The commander of the predominantly Shiite Lebanese 6th Brigade, which had been keeping the peace in West Beirut, immediately complied by pulling his forces out of the city and back to their barracks. The Muslim militia quickly took over the streets. At the same time, the mullahs began broadcasting from the mosques that the Shiite soldiers should return to their barracks and no longer fight for a government that did not represent their interests.
Soon afterward, the Druze deputy commander, Major General Hakim, defected to the Druze PSP in the Chouf Mountains.
The evening after his defection, a Lebanese army battalion commander operating south of Beirut took three of his Christian lieutenants out on a reconnaissance. They didn't return. The next morning, a patrol sent out to locate the battalion commander found the three lieutenants with their throats cut — and no battalion commander; he had defected. Two other Christian soldiers were later found in their foxholes, also with their throats cut.
The same day, the Shiite militia began raking the family home of the Shiite but loyal Brigadier General Abbas Hamdan with machine-gun fire. Hamdan, who had been staying at the Ministry of Defense, sent his family back to safety in his wife's native France, but he remained in Beirut until Tannous persuaded him to join his family, his chances of survival in Lebanon being effectively zero.
In a matter of days, Lebanese army units, which had fought so well and so cohesively for months, lost trust in one another and began to fission; the pieces flew off to the various factional militias. Beirut's old "Green Line" — a street that served as a demarcation line between Christians and Muslims — once again became a battle line. Daily killings returned.
Early in February, the Embassy began evacuating nonessential Americans.
Meanwhile, a big question remained: What to do about the Marines in Beirut? After the bombing, they'd brought in replacements and continued to perform their mission.
A week after the Embassy started its own evacuation, the National Security Planning Group, presided over by Vice President George Bush, concluded that it was time to withdraw the Marines. President Reagan reluctantly accepted the recommendation.
The task of informing Amin Gemayel about this decision fell to Ambassador Rumsfeld, who just a week earlier had assured him that the United States would continue to stand behind the Lebanese government.
Rumsfeld later told me it was probably the toughest thing he ever had to do.
Ambassadors Rumsfeld and Bartholomew broke the news to Gemayel in his operations center in the basement of the Presidential Palace — the upstairs having been long since destroyed by artillery fire.
The news shattered Gemayel. Though he was assured that the assistance program to the Lebanese army would continue for the foreseeable future, he understandably felt seduced, abandoned, and powerless to do anything about it.
Later, an equally crushed General Tannous told me, putting on a brave front, "1 will gather together what remains of the Lebanese army and continue to fight for what 1 believe is right for Lebanon. We may have to make some concessions with Syria, but as long as I am in this job I will continue to do everything in my power to bring peace to Lebanon."
The next day, as the New Jersey blasted away with its 16-inch guns at Syrian artillery positions in the Chouf Mountains, the Marines began withdrawing to their ships. In a nine-hour period, the battleship fired 288 2,000-pound, 16-inch rounds.
The last element of the Marines left the beach at noon on February 26. At a brief ceremony to turn the airport over to the Lebanese army, as the Marines struck the American flag, the presiding Lebanese officer grabbed his country's flag and presented it to the Marines: "Well, you might as well take our flag, too," he said. He then asked the Marines to drop him off by helicopter back at the Ministry of Defense; he was a Christian and could not pass through the Muslim checkpoints. After they dropped him off, the last Marine sortie proceeded on to the ships.
Within minutes, the Shiite Amal Militia began occupying their vacant positions and taking control of the airport.
The fighting between the factions continued, making the situation for the Americans who still remained even more dangerous. The only halfway-safe place for Americans was now on the Christian side of the "Green Line" in East Beirut. Because they could no longer cross the Line, the airport had become off-limits, which meant that an Army helicopter detachment had to be brought in to Cyprus to shuttle Ambassador Bartholomew and the remaining military to Cyprus for connections elsewhere.
The remaining Muslim officers on Tannous's staff soon found themselves targets of their own factions. Though most soon paid for their loyalty with their lives, a few, like Hakim, managed to escape to other countries.
As word of the throat-cutting spread, mistrust among the remaining soldiers grew even more, and within days the army that had fought so well began to split along factional lines.
They did not fight each other during the breakup. They just slipped away with their weapons and returned to their own ethnic enclaves. The Shiites went to West Beirut and the Bekaa Valley, the Druze back to the mountains, and the Christians to East Beirut.
The 8th Brigade's losses were quickly filled by Christians, and it continued to hold the ridgeline at Souk Al Gharb. Tannous, having no other choice, quickly reorganized the army to compensate for the losses, but it was now a "Christian force," with far less capability, operating mainly from East Beirut and defending the Christian enclaves, the ridgeline at Souk Al Gharb, Yarze, and the seat of government.
Assad took advantage of the opportunity by moving Syrian regular units to take control of the northeastern sector of Lebanon and all major roads leading to the north and east. Now, with the Israelis controlling the buffer zone in the south, all that remained under Lebanese government control was the enclave of Beirut, but even that was mostly controlled by the Amal, which danced to Assad's tune.
Once his generals were in charge of all the trade routes — and lining their pockets — Assad began to stipulate conditions for reorganizing the government.
Of course, Tannous had to be replaced. When that time came, he relinquished command of the armed forces with respect, dignity, and pride, and quietly returned to his cement factory in East Beirut. However, his loyalty remained to Lebanon and its armed forces. The last I heard, he was still conducting advanced officer's classes on tactics in a training area/classroom that he'd established in the garden behind his house — an initiative he'd begun during the early phases of rebuilding the army in order to improve the tactical proficiency of midlevel combat arms officers.
A NEW FORM OF TERRORISM
Flushed with their bombing successes, the Islamic Jihad raised the stakes even more by introducing a new form of terrorism—"hostage-taking."
The first American was taken hostage on February 10, 1984. By the time TWA 847 was hijacked, some fourteen months later, seven Americans had been kidnapped.
Kidnapping is not a new idea, of course, and had long been commonplace in Lebanon: In the early '80s, more than 5,000 people from all sides had been kidnapped for ransom. Islamic Jihad's new tactics, however, were aimed solely at achieving political leverage — a big difference.
Their initial motivation was to capture a stable of Americans who could be used as bargaining material with the Kuwaiti government after the Kuwaitis had rounded up the seventeen Iranian-backed terrorists responsible for a December 1983 suicide bombing spree against six targets in Kuwait, in which five people had been killed and eighty-six wounded. One of those held in Kuwait was the brother-in-law of Lebanon's most feared Shiite terrorist, Imad Mugniyah, known as the "enforcer." Mugniyah was the thug responsible for the Islamic Jihad hostage-taking spree.