The Great War for Civilisation (159 page)

The hunks of shrapnel were now no more a rocket than a piece of broken china constituted a plate, but the very word “missile” would cause palpitations to any U.S. agent in the aftermath of the recent TWA disaster off New York; in five years' time, the whole exercise would have been impossible. In the end, Amnesty International—well aware of the ambulance killings in Lebanon—agreed to airfreight the missile parts from Paris to their Washington office. A few days later, I flew Air France to the United States; I can remember my sense of excitement as my aircraft stopped over briefly in New York. I stood with the French crew on the steps of the plane in the early afternoon, looking towards the distant skyscrapers and the tall grey towers of the World Trade Center on the warm horizon. Now at last I could confront the armourers with the consequences of their profession.

In Washington, I picked up the Hellfire fragment in the heart of the capital whose alliance with Israel allows neither criticism not restraint. I wasn't going to take a local flight and get caught on the metal detectors at Washington's Ronald Reagan airport, so the Crescent, a railroad train en route to New Orleans, would take me through the night down to Georgia, where Bob Algarotti of Boeing had agreed to meet me to discuss the Hellfire at the very home of the missile. He wanted to explain its advantages, its combat-proven abilities, to a reporter who— he wrongly assumed—wanted to write a puff piece about the missile's accuracy.

Washington, that late spring day, was beautiful. The Capitol and the great government buildings looked like ancient Rome. And when I awoke the next bright morning in my sleeping car heading south, the neat little American towns looked like they were on a Hollywood set. The soft green countryside and the clapboard houses sailed past the window of my carriage. How neat those little gardens were with their flowers and children's swings. Was I only 6,000 miles away from Lebanon—or on a different planet? There were Episcopalian churches and smart Georgian courthouses and towns called Cornelia and Magnolia Acres flicking past, and a gunstore—in a land where every man and woman has the right to bear arms—called Lock, Stock and Barrel. And so many flagstaffs that dawn morning I could see from my carriage window. And so many red, white and blue American flags snapping proudly from them. There hadn't been a war in these parts, I thought, for 130 years.

I climbed down at Gainesville station, where a taxi man with one surviving tooth took me down Interstate 85 to the Old Peachtree Road exit. We passed a sign saying Duluth and then Satellite Boulevard and then, less than 3 miles further on, we turned into a campus of discreet two-storey buildings hidden behind tall trees and manicured lawns. “Boeing Defense and Space Group,” it said on the sign at the gate.

It was to be a disturbing afternoon. A tiny, green-painted model of the Hellfire stood on a shelf of the room in which Bob Algarotti of Boeing introduced me to two executives intimately involved in the production of the missile. They were highly intelligent men; both were former serving officers in Vietnam and both would later request anonymity—for their security, it seemed, although their concern about Boeing's reaction to the interview appeared to outweigh any fear of Hizballah or “terrorism.”

I explained that I was interested in writing about the abilities of the Hellfire— but also about its specific use in the Middle East. The executive to my right— whom I shall call the Colonel, for that was his rank in Vietnam—produced a glossy brochure that detailed the evolution of the Hellfire modular missile system, and placed it on the table between us. Page 2 carried a series of small illustrated cross-sections of the rocket and, following the dates 1982–89, a coding of AGM 114A, B, C. The piece of shrapnel—which, unbeknown to the Boeing men, was in my camera bag—was marked AGM 114C. So the missile that killed Abbas Jiha's family, Nowkal and her niece was at least seven years old.

The Colonel listed the countries which had purchased either an early or later, improved, category of the Hellfire. First on the list was Israel with both categories—“they take soldiering pretty seriously,” the Colonel said admiringly, a remark I decided to let go for the moment—but Egypt, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates were also included. Sweden and Norway had purchased an anti-ship version of the Hellfire. The British had category two. It was a popular product and the Colonel was keen to explain why. “It's probably the most precise anti-armour weapon in the world,” he said. “You can fire it through a basketball hoop at five miles and it would do it every time.” So the women and children in the ambulance, I thought to myself, had stood no chance.

I understood at once what this meant. The Boeing men were promoting the accuracy of their weapons as part of their humanitarian pitch: the more accurate the Hellfire, the less chance civilians would be killed by it. The problem came when the weapon was specifically aimed at a civilian target—as it had been by the Israelis in Lebanon—when the very precision of the missile ensured that civilians would be killed. So I asked what checks Boeing carried out on the use to which the Hellfire had been put by the nations that purchased it. They read the papers, both executives said. I asked about Israel. “We do not get information from the Israelis about what they've done,” one of the men replied. “They don't give much information.”

It was time to produce the missile fragment. And as I knelt to extract it from my camera bag, I felt the electricity in the air behind me. I turned round and laid the shard of iron which had helped to kill the Lebanese in the centre of the table. I told all three men the date of its use, the location, the appalling results and Israel's explanation. The Colonel picked it up, turning it in his hand and muttering something about how it might be too small a fragment to identify. This was absurd. He could read the codes on the metal from the missile. He understood what they meant better than I did. His colleague to my left said nothing, stared at the fragment and looked at me. Bob Algarotti, the public relations man, picked it up, glanced at his colleagues, and said quietly: “Yeah, well, it's a Hellfire, we all know that.”

Then he said: “I'm getting a little uncomfortable.” But the Colonel was angry. “This is so far off base, it's ridiculous,” he said. I begged to disagree. These men manufactured this missile. Did they not bear some responsibility for its use—at least to ensure that it was used responsibly by their clients? Was reading about its use in the newspapers enough? Was that the extent of their interest or care? There then followed some very uncomfortable minutes. Algarotti complained that you couldn't blame a knife-maker if someone used the knife to murder someone else. Yes, I said, but this was not a knife. The Hellfire was an anti-personnel weapon. “It's not!” the Colonel replied angrily. “It's an anti-armour weapon.” And then there was silence—because, of course, if the missile was an anti-armour weapon, it most surely was not an anti-ambulance weapon.

“Are you on some kind of crusade?” one of the executives asked. I said I thought this an unfortunate remark.
¹⁷²
Algarotti interrupted quietly to agree with me. We were dealing with the death of innocent people, I repeated, including children. What was I looking for? one of the men asked. For some sign of compassion from them, I replied. One of the men in the room said: “I, as a person—sure I have feelings, but as a Boeing company employee, all we do is make missiles.” I then agreed to lay down my pen while the three men discussed how they could frame some statement of their feelings. Both executives clearly felt deeply troubled about the events that I described; they were family men and wanted to express their horror at the deaths of innocents. But they didn't want Boeing involved and— equally obviously—they were frightened of criticising Israel. During the afternoon, one man at Boeing would be heard to say twice—in identical words, I observed in my notebook—“Whatever you do, I don't want you to quote me as saying anything critical of Israel's policies.”

And here was the nub. These men, these armourers—so powerful, so overwhelmingly part of America's defence system, so patriotic in their motives, so immutably part of the history of the U.S. armed forces in Vietnam—were frightened of offending Israel, fearful that a mere word of criticism would damage or end their careers or send them careening off into a political crisis within the aerospace company so serious that their careers would be for ever ravaged. “Whatever you do . . .” the man had said.

Then one of the executives made up his mind. “Let me speak as a soldier, not as an employee of Boeing. No professional soldier is going to condone the killing of innocent people as targets. We're trained to preserve the peace . . . of course, the Boeing company is troubled if its weapons are misused or targeted against, you know, innocent people. But we build weapons systems to U.S. requirements, we get permission to sell to many different countries . . . we don't sell missiles that are intended for non-military targets . . .”

I pulled from my bag the photographs that Najla Abujahjah had taken of the victims. I laid them on the table, images of blood and torn limbs. The executive on my left looked through them with distaste. Then he said: “I don't want these.” And he slid the pictures of the dead and wounded members of the Jiha family across the heavily polished tabletop. The Colonel looked at them and gently returned them to me. We parted with handshakes; and I felt oddly sad for these men. They were decent, hard-working, loyal employees of Rockwell—now Boeing—and they had been shocked by the story of the ambulance. They wanted to show their compassion—and did so, up to a point—but were desperately anxious to avoid any offence to Boeing or to Israel. I told them to keep the Hellfire missile fragment. I was returning it to them. And as I left the room, I heard a voice behind me say: “I don't think we'll put this one in the trophy room.”

And there my story might have ended. The
Review
section of the London
Independenton Sunday
published my detailed account of the Israeli attack on the ambulance and the long journey to the south of the United States to find the men who made it. On the front cover, the paper ran a coloured photograph of the missile fragment, showing in minute detail the codings that had survived the explosion. But two days later, I received a letter from a European missile technician. He wanted anonymity. He said he wanted “some focusing of Human Rights for these people” killed in the ambulance. Then he went on:

The vital piece of evidence, the missile fragment, says a lot more than you revealed . . . The NATO Stock Number is partially obliterated, but does give a vital clue. The NSN is made up of a 42-34 digit sequence . . . the two digit part is the Nation Code. Each NATO country . . . has an identifying nationality code—in this case, the “01” for the U.S.A is clearly visible. This shows that the weapon was originally supplied to U.S. forces . . . The Lot No. is the most significant. This would tell you exactly where and when it was made, and more importantly, where it was delivered . . . you will see that the first part of the Lot No. has been obliterated . . . It also appears to have been made by a chisel-like instrument . . . being pushed down on the plate; the other damage is all of a glancing/scraping nature. So who cut out the Lot No.? Israeli forces upon receipt of “illegally exported” U.S. weaponry? U.S. forces before delivery? . . . It is quite clear that this missile . . . was exported from U.S. government stocks and given to the Israelis covertly.

The writer ended with a warning, telling me that I should be careful what I said on the telephone about my missile inquiries, because “all satellite transmissions are monitored by the U.S. National Security Agency at Menwith near Harrogate . . .‘Compromising NATO Security' would be the charge [against me] so please be discreet in your handling of this letter.”

Discreet I was. I messaged a friend in France and asked her to call the anonymous letter-writer. Minutes later she was on the line. “He called me back from a pay phone. He wants to meet you tomorrow for lunch at the Lutetia Hotel in Paris.” Next morning I boarded the first flight to Paris, the 8:05 from Beirut—the same plane I had flown with the missile fragment only a few days earlier. At Charles de Gaulle airport, I took a taxi to the
6ème arrondissement
. This was an assignment, it seemed, that would turn me into the ancient mariner, the Hellfire missile my personal albatross.

The technician had arrived in Paris with his wife. He went straight to the point. “Mr. Fisk, that missile was
never
sold to the Israelis. The ‘01' shows it was sold to the U.S. armed forces. And the ‘M' proves it was sold to the U.S. Marine Corps.” Was he sure? He pulled from his pocket NATO's entire arms coding list. Israel's imported NATO weapons, for example, would carry the numerals “31.” Britain's NATO coding is “99,” Italy “15.” But the nationality code for the United States was—suitably enough—“01.” Which was the code on the missile fragment. And “M” stood for the U.S. Marines. So how, in heaven's name, did a Marine Corps missile come to be fired by the Israelis into an ambulance in southern Lebanon? I called my then editor, Andrew Marr. “Bob,” he said, “looks like you'll be adding up some more air miles—get back to Washington.”

I did. I made a formal request to the Pentagon, giving them full details of the missile's codes, asking them for “the exact provenance of this missile . . . did it pass through U.S. military hands and, if so, how did it find its way to the Israel Defence Forces? . . . What follow-up action was taken by the U.S. government after the April 13 attack?” I received no reply. Indeed, after more than thirty calls from me to the U.S. Defense Department and the State Department—faxing and hand-delivering not only the coding of this missile but the coding on the unexploded missile which had also been fired at the ambulance, from which we had established some of the figures scratched off the exploded rocket—not a single official American government spokesman, either at Defense or State, was prepared to give me any information. “Some questions come to us with a kind of jinx attached,” a Defense Department official told me during another vain call to his office. “Yours seems to have a jinx.”