Beirut: Serious Errors in Judgment

The Marines draw heavy fire for laxity in the Beirut bombing

By training and tradition, the U.S. Marines prefer going over the top to hunkering down in the trenches. Their indifference to digging in may have proved fatal, however, when a terrorist truck bomb blew apart Marine headquarters in Beirut on Oct. 23, killing 241 men. So concluded a highly critical report last week by the Investigations Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee. The hawkish subcommittee, in a document approved by a vote of 9 to 3, charged the Marines with slack security and inadequate intelligence gathering, and accused the entire military chain of command of “very serious errors in judgment.”

The Marines also came under criticism from the five-man commission, headed red retired Admiral Robert L.J. Long, that investigated the Beirut bombing for the Defense Department. The commission’s report “blames a number of people for not exercising what in hindsight would have been better judgment,” said Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. Release of the report was delayed as the White House debated an awkward question: How can the military be held accountable without blaming the Administration for stationing the Marines in Beirut? Courts-martial are unlikely.

The Reagan Administration had at first pictured the tragedy as unavoidable. Four days after the bombing, President Reagan said in a televised speech that the truck “crashed through a series of barriers, including a chain-link fence and barbed-wire entanglements. Guards opened fire, but it was too late.” A week later, Marine Commandant General Paul X. Kelley asserted that the truck slammed through the barbed wire at 60 m.p.h., sped past two armed sentries, burst through an iron gate and jumped over an 18-in. pipe before exploding.

The facts laid out last week in the congressional subcommittee’s 78-page report were much different—and much less excusable. At 5 a.m., an hour and 20 minutes before the attack, a truck—possibly the one used in the bombing—circled with its lights off in the parking lot outside Marine headquarters. Only five minutes before the attack, a car pulled up and its driver began taking pictures of the building; one guard later pronounced this “kind of strange.” Finally, the red Mercedes truck with the fatal bomb rumbled through an iron gate left “invitingly” open, cruised at about 30 m.p.h. past two sentries, who had unloaded M-16s on their shoulders, and then steered between a pair of iron pipes that had been placed outside headquarters not to stop terrorists but to guide traffic. The only impediment was a roll of barbed wire that “just made a popping sound” as the truck drove through, “like someone walking over twigs,” recounted a guard. One stunned Marine “kind of stared for a couple of seconds” before loading his rifle, too late. The driver of the truck “looked right at me,” said another. “He smiled.”

A moment later, the terrorist detonated 12,000 Ibs. of explosives. The explosives had been wrapped around gas cylinders and placed on a 7-in. floor of concrete covered with an inch-thick slab of solid marble in order to direct the intensity of the blast upward. Even so, the explosive force drove the truck bed 8 ft. down into the earth.

Before the bombing, the subcommittee reported, the Marines had been inundated with intelligence reports warning against terrorist attacks. Indeed, at times there was a backlog of 36 to 40 hours in communications from the offshore fleet to Marine headquarters. But the intelligence was so “nonspecific” that it was “useless” in building defenses, the congressional investigators found. Moreover, the Marines in Beirut had no intelligence officer trained to evaluate the raw data.

The subcommittee faulted the Marine ground commander, Colonel Timothy Geraghty, for many of the security lapses, but it also criticized the military brass overseeing the peace-keeping operation for doing nothing more than “familiarizing” themselves with Marine security. “If you want to speak of negligence,” said the subcommittee’s chairman, Alabama Democrat Bill Nichols, “then it goes all the way up to the combined Joint Chiefs of Staff.” While not blamed for the disaster, Kelley was upbraided for giving “often inaccurate, erroneous and misleading” statements to the subcommittee in the wake of the bombing. At his news conference last week, Reagan stood up for the general, denying that Kelley “was attempting to cover up for anyone.”

While critical of the Marines, the House Armed Services subcommittee agreed with the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the Marines are poorly suited for their “peacekeeping” role in Lebanon. According to the congressional report, the Marines may have taken their diplomatic mission too literally. Geraghty, said the subcommittee, assumed that the Marines could not hide behind earthen walls or antitank trenches, because their “presence” required a high profile. Yet former U.S. Special Envoy Philip Habib testified that better defenses would not have “impaired the diplomatic mission.” After the Navy shelled Druze positions in September, the subcommittee noted, the Marines were also slow to see that their perceived role was changing from symbolic peace keepers to pro-Gemayel combatants.

As they crouch in bunkers and nervously eye every moving vehicle, the Marines in Lebanon are now acutely aware of their vulnerability. But congressional investigators say that the Marine presence in Lebanon constitutes “a continuing invitation to attack by hostile forces.” The Marines may learn soon enough if the terrorists decide to accept the invitation. Last week the Islamic Jihad organization, the group claiming responsibility for the bombing last Wednesday near a French military command post in Beirut, said it would strike again if the U.S. did not withdraw its forces within ten days.

—By Evan Thomas. Reported by Bruce van Voorst/Washington