Counterterrorism magazine published my
Q&A with James M. Scott (seen in the photo below), the co-author of Targeted Beirut.
You can read the magazine pages below or the text
below:
The IACSP
Q&A With James M. Scott, the Co-Author of
“Targeted
Beirut: The 1983 Marine Barracks Bombing and the
Untold Origin
Story of the War on Terror”
Jack Carr and James M. Scott have written “Targeted Beirut:
The 1983 Marine Barracks Bombing and the Untold Origin Story of the War on
Terror,” the
first in an in-depth nonfiction series examining the devastating terrorist
attacks that changed the course of history.
In
1983 the United States Marine Corps experiences its greatest single-day loss of
life since the Battle of Iwo Jima when a truck packed with explosives crashes
into their headquarters and barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. This horrifying
terrorist attack, which killed 241 servicemen, continues to influence US
foreign policy and haunts the Marine Corps to this day.
Jack
Carr is a former Navy SEAL who retired from active duty in 2016, and he is the
author of The Terminal List, True Believer, Savage
Son, The Devil’s Hand, In the Blood, Only
the Dead, Red Sky Mourning. His debut novel, The
Terminal List, was adapted into the #1 Prime Video series starring Chris
Pratt.
A
Pulitzer Prize finalist and former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, James M. Scott is
the author of Target Tokyo, Black Snow, Rampage, The
War Below, and The Attack on the Liberty. In addition, Scott is
a sought-after public speaker, who leads battlefield tours and lectures at
institutions around the world. He lives with his wife and two children in
Charleston, South Carolina, where he is the Scholar in Residence at The
Citadel.
James M. Scott was interviewed by Paul Davis.
IACSP: I read “Targeted Beirut,” and I really enjoyed it. I
thought you covered well the lead up to the 1983 bombing, the attack itself,
and the aftermath. I’m 72, so I remember following the story when it happened
at the time, but your book provided a lot of details that I didn’t know, or don’t
remember. What do you and your co-author call the 1983 Marine barracks bombing
the “untold origin story of the war on terror?”
Scott:
I think you really look at this as the beginning of Hezbollah. The embassy
bombing is the beginning of it, and the beginning of our book, and it builds up
to the bombing of the Marine headquarters and barracks. Hezbollah is a proxy of
Iran, just like Hamas and the Houthi rebels.
You are really seeing in a post-Iranian Revolution era this warfare by proxy,
and this is the first time for the United States that it comes home to roost.
That is going to set the current for the next four decades. We are going to
look back and say when did it all begin? And for the United States, it really
begins in Beirut in 1982 and 1983. We are still dealing with it today. It is
amazing how much similarities are in the news now to what it was like
researching the 1983 bombing.
IACSP: So you and your co-author Jack Carr plan on writing further
non-fiction books about terrorism?
Scott: We do, yes. This is the first in a series and we
have another book that we haven’t announced yet.
IACSP: What brought you and Jack Carr together to write
this book and the series?
Scott: I didn’t know Jack personally before this, but it
was really serendipitous that he reached out to me to about that time that I
was reading his books and watching “The Terminal List.” He was looking to begin
a series of non-fiction books. He writes about these issues in his fiction, but
he wanted to branch out to non-fiction, and he wanted to bring in someone with
a background of doing archival research and interviews that go with traditional
non-fiction. He read several of my books, and he approached his editor and said
I’d like to work with this guy James Scott. He looked at one of the
acknowledgments in my books, and said his editor is a guy by the name John
Glusman. Jack’s editor said that John Glusman was her husband. Small world.
Jack’s editor at Simon and Schuster is married to my editor at W.W. Norton.
IACSP: Yes, a small world.
Scott: At that point putting us together was pretty easy.
Jack reached out to me and we had a long call and this is what I want to do and
asked me what my thoughts were, and I was getting ready to go to a conference
that weekend and one of the folks at the conference was a guy named Charlie B.
Neimeyer, the retired director of Marine Corp History. I had dinner one night
with Charlie and I’ve been approached about this project on Beirut and asked
what kind of stuff they had in the archives, and he said they had tons of
material on Beirut. We have the monthly command chronologies, the weekly
situation reports, the message traffic, and the oral histories. He said that I
really need to jump on this project. On my way back from that conference, I
remembered a guy I went to grad school with who mentioned Beirut. I texted him and
asked him to remind me about Beirut. He called me back right away and said he
was one of the rescuers when the bomb went off. His name is Mark Singleton, and
you’ll see his name a number of times in the book. Mark said he could put me in
touch with plenty of the guys who were there. I called Jack and I told him I
had found all these records that are available, and I had a buddy who was
there. All we saw was green lights at this point and it was go, go, go. Jack
said let’s do it. So we mapped out a rough idea of how the book would look like.
The beauty of non-fiction is we were at the mercy of history, so you want to
think about where you wanted to start the narrative and where you wanted to end
it. I’m the archive guy. We did more than a hundred hours of interviews with
survivors. We had a thousand pages of letters and diaries.
IACSP: I was an enlisted sailor in the Navy back in the
1970s, and I liked how you used the letters of the enlisted Marines to see
their thoughts and views alongside those of the officers. One can tell the
research for the book was extensive and the interviews were extensive as well.
Can you tell us about the situation in Beirut before the Marines went ashore as
peacemakers? Who were the factions fighting there?
Scott: It was everybody against everybody. Beirut had been
kind of a mess for a while because of this sort of sectarian in-fighting. It
really traces all the way back to its origins as a modern state in the
post-World War II area, in which the power structure was based on your faith.
At that time, the Christians had a majority of the population, so they held the
highest office. The Sunnis had the next popular majority, so they had the prime
minister position, and then the Shia, who were the smaller group at the time,
so they had the speaker of the house. So you had power roughly divided along
these three religious lines, which were backed up by the demographics in the
1940s. In the four decades until the 80s, there were huge demographics shifts that
took place. Christians, who were dominant, fall off, Shias, who were the least
powerful, end up having a population growth, so what you see then is the
demographics are being shifted and people saying, hey, we want a bigger slice
of the power pie. That then sets the stage for all of this in-fighting that is
going on and that erupts into a civil war in the 1970s, and that quells, but
there is this huge amount of tension and animosity there. Into this chaos comes
the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization. They are kicked out of Jordan
in the 1970s and they set up shop in Beirut. They use Lebanon as a base to wage
attacks against the Israelis and the Israelis of course retaliate, blowing
things up in Lebanon. Syria at this point too is also looking at chunks of Lebanon,
thinking, hey, we would like to have parts of this as well. You have internal
and external factions that are creating this huge tug of war over who was going
to control everything. Of course, the central government, which is still sort
of lead by Christians, is a very small, weak element. What happens is in 1982
the United States comes in after the Israelis go pretty hard after the PLO and
in order to bring about peace, the U.S. goes in with several other nations to
sort of get the PLO out. One of the first steps in righting the ship is going
to be getting these foreign elements out of Lebanon so the Lebanese can take
control of their own destiny. We go in in 82 along with the British, the French
and the Italians and we help get the PLO out. Soon thereafter, the president of
Lebanon is assassinated. His assassination leads to huge retaliation against
the Palestinians, and it becomes a mess again. The peacekeepers are pulled back
in in late 1982 and that’s what sets the stage for the mission the Marines are
on when things really go sideways in Lebanon.
IACSP: In your book, you did a good job of describing the
internal Reagan administration’s senior cabinet people and their antagonism
towards each other. Who were they, what
did they fight about, and what course did President Reagon finally follow?
Scott: You had a
division among senior Reagan advisors about what to do in Lebanon. On one side
you had Casper Weinberger, who was the Defense Secretary, and the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, which were led by the Chairman, General John Vessey. They didn’t want
the United States getting involved in Lebanon. They saw Lebanon as a side show
from the larger Cold War. They saw no upside from Lebanon, only a downside. There
was a lot of risk and very little reward. On the flip side of that you had
George Schultz, the Secretary of State, and Bud McFarlane, the National
Security Advisor. The two of them thought there was a lot to be gained there.
They wanted to bring in a peaceful Lebanon that would be a peaceful neighbor
for the Israelis. The men were sort of at loggerheads over this and Reagan, for
all his strengths, one of his weaknesses was he did not like in-fighting among
his people. Weinberger and Shultz would go at each other in these meetings and
Reagan would respond by shutting down or looking for compromise. Often,
compromise is not what you need, which can lead to stagnation. Things are
getting more violent, beginning with the embassy bombing, followed by attacks
on the Marines at the airport. As Marine Colonel Geraghty (the commander of the 24th Marine
Amphibious Unit in Beirut) said, “The mission changed, but no one
changed the mission.” The Marines were left on a peacekeeper mission that was
no longer a peacekeeping environment.
IACSP: As a teenage sailor who served on an aircraft
carrier during the Vietnam War and a Defense Department journeyman civilian
back in 1983, it was my view then, as it is today, that the Marines should have
been stationed on the ships. And as I thought then, as well as now, the troops
on the ground should have been UN peacekeepers. Most of the military people and
DOD civilians of all Ranks and grades that I worked with at the time agreed on
those two points, as I recall.
Do you know why the Marines were stationed in a building
rather than being stationed on the U.S. Navy
amphibious warfare ships, where they could be helicoptered in for
patrols, and then rotated back to the safety of the Navy ships?
Scott: That’s what Weinberger wanted to do when the
situation got worse. He wanted to pull the Marines back aboard ship. The
initial idea was that sending the Marines in as a peacekeeping force would make
it easier for them to be on land and go out and about.
IACSP: But the ships had helicopters, the ships were helo
carriers. The helos could have flown the Marines in and out, rotating the land
patrols. Effectively making the Marines a moving target rather than the
proverbial sitting duck.
Scott: Exactly. It was almost like a mission creep kind of
thing. They were there on the ground, they were flying in their food, then they
brought in portable kitchens, and they brought in portable medicine, and they
increasingly creeped up into a full-scale base at the airport. And Colonel Geraghty said if our mission is
peacekeeping, then we need to be flying the flag and we can’t have our base
look like a huge fortress. That was the op orders they were still operating off
as no one changed their mission.
IACSP: Bad calls in retrospect, but…
Scott: June to October is such a pivotal time-period for
the Marines. The embassy has been blown up in April, the new Marines arrived
May 29th, and pretty soon the escalation against them really begins.
That would have been the time to evaluate and change things. Whether we should
have really been there to start with, that really got into the heart of that
big debate in the Reagan administration.
IACSP: I’m a huge admirer of President Ronald Reagan, but I
think he erred in this.
Scott: When we went in the first time to get the PLO out,
we had a very actionable mission. Go in, get the PLO out and leave. We were in
and out like in 17 days. When we went back in the second time, we don’t have a
clear-cut mission and that’s the problem. We went back in largely because of
guilt. Even General Vessey said, hey, we figured that we go back in, stay a few
months, let our guilt kind of ease, and then we pull back out. The problem is,
once we go back in there, we don’t have a clear-cut mission. You look at
Reagan’s national security directives. You start seeing the mission change from
stabilization and peacekeeping to nation-building. And that keeps us stuck
there.
IACSP: Why didn’t President Reagan order a retaliatory air
attack after the bombing? He ordered a retaliatory air attack on Libya after the
bombing of a club in West Germany.
Scott: He didn’t because Casper Weinberger didn’t want to do
it. He liked Weinberger a lot and they had a long history together. Weinberger
did not want to escalate the situation.
IACSP: I think Casper Weinberger’s rules for getting into
combat should be more adhered to. After all these years, do we know who
planned, ordered and mounted the Marine bombing attack? And if so, what
happened to them?
Scott: We do. This is the beginning of Hezbollah. While
everyone else is coming into Lebanon, sort of exploiting the chaos and
instability, so too did the Iranians. The Iranians come in in 1982 and they
take advantage of this lawless wild west area up along the Lebanese Syrian
border. They bring in about 800 Revolutionary Guardsmen and they built a
terrorist training camp up there. Then they start tapping into that resentment
that the improvised Shias community in southern Iran feels there. They start
recruiting homegrown terrorists. There were some groups already floating around
at that point, but the Iranians brought them all under their umbrella. They
merged these terrorist groups together into what we know today as Hezbollah.
Hezbollah and other proxy groups were getting their funding, their training and
their marching orders straight from Iran. Iran was the puppet master. They were
pulling the strings.
IACSP: As you note
in your book, a Lebanese Shia named
Imad Mughniyeh is suspected of planning the attack. As fate, or irony, would
have it, he was killed by a car bomb in 2008.
I
especially liked the way you described President Reagan’s anguish over the
bombing.
Scott: That was very
real. Reagan had a huge heart. His son Michael, who Jack talked to in the
course of researching the book, and we both met him at the Reagan Library a
couple months ago, said his father these deaths haunted him for the rest of his
life. He reached out to the families of the men, and he wrote letters.
IACSP: After all these years, what are the lessons learned
from the bombing?
Scott: One of the big lessons is that terrorism works. For
the very low price of a truck a bomb, and one life of a volunteer, you can
totally impact American foreign policy. Iran was the biggest benefactor. Iran
watched all of this unfold. They said, hey, not only can we do this, but
America won’t retaliate. It set the stage for the next four decades. From the
USS Cole attack to 9/11, you see that terrorism works. I also think an
important lesson is one that Weinberger enunciates, which is you have to have a
real clear plan.
IACSP: Thank you for speaking to us.
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