A HISTORY OF
THE CAR BOMB
PART 1: The poor man's air
force By Mike Davis
"You have shown no pity to us! We will do
likewise. We will dynamite you!" -
anarchist warning (1919)
On a warm
September day in 1920 in New York, a few months
after the arrest of his comrades Sacco and
Vanzetti, a vengeful Italian anarchist named Mario
Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon near the corner
of Wall and Broad streets, directly across from J
P Morgan Company. He nonchalantly climbed down and
disappeared, unnoticed, into the lunchtime crowd.
A few blocks away, a startled postal
worker found strange leaflets warning: "Free the
political prisoners or it will be sure death for
all
of
you!" They were signed: "American anarchist
fighters". The bells of nearby Trinity Church
began to toll at noon. When they stopped, the
wagon - packed with dynamite and iron slugs -
exploded in a fireball of shrapnel.
"The
horse and wagon were blown to bits," wrote Paul
Avrich, the celebrated historian of US anarchism
who uncovered the true story. "Glass
showered down from office windows, and awnings 12
stories above the street burst into flames. People
fled in terror as a great cloud of dust enveloped
the area. In Morgan's offices, Thomas Joyce of the
securities department fell dead on his desk amid a
rubble of plaster and walls. Outside, scores of
bodies littered the streets."
Buda was
undoubtedly disappointed when he learned that J P
Morgan was not among the 40 dead and more than 200
wounded - the great robber baron was away in
Scotland at his hunting lodge. Nonetheless, a poor
immigrant with some stolen dynamite, a pile of
scrap metal and an old horse had managed to bring
unprecedented terror to the inner sanctum of US
capitalism.
His Wall Street bomb was the
culmination of a half-century of anarchist
fantasies about avenging angels made of dynamite;
but it was also an invention, like Charles
Babbage's difference engine, far ahead of the
imagination of its time. Only after the barbarism
of strategic bombing had become commonplace, and
when air forces routinely pursued insurgents into
the labyrinths of poor cities, would the truly
radical potential of Buda's "infernal machine" be
fully realized.
Buda's wagon was, in
essence, the prototype car bomb: the first use of
an inconspicuous vehicle, anonymous in almost any
urban setting, to transport large quantities of
high explosive into precise range of a high-value
target. It was not replicated, as far as I have
been able to determine, until January 12, 1947,
when the Stern Gang drove a truckload of
explosives into a British police station in Haifa,
Palestine, killing four and injuring 140. The
Stern Gang (a pro-fascist splinter group led by
Avraham Stern that broke away from the right-wing
Zionist paramilitary Irgun) would soon use
truck and car bombs to kill Palestinians as well:
a creative atrocity immediately reciprocated by
British deserters fighting on the side of
Palestinian nationalists.
Vehicle bombs
thereafter were used sporadically - producing
notable massacres in Saigon (1952), Algiers (1962)
and Palermo (1963) - but the gates of hell were
only truly opened in 1972, when the Provisional
Irish Republican Army accidentally, so the legend
goes, improvised the first ammonium nitrate-fuel
oil (ANFO) car bomb. These new-generation bombs,
requiring only ordinary industrial ingredients and
synthetic fertilizer, were cheap to fabricate and
astonishingly powerful: they elevated urban
terrorism from the artisanal to the industrial
level, and made possible sustained blitzes against
entire city centers as well as the complete
destruction of ferro-concrete skyscrapers and
residential blocks.
The car bomb, in other
words, suddenly became a semi-strategic weapon
that, under certain circumstances, was comparable
to air power in its ability to knock out critical
urban nodes and headquarters as well as terrorize
the populations of entire cities. Indeed, the
suicide truck bombs that devastated the US Embassy
and Marine Corps barracks in Beirut in 1983
prevailed - at least in a geopolitical sense -
over the combined firepower of the fighter-bombers
and battleships of the US 6th Fleet and forced the
administration of president Ronald Reagan to
retreat from Lebanon.
Hezbollah's ruthless
and brilliant use of car bombs in Lebanon in the
1980s to counter the advanced military technology
of the United States, France and Israel soon
emboldened a dozen other groups to bring their
insurgencies and jihads home to the metropolis.
Some of the new-generation car-bombers were
graduates of terrorism schools set up by the US
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Pakistani
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), with Saudi
financing, in the mid-1980s to train mujahideen to
terrorize the Russians then occupying Kabul.
Between 1992 and 1998, 16 major vehicle-bomb
attacks in 13 different cities killed 1,050 people
and wounded nearly 12,000.
More important
from a geopolitical standpoint, the Irish
Republican Army (IRA) and Gama'a al-Islamiyya
inflicted billions of dollars of damage on the two
leading control centers of the world economy - the
City of London (1992, 1993 and 1996) and Lower
Manhattan (1993) - and forced a reorganization of
the global reinsurance industry.
In the
new millennium, 85 years after that first massacre
on Wall Street, car bombs have become almost as
generically global as iPods and AIDS, cratering
the streets of cities from Bogota to Bali. Suicide
truck bombs, once the distinctive signature of
Hezbollah, have been franchised to Sri Lanka,
Chechnya/Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Kuwait and
Indonesia.
On any graph of urban
terrorism, the curve representing car bombs is
rising steeply, almost exponentially. US-occupied
Iraq, of course, is a relentless inferno, with
more than 9,000 casualties - mainly civilian -
attributed to vehicle bombs in the two-year period
between July 2003 and June 2005. Since then, the
frequency of car-bomb attacks has dramatically
increased: 140 per month last autumn, and 13 in
Baghdad this New Year's Day alone. If roadside
bombs or IEDs (improvised explosive devices) are
the most effective device against US armored
vehicles, car bombs are the weapon of choice for
slaughtering Shi'ite civilians in front of mosques
and markets and instigating an apocalyptic
sectarian war.
Under siege from weapons
indistinguishable from ordinary traffic, the
apparatuses of administration and finance are
retreating inside "rings of steel" and "green
zones", but the larger challenge of the car bomb
seems intractable. Stolen nukes, sarin gas and
anthrax may be the "sum of our fears", but the car
bomb is the quotidian workhorse of urban
terrorism. Before considering its genealogy,
however, it may be helpful to summarize those
characteristics that make Buda's wagon such a
formidable and undoubtedly permanent source of
urban insecurity.
First, vehicle bombs are
stealth weapons of surprising power and
destructive efficiency. Trucks, vans or even
sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) can easily transport
the equivalent of several conventional 1,000-pound
(453-kilogram) bombs to the doorstep of a prime
target. Moreover, their destructive power is still
evolving, thanks to the constant tinkering of
ingenious bomb-makers. We have yet to face the
full horror of truck-trailer-sized explosions with
a lethal blast range of 200 meters or of dirty
bombs sheathed in enough nuclear waste to render
mid-Manhattan radioactive for generations.
Second, they are extraordinarily cheap: 40
or 50 people can be massacred with a stolen car
and maybe US$400 of fertilizer and bootlegged
electronics. Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the
1993 attack on the World Trade Center, bragged
that his most expensive outlay was in
long-distance phone calls. The explosive itself
(one-half ton of urea) cost $3,615 plus the $59
per day rental for a 3-meter-long Ryder van. In
contrast, the cruise missiles that have become the
classic US riposte to overseas terrorist attacks
cost $1.1 million each.
Third, car
bombings are operationally simple to organize.
Although some still refuse to believe that Timothy
McVeigh and Terry Nichols didn't have secret
assistance from a government or dark entity, two
men in the proverbial phone booth - a security
guard and a farmer - successfully planned and
executed the horrendous Oklahoma City bombing with
instructional books and information acquired from
the gun-show circuit.
Fourth, like even
the "smartest" of aerial bombs, car bombs are
inherently indiscriminate: "collateral damage" is
virtually inevitable. If the logic of an attack is
to slaughter innocents and sow panic in the widest
circle, to operate a "strategy of tension", or
just demoralize a society, car bombs are ideal.
But they are equally effective at destroying the
moral credibility of a cause and alienating its
mass base of support, as both the IRA and the ETA
(Euskadi ta Askatasuna, or Basque Fatherland and
Liberty) separatist movement in Spain have
independently discovered. The car bomb is an
inherently fascist weapon.
Fifth, car
bombs are highly anonymous and leave minimal
forensic evidence. Buda quietly went home to
Italy, leaving William Burns, J Edgar Hoover and
the Bureau of Investigation (later to be renamed
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI) to
make fools of themselves as they chased one false
lead after another for a decade. Most of Buda's
descendants have also escaped identification and
arrest. Anonymity, in addition, greatly recommends
car bombs to those who like to disguise their
handiwork, including the CIA, the Israeli Mossad,
the Syrian General Security Directorate (GSD), the
Iranian Pasdaran and the ISI - all of whom have
caused unspeakable carnage with such devices.
Preliminary detonations
(1948-63) "Reds' time bombs rip Saigon
center" - New York Times headline (January
10, 1952)
Members of the Stern Gang
were ardent students of violence, self-declared
Jewish admirers of Benito Mussolini, who steeped
themselves in the terrorist traditions of the
pre-1917 Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party,
the IMRO (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary
Organization) and the Italian Blackshirts. As the
most extreme wing of the Zionist movement in
Palestine - "fascists" to the Haganah (Jewish
paramilitary in Palestine 1920-48) and
"terrorists" to the British - they were morally
and tactically unfettered by considerations of
diplomacy or world opinion. They had a fierce and
well-deserved reputation for the originality of
their operations and the unexpectedness of their
attacks.
On January 12, 1947, as part of
their campaign to prevent any compromise between
mainstream Zionism and the British Labour
government, they exploded a powerful truck bomb in
the central police station in Haifa, resulting in
144 casualties. Three months later, they repeated
the tactic in Tel Aviv, blowing up the Sarona
police barracks (five dead) with a stolen postal
truck filled with dynamite.
In December
1947, after the United Nations vote to partition
Palestine, full-scale fighting broke out between
Jewish and Arab communities from Haifa to Gaza.
The Stern Gang, which rejected anything less than
the restoration of a biblical Israel, now gave the
truck bomb its debut as a weapon of mass terror.
On January 4, 1948, two men in Arab dress drove a
truck ostensibly loaded with oranges into the
center of Jaffa and parked it next to the New
Seray building, which housed the Palestinian
municipal government as well as a soup-kitchen for
poor children. They coolly lingered for coffee at
a nearby cafe before leaving a few minutes ahead
of the detonation.
"A thunderous
explosion," wrote Adam LeBor in his history of
Jaffa, "then shook the city. Broken glass and
shattered masonry blew out across Clock Tower
Square. The New Seray's center and side walls
collapsed in a pile of rubble and twisted beams.
Only the neo-classical facade survived. After a
moment of silence, the screams began, 26 were
killed, hundreds injured. Most were civilians,
including many children eating at the charity
kitchen."
The bomb missed the local
Palestinian leadership, who had moved to another
building, but the atrocity was highly successful
in terrifying residents and setting the stage for
their eventual flight.
It also provoked
the Palestinians to cruel repayment in kind. The
Arab High Committee had its own secret weapon -
blond-haired British deserters, fighting on the
side of the Palestinians.
Nine days after
the Jaffa bombing, some of these deserters, led by
Eddie Brown, a former police corporal whose
brother had been murdered by the Irgun,
commandeered a postal delivery truck that they
packed with explosives and detonated in the center
of Haifa's Jewish quarter, injuring 50 people. Two
weeks later, Brown, driving a stolen car and
followed by a five-ton truck driven by a
Palestinian in a police uniform, successfully
passed through British and Haganah checkpoints and
entered Jerusalem's New City. The driver parked in
front of the Palestine Post, lit the fuse, and
then escaped with Brown in his car. The newspaper
headquarters was devastated, with one dead and 20
wounded.
According to a chronicler of the
episode, Abdel Kader el-Husseini, the military
leader of the Arab Higher Committee, was so
impressed by the success of these operations -
inadvertently inspired by the Stern Gang - that he
authorized an ambitious sequel employing six
British deserters. "This time three trucks were
used, escorted by a stolen British armored car
with a young blond man in police uniform standing
in the turret." Again, the convoy easily passed
through checkpoints and drove to the Atlantic
Hotel on Ben Yehuda Street. A curious night
watchman was murdered when he confronted the gang,
who then drove off in the armored car after
setting charges in the three trucks. The explosion
was huge and the toll accordingly grim: 46 dead
and 130 wounded.
The window of opportunity
for such attacks - the possibility of passing from
one zone to another - was rapidly closing as
Palestinians and Jews braced for all-out warfare,
but a final attack prefigured the car bomb's
brilliant future as a tool of assassination.
On March 11, the official limousine of the
US consul-general, flying the Stars and Stripes
and driven by the usual chauffeur, was admitted to
the courtyard of the heavily guarded Jewish Agency
compound. The driver, a Christian Palestinian
named Abu Yussef, hoped to kill Zionist leader
David Ben Gurion, but the limousine was moved just
before it exploded; nonetheless, 13 officials of
the Jewish Foundation Fund died and 40 were
injured.
This brief but furious exchange
of car bombs between Arabs and Jews would enter
the collective memory of their conflict, but would
not be resumed on a large scale until Israel and
its Phalangist (members of the Lebanese military
organization Phalanges Libanaises) allies began to
terrorize West Beirut with bombings in 1981: a
provocation that would awaken a Shi'ite sleeping
dragon.
Meanwhile, the real sequel was
played out in Saigon: a series of car and
motorcycle bomb atrocities in 1952-53 that Graham
Greene incorporated into the plot of his novel
The Quiet American, and which he portrayed
as secretly orchestrated by his CIA operative
Alden Pyle, who conspires to substitute a
pro-American party for both the Vietminh (Ho Chi
Minh's League for the Independence of Vietnam,
upon which the actual bombings will be blamed) and
the French (who are unable to guarantee public
safety).
The real-life Quiet American was
the counter-insurgency expert Colonel Edward
Lansdale (fresh from victories against peasant
communists in the Philippines), and the real
leader of the "Third Force" was his protege,
General Trinh Minh The, of the Cao Dai religious
sect. There is no doubt, wrote The's biographer,
that the general "instigated many terrorist
outrages in Saigon, using clockwork plastic
charges loaded into vehicles, or hidden inside
bicycle frames with charges. Notably, the Li An
Minh [The's army] blew up cars in front of the
Opera House in Saigon in 1952. These 'time-bombs'
were reportedly made of 50-kilogram ordnance, used
by the French Air Force, unexploded and collected
by the Li An Minh."
Lansdale was
dispatched to Saigon by Allen Dulles of the CIA
some months after the opera atrocity (hideously
immortalized in a Life magazine photographer's
image of the upright corpse of a rickshaw driver
with both legs blown off), which was officially
blamed on Ho Chi Minh. Although Lansdale was well
aware of The's authorship of these sophisticated
attacks (the explosives were hidden in false
compartments next to car fuel tanks), he
nonetheless championed the Cao Dai warlord as a
patriot in the mold of George Washington and
Thomas Jefferson. After either French agents or
Vietminh cadres assassinated The, Lansdale
eulogized him to a journalist as "a good man. He
was moderate, he was a pretty good general, he was
on our side, and he cost $25,000."
Whether
by emulation or reinvention, car bombs showed up
next in another war-torn French colony - Algiers
during the last days of the pieds noirs or
French colonial settlers. Some of the embittered
French officers in Saigon in 1952-53 would also
become cadres of the Organization de l'Arme
Secrete (OAS), led by General Raoul Salan.
In April 1961, after the failure of its
uprising against French president Charles de
Gaulle, who was prepared to negotiate a settlement
with the Algerian rebels, the OAS turned to
terrorism - a veritable festival de
plastique - with all the formidable experience
of its veteran paratroopers and legionnaires. Its
declared enemies included de Gaulle, French
security forces, communists, peace activists
(including philosopher and activist Jean-Paul
Sartre) and especially Algerian civilians. The
most deadly of their car bombs killed 62 Muslim
stevedores lining up for work at the docks in
Algiers in May 1962, but succeeded only in
bolstering the Algerian resolve to drive all the
pieds noirs into the sea.
The next
destination for the car bomb was Palermo, Sicily.
Angelo La Barbera, the Mafia capo of
Palermo-Center, undoubtedly paid careful attention
to the Algerian bombings and may even have
borrowed some OAS expertise when he launched his
devastating attack on his Mafia rival, "Little
Bird" Greco, in February 1963. Greco's bastion was
the town of Ciaculli outside Palermo where he was
protected by an army of henchmen. La Barbera
surmounted this obstacle with the aid of the Alfa
Romeo Giulietta.
"This dainty four-door
family saloon," wrote John Dickie in his history
of the Cosa Nostra, "was one of the symbols of
Italy's economic miracle - 'svelte, practical,
comfortable, safe and convenient', as the adverts
proclaimed." The first explosive-packed Giulietta
destroyed Greco's house; the second, a few weeks
later, killed one of his key allies. Greco's
gunmen retaliated, wounding La Barbera in Milan in
May; in response, La Barbera's ambitious
lieutenants Pietro Torreta and Tommaso Buscetta
(later to become the most famous of all Mafia
pentiti) unleashed more deadly Giuliettas.
On June 30, 1963, "the umpteenth Giulietta
stuffed with TNT" was left in one of the tangerine
groves that surround Ciaculli. A tank of butane
with a fuse was clearly visible in the back seat.
A Giulietta had already exploded that morning in a
nearby town, killing two people, so the
carabinieri (military police) were cautious
and summoned army engineers for assistance.
"Two hours later two bomb disposal experts
arrived, cut the fuse and pronounced the vehicle
safe to approach. But when Lieutenant Mario
Malausa made to inspect the contents of the boot
[luggage compartment], he detonated the huge
quantity of TNT it contained. He and six other men
were blown to pieces by an explosion that scorched
and stripped the tangerine trees for hundreds of
meters around." (The site is today marked by one
of the several monuments to bomb victims in the
Palermo region.)
Before this "first Mafia
war" ended in 1964, the Sicilian population had
learned to tremble at the very sight of a
Giulietta, and car bombings had become a permanent
part of the Mafia repertoire. They were employed
again during an even bloodier second Mafia war, or
matanza, in 1981-83, then turned against
the Italian public in the early 1990s after the
conviction of Cosa Nostra leaders in a series of
sensational "maxi-trials". The most notorious of
these blind-rage car bombings - presumably
organized by "Tractor" Provenzano and his
notorious Corleonese gang - was the explosion in
May 1993 that damaged the world-famous Uffizi
Gallery in the heart of Florence and killed five
pedestrians, injuring 40 others.
The
black stuff "We could feel the rattle where
we stood. Then we knew we were on to something,
and it took off from there." - IRA veteran
talking about the first ANFO car bomb
The first-generation car bombs -
Jaffa-Jerusalem, Saigon, Algiers and Palermo -
were deadly enough (with a maximum yield usually
equal to several hundred pounds of TNT), but
required access to stolen industrial or military
explosives. Journeymen bomb-makers, however, were
aware of a home-made alternative - notoriously
dangerous to concoct, but offering almost
unlimited vistas of destruction at a low cost.
Ammonium nitrate is a universally
available synthetic fertilizer and industrial
ingredient with extraordinary explosive
properties, as witnessed by such accidental
cataclysms as an explosion at a chemical plant in
Oppau, Germany, in 1921 - the shock waves were
felt 250 kilometers away, and only a vast crater
remained where the plant had been - and a Texas
City disaster in 1947 (600 dead and 90% of the
town structurally damaged). Ammonium nitrate is
sold in half-ton quantities affordable by even the
most cash-strapped terrorist, but the process of
mixing it with fuel oil to create an ANFO
explosive is more than a little tricky, as the
Provisional IRA found out in late 1971.
"The car bomb was [re]discovered entirely
by accident," explained journalist Ed Maloney in
his The Secret History of the IRA, "but its
deployment by the Belfast IRA was not. The chain
of events began in late December 1971 when the
IRA's quartermaster general, Jack McCabe, was
fatally injured in an explosion caused when an
experimental, fertilizer-based home-made mix known
as the 'black stuff' exploded as he was blending
it with a shovel in his garage on the northern
outskirts of Dublin. [Provisionals' general
headquarters] GHQ warned that the mix was too
dangerous to handle, but Belfast had already
received a consignment, and someone had the idea
of disposing of it by dumping it in a car with a
fuse and a timer and leaving it somewhere in
downtown Belfast." The resulting explosion made a
big impression upon the Belfast leadership.
The "black stuff" - which the IRA soon
learned how to handle safely - freed the
underground army from supply-side constraints: the
car bomb enhanced destructive capacity yet reduced
the likelihood of volunteers being arrested or
accidentally blown up. The ANFO-car bomb
combination, in other words, was an unexpected
military revolution, but one fraught with the
potential for political and moral disaster. "The
sheer size of the devices," emphasized Moloney,
"greatly increased the risk of civilian deaths in
careless or bungled operations."
The IRA
Army Council led by Sean MacStiofain, however,
found the new weapon's awesome capabilities too
seductive to worry about ways in which its grisly
consequences might backfire. Indeed, car bombs
reinforced the illusion, shared by most of the top
leadership in 1972, that the IRA was one final
military offensive away from victory over the
English government.
Accordingly, in March
1972, two car bombs were sent into Belfast city
center, followed by garbled phone warnings that
led police inadvertently to evacuate people in the
direction of one of the explosions: five civilians
were killed along with two members of the security
forces. Despite the public outcry as well as the
immediate traffic closure of the Royal Avenue
shopping precinct, the Belfast Brigade's
enthusiasm for the new weapon remained
undiminished and the leadership plotted a huge
attack designed to bring normal commercial life in
Northern Ireland to an abrupt halt. MacStiofain
boasted of an offensive of "the utmost ferocity
and ruthlessness" that would wreck the "colonial
infrastructure".
On Friday, July 21, IRA
volunteers left 20 car bombs or concealed charges
on the periphery of the now-gated city center,
with detonations timed to follow one another at
approximately five-minute intervals. The first car
bomb exploded in front of the Ulster Bank in north
Belfast and blew both legs off a Catholic
passer-by; successive explosions damaged two
railroad stations, the Ulster bus depot on Oxford
Street, various railway junctions, and a mixed
Catholic-Protestant residential area on Cavehill
Road.
"At the height of the bombing, the
center of Belfast resembled a city under artillery
fire; clouds of suffocating smoke enveloped
buildings as one explosion followed another,
almost drowning out the hysterical screams of
panicked shoppers." A series of telephoned IRA
warnings just created more chaos, as civilians
fled from one explosion only to be driven back by
another. Seven civilians and two soldiers were
killed and more than 130 people were seriously
wounded.
Although not an economic knockout
punch, "Bloody Friday" was the beginning of a "no
business as usual" bombing campaign that quickly
inflicted significant damage on the Northern
Ireland economy, particularly its ability to
attract private and foreign investment. The terror
of that day also compelled authorities to tighten
their anti-car-bomb "ring of steel" around the
Belfast city center, making it the prototype for
other fortified enclaves and future "green zones".
In the tradition of their ancestors, the Fenians,
who had originated dynamite terrorism in the
1870s, Irish Republicans had again added new pages
to the textbook of urban guerrilla warfare.
Foreign aficionados, particularly in the Middle
East, undoubtedly paid close attention to the twin
innovations of the ANFO car bomb and its
employment in a protracted bombing campaign
against an entire urban-regional economy.
What was less well understood outside of
Ireland, however, was the seriousness of the wound
that the IRA's car bombs inflicted on the
Republican movement itself. Bloody Friday
destroyed much of the IRA's heroic-underdog
popular image, produced deep revulsion among
ordinary Catholics, and gave the British
government an unexpected reprieve from the
worldwide condemnation it had earned for the Blood
Sunday massacre in Derry and internment without
trial.
Moreover, it gave the British army
the perfect pretext to launch massive Operation
Motorman: 13,000 troops led by Centurion tanks
entered the "no go" areas of Derry and Belfast and
reclaimed control of the streets from the
Republican movement. The same day, a bloody,
bungled car-bomb attack on the village of Claudy
in County Londonderry killed eight people.
(Protestant Loyalist paramilitary groups - who
never bothered with warnings and deliberately
targeted civilians on the other side - would claim
Bloody Friday and Claudy as sanctions for their
triple car-bomb attack on Dublin during afternoon
rush hour on May 17, 1974, which left 33 dead, the
highest one-day toll in the course of the
"Troubles".)
The Belfast debacle led to a
major turnover in IRA leadership, but failed to
dispel their almost cargo-cult-like belief in the
capacity of car bombs to turn the tide of battle.
Forced on to the defensive by Motorman and the
backlash to Bloody Friday, they decided to strike
at the very heart of British power instead.
The Belfast Brigade planned to send 10 car
bombs to London via the Dublin-Liverpool ferry
using fresh volunteers with clean records,
including two young sisters, Marion and Dolours
Price. Snags arose and only four cars arrived in
London; one of these was detonated in front of the
Old Bailey, another in the center of Whitehall,
close to the prime minister's house at No 10
Downing Street. One hundred and eighty Londoners
were injured and one was killed.
Although
the eight IRA bombers were quickly caught, they
were acclaimed in the West Belfast ghettoes, and
the operation became a template for future
provisional bombing campaigns in London,
culminating in the huge explosions that shattered
the City of London and unnerved the world
insurance industry in 1992 and 1993.
Hell's Kitchen (the 1980s) "We
are soldiers of God and we crave death. We are
ready to turn Lebanon into another Vietnam."
- Hezbollah communique
Never in
history has a single city been the battlefield for
so many contesting ideologies, sectarian
allegiances, local vendettas or foreign
conspiracies and interventions as Beirut in the
early 1980s. Belfast's triangular conflicts -
three armed camps (Republican, Loyalist and
British) and their splinter groups - seemed
straightforward compared with the fractal,
Russian-doll-like complexity of Lebanon's civil
wars (Shi'ite versus Palestinian, for example)
within civil wars (Maronite versus Muslim and
Druze) within regional conflicts (Israel versus
Syria) and surrogate wars (Iran versus the United
States) within, ultimately, the Cold War.
In the autumn of 1971, for example, there
were 58 different armed groups in West Beirut
alone. With so many people trying to kill one
another for so many different reasons, Beirut
became to the technology of urban violence what a
tropical rainforest is to the evolution of plants.
Car bombs began regularly to terrorize
Muslim West Beirut in the autumn of 1981,
apparently as part of an Israeli strategy to evict
the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from
Lebanon. The Israeli secret service, the Mossad,
had previously employed car bombs in Beirut to
assassinate Palestinian leaders (novelist Ghassan
Kanfani in July 1972, for example), so no one was
especially surprised when evidence emerged that
Israel was sponsoring the carnage. According to
Middle East scholar Rashid Khalidi, "A sequence of
public confessions by captured drivers made clear
these [car bombings] were being utilized by the
Israelis and their Phalangist allies to increase
the pressure on the PLO to leave."
Journalist Robert Fisk was in Beirut when
an "enormous [car] bomb blew a 45-foot [15-meter]
crater in the road and brought down an entire
block of apartments. The building collapsed like a
concertina, crushing more than 50 of its occupants
to death, most of them Shi'a refugees from
southern Lebanon." Several of the car bombers were
captured and confessed that the bombs had been
rigged by the Shin Bet, the Israeli equivalent of
the FBI or the British Special Branch.
But
if such atrocities were designed to drive a wedge
of terror between the PLO and Lebanese Muslims,
they had the inadvertent result (as did the
Israeli air force's later cluster-bombing of
civilian neighborhoods) of turning the Shi'ites
from informal Israeli allies into shrewd and
resolute enemies.
The new face of Shi'ite
militancy was Hezbollah, formed in mid-1982 out of
an amalgamation of Islamic Amal with other
pro-Khomeini groups. Trained and advised by the
Iranian Pasdaran in the Bekaa Valley, Hezbollah
was both an indigenous resistance movement with
deep roots in the Shi'ite slums of southern Beirut
and, at the same time, the long arm of Iran's
theocratic revolution. Although some experts
espouse alternative theories, Islamic
Amal/Hezbollah is usually seen as the author, with
Iranian and Syrian assistance, of the devastating
attacks on US and French forces in Beirut during
1983.
Hezbollah's diabolic innovation was
to marry the IRA's ANFO car bombs to the kamikaze
- using suicide drivers to crash truckloads of
explosives into the lobbies of embassies and
barracks in Beirut, and later into Israeli
checkpoints and patrols in southern Lebanon.
The United States and France became
targets of Hezbollah and its Syrian and Iranian
patrons after the multinational force in Beirut,
which supposedly had landed to allow the safe
evacuation of the PLO from that city, evolved into
the informal and then open ally of the Maronite
government in its civil war against the
Muslim-Druze majority.
The first
retaliation against Reagan's policy occurred on
April 18, 1983, when a pickup truck carrying 900kg
of ANFO explosives suddenly swerved across traffic
into the driveway of the oceanfront US Embassy in
Beirut. The driver gunned the truck past a
startled guard and crashed through the lobby door.
"Even by Beirut standards," wrote former
CIA agent Robert Baer, "it was an enormous blast,
shattering windows. The USS Guadalcanal, anchored
five miles off the coast, shuddered from the
tremors. At ground zero, the center of the
seven-story embassy lifted up hundreds of feet
into the air, remained suspended for what seemed
an eternity, and then collapsed in a cloud of
dust, people, splintered furniture, and paper."
Whether as a result of superb intelligence
or sheer luck, the bombing coincided with a visit
to the embassy of Robert Ames, the CIA's national
intelligence officer for the Near East. It killed
him ("his hand was found floating a mile offshore,
the wedding ring still on his finger") and all six
members of the Beirut CIA station. "Never before
had the CIA lost so many officers in a single
attack. It was a tragedy from which the agency
would never recover." It also left the Americans
blind in Beirut, forcing them to scrounge for
intelligence scraps from the French Embassy or the
British listening station offshore on Cyprus. (A
year later, Hezbollah completed its massacre of
the CIA in Beirut when it kidnapped and executed
the replacement station chief, William Buckley.)
As a result, the agency never foresaw the coming
of the mother of all vehicle-bomb attacks.
Over the protests of Colonel Timothy
Gerahty, the commander of the US marines onshore
in Beirut, Reagan's national security adviser,
Robert McFarlane, ordered the 6th Fleet in
September to open fire on Druze militia that were
storming Lebanese Army Forces positions in the
hills above Beirut - bringing the United States
into the conflict brazenly on the side of the
reactionary Amin Gemayel government. A month
later, a five-ton Mercedes dump truck hurled past
sandbagged marine sentries and smashed through a
guardhouse into the ground floor of the "Beirut
Hilton", the US military barracks in a former PLO
headquarters next to the international airport.
The truck's payload was an amazing 5,400 kilograms
of high explosives. "It is said to have been the
largest non-nuclear blast ever [deliberately]
detonated on the face of the Earth.
"The
force of the explosion," continued Eric Hammel in
his history of the marine landing force,
"initially lifted the entire four-story structure,
shearing the bases of the concrete support
columns, each measuring 15 feet [4.5 meters] in
circumference and reinforced by numerous
one-and-three-quarter-inch [45-millimeter] steel
rods. The airborne building then fell in upon
itself. A massive shock wave and ball of flaming
gas was hurled in all directions." The marine (and
navy) death toll of 241 was the corps's highest
single-day loss since Iwo Jima in 1945.
Meanwhile, another Hezbollah kamikaze had
crashed his explosive-laden van into the French
barracks in West Beirut, toppling the eight-story
structure, killing 58 soldiers. If the airport
bomb repaid the Americans for saving Gemayel, this
second explosion was probably a response to the
French decision to supply Saddam Hussein with
Super-Etendard jets and Exocet missiles to attack
Iran.
The hazy distinction between local
Shi'ite grievances and the interests of Tehran was
blurred further when two members of Hezbollah
joined with 18 Iraqi Shi'ites to truck-bomb the US
Embassy in Kuwait in mid-December. The French
Embassy, the control tower at the airport, the
main oil refinery and an expatriate residential
compound were also targeted in what was clearly a
stern warning to Iran's enemies.
After
another truck bombing against the French in Beirut
as well as deadly attacks on US Marine Corps
outposts, the multinational force began to
withdraw from Lebanon in February 1984. It was
Reagan's most stunning geopolitical defeat. In the
impolite phrase of Washington Post reporter Bob
Woodward, "Essentially we turned tail and ran and
left Lebanon." US power in Lebanon, added Thomas
Friedman of the New York Times, was neutralized by
"just 12,000 pounds of dynamite and a stolen
truck".
(This article - a preliminary
sketch for a book-length study - will appear next
year in Indefensible Space: The Architecture of
the National Insecurity State (Routledge
2007), edited by Michael Sorkin.)
Next
week: Part 2: Car bombs with wings
Mike Davis is the author most
recently of The Monster at Our Door: The
Global Threat of Avian Flu (The New Press) and
Planet of Slums (Verso). He lives in San
Diego.
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