Terror to End Terror?

IT was a little after midnight when the Israeli commandos struck the sleeping city of Beirut. They had steamed up the Mediterranean coast in gunboats, then embarked in rubber dinghies. Some 60 naval commandos and paratroopers, armed with automatic rifles, grenades and almost 800 Ibs. of explosives, quietly rowed toward five different points along the moonlit shore. Helicopters hovered offshore with reinforcements; they were not needed. The raiders took less than 2 1/2 hours to accomplish their missions: the assassination of three Palestinian leaders and the destruction of several fedayeen facilities. The Israelis killed at least 14 other people and wounded many more. Their own losses: two dead and two wounded. It was, all in all, one of the most spectacular raids that the Israelis had ever undertaken.

The raids were staged the day after Arab guerrillas had attacked Israeli targets in Cyprus (see following story). But the detailed planning had actually begun a month earlier, when two nondescript men and a dark-haired woman in her mid-30s visited Beirut on Western passports. Agents of Mossad, the Israeli external-intelligence network, they laid the groundwork for the extraordinary invasion. They were helped by Israeli agents living in Beirut, including some who had infiltrated the fedayeen movement itself and others who arrived later. To get ready for the commandos, six agents went to Avis and a local firm called Lenacar and rented a station wagon, four American sedans and a pert blue Renault sporting a rallye stripe.

D-day was originally scheduled for April 7, but something caused a delay. Perhaps it was political hesitation, or maybe the onset of unseasonable thunderstorms. The Cyprus attacks could have ended any political wavering. Besides, the weather turned pleasant, the seas became calm.

As TIME Correspondent Spencer Davidson reconstructed the events, the Israeli raiders zeroed in on their targets with awesome precision. Two groups landed on the luxurious western edge of the city. One group raced across a wide sandy strip known as Dead Man's Beach (because of the strong undertow in front), scaled a 40-ft. embankment and rendezvoused with three of the rented vehicles. Overhead, a sign atop the Beirut International Hotel serenely went on winking its ad for the " 1,000 and One Nights" supper club. The second Israeli group splashed ashore on a narrower beach half a mile away, clambered up a rocky incline and found three more rented cars on top of a promontory called Eden Roc.

The first group drove a scant mile to Rue Khaled Ben al Walid. Two apartment buildings halfway along the short street housed the Palestinian leaders marked for assassination: Al-Fatah Deputy Leader Abu Yusuf, Intelligence Expert Kamal Adwan and Palestinian Spokesman Kamal Nasser. All three had attended a meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization during the evening.

Entering by a rear yard to avoid a protective squad of fedayeen in front, the Israelis climbed to Adwan's third-floor apartment. While one of them rang the front doorbell, the others somehow got in through another door. When Adwan answered the ring, the attackers were behind him. Before he could defend himself, they pumped 53 bullets into him. His wife jumped into bed with their six-year-old daughter and four-year-old son and pulled the covers over their heads. The Israelis ignored the three as they methodically ransacked the apartment, scooping up documents listing the identities and codes of Palestinian activists in Israeli-occupied territories. (Israeli officials later described the documents as a bonanza that quickly led to a wave of arrests.)

One floor above, meanwhile, another squad of Israelis burst into Nasser's apartment while he was scribbling notes for a magazine article. He had just written: "If we don't proceed to Palestine, danger will approach us." The Israelis smashed his door off its hinges and riddled him with bullets. The floor where he fell was still wet with gore six hours later. On a nearby coffee table sat an empty glass, a half-full pack of Marlboros and an ashtray of cigarette butts.

In the other building, a third group of raiders shot the locks off the door to Abu Yusufs seventh-floor apartment and then gunned him down. His wife Rasmat threw herself on his body, and she too was killed. Abu Yusufs six children were not harmed, but there were other deaths when the Israelis began making their getaway. During an exchange of fire between the Israelis and the aroused fedayeen guards, a 70-year-old Italian woman looked out of her apartment window and was killed by a stray bullet. Two Beirut policemen entered the fighting and also died. The Israelis suffered no losses as they smoothly rolled out of the neighborhood in their undamaged cars.

The other three carloads of raiders had traveled roughly a mile in another direction. Their target: an eight-story apartment building that housed a small radical group known as the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The Israelis planted explosives that blew out the first three floors of the building. The Palestinians fought back, but five of them were killed in a pitched battle that also caused the only Israeli casualties in the whole invasion.

While the urban raiders were striking, three other detachments of Israelis landed at outlying coastal areas. One group hit the impoverished village of Ouzai, at the south end of Beirut. It unaccountably blew up the house of the village headman. He escaped, but two of his brothers were shot to death when they rushed out of their houses to see what had happened. Beyond the village, the Israelis coolly set up a roadblock on the coastal highway and then blew up a small factory suspected of supplying explosives to Palestinian terrorists. Three Syrians who ran the factory were killed in the blast. The other two commando contingents struck at the northeast industrial neighborhood of Doura, where they blasted a single-story machine shop believed to be used by terrorists. At Sidon, 25 miles to the south, they destroyed a small fedayeen garage.

Lebanese citizens were dismayed at their army's failure to mount any real resistance. The Beirut newspaper Al Moharrer ran a huge headline: A DAY OF HUMILIATION. Lebanese Premier Saeb Salam visited Ouzai to inspect the damage, and furious residents pelted him with oranges and tomatoes. He later resigned, demanding also the resignation of Lebanon's military chief of staff, General Iskandar Ghanem.

Anger spread throughout the Arab world, much of it directed at the U.S. Anti-American placards sprouted among the 100,000 or so mourners in a funeral procession for the victims. The Palestine Liberation Organization in Beirut accused U.S. intelligence agents of planning the Israeli raids. A Voice of Palestine broadcast from Algiers called on Arabs "to strike everywhere at American interests and embassies and kill and assassinate everyone who is American."

Apparent response to that provocative battle cry came quickly. At week's end a giant oil-storage facility near Sidon on the Lebanese coast erupted in flames. Some 200,000 barrels of oil were destroyed. Spokesmen for the Palestinian guerrillas denied responsibility for the fire, but their words had a hollow ring. The big tank farm is the terminus of a pipeline that carries oil from Saudi Arabia for refinement and loading onto supertankers; it is part of the Aramco complex and the U.S.-owned corporation is an obvious guerrilla target.

The State Department denied U.S. involvement in the Lebanon raid, even as it deplored both the Arab and the Israeli strikes. As usual, the Israelis justified their raids as a means to end terrorism. "It was very marvelous," Prime Minister Golda Meir told the Knesset, "because we killed the murderers who were planning to murder again. Shining pages will be written about this." Later, before a crowd of 10,000 in Tiberias, she warned of more Israeli raids. "If terrorist activities do not cease," she said, "we will be compelled to continue to seek terrorists out wherever they may be."

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