Nowhere was that idea taken more seriously than in the Bekaa Valley, the traditional home of Lebanon’s Shi’a Arabs. As a soaring population and economic pressures pushed Shi’a families from the Bekaa into the dusty suburbs of Beirut, the contrast between the way Christians and Arabs lived could not have been more stark.
Young Fawaz Younis did not spend his youth in his family’s Bekaa Valley hometown of Baalback playing among the Phoenician, Greek and Roman ruins. By the time he was born in August 1959, his parents had settled in the oppressive slums of West Beirut, where horrendous high-rise tenements housed large families in too-small apartments without reliable fresh water or electricity. The hope that brought them to Beirut was quickly being replaced by the frustration of hope unfulfilled.
No flowers grew in the rubble and trash of West Beirut. The charms of the Christian sections — the French import shops, bakeries, chocolate shops, cafés — all the wonderful things that made Beirut so much like Paris — were absent from the Arab slums. Services others take for granted, such as reliable trash collection, water, sewers, and electricity, were reserved for the Christian Maronite sections of the city.
As a boy, young Fawaz Younis wanted to bring flowers to his schoolteacher one day. After searching fruitlessly amid the rubble where he lived, he headed into a nice neighborhood in the Christian section. Young Fawaz raided the verdant garden of an old man’s house. While he was picking some flowers, the old man caught and beat him. This experience helped form a child’s emotions.
“The Christians hated us,” he says. “They treated us like it was not our country. They said we were dirty Arabs — but they would cut off our water and would not pick up our trash. They said we would not work. My father never stopped working day and night. In prison in America I learned why Arabs feel solidarity with black Americans. It is because our experiences with white Europeans were so much the same.”
Younis’s father ran a butcher shop not far from the Sabra-Shatila Palestinian refugee camp. The camp, which had begun in 1949 as a huge tent encampment, had by the 1960s grown into a horrendous slum. The Palestinians, who’d lost their land to the new Israel, had fled to Lebanon, where they were told they could not hold jobs or own land. In 1983, during the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, there was a Christian-led massacre at the camp, with as many as two thousand people killed. Today more than four hundred thousand registered Palestinians live in scores of these squalid camps in Lebanon. Repeated US interventions and CIA covert actions have done almost nothing to ease the tensions among the Christian, Sunni, Druze, and Shi’a populations.
Under the leadership of an expelled Christian-born Palestinian doctor named George Habash, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine began to organize in the refugee camps in the 1970s. Habash’s local commanders in Beirut organized Palestinians into military units inside the camps. “There were no Boy Scouts to join in West Beirut . . . ,” Fawaz Younis explains, “so even Shi’a boys my age who were not Palestinian went to the camp. Every day from the time I was sixteen, I pretended to go to school at 8 am. I would hide my books in the cemetery and then sneak into the refugee camp for training until 2:30 pm. I picked up my books and pretended to be home from school, and my parents never knew. They taught me how to shoot, how to fight. I loved it . . . Religion was never important to me before.
| Fawaz Younis was one of the Amal Militia’s top operatives in Lebanon. In this clip he discusses the roots of war in Lebanon. Josepth Trento interviewed him in Beirut in June, 2005. |
“But the Shi’a gave me discipline. It gave me a sense of belonging I did not have before . . . The mosque was for the Shi’a population their only hope for a voice or access to any political power.” Since they were ignored by the Christians who ran the country, the mullahs filled the vacuum and received the Shi’a populations’ loyalty.
In 1980 the tensions finally exploded into civil war. At nineteen, Younis became a soldier in the fight against the Christians. He saw friends die; he became battle-hardened. He also found himself caught up in the shifting political sands of Lebanon and the duplicity of Yassir Arafat. “We, the poor Lebanese Shi’a — long repressed by the Christian and European minority that held power — had embraced the Palestinian cause until Arafat turned on us and tried to take the little we had,” Younis says.
Arafat had made a series of alliances with Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Party leadership in Iraq. As a result, aid began coming into the camps, but it was directed against the once sympathetic Shi’a. The civil war between Muslims and Christians triggered a power struggle for control of West Beirut and south Lebanon between the native Shi’a and the Palestinians, supported by Saddam and Arafat. The goodwill between Lebanese Shi’a and Palestinians soon degenerated into enmity, a civil war within the larger civil war.
In the midst of this war Younis switched sides. He left Habash’s PFLP and joined the struggling Amal Militia, a Shi’a-based entity backed by Syria. Younis quickly demonstrated his abilities as a street fighter and a leader in Amal.
Nineteen eighty would prove to be a decisive year for the United States in the Middle East. In 1980, US President Jimmy Carter was covertly supplying the Afghanistan resistance and negotiating with Iran for the release of the American Embassy hostages. That same year David Belfield received the fatwa to assassinate the Shah’s former spokesman. He fled to Tehran in July to live in exile. A few months later, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran.
In April of 1980 Nabih Berri, a charismatic but not particularly religious man, took over the leadership of the Amal Militia and forged an unexpected alliance with the new Shi’a revolutionary regime in Iran. He used this to win over the Shi’a leadership in Lebanon, which up until then had rejected him. At the same time, according to CIA officers who would work with Berri, he convinced the Syrians he would make certain the interests of President Hafez Assad were represented in Lebanon. Berri was a pragmatist. His goal was political power. The radicalization of the Shi’a by the new Iranian regime presented a serious threat to the Ba’ath Party in both Iraq and Syria. Berri brilliantly walked a fine line, catering to the Ba’ath interests, which were largely Sunni, while he cultivated a relationship with the Shi’a Iranians.
Now under Iranian influence, the Lebanese Shi’a began to call themselves the Party of God, or Hezbollah. Favor was won in Shi’a ghettos and towns as the local mullahs handed out monthly cash payments, which continue to this day. The Shi’a mosques also provided services not provided by the government. All of this was financed with Iranian oil dollars.
| Fawaz Younis discusses his experiences in the Civil War in Lebanon.
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Although Berri was of Shi’a stock, he was not part of the Shi’a establishment in Lebanon, and this proved to be an advantage in dealing with the Sunnis. “The Sunnis in Syria saw Amal as someone they could deal with,” Younis says, “since Hezbollah and the Shi’a did not even consider Sunnis true Muslims. This alliance made Berri a very powerful warlord to outsiders.”
However, it also created a problem for Berri in dealing with the new generation of extreme Muslims personified by the Iranian Shi’a. They distrusted Berri’s relationship with the Sunnis in Syria and Iraq. Berri was caught in the middle. If he displeased the Iranian mullahs who controlled the supply of money to Hezbollah in Lebanon, he would lose his grip on power. Amal had to have an alliance with the Shi’a to be politically effective. Nabih Berri was reaching for the political stars when he successfully played the Americans off the Shi’a.
Berri, according to several of his US intelligence handlers, had bigger things in mind than being a local warlord. He saw himself as a conduit between the United States, whose citizens based in the Middle East had become targets for terrorists, and those who were encouraging the attacks. “Berri was targeted for CIA recruitment and so were members of his militia,” says Michael Pilgrim, a former US intelligence operative. “I think it is safe to say we probably financed his early trips to Iran.” Berri’s relationship extended to other US intelligence agencies such as the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Unfortunately for the United States, Berri was a genius at geopolitical duplicity. The relationship would end in a series of deadly disasters for members of our armed services and the CIA.
In January 1981 Iran returned the American hostages. They arrived in the United States on President Ronald Reagan’s inauguration day. William Casey’s meetings with Iranian mullahs before the 1980 election were well known to foreign intelligence services before Ronald Reagan ever took office. The Israelis had actually bugged the hotel where the meetings took place in Madrid. This information was never shared with the new Reagan administration, but it allowed the Israelis to have a sense of the weaknesses of the new administration. MOSSAD concluded that the Reagan administration would be unable to act effectively against Iran on terrorism because it was compromised on the day it took office. The Israelis watched with amazement as the new CIA Director, William Casey, kept repeating the same mistakes.
The story of the Reagan administration’s secret dealings with Iran through a Lebanese factional leader has been one of our government’s most closely guarded secrets. The political machinations of the Reagan campaign in the 1980 election gave the Iranian mullahs the ability to sponsor and fund terrorism with no effective response from the Reagan administration. Instead, the CIA — under orders from the Reagan and first Bush administrations – participated in a cover-up that would have devastating consequences for the United States.
The new Reagan administration escalated the scale of the Carter administration’s commitment to the mujahedin fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. It secretly helped arm both sides in the Iran Iraq War. All the while it boldly pronounced America’s strength in fighting terrorists – with whom it would never negotiate – and Communism. Despite private warnings from US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, President Reagan in 1982 committed Marines and Navy SEALS to participate in a multi-national peacekeeping contingent in Beirut.
According to US intelligence officials who served in Lebanon at the time, Nabih Berri kept peace with Tehran and the Shi’a by allowing them to attack Westerners in his Amal-controlled territory. To prove his loyalty to the Shi’a and keep the alliance that was essential to his power base, he failed to pass on intelligence to the United States. And the attacks on Americans were becoming more and more serious. In April 1983 the Iranians and Hezbollah, with the knowledge of Amal, stole a truck from the US embassy in Beirut and drove it back the next day loaded with two thousand pounds of explosives. In addition to bringing down the seven-story embassy, the truck bomb killed all seventeen members of the CIA station. Ironically, this made the CIA rely on Berri more than ever because the disaster had deprived it of its eyes and ears in Beirut. The Reagan administration failed to make the connection between the attack and Amal or its source Nabih Berri.
Six months after the embassy bombing, a period punctuated by kidnappings and other acts of terrorism against westerners, it became horrendously clear just how prophetic the State Department intelligence staff had been.