Still, the resiliency of the Lebanese people was amazing.
MacFarlane returned to Washington in early October, hoping the cease-fire would hold.
It lasted only a couple of weeks.
During this lull, I left Beirut and traveled first to Stuttgart to brief General Lawson, the Deputy CINC for Europe, and then on to Washington to brief the Joint Chiefs.
In the meantime, the training of the Lebanese army continued. A supply ship carrying military equipment, supplies, and ammunition, bought and paid for by the Lebanese government as part of the military assistance program, finally showed up after a two-week delay (it had crashed into a pier in Italy). It was very welcome.
Later in October, the shelling of the 8th Brigade resumed from Druze militia batteries located ten to fifteen kilometers west of the ridgeline. The firing this time was much less intense than in September, and now had a discernible pattern: There was firing in the morning, and then again later in the afternoon. This turned out to be a convenient modus operandi for the Druze, many of whom kept a mortar in their backyard or in their houses (they'd drag it out and quickly set it up to fire). They dropped a few rounds in the tube before going to work and again in the afternoon as they returned.
The 8th Brigade continued to hold the ridgeline. But ominously, almost every night they could see headlights of convoys resupplying Syrian artillery positions in the Chouf.
The shelling of the Ambassador's residence at Yarze and the Ministry of Defense also resumed, but also at a reduced rate, which meant that people were more or less able to conduct business as usual. You couldn't say that people were leading "normal" lives, but chances of immediate, violent death were much lessened.
Soon the Shiites in West Beirut began ambushing people traveling the coastal road — an ironic setting, since it was hardly more than rock-throwing distance from the fleet of twenty-eight American warships, including a battleship and two aircraft carriers. People were killing each other and burning the bodies in clear view of many of the ships, and nothing could be done about it.
Though I encouraged Tannous to have the Lebanese army brigade responsible for the area put a stop to it, little was done, because the brigade commander and most of the brigade were Shiites.
Meanwhile, the Navy continued its daily reconnaissance flights over the Chouf Mountains and the Bekaa Valley. Soon they were drawing antiaircraft fire from SA-7 missiles and 37mm twin-barrel antiaircraft guns.
THE NEW THREAT
As October dragged on, we began to receive credible intelligence reports of possible car bomb attacks, sometimes even giving the make and the color of the car. One of these messages indicated that a spectacular act now being planned would make the ground shake underneath the foreign forces.
A Lebanese intelligence official believed that this act could be perpetrated in one of the many sea caves that snaked underneath Beirut. Some of these caves were large enough for passage by small boats, and the PLO had already used them as ammunition storage areas during their occupation of West Beirut.
A meeting held between Tannous and the commanders of the multinational forces (who were, understandably, deeply concerned) decided to search the tunnels and use well-drilling and seismic detection equipment to determine if any of the caves ran under the multinational force positions. The seismic detection equipment was brought in from the United States and Europe; the well-drilling equipment was already present in Lebanon.
A Lebanese navy search found nothing suspicious within the known caves, while seismic detection and well-drilling failed to locate any previously unknown caverns.
During all this activity, of course, everybody was doing everything possible to determine the nature of the target, and the method and timing of the attack.
At 6:30 Sunday morning, October 23, 1983, Tannous and I were sitting over coffee in his MOD office, discussing the training activities of the Lebanese army and future employment plans. The office had a large plateglass window, providing a panoramic view of Beirut.
WHAM!
We heard a tremendous explosion. Shortly afterward, the shock wave rocked the building. A huge black column of smoke topped by a white, rapidly spinning smoke ring — like an atomic explosion — was rapidly rising from an area approximately two miles away, near the airport.
"God willing," Tannous said, part in exclamation, part in prayer — he was a devout Christian, "I hope it's not the Marines!"
He jumped up from his desk. "Let's go," he said. "We've got to get there. We'll take my car" — instead of a military vehicle—"and go straight through West Beirut to the airport. That's the shortest route."
Before we reached the car — WHAM! — another huge explosion. And we could see a similar cloud rising over the area where the French compound was located.
The explosions had shocked West Beirut to life. As we went through town, making at least seventy miles an hour, people were already on balconies and the tops of buildings trying to see what was going on.
As Tannous had feared, the Marines' compound had been truck-bombed. When we arrived, there was almost indescribable devastation. I have never seen anything like it. Fires were burning everywhere, people were torn apart, and the building had just collapsed on top of itself. The survivors were all in a daze.
When the blast occurred, Colonel Geraghty had been working in his office about a hundred yards away. He was now doing everything possible to bring order.
"Whatever you need, you've got," Tannous told him. "We'll bring every emergency crew in Lebanon to bear on this, and I'll get you heavy construction equipment in here immediately to lift some of these layers off these people."
One of Beirut's largest construction companies, with a contract to clean up rubble from previous fighting, was quickly ordered in to help. Tannous also immediately ordered one of his army brigades to move into the airport area to provide security for the Marines.
Tannous and I spent no more than ten minutes at what was left of the Marine compound before heading to the French compound only a couple of miles away, where we found similar, but somewhat lesser, devastation. "It was a truck bomb," the French commander reported. "We have at least twenty-five dead." The number would eventually reach fifty-nine.
Tannous offered the French the same assistance he'd given the Marines, and ordered in a Lebanese army battalion to secure their area.
We returned to the Marine compound. By this time, two guards who had witnessed the bombing reported that a yellow Mercedes-Benz stake bed truck, about the size of a dump truck, had rammed through the gates and the concertina wire, smashed over the guard shack, and plunged straight into the lobby of the four-story building, where some 350 Marines were sleeping. Once inside, the driver had detonated the bomb, killing himself and 241 Marines.
It was obvious that both the Marine and the French bombs had been planned to go off simultaneously, but for some reason there had been a two-to three-minute delay. Forensic experts from the FBI later concluded that the bomb under the Marine barracks contained the equivalent of 12,000 pounds of TNT. It dug an eight-foot crater through a seven-inch floor of reinforced concrete. One of the strongest buildings in Beirut was now reduced to a pile of pancaked rubble; the heavy reinforcing steel rods in the concrete had all been sheared like straws.
Within minutes, the intelligence community intercepted this unattributed message: "We were able to perform the spectacular act, making the ground shake underneath the feet of the infidels. We also got that Army brigadier general and the CIA station chief [Bill Buckley] in the process."