The Watchers (3 page)

—National Security Adviser John Poindexter, in a 1986
Wall Street Journal
editorial defending the Reagan
administration's decision to trade arms for hostages
in Iran, published one day before he resigned

The sun dawned about a quarter after six on Sunday. Most of the Marines were still asleep. A few who were up and moving about the compound noticed a yellow truck outside the concertina wire that guarded the perimeter. It was a Mercedes-Benz stake-bed, a workhorse used to carry heavy cargo. Before anyone could figure out why it was there, the truck picked up speed and crashed through the fence.

A sentry in one of the two guard posts nearby turned in time to see the truck heading straight for the Marines' barracks. He grabbed his unloaded M16 and reached for a magazine of ammunition. The truck sped through an open gate, swerved around a sewer pipe, and aimed for the small sergeant-of-the-guard post stationed at the entrance to the hulking concrete building.

That guard was facing the lobby and heard the roaring truck behind him. He turned, and he thought for a moment, “What's that truck doing inside the perimeter?” An instant later he was sprinting through the building to another entrance on the far side.

“Hit the deck!” he yelled. “Hit the deck!” He glanced back over his shoulder and watched the truck flatten his post before crashing into the lobby. It halted there. One or two seconds passed, and then the guard saw a bright orange and yellow flash. Then he realized he was flying through the air.

 

First Lieutenant Glenn Dolphin awoke to the barks of an early-rising Arkansas captain. He exhorted the roomful of exhausted men to join him at the barracks gym for a workout before reveille. They were splayed out on cots set up in the parking bay of an old fire department building. Dolphin looked over. The guy worked out constantly, and he thought he looked like a million bucks. But it was Sunday, the one day Dolphin could sleep in. The only Marines up now were jogging the perimeter, enjoying the rare morning quiet. The rest would stroll down later to the chow tent, where the cooks set up an omelet station on Sundays. Dolphin had been on duty in the Combat Operations Center until midnight and had been looking forward to the extra rest.
Fuck it,
he thought, eyeing the energetic captain. Dolphin rolled over in his cot to steal a few more minutes' sleep.

Dolphin had been encamped with the Twenty-fourth Marine Amphibious Unit at the Beirut International Airport for seven months now, ostensibly as part of an international peacekeeping force. Only two days earlier, the Marines had held another memorial service, the fifth in two months. Alan Soiffert, a twenty-five-year-old staff sergeant from Nashua, New Hampshire, had taken a sniper round in the chest as he patrolled the airport perimeter in his Jeep. The vehicle flipped over, and Soiffert bled onto the hard, dry ground. He was the first Jewish Marine to die in Lebanon. A rabbi had come in especially for the memorial.

Beirut, a religiously diverse cradle of antiquity and once the glittering cultural and economic heart of the Levant, seemed on an irreversible descent into hell since the Marines arrived. They'd taken persistent rocket and artillery attacks in recent weeks from Muslim Druze militia redoubts in the Shuf Mountains, which overlooked the city. The Americans had first come ashore the previous June, evacuating U.S. citizens in the wake of an Israeli invasion. The Israeli Defense Force had launched a massive campaign against Palestinian militants, who had long since turned a politically disorganized and factional Lebanon into their lawless launchpad for attacks into Israel. It took only three days for the Israelis to reach the outskirts of Beirut. There, they hooked up with Christian Lebanese militia opposed to the Palestinians. Two weeks later the forces rolled into the town of Alayh, killing a dozen Druze soldiers. The next day the Christian militia first entered the Shuf, sparking long and terrible artillery battles with their Muslim enemies. Lebanon, which had teetered for so many years on the brink of civil war, careered over the edge.

To halt the outbreak of regional war, the United States joined a multinational force with France and Italy and managed to get fifteen thousand armed Palestinian and Syrian forces out of the capital. The Syrians dominated Lebanese politics and had hobbled the country and its government during six years of occupation. But the American-led peace was fitful. Syrian operatives assassinated the young, Christian president-elect. The Israelis then seized West Beirut and for two days stood by as the Christian militia exacted revenge, slaughtering untold hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians in a pair of refugee camps.

Dolphin's Unit descended into the bedlam on November 3, 1982. They staked their ground at the airport, wedging themselves between Israeli positions and the heavily populated areas of Beirut. The relative calm fractured five months later, when someone slammed a bomb-laden truck into the lobby of the U.S. embassy. The suicide attacker killed sixty-three people, including most of the CIA station in Beirut. After that, the notion that the Americans were in Beirut on a peacekeeping mission struck the twelve hundred Marines as absurd.

Rather than pushing out into the craggy Shuf, which hid the snipers and artillery batteries, the Marines sheltered in place on the south side of the airport. They built makeshift bunkers out of sandbags, which cast long shadows on the vast, open expanse of dirt and asphalt, providing easy marks for gunmen. The Marines' rules of engagement, handed down from the Pentagon, said they must maintain a noncombat presence—that meant no heavily fortified bunkers, nothing more than concertina wire to mark their compound, and, in what struck so many of the men as sheer madness, no loaded weapons. Beirut was teeming with agitated, gun-toting boys enamored of the radical Iranian leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, whose dark eyes peered from posters plastered around the city. The few men who'd gone on limited patrols in town came back with stories of ominous black hands painted on buildings, the sign that its residents had been marked for death. They watched young boys stare menacingly at the Stars and Stripes patches sewn on the peacekeepers' sleeves. The Marines were trapped in what
Time
magazine, in a story about Soiffert's death, had called “the fratricidal quagmire that is Lebanon.”

Dolphin was twenty-five, but he felt old. The wind and sand had beaten the shine off his skin and dulled his red hair. He'd been wondering if his unit's reinforcements might arrive by Thanksgiving or Christmas. The sun still low in the sky, he started to fall back to sleep on his cot.

Dolphin felt a wave of pressure before he actually heard the explosion. He and the other Marines were lying next to six huge metal doors. They flew off their frames and away from the building as daylight flooded into the parking bay.

Dolphin saw the doors slow down in midair, and then careen back toward him, sucked in by a vacuum created in the blast. One door clipped him on the back. Then he heard the boom, so loud he couldn't have imagined it before that moment. Everything in the bay that wasn't nailed down flew up in a maelstrom of shrapnel. A skylight at the top edge of the building shattered, and glass rained on the Marines.

 

The open-air lobby of the barracks, known to the Marines as the battalion landing team headquarters, or BLT, was surrounded by food storage areas, weight machines, and an armory cache. The first, second, and third floors held the Marines' quarters. Its central location on the airport grounds made it the perfect distribution hub for water, rations, and supplies, and its roof offered 360-degree panoramic views and a platform for radio antennae. But more than that, this former-office-building-turned-fortress had obviously withstood the punishment of war. It had played host to a line of foreign invaders—first the Palestinians, then the Syrians, and later the Israelis, who had turned it into a field hospital during the invasion. When the Marines took over, the BLT was a bombed-out, battle-scarred shell of a building. The second, third, and fourth floors, once encased in plate-glass windows, looked now like rows of broken teeth. The holes were patched with plywood and scrap cloth from sandbags, and makeshift screens of plastic sheets flapped in the wind. The elevator shafts had been burned out. But for all that, the decrepit, Brutalist monstrosity was still standing. The damned thing had not been moved, and so the Marines naturally gravitated to it.

The racket of a Mercedes truck crashing into the building surely woke some of the men. But for a few seconds before the driver detonated his cargo, the truck sat still and quiet in the lobby. The blast severed the base of the building, a set of upright concrete columns measuring fifteen feet in circumference and reinforced with iron rods nearly two inches thick. The BLT's most prominent design feature, an open courtyard that extended from the lobby up to the roof, captured the blast like gas in a bottle, and intensified its force.

The entire structure rose into the air. The top of the building exploded upward in a V shape, like two great arms stretched up to the sky. The BLT hung for a moment in midair, then fell back in on itself, crushed downward, and poured into a crater nine feet deep.

 

Blood dripped off Dolphin's back. He walked over the glass-covered floor and made his way outside. He saw pieces of concrete falling from the sky. At least half a minute had passed since he'd heard the blast.

He ran to the Combat Operations Center located next to his sleeping quarters. This was his default duty station during Condition One, a basewide emergency. Another communications officer was pulling himself up off the floor; the blast had thrown him from his chair and separated his shoulder. Long cracks ran up the wall of the COC. Dolphin could see daylight through them.

The Marines on duty scurried to reassemble the radios littering the floor. Something must have landed on us, Dolphin thought to himself. Something huge. Rumors had circulated that the Soviets were supplying the Syrian military with intercontinental ballistic missiles. Could someone have nuked the base? Was that what this was?

“I can't raise the BLT,” a young corporal called out. “I can't get them to pick up the phone.”

A staff sergeant flew into the room. “The BLT is gone!” he yelled. “It's gone!”

Dolphin was confused.
Did they deploy? Maybe they're going out after whatever hit us,
he thought. Then a third man came in, a major, reporting that the building itself was gone.

Dolphin went outside. First he saw the smoke. And then Marines, walking around in circles, some of them with almost all their clothes blown off. On a few men Dolphin could make out only the standard-issue red exercise shorts the Marines wore during workouts. Everyone was covered from head to toe in a gray powder, as if he'd rolled in it. Facial features, hair color, race—everything was obscured under the ghostly cover of pulverized concrete.

Dolphin spotted a staff sergeant named Lawson speeding in his Jeep toward a medical post across the street. Lawson tried to steady a wounded Marine in the passenger seat with his free hand; the man's head rolled and bobbed like it might come off. One of his eyes had blown out of its socket and flopped down on his cheek. Dolphin turned and looked down the road. Where the BLT should have stood, he noticed a new view—the ocean.

A catatonic Marine was standing in front of him, wearing nothing but the waistband of his red shorts. His body hair had been burned off. His arm hung limp. Dolphin tried to lift him, but the pain from his back swelled.

“Listen!” he said. “Help isn't going to come to you. You've got to help yourself.” The Marine started walking. “I don't want to lose my arm,” he said. “I don't want to lose my arm.” He kept uttering the refrain as Dolphin walked with him up the road. He spotted Lawson driving back to the blast site. Dolphin loaded the man into the Jeep. “Just take him,” he said, and then went looking for more.

The whole day went like that.

 

The ring of the secure phone at his home in suburban Maryland summoned Admiral John Poindexter from slumber. He reached over to his bedside table and lifted the receiver. It was nearly 1:00 A.M.

A watch officer in the White House Situation Room relayed what he knew. A bombing at the Marine compound. Minutes later the French regiment also had been hit at their base, not far away. Near simultaneous attacks. Perhaps copycats of the embassy bombing.

Poindexter absorbed the information. Someone had to tell the president. “Call Bud,” he said.

Ronald Reagan had selected Robert “Bud” McFarlane as his national security adviser only a week earlier. He'd moved up from the deputy slot, and Poindexter had become the new number two. McFarlane was traveling with the president on a weekend outing at the Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia. The Situation Room would raise McFarlane on a secure phone, and then he'd have to trot across the dark links to Reagan's cottage, wake him, and impart the dreadful news. Meanwhile, Poindexter would hold down the fort in Washington until McFarlane could return.

The two had come up through the Naval Academy together, Poindexter graduating in 1958 and McFarlane a year later. At the White House they'd been working for some time now at a step above their official titles. The previous national security adviser, Bill Clark, an old friend and aide of Reagan's, enjoyed uncommonly intimate access to the president and preferred to play the role of chief confidant instead of security adviser. That left McFarlane and Poindexter to actually run the National Security Council staff, the president's gateway to the vast, unwieldy, and often competing bureaucracies of the Defense and State departments, as well as those of the CIA and several other agencies that comprised the intelligence community.