Known and Unknown (3 page)

O
n October 23, 1983, as dawn broke in the Middle East, a water delivery truck was headed for an American military facility at Beirut International Airport. The truck had been hijacked and loaded with explosives, the equivalent of some twelve thousand pounds of TNT.
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An eyewitness who caught a glimpse of the driver characterized him as “smiling death” for his chillingly cheerful expression as the truck headed toward his target—a four-story building that housed sixteen hundred men and women in uniform and flew the flag of the United States of America.
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After the truck barreled through the building's entrance, it ignited an explosion so massive that it briefly lifted the entire structure into the air, until it collapsed upon itself. A second bomb, targeting French military personnel, had gone off almost simultaneously, killing fifty-eight.

By the time the rubble settled, 241 Americans were dead.
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They had been part of a Marine contingent and multinational force deployed to Lebanon to serve as a check on the warring factions of that country. The Beirut airport bombing was the largest loss of Marines in a single incident since the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II. And until September 11, 2001, it was the worst terrorist attack ever committed against American citizens.

At the time of the Beirut attack I was home in Chicago and serving as chief executive officer of G. D. Searle & Co., a pharmaceutical company. As I watched the pictures of the huge plume of smoke over the bomb site on television, I was stunned by the scale of the attack. So was President Reagan, who appeared grief-stricken as one after another flag-draped coffin containing murdered Americans returned home. The Marine barracks bombing, Reagan later said, was the saddest day of his presidency and maybe the saddest day of his life.
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Many groups immediately claimed credit for it, but eventually the attack was linked to a fledgling terrorist group backed by Iran and Syria. The group called itself Hezbollah, Arabic for “Party of God,” even as they committed this brazen act of mass murder. The bombing clearly had been intended to spark an American withdrawal from Lebanon so that Syria, Hezbollah's sponsor, which already occupied a third of the country, could gain even more influence.
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In an effort to show America's resolve, Vice President George H. W. Bush was dispatched to Beirut. “We're not going to let a bunch of insidious terrorists, cowards, shape the foreign policy of the United States,” Bush vowed.
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As I watched the scene, I was uncomfortable with his word choice. I have never thought people willing to drive a truck bomb into a building and kill themselves were “cowards.” Rather, I saw them as dangerous fanatics willing to do anything for their cause. I did agree with him that we should not let terrorists shape the foreign policy of the United States.

As America continued to bring the dead home, there was a profound sense that the country should respond forcefully to the atrocity. In the aftermath of the attack, the most powerful nation in the world did not.
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With no substantive military response in the offing, the only other way the United States could react to the terrorist challenge was through aggressive diplomacy. The President decided that a fresh set of eyes might be useful in the Middle East, and that it would at least demonstrate his and our country's concern.

Shortly after the Beirut bombing, I received a phone call from Secretary of State George Shultz, who I first had met in 1969 when we served in the Nixon administration, and who had been a friend ever since. Shultz was President Reagan's second secretary of state, replacing Alexander Haig, another colleague of ours from the Nixon years. A former Marine with a low-key demeanor, Shultz spoke plainly. He said the President needed to appoint a new special envoy to the Middle East to work on the Lebanon crisis and help with the American response to the terrorist attacks. Shultz said they wanted someone who had standing outside of the government. “I'd like you to do it,” he said.

If I agreed, the task would be to support the Lebanese government, to work with our allies on encouraging the Syrians to ratchet down their aggressive behavior, and to signal America's commitment to the region.

I knew the history of presidential envoys to the Middle East was not a happy one. I had observed the challenges of America's diplomacy in the region over my years in Congress and my service in the Nixon and Ford administrations, during which a number of experienced foreign policy officials worked in the region with hopes of breakthroughs, generally to return disappointed. I requested and received a leave of absence as CEO of Searle. Then I prepared to go to Washington to meet with President Reagan as he coped with the biggest national security crisis his administration had yet encountered.

 

R
onald Reagan had been in office for more than two years when he faced the Lebanon crisis. I had come to know him when he was governor of California and I was serving in the Nixon and Ford administrations. I was used to seeing him on television or being with him at more formal events when he had the aura of a movie star. Instead, as I entered the Oval Office on November 3, 1983, he looked quite different. The President welcomed me into the room with horn-rimmed granny glasses perched on his nose and a stack of papers in his hand, which he referenced occasionally while talking.

The caricature often used by Reagan's critics was that he was good-hearted but not particularly bright—an “amiable dunce,” one said. I had heard the same charge of low candle power made against nearly every Republican president in my adult lifetime, usually by those on the other side who couldn't imagine how anyone intelligent could possibly disagree with them. In Reagan's case, as in others, the caricature simply wasn't true. The President was not a detail-oriented manager, to be sure. He enjoyed telling a humorous anecdote, even during the most serious of meetings. He lacked the hard-charging style so often common among Washington politicians, and his approach took some getting used to. But as I came to know Reagan over the years, it was clear that he had the strong, long-range strategic sense so essential to successful leadership. Now that Reagan's letters and other writings have been published, it is instructive to see his insightful mind at work.

Some presidents allow themselves to get lost in minutiae. Reagan's predecessor, Jimmy Carter, was a famous micromanager. Ronald Reagan didn't have that problem. He knew where he wanted to lead America, and set the course for his administration around large principles. He left it to others to sort out the details while standing ready to provide course corrections and calibration as necessary. While that didn't always serve his best interests, for the most part it worked exceedingly well.

“My idea of American policy…is simple,” he told aides when asked his view on the Soviet Union. “We win and they lose.” Critics scoffed at that statement as simplistic bravado, but in truth it was a big idea, bold and transformative. For a number of years before Reagan took office, the architecture of the federal government and the foreign policy establishment had been built around the notion of peaceful coexistence, or “détente,” as it was called, with the Soviets. It was not fashionable to look at the Cold War as a win-lose proposition. The Soviet Union was considered more an unfortunate fact of life. But Reagan knew that major strategic changes in U.S. policy could be made by a president who had thought the subject through, was determined to redirect policy, and had an effective team of senior officials ready to implement his vision. The ultimate confirmation of his wisdom toward the Soviets, of course, is that President Reagan accomplished what he set out to do.

With regard to the crisis in Lebanon, Reagan's words were similarly straightforward, even if things ended up turning out quite different than he'd initially hoped. On the Middle East, Reagan's instincts were consistent with his policy against the Soviets: to use American strength to protect and encourage the aspirations of free people and to deter those who would break the peace. The President said we could not allow terrorists to drive us from Lebanon. At the same time, he was aware that when it came to the maneuverings of the Middle East, the United States was holding a difficult hand that would require substantial time and patience to play successfully. Those two commodities were in short supply. Reagan's major national security focus was the Soviet Union, as it should have been at the height of the Cold War. For the time being at least, his goal in the Middle East was to try to bring about some modest degree of stability.

I told Reagan I would do my best to represent our country's interests in the region. He thanked me for agreeing to come onboard at a difficult time for the country and pledged his support for the mission. Yet it was apparent that the “mission” wasn't all that clear.

Throughout the Lebanon crisis, Reagan got the rhetoric right—he declared that America would not cower in the face of terror or abandon our friends in the region—but I could tell from our first meeting that formulating a consistent policy was going to be more difficult. It was hard to plant a standard toward a goal when there was little or no solid ground in which to set it.

After our discussion in the Oval Office, President Reagan and I walked to the White House press briefing room, where he introduced me as his special envoy to the Middle East.
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The press began with typical Washington-style queries. They noted that I was Reagan's third Middle East envoy in three years, the latest diplomat being sent out to undertake the Sisyphean task of rolling a boulder up a never-ending hill. Why, some wondered, would I take such a “no-win job”? I responded that I simply wanted to be helpful, despite the difficulty of the challenge. But what I didn't say was that I also had to try to manage expectations. As I told George Shultz, “I promise you will never hear out of my mouth the phrase ‘The U.S. seeks a just and lasting peace in the Middle East.' There is little that is just, and the only things I've seen that are lasting are conflict, blackmail and killing—not peace.”
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I thought the best I could hope for was to make some modest progress. Under the circumstances I knew that even keeping things from getting worse in the Middle East could be valuable.
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Because I wasn't on the federal payroll, I had hoped that would free me from some of the burdens of the federal bureaucracy. That was wishful thinking. A Department of State functionary decided I had to be classified technically as an “unpaid government employee.” As such, a legal title was needed for me so that they could determine which classification applied. Was I a State Department expert or a consultant, or did I fall into some other category? It was finally concluded that I was to be considered an expert. I was uncomfortable with that classification. Anyone who claims to be an expert on the Middle East is starting off on the wrong foot.

 

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did know Lebanon's plight was agonizing, and that it had worsened since civil war broke out there in 1975. I had been serving as secretary of defense in the Ford administration when the Department of Defense (DoD) assisted in the evacuation of American citizens from the country. The Lebanese civil war ultimately claimed 150,000 lives, and by 1983, the loss of life was already monumental—“comparable to the United States losing ten million of its citizens,” Reagan declared that December.
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Hundreds of thousands of the most successful and educated Lebanese fled the country. The countryside outside Beirut came under the control of Lebanese militias that had little or no allegiance to the central government.

Complicating matters further, by the time of the 1983 Beirut bombing a large fraction of the country was occupied by Lebanon's neighboring and rival foreign powers, Syria and Israel. The Syrians had a proprietary attitude toward Lebanon, which they considered part of greater Syria. Israel had invaded in June 1982 to protect its territory from the Palestinian terrorist camps that were operating inside Lebanon. The Syrians resented the Israeli occupation, the Israelis resented the Syrian occupation, and the Lebanese resented being occupied by anyone. In the middle of all this hostility was a small contingent of American military personnel as part of a multinational peacekeeping force.

From a safe distance in Washington, it was easy for American leaders to say that we'd never let terrorists defeat us in Lebanon or push us to withdraw. But it became apparent that fulfilling that pledge would have required far more than Americans were prepared to muster. There was little appetite anywhere—in the administration, in Congress, or among the American people—to increase our military commitment to Lebanon, especially after the outrage over the Beirut bombing dissipated.

Lebanon, I soon learned, was also the subject of intense debate even within the administration. Many in the Pentagon, including Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, favored an early and complete withdrawal from the country. The American troops still on the ground were in largely indefensible positions and were being targeted by the Syrian-backed extremists. Because of the dangers they faced, the troops' movements were severely restricted. They were using, as Weinberger later put it, “fruitless tactics in pursuit of unreachable goals.”
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During his trip to Beirut after the bombings, even Vice President Bush, who publicly expressed support for our presence, privately characterized the pleas of Lebanon's president for American support unpersuasive.
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On the other side of the issue was Secretary of State Shultz, who favored maintaining an American military presence to help stabilize the Lebanese government. The unpleasant alternative to that, Shultz pointed out, was to have the country become a client state of Syria or an ungoverned haven for terrorists and extremists. Shultz's position was bolstered by a number of our strongest allies in the region. King Hussein of Jordan, for example, made it clear that if the United States were to leave Lebanon, we would essentially be out of the Middle East dynamic. Of greater concern, the King felt that without an American counterweight in Lebanon, Syria would likely turn its attention toward Jordan, and then to Saudi Arabia. Saddam Hussein told me during our meeting in Baghdad that he believed the United States had been indifferent to Syria's initial invasion of Lebanon and had “let this group of lunatics bash each other.”
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It was an experience to be on the receiving end of a lecture from Saddam Hussein, especially when he might have been right.