Counterterrorism magazine published my Q&A with James M. Scott (seen in the photo below), the co-author of Targeted Beirut.

You can read the magazine pages below or the text below:

The IACSP Q&A With James M. Scott, the Co-Author of

“Targeted Beirut: The 1983 Marine Barracks Bombing and the

Untold Origin Story of the War on Terror”

Jack Carr and James M. Scott have written “Targeted Beirut: The 1983 Marine Barracks Bombing and the Untold Origin Story of the War on Terror,” the first in an in-depth nonfiction series examining the devastating terrorist attacks that changed the course of history.

In 1983 the United States Marine Corps experiences its greatest single-day loss of life since the Battle of Iwo Jima when a truck packed with explosives crashes into their headquarters and barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. This horrifying terrorist attack, which killed 241 servicemen, continues to influence US foreign policy and haunts the Marine Corps to this day.

Jack Carr is a former Navy SEAL who retired from active duty in 2016, and he is the author of The Terminal List, True Believer, Savage Son, The Devil’s Hand, In the Blood, Only the Dead, Red Sky Mourning. His debut novel, The Terminal List, was adapted into the #1 Prime Video series starring Chris Pratt.

A Pulitzer Prize finalist and former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, James M. Scott is the author of Target Tokyo, Black Snow, Rampage, The War Below, and The Attack on the Liberty. In addition, Scott is a sought-after public speaker, who leads battlefield tours and lectures at institutions around the world. He lives with his wife and two children in Charleston, South Carolina, where he is the Scholar in Residence at The Citadel.

James M. Scott was interviewed by Paul Davis.

IACSP: I read “Targeted Beirut,” and I really enjoyed it. I thought you covered well the lead up to the 1983 bombing, the attack itself, and the aftermath. I’m 72, so I remember following the story when it happened at the time, but your book provided a lot of details that I didn’t know, or don’t remember. What do you and your co-author call the 1983 Marine barracks bombing the “untold origin story of the war on terror?”

Scott: I think you really look at this as the beginning of Hezbollah. The embassy bombing is the beginning of it, and the beginning of our book, and it builds up to the bombing of the Marine headquarters and barracks. Hezbollah is a proxy of Iran, just like Hamas and the Houthi rebels. You are really seeing in a post-Iranian Revolution era this warfare by proxy, and this is the first time for the United States that it comes home to roost. That is going to set the current for the next four decades. We are going to look back and say when did it all begin? And for the United States, it really begins in Beirut in 1982 and 1983. We are still dealing with it today. It is amazing how much similarities are in the news now to what it was like researching the 1983 bombing.

IACSP: So you and your co-author Jack Carr plan on writing further non-fiction books about terrorism?

Scott: We do, yes. This is the first in a series and we have another book that we haven’t announced yet.

IACSP: What brought you and Jack Carr together to write this book and the series?

Scott: I didn’t know Jack personally before this, but it was really serendipitous that he reached out to me to about that time that I was reading his books and watching “The Terminal List.” He was looking to begin a series of non-fiction books. He writes about these issues in his fiction, but he wanted to branch out to non-fiction, and he wanted to bring in someone with a background of doing archival research and interviews that go with traditional non-fiction. He read several of my books, and he approached his editor and said I’d like to work with this guy James Scott. He looked at one of the acknowledgments in my books, and said his editor is a guy by the name John Glusman. Jack’s editor said that John Glusman was her husband. Small world. Jack’s editor at Simon and Schuster is married to my editor at W.W. Norton.

IACSP: Yes, a small world.

Scott: At that point putting us together was pretty easy. Jack reached out to me and we had a long call and this is what I want to do and asked me what my thoughts were, and I was getting ready to go to a conference that weekend and one of the folks at the conference was a guy named Charlie B. Neimeyer, the retired director of Marine Corp History. I had dinner one night with Charlie and I’ve been approached about this project on Beirut and asked what kind of stuff they had in the archives, and he said they had tons of material on Beirut. We have the monthly command chronologies, the weekly situation reports, the message traffic, and the oral histories. He said that I really need to jump on this project. On my way back from that conference, I remembered a guy I went to grad school with who mentioned Beirut. I texted him and asked him to remind me about Beirut. He called me back right away and said he was one of the rescuers when the bomb went off. His name is Mark Singleton, and you’ll see his name a number of times in the book. Mark said he could put me in touch with plenty of the guys who were there. I called Jack and I told him I had found all these records that are available, and I had a buddy who was there. All we saw was green lights at this point and it was go, go, go. Jack said let’s do it. So we mapped out a rough idea of how the book would look like. The beauty of non-fiction is we were at the mercy of history, so you want to think about where you wanted to start the narrative and where you wanted to end it. I’m the archive guy. We did more than a hundred hours of interviews with survivors. We had a thousand pages of letters and diaries.

IACSP: I was an enlisted sailor in the Navy back in the 1970s, and I liked how you used the letters of the enlisted Marines to see their thoughts and views alongside those of the officers. One can tell the research for the book was extensive and the interviews were extensive as well. Can you tell us about the situation in Beirut before the Marines went ashore as peacemakers? Who were the factions fighting there?

Scott: It was everybody against everybody. Beirut had been kind of a mess for a while because of this sort of sectarian in-fighting. It really traces all the way back to its origins as a modern state in the post-World War II area, in which the power structure was based on your faith. At that time, the Christians had a majority of the population, so they held the highest office. The Sunnis had the next popular majority, so they had the prime minister position, and then the Shia, who were the smaller group at the time, so they had the speaker of the house. So you had power roughly divided along these three religious lines, which were backed up by the demographics in the 1940s. In the four decades until the 80s, there were huge demographics shifts that took place. Christians, who were dominant, fall off, Shias, who were the least powerful, end up having a population growth, so what you see then is the demographics are being shifted and people saying, hey, we want a bigger slice of the power pie. That then sets the stage for all of this in-fighting that is going on and that erupts into a civil war in the 1970s, and that quells, but there is this huge amount of tension and animosity there. Into this chaos comes the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization. They are kicked out of Jordan in the 1970s and they set up shop in Beirut. They use Lebanon as a base to wage attacks against the Israelis and the Israelis of course retaliate, blowing things up in Lebanon. Syria at this point too is also looking at chunks of Lebanon, thinking, hey, we would like to have parts of this as well. You have internal and external factions that are creating this huge tug of war over who was going to control everything. Of course, the central government, which is still sort of lead by Christians, is a very small, weak element. What happens is in 1982 the United States comes in after the Israelis go pretty hard after the PLO and in order to bring about peace, the U.S. goes in with several other nations to sort of get the PLO out. One of the first steps in righting the ship is going to be getting these foreign elements out of Lebanon so the Lebanese can take control of their own destiny. We go in in 82 along with the British, the French and the Italians and we help get the PLO out. Soon thereafter, the president of Lebanon is assassinated. His assassination leads to huge retaliation against the Palestinians, and it becomes a mess again. The peacekeepers are pulled back in in late 1982 and that’s what sets the stage for the mission the Marines are on when things really go sideways in Lebanon.

IACSP: In your book, you did a good job of describing the internal Reagan administration’s senior cabinet people and their antagonism towards each other. Who were they, what did they fight about, and what course did President Reagon finally follow?

Scott: You had a division among senior Reagan advisors about what to do in Lebanon. On one side you had Casper Weinberger, who was the Defense Secretary, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which were led by the Chairman, General John Vessey. They didn’t want the United States getting involved in Lebanon. They saw Lebanon as a side show from the larger Cold War. They saw no upside from Lebanon, only a downside. There was a lot of risk and very little reward. On the flip side of that you had George Schultz, the Secretary of State, and Bud McFarlane, the National Security Advisor. The two of them thought there was a lot to be gained there. They wanted to bring in a peaceful Lebanon that would be a peaceful neighbor for the Israelis. The men were sort of at loggerheads over this and Reagan, for all his strengths, one of his weaknesses was he did not like in-fighting among his people. Weinberger and Shultz would go at each other in these meetings and Reagan would respond by shutting down or looking for compromise. Often, compromise is not what you need, which can lead to stagnation. Things are getting more violent, beginning with the embassy bombing, followed by attacks on the Marines at the airport. As Marine Colonel Geraghty (the commander of the 24^th Marine Amphibious Unit in Beirut) said, “The mission changed, but no one changed the mission.” The Marines were left on a peacekeeper mission that was no longer a peacekeeping environment.

IACSP: As a teenage sailor who served on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War and a Defense Department journeyman civilian back in 1983, it was my view then, as it is today, that the Marines should have been stationed on the ships. And as I thought then, as well as now, the troops on the ground should have been UN peacekeepers. Most of the military people and DOD civilians of all Ranks and grades that I worked with at the time agreed on those two points, as I recall.

Do you know why the Marines were stationed in a building rather than being stationed on the U.S. Navy amphibious warfare ships, where they could be helicoptered in for patrols, and then rotated back to the safety of the Navy ships?

Scott: That’s what Weinberger wanted to do when the situation got worse. He wanted to pull the Marines back aboard ship. The initial idea was that sending the Marines in as a peacekeeping force would make it easier for them to be on land and go out and about.

IACSP: But the ships had helicopters, the ships were helo carriers. The helos could have flown the Marines in and out, rotating the land patrols. Effectively making the Marines a moving target rather than the proverbial sitting duck.

Scott: Exactly. It was almost like a mission creep kind of thing. They were there on the ground, they were flying in their food, then they brought in portable kitchens, and they brought in portable medicine, and they increasingly creeped up into a full-scale base at the airport. And Colonel Geraghty said if our mission is peacekeeping, then we need to be flying the flag and we can’t have our base look like a huge fortress. That was the op orders they were still operating off as no one changed their mission.

IACSP: Bad calls in retrospect, but…

Scott: June to October is such a pivotal time-period for the Marines. The embassy has been blown up in April, the new Marines arrived May 29^th, and pretty soon the escalation against them really begins. That would have been the time to evaluate and change things. Whether we should have really been there to start with, that really got into the heart of that big debate in the Reagan administration.

IACSP: I’m a huge admirer of President Ronald Reagan, but I think he erred in this.

Scott: When we went in the first time to get the PLO out, we had a very actionable mission. Go in, get the PLO out and leave. We were in and out like in 17 days. When we went back in the second time, we don’t have a clear-cut mission and that’s the problem. We went back in largely because of guilt. Even General Vessey said, hey, we figured that we go back in, stay a few months, let our guilt kind of ease, and then we pull back out. The problem is, once we go back in there, we don’t have a clear-cut mission. You look at Reagan’s national security directives. You start seeing the mission change from stabilization and peacekeeping to nation-building. And that keeps us stuck there.

IACSP: Why didn’t President Reagan order a retaliatory air attack after the bombing? He ordered a retaliatory air attack on Libya after the bombing of a club in West Germany.

Scott: He didn’t because Casper Weinberger didn’t want to do it. He liked Weinberger a lot and they had a long history together. Weinberger did not want to escalate the situation.

IACSP: I think Casper Weinberger’s rules for getting into combat should be more adhered to. After all these years, do we know who planned, ordered and mounted the Marine bombing attack? And if so, what happened to them?

Scott: We do. This is the beginning of Hezbollah. While everyone else is coming into Lebanon, sort of exploiting the chaos and instability, so too did the Iranians. The Iranians come in in 1982 and they take advantage of this lawless wild west area up along the Lebanese Syrian border. They bring in about 800 Revolutionary Guardsmen and they built a terrorist training camp up there. Then they start tapping into that resentment that the improvised Shias community in southern Iran feels there. They start recruiting homegrown terrorists. There were some groups already floating around at that point, but the Iranians brought them all under their umbrella. They merged these terrorist groups together into what we know today as Hezbollah. Hezbollah and other proxy groups were getting their funding, their training and their marching orders straight from Iran. Iran was the puppet master. They were pulling the strings.

IACSP: As you note in your book, a Lebanese Shia named Imad Mughniyeh is suspected of planning the attack. As fate, or irony, would have it, he was killed by a car bomb in 2008.

I especially liked the way you described President Reagan’s anguish over the bombing.

Scott: That was very real. Reagan had a huge heart. His son Michael, who Jack talked to in the course of researching the book, and we both met him at the Reagan Library a couple months ago, said his father these deaths haunted him for the rest of his life. He reached out to the families of the men, and he wrote letters.

IACSP: After all these years, what are the lessons learned from the bombing?

Scott: One of the big lessons is that terrorism works. For the very low price of a truck a bomb, and one life of a volunteer, you can totally impact American foreign policy. Iran was the biggest benefactor. Iran watched all of this unfold. They said, hey, not only can we do this, but America won’t retaliate. It set the stage for the next four decades. From the USS Cole attack to 9/11, you see that terrorism works. I also think an important lesson is one that Weinberger enunciates, which is you have to have a real clear plan.

IACSP: Thank you for speaking to us.