Amid a landscape of twisted metal, concrete, and broken glass, the wounded and disoriented stumbled about in utter shock.
Security officer Gannon and his boss, Roberts, were blown to the floor. Roberts, who had been facing the window, was cut by flying glass. In the next room a secretary was screaming.
On the eighth floor Ambassador Dillon had slipped the heavy T-shirt halfway over his head at the moment of the blast. The shirt absorbed the glass that was blown in and saved his face, if not his life.
But much of the worst damage occurred in the upper floors, which collapsed and pancaked one atop the next.
Within minutes the frantic search for survivors began. From the street there was a grim vision of a body literally hanging over the edge. It was that of CIA officer Frank Johnston. Pinned between slabs, he was being crushed to death. A military team reached him and pried up one of the slabs just long enough to loosen its grip and free him. Johnston lived just long enough to ask that his wallet be given to his wife, Arlette.
On the upper floor where the CIA station had been meetingâ where Monique had been enjoying her first day on the jobâthere was now nothing but air and the dismal view of seven floors of concrete, steel, and glass reduced to rubble far below. Jim Lewis, Monique, Bill Sheil, Deborah Hixon, Phyliss Faraci, Bob Ames, station chief Ken Haasâall lost. Cranes carefully lifted slabs searching for survivors. From inside the wrecked building a rescuer yelled into a bullhorn, “If anybody can hear me, please call for help.” He was met with utter silence.
Scenes of horror would forever etch themselves on the memories of those combing through the debris. From the cafeteria emerged a worker carrying a plastic bag containing human hands.
It would be two, even three days before their bodies would be found. The awful duty of identifying the bodies fell to Deputy Chief of Mission Robert Pugh. Among the bodies he identified were those of Jim and Monique Lewis, Bob Ames, and the other CIA officers. “They were not mangled,” he remembers. “They looked very much like themselves. They had been suffocated by debris and dirt. It looked almost as if they had died in their sleep.”
Of the entire CIA Beirut station only one covert officer had survived. His name was Murray J. McCann. At the time the bomb detonated he had been out of the building on a personal errandâtaking a second look at an oriental rug he was considering buying.
And, unknown to even the embassy, there was yet another covert CIA officer in Beirut that day. He was Alexander MacPherson, the veteran of clandestine missions who five years earlier had crawled away from the fiery North Carolina plane crash that had killed Berl King and Dennis Gabriel. MacPherson, then under deep cover, was on temporary duty in Beirut and had scrupulously avoided contact with the embassy lest it compromise his cover. Standing a mile or so from the embassy, he heard the deafening blast. Once again he had proved to be the consummate survivor.
In all, seventeen Americans and thirty-three foreign nationals had died in the embassy bombing.
While the search for survivors continued, security officer Gannon and the CIA's McCann bumped into each other amid the confusion. McCann was worried about classified documents strewn about in the rubble. He wanted to sift through the documents and try to preserve that which was needed, getting rid of the rest. But Gannon was convinced there would be no time for such a procedure.
“Burn everything!” he barked to the marines standing nearby. The soldiers gathered up armfuls of classified materials and dumped them into fifty-gallon drums, then set them on fire. Armful after armful of sensitive papers was put into the flames, while an officer stirred it with a stick, making sure that nothing survived the blaze.
In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, the State Department was besieged by reporters asking for the identities and biographies of those killed in the attack. Without time to coordinate stories with the CIA, State released thumbnail sketches of the victims based upon the cover stories provided. Reporters were told, for instance, that CIA operative William Sheil was a civilian employee of the army, but there had been no time to give the army a heads-up. “Sheil?” said an army spokesman. “We have no William Sheil.”
There would be many attempts to remember the dead. Five days after the bombing, President Ronald Reagan boarded a helicopter for the flight to Andrews Air Force Base to meet the arrival of a cargo plane bearing the bodies of sixteen Americans killed in the bombing. Seven of the coffins held CIA officers. Among them were the bodies of James and Monique Lewis. It was a cold rain that fell that late afternoon as the Lewis family huddled together inside the hangar, their eyes on the flag-draped coffins.
An angry Ronald Reagan spoke of the loss and declared: “Let us here in their presence serve notice to the cowardly, skulking barbarians in the world that they will not have their way.” But such resolve was of little use without the underlying intelligence needed to bring the guilty to justice. Even as he spoke, Lebanese authorities were rounding up anyone who might be a suspect. Even some who were bodyguards to the U.S. ambassador were swept up in the net and beaten by their interrogators. But ultimately the call for accountability would go unanswered. Reagan would later speak of that afternoon's trip to Andrews Air Force Base as “one of the saddest journeys of my presidency.” The nation, too, watched on television in an extraordinary outpouring of public grief.
Six days later, on April 29, the CIA conducted its own ceremony for the victims of the bombing. This one was held in the Agency's auditorium and was closed to the public. Such losses were viewed as intensely familial. It began with a playing of the national anthem and a scriptural reading from Romans 14: “None of us lives as his own master and none of us dies as his own master. While we live we are responsible for the Lord and when we die, we die as his servants. Both in life and in death we are the Lord's . . . Let us then make it our aim to work for peace and to strengthen one another.” Then William J. Casey, Director Central Intelligence, spoke of the heroism of those who had died. He cited the lines written at Thermopylae, where in 480 B.C. the Greeks, though ultimately defeated, heroically resisted the Persians. “Go, passerby, and to Sparta tell that we in faithful service fell.”
A year later, in his private office on the Agency's seventh floor, Casey would present to Lewis's mother, Toni, posthumous medals for her son's valor. The citation for the Certificate of Distinction for Courageous Performance reads: “In recognition of his superior performance with the Central Intelligence Agency from August 13, 1982, to 18 April 1983. During this period of civil anarchy and turmoil at an overseas location, he demonstrated exceptional devotion to duty under conditions of grave personal risk. His professionalism was a constant source of strength and encouragement to his colleagues and upholds the finest traditions of the Operations Directorate. Mr. Lewis' flawless efforts, commitment to excellence and unstinting courageous service reflect credit on himself, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal service.”
Even in a posthumous commendation to the mother of a fallen covert officer, the Agency would not put in writing the country of service.
But it was the letters of condolence from Jim Lewis's colleagues within the covert ranks that moved Toni Lewis most deeply. “Iâand many othersâregard Jim as one of the true latter-day American Heroes,” one colleague wrote. “Unfortunately, the world may never become fully aware of the depth of his experience and service and sense of duty. I hope that you can take comfort in knowing that there are many who not only know of Jim's gallant history, but who will also remember him as a model for our own lives.” Another covert officer wrote: “Your son was a friend and colleague for the past twenty years . . . Our sorrow, frustration, and anger over his loss in Beirut cannot be expressed to you in a way that will soften the blow or dull the pain . . . All of us have learned to create a reserved place in our hearts for memories of men like Jimâto be brought occasionally to the forefront of our thoughts, carefully burnished, and recalled with a mixture of sadness and pride. Remembering Jim's efforts to make a difference in this world will help us continue.”
The Agency lost more staff operatives in the Beirut bombing than at any time since the Vietnam conflict. Many of those individuals were among the most skilled the Agency had. Casey would later call Bob Ames, the CIA's senior Middle East expert, who was killed in the blast, “the closest thing to the irreplaceable man.” Casey said he had “the keenest insights into the Arab mind of any individual in government.” Ames had been something of an idealist. He had believed that “things need not always end in disaster.”
But the loss in Beirut could not be measured in lives alone. Its psychological impact would be felt for years to come. Just as James Lewis, the “indestructible” one, had been killed, so, too, the Agency would find itself faced with a new and profound sense of vulnerability. It was a feeling shared by the entire foreign service.
Before Beirut there was a feeling that, in the words of diplomat Robert Pugh, “embassies were sacrosanct, that they were safe ground.” True, other American embassies had been targeted in the pastâTeheran and Saigon among themâbut the sheer magnitude of the Beirut assault was stunning.
After that day in April 1983, the term “diplomatic immunity” had a different, almost anachronistic ring. The violence of the world would no longer stop at the embassy door or respect the lives of those engaged in representing nations. After Beirut, embassies worldwide underwent renewed security exams and hardening against attack. But no amount of protection could fend off a terrorist willing to sacrifice his own life to take the lives of others. It was often observed that the United States had to be vigilant all the time, but the terrorist only had to get lucky once.
The old world and the rules by which it lived were dissolving quickly, but in the Oval Office and at Langleyâas well as in the Kremlinâthe old guard was having its final days. In Washington two aging Cold Warriors called the shots. President Reagan, who had spoken of the Kremlin as “the evil empire,” was determined not to allow Soviet influence to expand even by a single inch. William Casey, a shrewd and combative former OSS veteran, now Director Central Intelligence, was committed to restoring pride to the Agency and reenergizing the clandestine service. With Reagan's unflagging support, Casey's CIA was the beneficiary of a multibillion-dollar buildup. Thousands of new officers were brought into the Agency, so many that future DCI Robert Michael Gates would say they were “stacking people like cordwood in the corridors.”
Under Reagan's watch, Casey launched ambitious new covert operations and engaged the Agency in numerous superpower proxy wars. Support was given to the Contras in their effort to topple the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. Military aid, including Stinger missiles, was provided Afghan guerrilla fighters seeking to expel a Soviet aggressor. At Langley the Cold War showed little evidence of winding down. Even after so many years of scrutinizing the Soviets, tensions ran high and intelligence was much less than perfect.
On September 1, 1983, the Soviets shot down a Korean commercial airliner, KAL 007, killing all 269 people, including 61 Americans. And in November 1983 the Soviets actually believed that the United States was possibly preparing a preemptive nuclear strike against them. The attack, they believed, was to come under cover of a planned NATO command post exercise known as Able Archer. The Kremlin's military was placed on heightened military alert, and it was not until many months later that Casey's CIA came to understand that the Soviets viewed such a strike as potentially imminent. “The hottest year of the last half of the Cold Warâ the period when the risk of miscalculation, of each side misreading the other, and the level of tension were at their highestâwas 1983,” reflected Robert Gates, then the Agency's deputy director for intelligence. He would remember 1983 as “the most dangerous year.”
But even then, the specter of a new and faceless enemy, that of the terrorist, stalked the Agency. It was suggested by some that the Cold War had provided a kind of unwritten understanding between Moscow and Washington that we would not kill their case officers and they would not kill ours, as if espionage were subject to Robert's Rules of Order or some higher code of chivalry. Not so, though it is true that direct attacks on one another's case officers rarely if ever occurred. This was less the result of mutual respect or restraint than simple pragmatism. “We coexist,” KGB Director Vladimir Krychkov once remarked. “They work, and we work.” Once a case officer was identified by the other side, be he CIA or KGB, it was easier to monitor his or her comings and goings than to assassinate him and risk a replacement who might take months or years to identify, and who in the interim could wreak havoc. Besides, the consequences of assassinating the other side's case officers working under diplomatic cover could indeed be grave.
No such concerns applied in the post-Beirut era. The object was not to gather intelligence, but to create chaos and spill blood. Men and women of superior training and valor were as likely to be incidental victims as intended targets. Indeed, it was the very randomness of such mayhem that gave acts of terrorism their potency.
Within months of the bombing terrorists struck again. On October 23, 1983, Islamic Jihad targeted the U.S. Marines barracks. Two hundred and forty-one marines and fifty-eight French paratroopers were killed. In December a Mercedes dump truck heavy with explosives rammed the gate of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait. Between 1984 and 1986 some eighteen Americans were taken hostage in Beirut. Station Chief Ken Haas was succeeded by William Buckley, winner of a Silver Star in Korea and a man whose Agency career spanned four decades. He would be kidnapped and tortured. In 1991 his remains were discovered in a plastic sack beside the road to the Beirut airport.