SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden (14 page)

In the 1960s, Lebanon was peaceful and prosperous. Osama bin Laden attended the Brummana academy in the hills above Beirut, and he continued to visit Lebanon throughout the seventies with his family. Though its central government was congenitally weak, the Lebanese pound was strong and the beautiful city of Beirut was considered the Paris of the Arab world, and also its financial capital.

Sent packing from Jordan, when that country’s army had inflicted more than three thousand casualties on PLO fighters and Palestinian civilians, Yasser Arafat arrived in Beirut with suitcases full of cash and thousands of heavily armed PLO fighters. In Beirut, as Arafat practiced his tyranny, he founded a covert arm of Fatah called Black September. He selected the most battle-hardened and ruthless of his subordinates and ensured their loyalty with cash bounties. He arranged for them to receive the best training he could—often from intelligence agents from the Warsaw Pact. He made sure they were extravagantly equipped. With this paid gang of killers, Yasser Arafat would make his wrath felt around the world. Based out of Lebanon, Black September terrorists assassinated Jordan’s prime minister, sent letter bombs, sprayed the Athens airport with gunfire, and gunned down Israeli diplomats in London.

The Arab world was desperate to strike any blow it could against Israel. The Arab people were so downtrodden and humiliated, they were willing to overlook that Arafat’s “victories” were often scored against unarmed people. He was fighting back, and that was all that mattered.

Hundreds of millions of dollars streamed into PLO coffers, and the nations of the Warsaw Pact offered diplomatic status to PLO representatives. Communist East Germany was especially helpful—providing Black September with safe havens, weapons storage, explosives training, and travel documents. Arafat returned the favor by sabotaging electrical plants in West Germany and scarring the 1972 Munich Olympics by murdering eleven Israeli athletes in cold blood.

Despite Arafat’s frantic urging, Lebanon wisely declined to participate in the second Arab-Israeli war in 1973, but the PLO joined in, staging attacks from southern Lebanon. As the Lebanese government lost control, militias flourished in the countryside, and the rule of law bowed down to the Kalashnikov.

Largely because of the disruptive presence of Arafat and the PLO, civil war erupted in Lebanon in 1975. An estimated one hundred thousand Lebanese civilians would be consumed in a senseless paroxysm of violence.In almost a thousand years of human history there is no parallel to the violence that destroyed Lebanon. Armed with twentieth-century weapons, the citizens of Lebanon turned on each other with unfathomable barbarity. Brutal militias rained rockets and artillery shells on Beirut, killing thousands of men, women, and children as they huddled in the basements of their homes. Atrocity followed outrage and massacre followed murder until the reason for the violence was lost in a bottomless pit of human depravity. Yasser Arafat presided over a bizarre six-sided war, raining rockets and mortars around the compass, hitting “enemy locations” that included hospitals and elementary schools.

PLO fire was returned by Lebanese militias who retaliated in kind, shell for shell, rocket for rocket, sniper kill for sniper kill. It was like the end of the world—except that it would not end. Month after month, and year after year, the war continued, the lines never changing, the antagonists content to merely pump artillery shells into each other’s neighborhoods. An entire generation of Lebanese children were made into trembling, shell-shocked PTSD victims. Many Beiruti survivors adapted by inuring themselves to brutality. Many of these children would grow up to become members of a violent religious militia called Hezbollah—but that would be twenty years in the future. The mayhem of the Lebanese civil war went on for almost a decade.

*   *   *

Osama bin Laden carefully followed the war in Beirut from his home in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. As a boy and teenager, he had traveled many times to Lebanon, and knew the country and its people well. As a religious man, Osama cared very little for Yasser Arafat, a wholly secular and political being, who rarely, if ever, mentioned his Muslim faith. Arafat put the creation of a Palestinian state before everything else in his life—including God. Arafat is alleged to have said that “fighting wars over religion was like arguing about who has the best imaginary friend.” If Osama bin Laden heard those words, he would have been incensed.

Though Osama was sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian people, and took a secret delight in the successes of Palestinian terror operations, he could not thoroughly embrace Arafat or the PLO because they had not made Islam part of their solution.

Broadcasts from the Middle East were a monotony of violence and a bewildering array of causes, combatants, countries, and catastrophe. Osama bin Laden was shocked and infuriated by the implacable apathy of the American people to the plight of the Arabs. In his mind America’s indifference was taken as proof of a cold and calculated plan to destroy the Arabs and erase fifteen hundred years of Muslim history and culture. Through the prism of his increasing religiosity, Osama began to see America not merely as the ally of Israel, but as an enemy of Islam.

Throughout 1981, Christian militias did battle both the PLO and the invading Syrian army. The Israelis could not resist getting in shots of their own. In retaliation for continued PLO attacks, the Israeli air force pummeled Beirut at will. The airport was destroyed, power plants were bombed, and hundreds of “PLO headquarters” were reduced to rubble. Parts of Beirut began to resemble the surface of Mars.

Lebanon became the prototype of the “failed nation.” Through it all, Arafat ordered his forces to escalate attacks on Israel, launching raids and terror attacks from PLO bases in south Lebanon.

Finally, the Israelis had had enough. They launched an invasion.

Menachem Begin, architect of the King David Hotel bombing, inventor of the truck bomb, former head of the terrorist group the Irgun, had been elected prime minister of Israel in 1977. He decided to get tough on terrorism.

On June 6, 1982, Begin ordered the Israeli army to invade Lebanon. IDF armored columns quickly swatted aside whatever forces could be put in front of them. Their goal was Yasser Arafat in Beirut. Soon, the Israelis controlled the coast roads and had surrounded Lebanon’s capital on two sides. Using U.S.-supplied aircraft, artillery, and bombs, the Israelis put Beirut under a ring of fire.

Two months after the Israeli invasion, a Christian, Bashir Gemayel, was elected president of Lebanon. He prevailed upon the U.S. to try to rein in the Israeli army. President Ronald Reagan brokered a cease-fire, and the U.S. landed a small amphibious force to embark the PLO onto ferryboats and cargo ships. In a Dunkirk-like evacuation, thousands of PLO gunmen were flotillaed to Cyprus. On August 20, 1982, Yasser Arafat and the high command of the PLO were allowed to step onto a cruise ship and also depart. During his extraction from Beirut, Yasser Arafat was protected by a detachment of U.S. Navy SEALs.

With the PLO gone, the Americans withdrew, but it took a year for the Israeli army to pull out of Beirut. It was long, fateful, and bloody year.

On September 1982, President Bashir Gemayel was assassinated by a car bomb that took out an entire city block. The crowning atrocity of the Lebanese war was set into motion.

Following the death of President Gemayel, three companies of the Christian Phalangist militia crossed Israeli-occupied territory in south Beirut and entered the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. The PLO was gone, and the refugees were defenseless. The Lord told the Christians to take an eye for an eye and the destruction they visited on the two camps was biblical.

On the nights of September 16, 17, and 18, 1982, Christian militiamen killed more than two thousand Palestinian men, women, and children in an orgy of destruction. The Israelis watched the murderers come, and then they watched them go. Israeli artillery units fired flares over the camps so the murderers could set about their work. It was one of the most cold-blooded massacres in human history.

News cameras found the victims. Some had been hacked to death and mutilated. Women and children had been tortured, raped, and murdered. Men were found with their hands tied, lined up before walls, and machine-gunned in heaps. Their homes had been ransacked, their stores looted, and even their animals slaughtered in their pens.

The news story was carried in
Time
magazine, but Jewish groups in the U.S. insisted that the story was “PLO propaganda.” The sheer scale of the barbarism boggled comprehension. The American public ignored the suffering of the Palestinian people as it had ignored the horrors of the Lebanese civil war.

America turned a blind eye, but the Arab world was shocked and disgusted. The images of Sabra and Shatila did more to fuel anti-Israeli and anti-American feelings than any other event in the twentieth century. Yet it hardly blipped in Western media.

International condemnation fell on Israel’s then minister of defense, Ariel Sharon. An Israeli commission found that Sharon bore “personal responsibility” for the massacre. He resigned his post and the condemnation faded. Nineteen years later, rehabilitated as a patriot, he would be elected prime minister of Israel.

The martyrs of Sabra and Shatila were forgotten, piled into garbage trucks, and bulldozed into a mass grave in a rubbish dump north of the Beirut airport.

Tens of thousands of Arab men, those who considered themselves religious and those who were purely secular, vowed revenge for the innocents killed at Sabra and Shatila.

One of those men was Osama bin Laden.

In March 1983, largely to prevent further atrocities, the United States again sent Marines into Lebanon, this time as part of a multinational peacekeeping force. France, Britain, and Italy also sent contingents, but it was U.S. Marines who did the heavy lifting.

Trouble started almost at once. On April 18, 1983, a suicide truck bomb destroyed the American embassy in Beirut, killing sixty Americans. It was the first time since the Empire of Japan initiated kamikaze attacks that a suicide operation had killed Americans overseas.

The Israeli army eventually skulked out of Beirut, leaving behind a ruin. When the Israelis departed, the Lebanese civil war exploded again in all its ferocity.

One member of the multinational peacekeeping force described what happened next: “Finally there was nothing left for the Israelis to burn. When they pulled out, it was like the last fifteen minutes of
Blackhawk Down,
all day, every day.”

Once again Beirut descended into anarchy. Traffic accidents would set off fistfights, which turned in minutes to gun battles, then firefights, then artillery duels. Thousands more civilians were killed. The peacekeepers of the multinational force, especially the Marines, found themselves the targets of a dizzying array of Lebanese militias, as well as the armed forces of Syria and Iran.

Dug into bunkers at the Beirut airport and a short strip of sand called Green Beach was a battalion of U.S. Marines augmented by Navy Seabees and a platoon from SEAL Team Four. They could do nothing to stem the violence, and very little to defend themselves. The SEALs hunted snipers and took out Syrian artillery spotters in the Shouf Mountains above the city. By September, it became too crazy for the Americans to even attempt to leave their positions.

Again the American media was curiously silent about what was going on in Beirut. Marines who returned from Lebanon were surprised to learn that though they had been through six months of combat, no one back in the United States seemed to know or care. Before the year 1983 was over, more Marines would die in Lebanon than were killed in the 120-day siege of Khe Sanh during the Vietnam War. But much worse was to come for the Marines in Lebanon. Looming for them would be America’s greatest military defeat since Pearl Harbor, and the single deadliest terrorist attack mounted against the United States until the horror of 9/11.

Ronald Reagan would describe Beirut as “the biggest tragedy of my presidency.”

Although the Israelis were gone, those determined to strike back for the massacres at Sabra and Shatila still had targets to strike … namely the French and American peacekeepers hanging on to outposts within Beirut.

Members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps were serving as military advisers to a small but determined Lebanese militia called “Hezbollah,” or “the Party of God.” Orders came from Tehran to blow up the American and French headquarters with suicide truck bombs. The idea was to strike the French and Americans simultaneously and force their governments to withdraw their peacekeepers from Lebanon.

On a tactical level, the operation would be payback for the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. With the only credible armed force in Beirut withdrawn, the Lebanese people could be counted on to descend again into anarchy. This would enable the Shiite religious party, Hezbollah, to rise to the occasion and establish a theocratic government—along the lines of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It was an audacious, even grandiose plan. Astoundingly, it worked.

On the morning of Sunday, October 23, 1983, a pair of identical truck bombs were driven toward the headquarters buildings of the American and French peacekeeping forces in Beirut. They detonated twenty-eight seconds apart, killing 243 U.S. Marines and sixty French paratroopers. It was the first time in history that a peacekeeping force had been massacred in their beds.

The man who designed the truck bombs was an Iranian trained member of Hezbollah named Imad Mughniyeh. The intrepid Mughniyeh went on to specialize in attacks on U.S. bases, putting together another truck bomb that would devastate a U.S. Air Force barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996. By then, Osama bin Laden would be so impressed that he would send his own bomb makers to train with Mughniyeh in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.

Most scholars agree that these two explosions were the opening shots of what has been called the Global Salafist Jihad. They were also a turning point in the evolution of warfare. The use of unconventional weapons and proxy militias is an aspect of fourth-generation warfare. Sometimes called “asymmetrical combat,” these techniques allow a small foe to fight a very much larger enemy. This new type of war uses special operations forces, unconventional weapons, advanced technology, and social media to attack an enemy simultaneously in military, political, and social spheres. Its tactics include the use of proxy organizations, state-sponsored bombings, transnational terror organizations, information warfare, and the manipulation of media. Fourth-generation warriors operate against nontraditional points of attack—especially soft and symbolic targets like monuments and large assemblies of people. The goal is to obscure the authors of the violence, shift the blame from attacker to victims, and frame debate for the causal factors in the media. It is in the media where the real effort is expended, in an attempt to “control the narrative,” so the smaller, attacking foe can “fight the fight” in the information space—on the news and the Internet—rather than on the battlefield, where open combat would be impossible.