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22 BEIRUT, A CITY BATTERED BY WAR, was experiencing a period of relative calm in fall 1983. US diplomats and soldiers were still coming to terms with the suicide bombing that struck the US embassy in April, and US Marines wore their combat uniforms everywhere they went—even to social events and diplomatic functions. But to the US Marine commander on site, the threat environment seemed to have eased somewhat. The embassy bombing was seen as an outlier event. Marines were free to roam the city and were interacting with Lebanese children in public without fear of ambush.1 Beirut was under a cease-fire, and hopes were high for Syrian reconciliation talks. It was the quiet before the storm. In the early hours of October 23, 1983, a young Lebanese man from a Shi’a family awoke, said his morning prayers, and drank tea. In a suburb overlooking the marine barracks, his superiors shared a few final thoughts with him, after which a senior cleric blessed him before he drove off in a yellow Mercedes truck.2 At 6:22 am, he rammed the explosive-laden truck through the guard post at the entrance to the US Marine Battalion Headquarters Building in Beirut. The blast decimated the fourstory , concrete, steel-reinforced structure—considered one of the strongest buildings in Lebanon at the time. A dense, gray ash cloud engulfed the area as emergency vehicles rushed to the scene.3 Those soldiers lucky enough to escape serious injury quickly mobilized to rescue their fellow marines, sifting through “dust-covered body parts, moaning wounded and dazed survivors.”4 Seconds later, a nearly identical attack targeted the French Multinational Force (MNF) building less than four miles away. Lebanon’s devastating civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990, hardened divisions among the country’s various sectarian communities. Against this backdrop, the 1982 Israeli invasion and subsequent occupation of southern Lebanon created the space in which Iranian diplomats and agents could help fashion the unified entity Hezbollah from a motley crew of Shi’a militias and groups. Another turning point in the 1980s involved militants targeting not only fellow Lebanese but also the international forces dispatched as peacekeepers to provide the war-torn country with a measure of security. Over time, Hezbollah and Iran’s interests in driving foreign 2 Branching Out Targeting Westerners in Lebanon and Beyond Branching Out 23 forces out of Lebanon would expand from attacks targeting Western interests in Lebanon to attacks on Western interests abroad. Over a nine-month period in 1985, the CIA calculated, Iran’s Lebanese proxy groups were responsible for at least twenty-four international terrorist incidents.5 Such targets were popular given Iran’s efforts to dissuade countries from arming and supporting Iraq in its ongoing, costly war against the Islamic Republic. HeedingIran ’scalltocarryoutattacksbeyondLebanon’sborders,Hezbollahwouldengage in plots throughout the Middle East. By February 1985 the CIA would warn that “Iranian-sponsored terrorism” presented the greatest threat to US personnel and facilities in the region.6 Inevitably some of the Hezbollah operatives sent to conduct attacks in places like Kuwait were caught, leading Hezbollah to plot bombings, hijackings , and other operations in places as diverse as Germany and the Republic of the Congo in an effort to secure the release of jailed comrades. In Lebanon three spectacular attacks targeting US interests over an eighteenmonth period defined the group’s relationship with the United States for years to come. The US embassy was bombed on April 18, 1983, killing sixty-three, including seventeen Americans. The driver of the explosive-filled van entered the embassy compound, slowed to navigate a sharp left turn down a cobblestone lane, and then accelerated and crashed into the embassy’s front wall. The seven-floor embassy complex was engulfed in clouds of black smoke that hid the bodies of Lebanese security guards and American government workers torn apart by the blast. Among the dead were the top American intelligence officials stationed in Lebanon, including the CIA’s chief Middle East analyst, Robert C. Ames.7 Then came the nearly simultaneous attacks of October 23, 1983, targeting the US Marines and French army barracks, both compounds under the aegis of the Beirutbased Multinational Force sent to Lebanon as peacekeepers to oversee the evacuation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from Beirut.8 Those attacks left 241 Americans and 58 French dead. Less than a year later, on September 20, 1984, the US embassy annex was bombed, killing 24. The US government...

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