Joshua
Sinai offers a good review in the Washington Times of Fred Burton and Samuel M.
Katz’s Beirut Rules: The Murder of a CIA Station Chief And Hezbollah’s War
Against America.
On
March 16, 1984, William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut,
Lebanon,
was kidnapped by Hezbollah operatives just as he had left his
apartment building at 6:45 am and started driving his car to his office at the
United States embassy compound, a two-minute drive away. The two cars driven by
the Hezbollah kidnappers quickly blocked Mr. Buckley’s
car and their operatives overwhelmed him with their firearms and hurled him
into one of their cars, driving him to their hidden place of captivity. Mr.
Buckley had been in his position since June 1983, and contrary to standard
security practice, he was not accompanied by an embassy-provided driver or
bodyguard. Mr. Buckley reportedly died in Hezbollah
captivity in June 1985, despite the numerous measures the United States had
employed to attempt his rescue.
Taking this high-profile
kidnapping as its central focus, this book is a dramatic and engaging account
of the American backchannel intelligence and military efforts to help restore
order to Lebanon’s protracted Hobbesian civil war, with the
Iranian- and Syrian-backed Hezbollah’s
Shi’ite insurgency the primary antagonist.
Hezbollah’s
insurgency took the form of systematically kidnapping and assassinating
Westerners in Lebanon, whether academics, United Nations officers,
Christian humanitarian aid officials and journalists. During Mr. Buckley’s
brief tenure at the U.S. embassy, Hezbollah also organized two spectacular truck-driven
suicide bombing attacks in Beirut on Oct. 23, 1983, with the first explosion
killing 241 U.S. Marine Corps personnel at their barracks by the Beirut
Airport, and the second killing 58 French peacekeeping personnel and six
civilians.
You can
read the rest of the review via the below link:
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