"Bashir & Hariri"

My friend Richard Sale is an award-winning journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist who has written forThe Washington Post and San Francisco Examiner. Most recently, he served as a special correspondent for UPI for 5 years. He is the author of Traitors and The Blackstone Rangers. He is currently Intelligence Correspondent for Middle East Times. He lives in Stamford, Connecticut.

"The history of our foreign policy in the Middle East are so  ugly and twisted and so stolid and remorselessly ruthless that reviewing them is a real glimpise into genuine moral squalor.  

Lebanon is an excellent example. U.S. policy there in 1982 was under the influence of the truculent hawk, Ariel Sharon. Israel was then supplying covert support to the main Christian group in Beirut, the right-wing Phalangist party, headed by Bashir Gemayel who had the face of a baby and the mind of wolverine. Sharon came to America asking that the Reagan people put up another $ 1- million to support Bashir.  The Reagan people were deeply in thrall to Israeli views and, like Israel, they saw Lebanon as a “regional influence,” and like Casey thought that the PLO was the major threat to Israel and were delighted that Bashir also loathed the PLO. 

The case was complicated. Elements in the CIA were opposed because Bashir was a homicidal thug. He had attacked a rival Christian group headed by Tony Frangieh, killing the man’s two-year old daughter, his wife and various staff members of the Frangieh home. In 1980, Bashir had come close to wiping out another Christian group headed by Camille Chamoun.  Why would Washington want ties to such a man? We are all the slaves of pressing contingencies. The necessary has to get done. Bashir in the early 1980s come to Washington to work for a law firm and the CIA had recruited him there. But the Christian group, the Phalange was a force and we wanted a say in its operations and direction and Bashir, charming and effective seemed the way to have it. And given US influence, the scope of his information, Bashir’s importance grew to become indispensable.  Beirut at that time was like the Balkans in 1914, teeming with so many spies, they tripped over each other. Bashir was a murderer, but he had political talents and he would say all the right things, speaking of the “new Lebanon” and impressing many who, like Bashir, had no idea of what it meant. 

The Casey operation involving Bashir was complicated. I am speaking here from memory, but as I recall, the CIA station in Beirut couldn’t stomach Bashir whom they thought an abomination) so CIA chief Bill Casey ran the whole operating off the books, outside the normal, internal channels and secret channels using a staffer on the National Security Council who dealt directly with a Bashir aide in Beirut.  It was all very neat and tidy. More and more Bashir began to be seen by Washington as a man who would “stabilize” Lebanon., especially by outfits like the CIA station in Tel Aviv. If Lebanon was allied with the US, it would derail the existing balance of power that then ran in favor of Iran, Syria and other states unfriendly to Israel and America.  As relations with Bashir grew closer Casey and Reagan approved a more widespread overt op that involved another secret payment of $600,000. Then on Sept. 14, while going to speak at a Phalangist, gathering, a car bomb blew up a building which came down and killed Bashir.The agency was horrified - to have such a prominent asset assassinated meant a major disaster for its reach and authority.  The Bashir killing brought a train of calamitous events in its wake, one of the most ugly as the Israelis letting Phalangist elements into PLO camps where the inmates were massacred along with dogs, cats and other animals.  The bombing of the Marine barracks was quick to follow. 

The bomb that killed Bashir had been installed by one  Habib Chartouny 26, whose case officer was a captain in the Syrian service and Israeli efforts eventually came up with a Lt. Col. Mohammed G’aman also a Syrian intelligence officer in charge of Lebanese ops, as the mastermind of the plot.  All of this could have resulted in a blood feud with Israel killing Syrian agents and vice versa, except for one Israeli intelligence chieftain, Maj. Gen  Saguy, who had always felt a strong Lebanon-Israeli tie to be a mistake along with US support fo Bashir. Casey’s strategic vision had been that of a man with a box around his head. The CIA chief  was left facing a major intelligence failure and a lot of missteps ( One thinks of Samuel Johnson’s quip, “All stupid people think they’re cunning.” In any case, the whole episode of clandestine support for Bashir was buried and kept quiet. 

Bashir and Hariri Part 2 / Moral Squalor 

The tale of Bashir seems an appropriate introduction to a world, like that of Lebanon, in which nothing really is at it seems.  Rafik Hariri was, like Bashir, thought to be another example of a fruitful CIA recruitment. The original story claimed that Hariri was recruited in the 1980s by the CIA Chief of Station (COS) in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, Alan Fiers, when the Saudis offered Hariri to be the Saudi representative of the Murphy-Habib-Hariri team attempting to identify and deal with menacing regional problems. 

Diplomat Richard Murphy had close contacts with Hariri and most sources think that Murphy passed Hariri onto Fiers. Fiers was reported to be a vain man who wasn’t likely to consider Hariri a plant by Saudi intelligence. Fiers was therefore active in displaying Hariri as an example of a perceptive agency recruitment. (My sources here are all former senior US intelligence officials who only spoke to me on condition of being allowed to remain anonymous.)  But in summary, Hariri’s chief value would be to promptly pass on to the U.S. and his handlers relevant intelligence able to affect U.S. interests in the region. This meant Saudi diplomatic contacts with Syria and other major area players. ....... Following the (Taif) accord, the Saudis arranged for Hariri to become the Lebanese prime minster, even though Hariri  for six years was a Saudi citizen and a subject of the Saudi king.  (He remained a Saudi citizen until his death. ) By the time of his return to Lebanon, Hariri’s worth was reliably estimated  by  U.S. sources to be between four and five billion dollars. By a2004, it was estimated to be $10  billion. Said a former senior U.S. intelligence source, “The increase had resulted from the continuing flow of monies from Saudi Arabia in addition to the billions that he and his Lebanese partners have looted from the Lebanese economy.” 

All the while some in the CIA  assumed Hariri was their man, ignoring the fact that the  Saudis were the directing force, and not realizing that all the while, the same Wahabi  factions that funded Hiriri were also busy giving money to extremist Sunni groups whose aim was to reassert Sunni dominance of the eastern Mediterranean. And all the while Hariri advanced such interests portraying himself as a defender of the Sunnis against the Shia and different Christian communities in Lebanon. ......   In Syria, he used his Wahabi money to buy the cooperation of the Syrian branch of the Syrian Baath Party. To do this, Harari took the sons of such figures as Hikmat Shilabi, Abd al-Halim Khaddam and Mustafa Tlas as his “partners.”  Before the death of then Syrian President Hafiz Assad, Hariri and his Saudi backers believed that the resultant unrest caused by the inexperience of Assad’s son, Bashar, meant that Khaddam could safely be made president overseeing the restoration of majority Sunni rule in Syria under Wahabi influence. ..." (To be continued)