The Horror, the Horror!

By James Kelly

After a murderous bombing in Beirut, Shultz heads for the Middle East

The explosion was over in a flash, but the horror of it all deepened through the week. Day and night, rescue workers picked through the rubble, desperately looking for survivors. Cranes gingerly hoisted slabs of broken concrete up and away from the site, while bulldozers scraped away debris. A searcher somewhere inside the wreckage kept yelling through a bullhorn: "If anybody can hear me, please call for help." No one did. By Saturday, members of the rescue teams were still uncovering corpses buried under the avalanche of what was once the U.S. embassy. At one point, the rescuers pulled the body of a Marine out of the ruins and wrapped it in an American flag. As the figure was placed in a waiting ambulance, a squad of Marines snapped to attention and saluted.

The bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut last week killed at least 57 people, 17 of them Americans, and wounded some 100; though the death toll is likely to rise as the search goes on, the assault already ranks as the bloodiest terrorist attack ever against a U.S. diplomatic mission. Ten minutes after the blast, an anonymous caller warned Agence France-Presse that the strike was "part of the Iranian revolution's campaign against imperialist targets throughout the world." The man identified himself as a member of the Islamic Jihad Organization, an obscure pro-Iranian group made up of Shi'ite Muslims loyal to Ayatullah Khomeini. Yet within a day, two other terrorist groups had also claimed responsibility. Though the attacker remains unknown, the motive was not in doubt: to bully Washington and upset the course of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

President Reagan quickly reaffirmed his intention to stand by U.S. commitments in the region and, more immediately, to secure the withdrawal of foreign forces from Lebanon. "This criminal attack will not deter us," said Reagan. "We will do what we know to be right." Lebanese President Amin Gemayel, who visited the still smoldering embassy two hours after the attack, echoed that resolve. Said he: "Those responsible for this crime have united in death innocent Lebanese and Americans and strengthened the determination of our two countries to continue to work together." As if to send a signal to the bombers, U.S. Negotiator Morris Draper met with Lebanese and Israeli officials the day after the tragedy to continue negotiations on the pullout of foreign troops from Lebanon. Three days later, Reagan announced that he was sending Secretary of State George Shultz to the region this week. His stated mission is to wrap up the withdrawal negotiations, but the hastily arranged trip is also an attempt to revive the President's moribund peace plan, according to which the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip would be linked to Jordan.

The attack, nonetheless, renewed concern in Congress about the U.S. role in Lebanon. The House Foreign Affairs Committee approved an Administration request for an additional $251 million in military and economic aid to Lebanon. But the committee attached an amendment that would require the Administration to seek congressional approval before increasing the U.S. contingent of the four-nation peace-keeping force above its present level of 1,500 Marines. Since an agreement on the withdrawal of foreign troops from Lebanon is expected to call for a doubling in the size of the peace-keeping force that the U.S. mans along with France, Italy and Britain, a fractious debate on Capitol Hill is in the offing.

The bombing also raised fears that a new wave of terrorism may be ready to break over the Middle East. Two weeks ago, Dr. Issam Sartawi, a moderate member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was assassinated in Portugal, apparently by members of a radical group that had broken away from the PL.O. As frustration over Israel's settlement policies in the West Bank grows and dissension within the P.L.O. mounts, further acts of violence may follow. Just as worrisome was the fact that the attack on the U.S. embassy in Beirut seemed to signal a more lethal style in terrorist tactics. Though individual diplomats have often been the targets of attacks, and embassies have been fired upon, rarely has a bomb been used to demolish a U.S. embassy and, in effect, murder as many Americans as possible.

Seconds before the explosion, the eight-story building was alive with the everyday activity common to any foreign mission. The consular office on the ground floor was busy with Lebanese applying for visas. Down the hall, many staffers were eating lunch in the cafeteria. At an office elsewhere in the embassy, the CIA'S chief Middle East analyst, Robert Ames, was meeting with four colleagues. On the third floor, Public Affairs Officer John Reid was typing a dispatch to Washington. Ambassador Robert Dillon was in his spacious penthouse office with a telephone receiver in one hand and a T shirt in the other, preparing to change for his daily jog with his guards.

At 1:05 p.m. it happened.

"There was a great flash of light and then the blast," recalled Reid, who was thrown to the floor. "Suddenly it looked like the whole room was coming apart in tiny pieces." So powerful was the explosion that sailors on the U.S.S. Guadalcanal, steaming five miles offshore, felt the ship shudder. A housewife in a suburb seven miles from the embassy heard her windows rattle. The center section of the horseshoe-shaped building collapsed like the layers of a cake, with glass and metal rocketing in all directions, and the consular section and cafeteria were swallowed up in a ball of fire. Pedestrians strolling along the esplanade in front of the embassy were hit by the flying shards, and cars parked near the building were blown to bits, their fenders and license plates landing a block away. The destructive force could be measured in small but telling ways: a nearby traffic light was melted by the heat of the bomb.

The first moments after the explosion were the most terrible, for amid the chaos no one was quite sure what had happened. TIME Photographer Franc,oise DeMulder, who lives a few blocks away, heard the roar and raced to the embassy. "Fires were burning and a huge column of black smoke obscured almost the whole fac,ade of the building," she recounted later. "The smoke made it difficult to see just how the building had been damaged. But the devastation all around left little doubt."

Within minutes, Beirut was filled with the wail of fire trucks and ambulances. Lebanese soldiers and Red Cross workers were joined on the scene by French soldiers from the multinational force and members of the Palestinian Red Crescent, a P.L.O.-linked rescue squad. Within 45 minutes, the U.S. Marines had cordoned off the area and taken charge of security. Diala Ezzedine, a Red Cross volunteer, remembers seeing people on the upper floors "screaming and shouting" for help. As firemen poured foam on the flames, others tried to reach workers with a ladder, but it fell short. At one point, Ezzedine was on the fifth floor helping to carry out a wounded staffer on a stretcher. She and her comrades discovered that the only way to reach the stairway was to inch around a chasm above the wreckage.

With the help of five people, the man on the stretcher was carefully passed over the hole and to the other side.

Reid, like most of the survivors, managed to make it to a stairway in the virtually undamaged back of the embassy and out a rear exit to the parking lot. Dillon remained pinned under a collapsed wall until a pair of aides freed him by prying off the chunks of concrete with the thick wooden staff of his office's American flag. U.S. Special Envoy Philip Habib and Draper were at the Presidential Palace in Baabda, about six miles away, but when word of the blast reached them, a frantic Draper drove immediately to the embassy. He feared that his wife Roberta was in the building that day. After a few tense minutes of searching here and there for her, Draper finally found and embraced Roberta, who turned out not to have been in the embassy after all.

With thousands of spectators looking on, the rescuers dragged out body after body from the ruins. The CIA appeared to have suffered the greatest loss: in addition to Ames and the Lebanon station chief, several of the dead are believed to have been agency employees. A few hours after the blast, a worker emerged from the cafeteria with a plastic bag stuffed with human hands. Every so often, a fire would blaze or a steam shovel digging through the rubble would hit a tear gas canister kept by the embassy's Marines, clouding the air with fumes. At night, with the giant floodlights switched on, it looked like a scene from an apocalyptic disaster movie.

As the search for bodies went on, the investigators pieced together how the attack was carried out. According to witnesses, a large van apparently filled with explosives hurtled past a Lebanese police checkpoint and rushed up the circular driveway in front of the embassy. Then, either the driver of the truck set the charge, blowing himself up, or a cohort detonated the deadly cargo by remote control. Authorities have already found pieces of the vehicle they suspect was used in the assault, but they doubt that the evidence will lead them to the killers. Even the magnitude of the explosion was open to question. Experts estimated that the blast carried the wallop of anywhere from 200 to 500 lbs.of TNT.

How could the embassy be so vulnerable? The State Department, it seems, had focused its attention on how to defend the building against the sort of mob that seized the U.S. embassy in Iran in 1979; a lobby wall was thickly armored and contained several gun ports, one of which was hidden behind a portrait of President Reagan. Yet the site remained prey to the most common form of terrorism in Beirut: the car bomb. No gate protected the embassy driveway, and though plans for a wall around the building were discussed frequently, none was ever built. Says a senior U.S. diplomat who spent several years in Beirut: "The department must live with that black mark." Ironically, the embassy may have been more exposed to attack since last summer, when the Israeli army drove the P.L.O. out of the city. For about ten years, the Palestinian group had tacitly agreed not only to refrain from attacking the building but to inform the U.S. of any threats from other quarters.

Even more important to embassy security is the Druze militia of the Progressive Socialist Party, a leftist Muslim organization headed by Walid Jumblatt. The group has long claimed the waterfront around the embassy as its turf, and thus took it upon itself to protect the building. When the Americans opted for safer accommodations during the ten-week Israeli siege of Beirut last summer, the Druze militia kept guard on the deserted building as well as on the nearby apartments of embassy officials. During tense moments Jumblatt's forces still discreetly patrol the area.

The lasting impact of last week's tragedy on the course of events in the Middle East was difficult to calculate. The bombing dealt a psychological blow to Lebanon's efforts to mend itself after last year's war and made the U.S. appear as vulnerable as other countries to the region's violence. Lebanese officials fear that the Israelis will use the explosion to back up their demands for a security zone in southern Lebanon. At last week's session of the withdrawal talks in the Israeli town of Netanya, Israeli Negotiator David Kimche again insisted that his country's soldiers be allowed to accompany their Lebanese counterparts on patrols, while Antoine Fattal of Lebanon insisted that the Israeli role be limited to taking part in "supervisory teams." The distinction is crucial, for the Syrians are not likely to agree to pull their forces out of Lebanon if Israel retains a military presence in the country. The Israeli government of Prime Minister Menachem Begin showed its persistence elsewhere last week by dedicating another new settlement, for 360 Israelis in the occupied West Bank. Some 2,000 members of Gush Emunim, the ultranationalist group that has spearheaded the West Bank colonies, attended the ceremony on the cold, windswept mountaintop. To their dismay, they were joined by 8,000 protesters from the Peace Now movement, which opposes Begin's settlement policies.

Only one day after the bombing, most of the Beirut embassy's 341 employees, some of them still wrapped in bandages, were back at work in a string of temporary offices around Beirut. When Public Affairs Officer Reid was asked if he was angry, he replied, "No, not really. You don't know whom to be angry at." His remark pointed up a tragic fact about Beirut: despite the P.L.O.'s withdrawal last summer, the country remains a haven for numerous violent factions, any one of which can strike at any time. As Foreign Minister Elie Salem put it, "Whatever the target, Lebanon is always the victim." And so, last week, was the U.S. --By James Kelly. Reported by Roberto Suro/Beirut and Gregory H. Wierzynski/ Washington

With reporting by Roberto Suro/Beirut, Gregory H. Wierzynski/Washington This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.