ton quantities affordable
by even the most cash-strapped terrorist, but the process of mixing it
with fuel oil to create an ANFO explosive is more than a little tricky
as the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) found out in late 1971.
“The car bomb was [re]discovered entirely by accident,” explains
journalist Ed Maloney in his The Secret History of the IRA, “but its
deployment by the Belfast IRA was not. The chain of events began in
late December 1971 when the IRA’s quartermaster general, Jack McCabe,
was fatally injured in an explosion caused when an experimental,
fertilizer-based homemade mix known as the `black stuff’ exploded as
he was blending it with a shovel in his garage on the northern
outskirts of Dublin. [Provisionals’] GHQ warned that the mix was too
dangerous to handle, but Belfast had already received a consignment,
and someone had the idea of disposing of it by dumping it in a car
with a fuse and a timer and leaving it somewhere in downtown Belfast.”
The resulting explosion made a big impression upon the Belfast leadership.
The “black stuff” — which the IRA soon learned how to handle safely
— freed the underground army from supply-side constraints: the car
bomb enhanced destructive capacity yet reduced the likelihood of
Volunteers being arrested or accidentally blown up. The ANFO-car bomb
combination, in other words, was an unexpected military revolution,
but one fraught with the potential for political and moral disaster.
“The sheer size of the devices,” emphasizes Moloney, “greatly
increased the risk of civilian deaths in careless or bungled operations.”
The IRA Army Council led by Sean MacStiofain, however, found the new
weapon’s awesome capabilities too seductive to worry about ways in
which its grisly consequences might backfire on them. Indeed, car
bombs reinforced the illusion, shared by most of the top leadership in
1972, that the IRA was one final military offensive away from victory
over the English government. Accordingly, in March 1972, two car bombs
were sent into Belfast city center followed by garbled phone warnings
that led police to inadvertently evacuate people in the direction of
one of the explosions: Five civilians were killed along with two
members of the security forces. Despite the public outcry as well as
the immediate traffic closure of the Royal Avenue shopping precinct,
the Belfast Brigade’s enthusiasm for the new weapon remained
undiminished and the leadership plotted a huge attack designed to
bring normal commercial life in Northern Ireland to an abrupt halt.
MacStiofain boasted of an offensive of “the utmost ferocity and
ruthessness” that would wreck the “colonial infrastructure.”
On Friday, July 21st, IRA Volunteers left 20 car bombs or concealed
charges on the periphery of the now-gated city center, with
detonations timed to follow one another at approximately five-minute
intervals. The first car bomb exploded in front of the Ulster Bank in
north Belfast and blew both legs off a Catholic passerby; successive
explosions damaged two railroad stations, the Ulster bus depot on
Oxford Street, various railway junctions, and a mixed
Catholic-Protestant residential area on Cavehill Road. “At the height
of the bombing, the center of Belfast resembled a city under artillery
fire; clouds of suffocating smoke enveloped buildings as one explosion
followed another, almost drowning out the hysterical screams of
panicked shoppers.” A series of telephoned IRA warnings just created
more chaos, as civilians fled from one explosion only to be driven
back by another. Seven civilians and two soldiers were killed and more
than 130 people were seriously wounded.
Although not an economic knockout punch, “Bloody Friday” was the
beginning of a “no business as usual” bombing campaign that quickly
inflicted significant damage on the Northern Ireland economy,
particularly its ability to attract private and foreign investment.
The terror of that day also compelled authorities to tighten their
anti-car-bomb “ring of steel” around the Belfast city center, making
it the prototype for other fortified enclaves and future “green
zones.” In the tradition of their ancestors, the Fenians, who had
originated dynamite terrorism in the 1870s, Irish Republicans had
again added new pages to the textbook of urban guerrilla warfare.
Foreign aficionados, particularly in the Middle East, undoubtedly paid
close attention to the twin innovations of the ANFO car bomb and its
employment in a protracted bombing campaign against an entire
urban-regional economy.
What was less well understood outside of Ireland, however, was the
enormity of the wound that the IRA’s car bombs inflicted on the
Republican movement itself. Bloody Friday destroyed much of the IRA’s
heroic-underdog popular image, produced deep revulsion amongst
ordinary Catholics, and gave the British government an unexpected
reprieve from the worldwide condemnation it had earned for the Blood
Sunday massacre in Derry and internment without trial. Moreover, it
gave the Army the perfect pretext to launch massive Operation
Motorman: 13,000 troops led by Centurion tanks entered the “no-go”
areas of Derry and Belfast and reclaimed control of the streets from
the Republican movement. The same day, a bloody, bungled car bomb
attack on the village of Claudy in County Londonderry killed 8 people.
(Protestant Loyalist paramilitary groups — who never bothered with
warnings and deliberately targeted civilians on the other side —
would claim Bloody Friday and Claudy as sanctions for their triple car
bomb attack on Dublin during afternoon rush hour on May 17, 1974 which
left 33 dead, the highest one-day toll in the course of the “Troubles.”)
The Belfast debacle led to a major turnover in IRA leadership, but
failed to dispel their almost cargo-cult-like belief in the capacity
of car bombs to turn the tide of battle. Forced onto the defensive by
Motorman and the backlash to Bloody Friday, they decided to strike at
the very heart of British power instead. The Belfast Brigade planned
to send ten car bombs to London via the Dublin-Liverpool ferry using
fresh volunteers with clean records, including two young sisters,
Marion and Dolours Price. Snags arose and only four cars arrived in
London; one of these was detonated in front of the Old Bailey, another
in the center of Whitehall, close to the Prime Minister’s house at
Number 10 Downing Street. One hundred and eighty Londoners were
injured and one was killed. Although the 8 IRA bombers were quickly
caught, they were acclaimed in the West Belfast ghettoes and the
operation became a template for future Provisional bombing campaigns
in London, culminating in the huge explosions that shattered the City
of London and unnerved the world insurance industry in 1992 and 1993.
Hell’s Kitchen (the 1980s)
“We are soldiers of God and we crave death. We are ready to turn
Lebanon into another Vietnam.”
— Hezbollah communiqué
Never in history has a single city been the battlefield for so many
contesting ideologies, sectarian allegiances, local vendettas, or
foreign conspiracies and interventions as Beirut in the early 1980s.
Belfast’s triangular conflicts — three armed camps (Republican,
Loyalist, and British) and their splinter groups — seemed
straightforward compared to the fractal, Russian-doll-like complexity
of Lebanon’s civil wars (Shiite versus Palestinian, for example)
within civil wars (Maronite versus Moslem and Druze) within regional
conflicts (Israel versus Syria) and surrogate wars (Iran versus the
United States) within, ultimately, the Cold War. In the fall of 1971,
for example, there were 58 different armed groups in West Beirut
alone. With so many people trying to kill each other for so many
different reasons, Beirut became to the technology of urban violence
what a tropical rainforest is to the evolution of plants.
Car bombs began to regularly terrorize Moslem West Beirut in the fall
of 1981, apparently as part of an Israeli strategy to evict the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from Lebanon. The Israeli
secret service, the Mossad, had previously employed car bombs in
Beirut to assassinate Palestinian leaders (novelist Ghassan Kanfani in
July 1972, for example), so no one was especially surprised when
evidence emerged that Israel was sponsoring the carnage. According to
Middle Eastern schoalr Rashid Khalidi, “A sequence of public
confessions by captured drivers made clear these [car bombings] were
being utilized by the Israelis and their Phalangist allies to increase
the pressure on the PLO to leave.”
Journalist Robert Fisk was in Beirut when an “enormous [car] bomb blew
a 45-foot-crater in the road and brought down an entire block of
apartments. The building collapsed like a concertina, crushing more
than 50 of its occupants to death, most of them Shia refugees from
southern Lebanon.” Several of the car bombers were captured and
confessed that the bombs had been rigged by the Shin Bet, the Israeli
equivalent of the FBI or the British Special Branch. But if such
atrocities were designed to drive a wedge of terror between the PLO
and Lebanese Moslems, they had the inadvertent result (as did the
Israeli air force’s later cluster-bombing of civilian neighborhoods)
of turning the Shias from informal Israeli allies into shrewd and
resolute enemies.
The new face of Shiite militancy was Hezbollah, formed in mid-1982 out
of an amalgamation of Islamic Amal with other pro-Khomeini
groupuscules. Trained and advised by the Iranian Pasdaran in the Bekaa
Valley, Hezbollah was both an indigenous resistance movement with deep
roots in the Shiite slums of southern Beirut and, at the same time,
the long arm of Iran’s theocratic revolution. Although some experts
espouse alternative theories, Islamic Amal/Hezbollah is usually seen
as the author, with Iranian and Syrian assistance, of the devastating
attacks on American and French forces in Beirut during 1983.
Hezbollah’s diabolic innovation was to marry the IRA’s ANFO car bombs
to the kamikaze — using suicide drivers to crash truckloads of
explosives into the lobbies of embassies and barracks in Beirut, and
later into Israeli checkpoints and patrols in southern Lebanon.
The United States and France became targets of Hezbollah and its
Syrian and Iranian patrons after the Multinational Force in Beirut,
which supposedly had landed to allow for the safe evacuation of the
PLO from that city, evolved into the informal and then open ally of
the Maronite government in its civil war against the Moslem-Druze
majority. The first retaliation against President Reagan’s policy
occurred on April 18, 1983, when a pickup truck carrying 2,000 pounds
of ANFO explosives suddenly swerved across traffic into the driveway
of the oceanfront U.S. embassy in Beirut. The driver gunned the truck
past a startled guard and crashed through the lobby door. “Even by
Beirut standards,” writes former CIA agent Robert Baer, “it was an
enormous blast, shattering windows. The USS Guadalcanal, anchored five
miles off the coast, shuddered from the tremors. At ground zero, the
center of the seven-story embassy lifted up hundreds of feet into the
air, remained suspended for what seemed an eternity, and then
collapsed in a cloud of dust, people, splintered furniture, and paper.”
Whether as a result of superb intelligence or sheer luck, the bombing
coincided with a visit to the embassy of Robert Ames, the CIA’s
national intelligence officer for the Near East. It killed him (“his
hand was found floating a mile offshore, the wedding ring still on his
finger”) and all six members of the Beirut CIA station. “Never before
had the CIA lost so many officers in a single attack. It was a tragedy
from which the agency would never recover.” It also left the Americans
blind in Beirut, forcing them to scrounge for intelligence scraps from
the French embassy or the British listening station offshore on
Cyprus. (A year later, Hezbollah completed their massacre of the CIA
in Beirut when they kidnapped and executed the replacement station
chief, William Buckley.) As a result, the Agency never foresaw the
coming of the mother-of-all-vehicle-bomb attacks.
Over the protests of Colonel Gerahty, the commander of the U.S.
Marines onshore in Beirut, Ronald Reagan’s National Security Advisor,
Robert McFarlane, ordered the Sixth Fleet in September to open fire on
Druze militia who were storming Lebanese Army Forces positions in the
hills above Beirut — bringing the United States into the conflict
brazenly on the side of the reactionary Amin Gemayel government. A
month later, a five-ton Mercedes dump truck hurled past sandbagged
Marine sentries and smashed through a guardhouse into the ground floor
of the “Beirut Hilton,” the U.S. military barracks in a former PLO
headquarters next to the international airport. The truck’s payload
was an incredible 12,000 pounds of high explosives. “It is said to
have been the largest non-nuclear blast ever [deliberately] detonated
on the face of the earth.” “The force of the explosion,” continues
Eric Hammel in his history of the Marine landing force, “initially
lifted the entire four-story structure, shearing the bases of the
concrete support columns, each measuring fifteen feet in circumference
and reinforced by numerous one and three quarter inch steel rods. The
airborne building then fell in upon itself. A massive shock wave and
ball of flaming gas was hurled in all directions.” The Marine (and
Navy) death toll of 241 was the Corps’ highest single-day loss since
Iwo Jima in 1945.
Meanwhile, another Hezbollah kamikaze had crashed his explosive-laden
van into the French barracks in West Beirut, toppling the eight-story
structure, killing 58 soldiers. If the airport bomb repaid the
Americans for saving Gemayal, this second explosion was probably a
response to the French decision to supply Saddam Hussein with
Super-Etendard jets and Exocet missiles to attack Iran. The hazy
distinction between local Shiite grievances and the interests of
Tehran was blurred further when two members of Hezbollah joined with
18 Iraqi Shias to truck-bomb the U.S. embassy in Kuwait in
mid-December. The French embassy, the control tower at the airport,
the main oil refinery and an expatriate residential compound were also
targeted in what was clearly a stern warning to Iran’s enemies.
Following another truck bombing against the French in Beirut as well
as deadly attacks on Marine outposts, the Multinational Force began to
withdraw from Lebanon in February 1984. It was Reagan’s most stunning
geopolitical defeat. In the impolite phrase of Washington Post
reporter Bob Woodward, “Essentially we turned tail and ran and left
Lebanon.” American power in Lebanon, added Thomas Friedman of the New
York Times, was neutralized by “just 12,000 pounds of dynamite and a
stolen truck.”
[This article — a preliminary sketch for a book-length study — will
appear next year in Indefensible Space: The Architecture of the
National Insecurity State (Routledge 2007), edited by Michael Sorkin.]
Mike Davis is the author most recently of The Monster at Our Door: The
Global Threat of Avian Flu (The New Press) and Planet of Slums
(Verso). He lives in San Diego.