Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [220]
Islamic Jihad struck first. In what came to be regarded as the first use of suicide truck bombing, on 11 November 1982 sheikh Ahmed Qassir blew up the Israeli headquarters in Tyre, killing or wounding 141 people. Then it was Hizbollah’s turn to deal a devastating blow at the US presence in Lebanon. On 18 April 1983 a battered pickup truck, low on its springs due to two thousand pounds of ANFO explosives concealed within, swerved into the exit of the US embassy on Beirut’s seafront, and then exploded as it crashed into the main lobby. Sixty-three people, including seventeen Americans, were killed in a blast that momentarily lifted up the entire building before most of it collapsed in a mountain of dust and rubble. The dead included all six members of the CIA’s Beirut station, as well as Robert Ames, the CIA’s top man on the Middle East and its former liaison with Black September’s Ali Hassan Salameh. Ames’s hand was found floating a mile away, his wedding ring still visible on a finger.
Six months later two massive suicide truck bombs killed 240 US Marines housed in temporary barracks dubbed the Beirut Hilton, and fifty-eight French soldiers who were also in Lebanon on peace-keeping duties. In the former case, a five-ton Mercedes truck smashed its way through flimsy guard posts at fifty miles an hour early one Sunday morning, enabling the driver to detonate 12,000 pounds of Hexogen high explosives, with tanks of bottled gas tied on to magnify the deadly brisance. The effects of both attacks were like some colossal natural disaster. Over at the French barracks, an uncomprehending lieutenant-colonel stared into a huge crater amid mountains of rubble: ‘There are about a hundred soldiers still under there. The bomb lifted up the building. Right up, do you understand? And it put it down again over there.’ He indicated a distance of about twenty feet. The Iranian Pasadren and their terrorist helpers in Hizbollah further pressured the West to vacate Lebanon through a series of kidnappings, including professors at the American University of Beirut, CNN reporters, priests and the local CIA station chief Bill Buckley. Kidnapping of Soviet diplomats was less successful, as the KGB abducted a relative of one of those involved, and began posting pieces of him back to his family to indicate their earnestness. Hizbollah also acted as Iran’s long arm by assassinating Iranian or Kurdish dissidents based in Europe on behalf of its paymasters, who were the biggest state sponsors of terrorism in the world. Agents based in Iranian embassies would enable Hizbollah to strike at Jewish and Israeli interests as far away as Argentina.3
Although Iran’s attempts to export the Islamic Revolution were a striking failure, apart from Hizbollah in the Lebanon, the symbolic example it gave alarmed rulers throughout the Muslim world. Here was an avowedly Islamic state, aggressively challenging the West. In the case of the ultra-conservative Saudis, they already had the mechanisms to try to contain the Iranians, because in 1962 they had established the Muslim World League to counter the national socialism of Nasser’s Egypt. Enormous increases in the price of oil after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war enabled the Saudis to propagate their puritanical Wahhabist strain of Islam globally. Named after Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703—92), Wahhabism was the austere version of Islam that underpinned the rule of the Saud dynasty in Arabia through a contract between clerics and rulers.4 Vast sums were disbursed to build some fifteen hundred mosques around the Sunni world, as well as in western Europe, which were then equipped with books and audio sermons, in the hope that they would speak with the voice of a Saudi moralising conservatism, whose existence was paradoxically underwritten by the