Iran’s Regime Admits it Was Behind the Massacre of American and French Marines at the Beirut Barracks
Iran’s Regime Admits it Was Behind the Massacre of American and French Marines at the Beirut Barracks
Last month, a senior official in the Islamic Republic of Iran admitted what the revolutionary regime had long denied: that it was behind the 23 October 1983 twin suicide bombing against the international peacekeepers in Beirut, the largest non-nuclear explosion since the Second World War, which massacred 241 American Marines, 58 French soldiers, and six civilians. While there was never any serious doubt Tehran was responsible for this atrocity forty years ago, it is interesting to have the admission and it provides a chance to examine the nature of the Islamic Revolution that rules Iran.
A BELATED CONFESSION
The confession was given by Issa Tabatabai, the representative of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamene’i in Lebanon, who served the same function for the Islamic Revolution’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (r. 1979-89), in an interview published on 13 September by the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), an official propaganda agency of the clerical despotism. A translation was published by MEMRI, which captured the key section of the transcript before it was removed from the IRNA website.
Tabatabai says:
[F]rom the Imam [Khomeini], I received approval for the struggle against Israel and even the fatwa [ordering Hizballah] to carry out martyrdom operations, and he confirmed this three times. … I quickly went to Lebanon and provided what was needed in order to [carry out] martyrdom operations in the place where the Americans and Israelis were.
Tabatabai broadly tries to maintain the narrative promulgated by the clerical regime, its supporters, and (alas) many Western academics that Hizballah was founded in 1982 as a response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June of that year to clear out the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) terrorist base on Israel’s northern border. But a close reading of Tabatabai’s remarks show that even he slips and admits the truth, that Hizballah was founded before that.
When—and how—Hizballah was founded is important because it goes to the heart of what Hizballah is and why the Iranian regime’s denials of responsibility for the Marine barracks bombing were by definition false.
Tabatabai refers to a “group” in Lebanon that was part of the Islamic Revolution that brought down the Shah in Iran, says that their “military base was located in my home” and these people “signed a contract declaring their willingness to become martyrs”, i.e. suicide-killers. Tabatabai says that probably more than seventy of these Khomeinist jihadists “signed this contract in my home”.
Crucially, Tabatabai adds: “This ‘group’ was given facilities, and then the war with Israel broke out in South [Lebanon]” [italics added]. Tabatabai goes on to explain that while he was not involved in establishing the political front of Hizballah that emerged after Hizballah publicly acknowledged its existence with its February 1985 manifesto or ‘Open Letter’, “God made it possible for me to continue the military activity with the group that had cooperated with us prior to the Revolution’s victory” in January-February 1979 [italics added].
Just as importantly, Tabatabai explains: “We received many facilities from the Palestinians. The military courses we had with the Palestinians prompted us to launch the struggle”. Finally, he says: “The efforts to establish [Hizballah] started in [Lebanon’s] Baalbek area, where members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps [IRGC] arrived.” This linguistic division between “the IRGC” and “Hizballah” is key to the denial and deception of the clerical regime about its nature.
THE ISLAMIC REVOLUTION AND HIZBALLAH
Khomeini had been deported from Iran in 1964. The Imam had staged a rebellion in June 1963 against the Shah’s “White Revolution”, an attempt to socially liberalise Iran alongside the drive to industrialisation: Khomeini was particularly incensed by the Shah providing universal education to girls. Six months after being released from prison in April 1964, Khomeini had tried to incite another uprising and was expelled in November 1964. After going briefly to Turkey, Khomeini settled in Iraq.1
From Iraq, Khomeini agitated against the Shah’s government. A series of lectures Khomeini gave in Najaf in 1970 were compiled into a book, Islamic Government, which set out the totalitarian Velayat-e Faqih (Guardianship of the Jurist) concept that still governs the Islamic Republic. The book, and audio versions of the lectures recorded on cassette tapes, circulated widely and could be bought easily at markets within Iran.2
Soon after the publication of Islamic Government, Khomeini moved to active plotting against the Iranian monarchy, drawing on assistance from the PLO and Libya’s Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi, with the Soviet Union in the background supporting both.
It is in this program of Khomeini’s in the early 1970s that the true origins of Hizballah lie, not as an “offshoot” or “proxy” of the Islamic Republic after its formation, but as the central cadre of the Islamic Revolution, forged on Lebanese territory but with no loyalty to Lebanon, which was then infiltrated into Iran to conduct the Revolution in 1978-79. This cadre was the nucleus the IRGC that uses the name “Hizballah” when it is on Lebanese soil and maintains its power partly by pretending to have “nationalist” ambitions.
In 1972, Khomeini made a tactical alliance with the Mojahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), the sinister Islamist-Marxist cult organisation that currently pretends to be a democratic opposition movement.3 The MEK had been weakened at that time by a domestic crackdown, so it could benefit from Khomeini’s money (supplied through Colonel Qaddafi) to rebuild, and, by assisting the MEK’s recuperation, Khomeini was able to guide their activities and acquire a reach into Iran. The MEK would carry out terrorist attacks within Iran to destabilise the Shah’s government throughout the 1970s, including against American servicemen. In 1978-79, the MEK was the terrorist wing of Khomeini’s Revolution.
The MEK was trained in “urban guerrilla” and other terrorist tactics the Libyan camps of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a PLO faction that largely controlled by the KGB, and MEK’s cadres were dispersed to camps in the Soviet colonies of Cuba, East Germany, and South Yemen. After 1976, when the Soviets created their terrorist haven in the areas of Lebanon occupied by Hafez al-Asad’s Syria, Moscow’s closest Arab ally, the MEK found their way there, too, closer to Iran as the Revolution loomed.4 The Soviets’ Lebanese terrorist menagerie had the benefit of being “deniable” at two steps removed: though controlled and financed by the KGB, Asad’s secret police were deputised to oversee the camps, and they were directly administered by the PLO, whose chief, Yasser Arafat, had relocated to Lebanon in 1970 after his effort to take over Jordan failed.
By the time the MEK migrated to Lebanon, Khomeini had already established his own direct line to the PLO and begun training what would become the IRGC in the Soviets’ camps. Khomeini first made contact with the PLO in 1973, sending his trusted aide, Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur,5 who was later a key actor in the Marine barracks bombing,6 to treat with Arafat:
Soon afterwards, Khomeinist cadres were sent to the bases of the PLO’s Force 17 unit in Lebanon to receive training in intelligence and terrorism. For PLO leader Yasser Arafat, this was a chance to be a regional and even global figure; for Khomeini, it laid down roots for a base on Israel’s doorstep. Force 17, whose primary role was protecting Arafat, was run by Ali Hassan Salameh (Abu Hassan), a senior PLO official who was also crucial in creating the “deniable” Black September organization to distance the PLO from its worst atrocities. Among Force 17’s ranks at this time was the future military commander of Hizballah (and actual [IRGC] Quds Force officer) Imad Mughniya, later used by Iran to establish relations with Al-Qaeda.
The Khomeinists in Lebanon succeeded in outgrowing their PLO tutors and creating their own parallel infrastructure by the time the Islamic Revolution began in Iran in early 1978, using the lavish funds that were flowing in from inter alia Colonel Qaddafi. By 1977, Khomeini’s network in Lebanon was receiving $100,000 per month through the Libyan Embassy in Beirut.7 This infrastructure is what we now call Hizballah.
In the summer of 1978, the triangle of Khomeini, Arafat, and Qaddafi—all motivated to destroy the Shah, as America’s (and Israel’s) closest ally—removed from the chessboard Musa al-Sadr, the “Vanished Imam”, who had been testing out an accommodation with the Shah and the mainstream clergy in Iran to isolate the revolutionary clergy. The Jaleh Square fiasco the MEK and the PLO had provoked in September 1978 did immense political damage to the Shah by allowing him to be presented abroad as a bloodthirsty tyrant,8 but for those on the ground it demonstrated the reverse. The Shah took steps to ensure there would be no repeat from panicky troops under fire; it was clear there would be no massive crackdown to abort the Revolution. The Iranian middle class—and anybody else who could—fled Iran, while the Khomeinists and some of their PLO allies poured in from Lebanon.9
The Shah referred to the Revolution against him as originating in an “unholy alliance of the Red and the Black”, of Communists and reactionary religious elements, and he was quite right about this. The Soviets—again largely through the PFLP and its camps in Qaddafi’s Libya, though with weapons transfers through the Captive Nations and connections to the Lebanon ecosystem—supported the Fedayeen, a Communist terrorist group the MEK collaborated with that was particularly active in the latter stages of the Revolution. The Soviets’ local “fraternal” Party, the Tudeh, was, of course, mobilised against the Shah during the 1978 crisis.
Unwilling to shed blood to stay in power, the Shah left his country in mid-January 1979 and the Interim Government fell to an Islamist-Communist coup with a month. The military cadre of Khomeinists trained in the Soviet-PLO camps in Lebanon became the IRGC, the vanguard to preserve the Imam’s nascent regime, and the clergy who had directed events in Lebanon now linked up with the internal revolutionaries like Ayatollah Muhammad Beheshti to create the Islamic Republic Party (IRP), which telling called itself “the Party of God” (Hizballah).
In the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, the liberals, who ignored Shapur Bakhtiar when he warned that he heard “the sounds of fascism” from the cracking of clergy’s sandals, were swiftly disabused of their illusions that they would play an important part in the “New” Iran, but the regime had the appearance of a relatively broad spectrum of Islamists and Leftists. It seemed likely one side would prevail, and it was not unreasonable to think, as the Shah did, it would be the Communists. Against a Soviet system with half-a-century of experience manipulating revolutionary situations, who would bet on a “crazy old man”? The massive external support system that made the Revolution possible was significantly tied to the Soviet Union and the KGB had involved itself in constructing the new Police State. The story seemed to write itself.
However, everyone misread which script History was working from. What looked to Moscow like a “popular front” of old was something entirely new. Khomeini took apart the Left—first the more “extreme” wing of the Fedayeen, with the help of the majority of the Fedayeen and the Tudeh; then the rest of the Fedayeen with the help of the Tudeh; and finally, in 1983, the Tudeh was defenceless when Khomeini came for them.
In the meantime, the MEK, convinced that Khomeini was not radical enough, had made a disastrous play for power within the Islamic Republic. As the MEK had already been crippled by Khomeini peeling off half of its core troops to the IRGC, the Imam made short work of them and the MEK leader, Masud Rajavi, fled into exile with Abolhassan Banisadr, one of the “moderate” Islamists of the Liberation Movement who thought he was using Khomeini to get to power and only realised too late that even being president in Khomeini’s State did not mean he had the liberty to think for himself.
THE FOUNTAINHEAD OF GLOBAL TERRORISM
Khomeini’s triumph was to have a profound impact on the whole world.
The Islamic Revolution has spread on the “Hizballah” model, with the “Special Groups” in Iraq, similar Shi’a militias in Syria and Afghanistan, and perhaps most thoroughly with “Ansar Allah” or “the Huthis” in Yemen, creating an Empire that now dominates the region. As one author so well explained: “These are not disparate, subordinate, local revolutionary groups allied for a greater cause and supported by the IRGC, but regional names of the same movement with the same leadership and goals that shifts the same personnel and resources to various fronts of its transnational jihad under different aliases.”
Clerical Iran’s strategic alliance with Moscow has enabled the spread of the Revolution much further afield, to Africa and Latin America, and the Iranians have upheld their part of this Axis by assisting the Russians in Ukraine and other global theatres where they can threaten Western interests.
In the first flush of the Islamic Revolution, though, the fear of its contagion was a real one in Moscow. Iran’s regime is seen by many Sunnis as a sectarian menace to them at the present time, after its role in the hecatomb in Syria since 2011, but the Islamic Republic does not conceive of itself as only for Shi’is and the main immediate impact of the Revolution was to electrify the entire Islamist spectrum. If the Shah, the most loyal and apparently powerful Western ally, could fall, then it meant the battered jihadists in Egypt and Syria had hope. It was this that fed into the KGB’s already conspiracy-addled assessment of the Communist client regime in Afghanistan,10 resulting in the full-fledged Soviet conquest of Afghanistan in December 1979, an event that ironically proved to be the crucible for the modern jihadist movement.
The solidification of the Islamic Republic, despite being plunged into a war with Saddam Husayn, and the use of Iran’s oil money to fund not only the regime’s own global terrorism and assassination campaign, but the ambitions of any anti-Western group, attracted many Sunni Islamists to Tehran. Al-Qaeda’s late emir, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was one of Khomeini’s exemplars of Islamic militancy and Al-Zawahiri retained his Iranian connections to his dying day. Al-Qaeda’s probable leader at this hour, and certainly most of the group’s remaining leadership, continue to be sheltered in Iran.
Three years ago, another senior Islamic Republic official decided the time had come for confession: he boasted of Iran’s assistance to Al-Qaeda during the Bosnian war, the first road-test of the alliance Clerical Iran had reached with Al-Qaeda in 1991. That awful war in the Balkans set Usama bin Laden’s outfit on the path to becoming a truly global entity, and Iran’s support for Al-Qaeda would only escalate through the 1990s as Bin Laden’s men showed themselves willing to do more and worse.
What had drawn Bin Laden to Iran in the first place was the Marine barracks bombing. Bin Laden knew it was Tehran’s handiwork and wanted instruction on how Al-Qaeda could repeat the feat. It has long been common knowledge that Mughniya, the IRGC officer who led Hizballah until 2008, watched from a nearby rooftop when the suicide bombers he had sent against the barracks did their work.11 American courts have documented the evidence of Iran’s responsibility for the Marine barracks bombing. And now, thanks to Tabatabai, nobody is in any doubt.
REFERENCES
Iraq was ruled in 1964 by Abd al-Salam Arif, one of the officers involved in the murderous 1958 coup against the Iraqi monarchy. The Ba’th Party took power in Iraq in 1968 and Saddam Husayn became de facto leader around 1973, before formally taking the presidency in 1979.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—which displayed a conspicuous anti-talent during the Iran crisis, even by its own high standards—denied the authenticity of Islamic Government when the book was finally brought to its attention in 1978, speculated that it was a fabrication (probably by Israel), and did not get around to translating it until March 1979, two months after the Shah had left his country and the revolutionary bloodbath was well-underway.
One of the crimes the MEK is responsible for—which often gets forgotten, and outrages its online minions if mentioned—is helping Saddam crush the 1991 rebellions that erupted after the Iraqi Army was evicted from Kuwait in Operation DESERT STORM.
Among the Soviet terrorist instruments in the Lebanese camps were the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the Japanese Red Army, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA).
Ronen Bergman (2018), Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, pp. 368-369.
Mohtashamipur was Iran’s ambassador to Syria (1982-86) when the Marine barracks bombing happened. Mohtashamipur did not hide that he was overseeing the training of IRGC/Hizballah personnel in the Bekaa Valley, and the Syrian Embassy is notorious as a hub of Iran’s terrorist activity: inter alia, the 1996 Khobar Towers attack in Saudi Arabia was run out of this facility.
Moreover, “Evidence presented in U.S. courts names Mohtashamipur as the man who relayed a message from MOIS/VEVAK [Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence] to one of Iran’s terrorist leaders in Lebanon—Husayn al-Musawi, a protégé of Mostafa Chamran’s, who led the now-defunct Islamic Amal, a splinter from Imam Musa’s Amal Movement—demanding he take ‘spectacular action’ against the U.S.-led peacekeepers, and it was at the ‘direction’ of Mohtashamipur that IRGC/Hizballah then met in Baalbek to plan the Marine barracks bombing. The IRGC operative who gave the direct order and provided the money and training to hit the Marine barracks was Hossein Dehghan, later Iran’s defence minister. The operational leader of the attack on the Marines was Imad Mughniya, whom Dehghan handled. Mohtashamipur was Interior Minister for the latter half of the 1980s and then a some-time MP. He is still alive.”
For all of the “debate” that has taken place in the decades since about what “Hizballah” is, U.S. intelligence was quite well aware in real time that the “Islamic Jihad Organisation” (IJO)—the cover name “Hizballah” used through the 1980s—was the IRGC in Lebanon. One reason this was known was because the National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted the message mentioned above, from VEVAK (also known as Ettela’at) to Mohtashamipur, on 26 September 1983, the day a supposed ceasefire had gone into effect in Lebanon, telling Mohtashamipur at the Embassy in Damascus to “take spectacular action against the American Marines”. Unfortunately, that intercept was only passed to the Marines three days after the bombing, on 26 October. See: Col. Timothy J. Geraghty (2011), Peacekeepers at War: Beirut 1983—The Marine Commander Tells His Story, pp. 77-78.
Andrew Scott Cooper (2016), The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran, p. 251.
Darioush Bayandor (2019), The Shah, the Islamic Revolution, and the United States, pp. 212-16.
The Fall of Heaven, pp. 407-10, 449-53, 476-80.
Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin (2005), The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, pp. 393-401.
Matthew Levitt (2013), Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon's Party of God, p. 24. Next to Mughniya on the roof that day was Mustafa Badreddine, the man who made the explosives for the attack and Mughniya’s successor as Hizballah’s military commander.