An interview with British channel 4 T.V. station, about the events and memories of the Beir Al-Abd Massacre

Lebanon was in a state of security chaos, with the international and local currents interfacing especially in the problems between the Lebanese, and the Palestinian, and especially the Israeli interference and that of the American troops to the extent that people thought that America wants to establish a military base in Lebanon. In short it was a state of security chaos with all parties thinking of killing their foes through intelligence agencies.

We have read some of the facts in the memories of William Casey the director of the CIA in Bob Woodward book the veil. He says that Casey met with an Arab prince and said that Sheikh Fadlullah according to their terminology, and become a problem and had logo.

On this basis the Prince gave Casey 3 million dollars to cover the expenses of my assassination, since the congress would not pay any money for such operation. Thus they made agreement with the Lebanese Army Intelligence.

They trained some youngest and made all preparations to assassinate me. They made sure that they knew where I was at a certain time. They used to keep track of me as I go to the mosque on Friday. The Media that day was insisting to get any statement from me as if wanting to record my last word.

Yes, the international press they went with me to the Imam Al-Rida Mosque in Beir Al-Abd. Thus, we heard the sound of a huge explosion. But at that time a pious woman, went up to the first floor, where the Mosque is situated. She asked me to talk to her, I said that I was sorry because I was tired but she insisted. And when I started to talk we heard the explosion. Had I not responded to that woman I would have been in the heart of it. It was an American operation to revenge for what happened to the marines, since they accuse me of being behind that. But they failed. This infarction was published in the Washington Post. And President Reagan stated that we did not order it. I would like to emphasize that I have nothing to do with the explosion of the marines. It is an American charge that has no basis.

When I heard the explosion, I did not know at first that I was the one who was targeted, but someone came and told me. The massacre led to the killing of about 80 people of babies, children women and workers and wounded about 120 other civilians.

I saw of course that the buildings around my house were largely destroyed. I also followed the issue of the victims including the women who left the mosque carrying their children, including a pregnant women who was killed with her baby in her womb. I felt how barbaric the Americans were, being responsible for such operations.

They could not have assassinated me by the traditional way, since I had a tight security. The neighbourhood too was secured. Thus, car explosion was the means that many parties resorted to confront their foes.

Because it could kill a large number of people, thus creating fear and intimidation, in addition to killing their foes, and this is what we notice now in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There were two cars near my house. And they were keeping an eye on the road I pass through to make sure that I'll be hit when I pass on this road.

But when I was delayed by the woman who insisted on asking me questions, the murderers saw some cars that looked like mine passing and they exploded the car. Had I come home right away I would have been killed. One local radio station even said that I were under the ruins, and that I were dead, which conforms with the preset plan. It also seems that the international press was informed about the plan because they were haunting me to get any last statement before the explosion.

Firstly, it seems that some Lebanese intelligence, probably the Phalanges, have leaked this to them saying that I had promised heaven to the one who executed the operation. At that time I commented that these accusations were too ridiculous to comment on, since it is not in the capacity of religious scholars to engage in such errands.

I cannot say who is responsible for each explosion, since there were several parties in Lebanon that performed such operations, but since the CIA was responsible for the explosion that targeted me, it indicates that they do resort to such means.

I believe that this is the norm instituted by the chaos the CIA created in the region.

Then there is the backward mentality that controls some people including certain extremists in Al-Qaida and other parties. And this is what we have noticed in nine eleven, Spain and Britain or even in Morocco Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Lebanon was filled with these kinds of explosives. It was an open arena for all weapons and explosives.

I do no think so, because we did not discover who are behind it. The Lebanese intelligence and even the International Investigation Committee were not able to discover them. Thus, one can accuse Israel that wants to destabilize Lebanon, or several other regional and international parties as well as Al-Qaida and other extremists.

As long as America and Israel are destabilizing the region to promote their interests I do not see such a prospect, especially that America continues to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan and dominates Pakistan, Somalia… America is talking about creating constructive chaos in the region, which evidently paves the way for such actions.

It is true that they did not know who was behind the explosion of the Marines headquarters. Thus when some Lebanese intelligence gave them this information they targeted the party that was behind it, and thus they picked me.

It might have been so.

I believe we have covered all the aspects. But I would like to point out that Reagan tried to deny his responsibility by saying that the American intelligence did it without his knowledge. That is why he issued a statement saying that he did not issue the orders to perform this operation… But it is certain that the American Administration is directly implicated in this terrorist act.

The flames were flickering in the Oval Office fireplace, suggesting intimacy, even home, for the meeting that fall afternoon just after the election victory. Casey strode in with his papers and a summary of talking points on a single sheet of paper. He was certain he had reduced the issue to its basics. Now, with the second term, it was time. He had in mind a presidential finding that would direct the CIA to train and support small unites of foreign nationals in the Middle East which would conduct preemptive strikes against terrorists. When intelligence showed that someone was about to hit a U.S. facility, such as an embassy or a military base, the units would be able to move to disable or kill the terrorists. The President was aware that the fanatics and suicide bombers were a visible demonstration of his Administration's impotence, and he had agreed to do something.

Weinberger had refused to involve the military; the shelling from the battleship New Jersey into Lebanon had not worked-it was too much, too indiscriminate, there was no pinpoint accuracy. Air strikes killed the innocent along with the terrorists. No thanks, not us, was the message from the Pentagon. Cap had folded his arms and said no.

Casey's own CIA had to be dragged in kicking and screaming; Mc-Mahon had also issued a no-thank-you; the CIA did intelligence, not killing. But Casey had been stubborn, and Shultz had backed him up.

Casey explained to the President that the finding was simply to train and put the units in place; another finding would be required to take action in a specific case. The Israeli were experienced at this kind of covert preemptive work, but it was essential that the Administration not get into bed with them on this. Any U.S. action had to be seen as antiterrorist, not anti-Arab.

With luck, no one would ever know even about the existence of these new units. At first, three five-man units would be trained and set up in Lebanon. Any preemptive hit would be carried out undercover; it would not be traceable to the CIA or the United States; all would have deniability.

The President told Casey to inform the congressional intelligence committees but to invoke the provision in the law that allowed him to inform only eight people – and the chairmen and vice-chairmen of the Senate and House committees, and the Republican and Democratic leaders of both the Senate and the House.

Casey said he would see to it personally. That would emphasize the sensitivity. No loudmouth staffers would know. He saw a chance to show that the CIA could conduct truly secret operations.

Reagan signed the formal finding and an accompany National Security Decision Directive. The immediate cost for the Lebanese units would be about $1 million. When the program was expanded to other countries, the cost would be $5.3 million.

Rear Admiral John M. Poindexter, McFarlane's deputy, who was at the meeting, later described the afternoon session to a colleague: "Casey mumbled, and Ronald Reagan nodded off".

Casey was determined to see this through. McMahon had fought him every step of the way, littering the bureaucratic landscape with doubts. Could they trust the foreign nationals, particularly the Lebanese? Could the CIA control them? As McMahon saw it, either answer to the second question spelled trouble. If the CIA had control, would it not involve the agency in assassinations? Wasn't participation in pre-emptive strikes assassination-planning that was banned by the Reagan executive order, no matter how it might be dressed up? If the CIA did not have control, were matter they not launching unguided missiles? And, McMahon wondered further, would they ever have attack? They had never had it so far.

Sporkin had helped develop Casey's rationale. He had written a legal opinion asserting that pre-emptive action would be no more an assassination than would a case in which a policeman gets off the first shot at the man who is pointing a gun at him. "Pre-emptive self-defence," he termed it.

Casey was focusing on Beirut. The past eight months had posed an emotional crisis for the agency. William Buckley, who had been kidnapped in Beirut on March 16, was described publicly as a political officer in the U.S. Embassy, but he was in fact Casey's station chief. Casey was sure that the Muslim extremists who had kidnapped him knew whom they had. He had pushed the DO nearly every day to come up with a way to locate and rescue Buckley. He had directed that extraordinary measures be taken: he would authorize money to pay informants; he ordered communications interception stepped up; he had satellite photos enhanced to search for clues; he established a special hostage-rescue task force. He was aware that neither he nor the agency could bargain for Buckley without violating Administration policy, which prohibited negotiations to ransom hostages. The ordeal was humiliating. The station in Beirut had had to be cut back to a new station chief and security people. Many of its intelligence functions had been turned over to the Lebanese intelligence service, a tough, lethal group that was in effect the last vestige of governmental authority in the capital. Money, equipment and technical support were being provided them by the CIA.

A group calling itself Islamic Jihad (Islamic Holy War) had claimed responsibility for kidnapping Buckley. Casey was sure the name was simply a slogan or a war cry for extremists. They had also been implicated in the bombing of U.S. facilities in Beirut.

For DDO Clair George, who had been the Beirut station chief from 1975 to 1976, the Buckley kidnapping revived bad dreams. During his time in Beirut, two U.S. government officials had been abducted and held hostage for four months before being released. He had lived that agony. George had turned the DO inside out trying to save Buckley. It was not only that he wanted Buckley back; the effort was a signal to thousands of DO officers abroad that the CIA would do just about anything to rescue one of its own. An expert FBI team trained in locating kidnap victims was sent to Beirut. It came up with nothing after a month.

It was time to hit back. But training the Lebanese was proving to be trouble. They couldn't be controlled; they were willing to commit murder, very willing. Casey's own CIA people began slowing down. No one inside the agency wanted to step out front. Casey saw the shell shocked faces, frightened of a real encounter with danger. He had brought them a long way in four years, but many of them, McMahon, the bean-counters in the budget office, the DO, didn't understand his reading of their obligation.

All the bold planning was going to be a wasted effort. Casey decided to turn to the Saudi intelligence service and King Fahd. They promised help in the form of $3 million.

One day in early 1985, Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar received courier directly from the King. A message contained secret instructions to cooperate with Casey. Bandar immediately made an appointment to visit Casey at Langley. Casey saw him, but proposed a second meeting elsewhere, saying: "Let's have a bite." It was as if he didn't want to talk at the CIA's own headquarters. They agreed to have lunch over the weekend at Bandar's residence, a palatial estate just a mile down Chain Bridge Road. Casey said he would bring Sophia. She realized that she and Bill had once looked at the house and considered buying it. Bill liked the larger library. Sophia found the ambassador's wife very friendly and nice. The launch, she felt, was just another one of the Washington social obligations. "For no purpose at all that I could see," she said later.

After lunch, Casey and Bandar walked alone out to the garden. When they were about as far away as possible from the house and the security guards, Casey withdrew a small card form his pocket and handed it to the ambassador. It contained the handwritten number of a bank account in Geneva. The $3 million was to go there.

"As soon as I transfer this," Bandar said, "I'll close out the account and burn the paper." He would make sure there were no tracks on the Saudi end.

"Don't worry," Casey said. His end would be clean, too. "We'll close the account at once".

Bandar had often found Americans naïve about the world, but here was a man with no inhibitions. He considered Casey the J. Edgar Hoover of the CIA.

Bandar knew how to have a conversation that never took place. He was funnelling millions to the contras; this was widely suspected and he just denied it routinely with a confident laugh and a long lecture about the implausibility. Their relationship was the kind that both Bandar and Casey valued- one in which men of authority could have frank, deniable talks and emerge with an agreement only they understood. Bandar and Casey agreed that a dramatic blow against the terrorists would serve the interests of both the United States and Saudi Arabia. They knew that the chief supporter and symbol of terrorism was the fundamentalist Muslim leader Sheikh Fadlallah, the leader of the Party of God, Hizbollah, in Beirut. Fadlallah had been connected to all three bombings of American facilities in Beirut. He had to go. The two were in agreement.

Later it was decided to give effective operational control to the Saudis, particularly as the CIA bureaucracy grew more and more resistant to active anti-terrorist measures. The Saudis came up with an Englishman who has served in the British Special Air-Service. The elite commando special operations forces. This man travelled extensively around the Middle East, and went in and out of Lebanon from another Arab state. He would be an ideal leader of a sophisticated operation. The CIA, of course, could have nothing to do with "elimination." The Saudis, if asked would back a CIA denial concerning involvement or knowledge. Liaison with foreign intelligence services was one CIA activity out of the reach of congressional oversight; Casey had flatly refused to the committees about this sensitive work. And in this case, the CIA as an institution did not know. Nothing was written down, there were no records. The Saudi $3 million deposited in the Geneva account was "laundered" through transfers among other bank accounts, making certain it could not be traced.

The Englishman established operational compartments to carry out separate parts of the assassination plan; none had any communication with any other except through him. several men were hired to procure a large quantity of explosives; another man was hired to find a car; money was paid to informants to make sure they knew where Fadlallah would be at a certain time; another group was hired to design an after-action deception so that the Saudis and the CIA would not be connected; the Lebanese intelligence service hired the men to carry out the operation.

On March 8, 1985, a car packed with explosives was driven into a Beirut suburb about fifty yards from Fadlallah's high-rise residence. The car exploded, killing eighty people and wounding two hundred, leaving devastation, fires and collapsed buildings. Anyone who had happened to be in the immediate neighbourhood was killed, hurt or terrorized, but Fadlallah escaped without injury. His followers strung a huge "MADE IN US" banner in front of a building that had been blown out.

When Bandar saw the news account, he got stomach cramps. Tracks have to be meticulously covered. Information was planted that the Israelis were behind the car bombing. But the Saudis needed more to prove their non-involvement. There was only one way. They provided irrefutable intelligence that led Fadlallah to some of the hired operatives. As Bandar explained it, "I take a shot at you. You suspect me and then I turn in my chauffeur and say he did it. You would think I am no longer a suspect."

Still Fadlallah was a problem, now more than ever. The Saudis approached him and asked whether, for money, he would act as their early-warning system for terrorist attacks on Saudi and American facilities. They would pay $2 million cash. Fadlallah accepted but said he wanted the payment in food, medicine and education expenses for some of his people. This would enhance his status among his followers. The Saudis agreed.

There were no more Fadlallah-supported terrorist attacks against Americans.

"It was easier to bribe him than to kill him," Bandar remarked. Casey was astounded that such a comparatively small amount of money could solve such a giant problem.

Bandar undertook two other secret covert operations at Casey's request. One was a bolster anti-Qaddafi efforts in Ghad. It cost the Saudis $8 million. The second was $2 million to assist in a secret operation to prevent the Communists from coming to power in Italy. The two operations were never traced to the Saudis or exposed.

Even though the mission to kill Fadlallah had failed, the Lebanese intelligence service privately began taking credit despite its comparatively small role. A demonstration of strength was necessary; it had to be shown that blood would be met with blood, terrorism with terrorism. Casey was despondent. The CIA relationship with the Lebanese service, to train units for pre-emptive actions, put the agency in jeopardy. It was too close to an assassination plot. McMahon, who was not aware of the Saudi role, wanted a disconnect; he said urgently that the agency had to get out of covert antiterrorist training. Casey had no choice, and the preemptive finding was rescinded.

Some continuing relationship with the Lebanese service, nonetheless, had to be maintained, since the CIA depended on it for intelligence, for manning listening posts and for security. Later in March, two colonels and three majors of the Lebanese service were brought to Washington for a three-week senior CIA management-training program. They were put up at the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown and were shuttled daily to a safe house in McLean, where they received boilerplate lectures, conferred with senior CIA officials and were served lunch by an Asian cook.

A dream and a truth.

Between fiction and reality there was a miracle. It might have been a Divine revelation or a spiritual inspiration that prevented the assassination of the Religious Authority Sayyed Muhammad (p.) Hussein Fadlallah in one of the ugliest American massacres in Beir Al-Abd on March 8-1985.

These are the words that the Hajja Zainab Ash-Shami – 67 years – the bloody terrorist act of Beir Al-Abd that led to the martyrdom and wounding of about 240 people.

That day the Sayyed said: A believing woman saved my life. And now this woman Zainab Ash-Shami says: Certainly what used to bond us to the Sayyed was the Mosque, where the Sayyed used to lead the Friday prayers for women. The security situation of that day was very tense and I was quite worried about the Sayyed. That night I saw a disturbing and horrifying dream, of a huge explosion near the Cinderella Cinema, where the explosion actually took place, that resulted in the martyrdom of the Sayyed. When the Sayyed finished the prayers and was about to leave the mosque in the middle of a huge crowd that was probably the biggest in its kind in that era, it was suggested to me… as if an angel has descended from the sky telling me to obstruct him. I rushed and obstructed his way telling him that I have a question I can not delay. He declined and said that he was tired and that we should postpone it, but something made insist, although I did not know what the question that I had to ask was.

It might be merely and inspiration or perhaps a spiritual and divine force that encouraged me to act in such an audacity I never thought I had in me. I do not remember that I have ever been engaged in such a situation before. The Sayyed is our godfather whom we talk to with respect. But that day, it seems that as if I had been send to "force" him to stay in the mosque. The Sayyed responded to my insistence and sat down to listen to my question. I don't remember what I told him that day.

All what I remember is that I have asked him to be wary and increase the guards because he was under threat.

When I told him what I had seen in my dream he said: We rely on Allah, May He reward you. What is written is unavoidable. We are all under the Mercy of Allah.

As if trying to remember what happened on that tragic day, she paused a little, and then said: At that moment we heard the sound of a huge explosion.

I honestly did not feel that I was the one that had prevented the Sayyed from leaving the Mosque. It was as if a Divine force had stopped him. When I went out to the street I saw many people whispering or shouting that the Sayyed was killed. I yelled: No it is not true… He did not die. He is still in the Mosque. But they thought that I was under the impact of the shock…

Of course I did. I visited him the following day and congratulated him on his safety. He praised my faithful belief and thanked God for protecting him through me. I believe that Allah, the most Exalted, has heard my prayers and protected the Sayyed to remain our leader, guide and supporter.

I honestly do not know. I only know that I have resorted to Istikhara, which was not only good, but also urging me to go. I went to the Mosque as if a certain force was carrying me. I might have been one of the first women who went to the mosque to pray on that day. It was the will of God that made me not hesitant anymore, and made my presence an indirect cause of saving the Sayyed.