70 Years of Foreign Interference In Lebanon

An excerpt from, “Register of the Wilbur Eveland papers” Hoover Institution Library and Archives, 2012:

Although not technically a CIA agent at this point in his career, Eveland was sent on a mission to Syria for the agency in 1955, where he was tasked with working with conservative groups in the country. Upon returning from this assignment, Eveland was recruited into the CIA, where he worked closely with Allen Dulles. From 1955 to 1959, Eveland was assigned to the American embassies in Damascus, Syria, and Beirut, Lebanon, as a CIA agent using Department of State cover. During this time, Eveland completed several missions in Syria, some involving coup attempts, including a mission to deliver half a million pounds to Syrian politician Mikhail Ilyan that Eveland completed shortly before the beginning of the Suez Crisis. Eveland participated in joint United States and United Kingdom planning sessions and also served as the contact person for Camille Chamoun, President of Lebanon.

From 1959 to 1961, Eveland was on CIA assignment to Rome, Italy, under cover as a Vinnell Corporation engineering company executive in charge of petroleum related construction, maintenance, and training projects in the Middle East and Africa. In 1962, he resigned from the CIA to become the vice president of Vinnell, although he was retained as an unpaid consultant to the CIA to maintain his security clearance. In the 1970s, Eveland worked as a consultant for various companies in the petroleum industry.

Eveland decided to write a book documenting American policy in the Middle East while watching the port of Beirut burn at the start of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975. The contract for Ropes of Sand: America’s Failure in the Middle East was signed in 1977. 

An excerpt from, “Ropes of Sand: America’s Failure in the Middle East” By Wilbur Crane Eveland, 1980, Forbidden Bookshelf, ‘Chapter Fifteen: The Ticking Clock 1956′:

At our urging, Chamoun reminded me, he had associated Lebanon with the Eisenhower Doctrine at a time when neutrality in the East-West struggle for influence in tlhe Middle East would have been an easier, and possibly wiser, course. Sustaining Lebanon’s pro-American position had not been easy: most of Lebanon’s politicians and religious leaders believed that their country’s interests would be better served by their remaining aloof from inter-Arab and global conflicts. The results of the recent parliamentary elections had introduced another issue with which both Chamoun and America would have to contend. Accusations that the voting had been rigged to permit the president to seek a second six-year term of office were being made by the country’s Egyptian-backed Moslems and Palestinians, supported by Radio Cairo’s calls for Chamoun to resign immediately. 

. . .Chamoun’s parting words contained a challenge: “Why don’t you fly back to Washington and urge that your government’s decision be formulated and brought here by McClintock when he presents his credentials?” This, I knew, meant arguing against the concept that a presidential appointment endowed its recipient with great wisdom. I decided, however, to try it.

Arriving in Washington at the height of the Christmas season was not a propitious action unless one had been called back to deal with an international crisis, and tiny Lebanon wasn’t expected ever to qualify in that category. To begin with, I was told by Assistant Secretary Rountree’s office that Ambassador McClintock had been thoroughly briefed. He was away for the holidays, and then he’d sail for Beirut to arrive in early January 1958. When I asked State’s Lebanon-desk officer what our position on the Lebanese presidency might be, he reminded me that the election wouldn’t be held until July and that we’d have plenty of time to decide before then. Allen Dulles was tied up and couldn’t see me, but Norman Paul and I found an audience with Richard Helms, who’d now added Kim Roosevelt’s responsibilities to his own. Helms admitted frankly that he knew little about the Middle East, but complaining that he’d been saddled with a legacy of the area’s aborted operations, he was eager to hear about the CIA’s funding of the Lebanese parliamentary elections. As I ticked off the problems we’d had with the embassy, Helms asked that I summarize my position in a memorandum and include my recommendations concerning future U.S. policy toward Lebanon.

Now without a family in Washington, I spent Christmas Eve typing up a fourteen-page report on what I’d learned about Lebanon and my views about how the United States should deal with the coming presidential election. The issue as I described it was not just what we should do about Lebanon, but how what we did there would affect our position in other states of the area. Nor should the U.S. position be based on Chamoun’s views alone.

That a Maronite Catholic would be the next president was not in question, for even the most antigovernment politicians had a stake in preserving this provision of the National Covenant, under which all faiths and sects benefited. The question, rather, was whether any Maronite president could sustain Lebanon’s pro-American orientation without support from two key coreligionists-the commander of the armed forces and the Maronite patriarch. Chamoun appeared to have the backing of General Fuad Shehab, whose military forces were predominantly Catholic, but Shehab was not noted for being forceful and he’d also once enjoyed the status of heading Lebanon’s government during a presidential crisis. Chamoun was at odds with the patriarch, who’d broken with the president over the Eisenhower Doctrine, holding that the church could not survive a conflict with Arab nationalism. Although presumably pro-American- he’d been a pastor in New Bedford and Los Angeles and, for a time, an American citizen-the patriarch saw Lebanon as a mediator between the Arabs and the West.

Also important were the leaders of the government’s opposition, I wrote, whom I feared Washington tended to think of as entirely Moslem, forgetting that what we’d done in the elections had alienated many Christians who’d previously sympathized with America’s Middle East policies. By highlighting the cleavages within Lebanon that our own actions had produced, I hoped to discourage thinking that support of a Chamoun bid for reelection would either unify Lebanon or enhance that country’s position with its neighbors.

I’d also learned that we still counted on Lebanon, with Chamoun’s permission, for planning to implement WAPPEN and SIPONY to change the governments in Syria and Egypt. Worse, there was still a WAKEFUL program, meaning that in addition to scheming with friendly intelligence services, we were still thinking about yet another unilateral CIA crack at Syria. I dealt with this in my report by drawing attention to the probability that we’d not be able to use Lebanon for such purposes under a successor to Chamoun. 

An excerpt from, “The Secret History of Hezbollah” By Tony Badran, Washington Examiner, November 25, 2013:

Thirty years ago last month, Hezbollah blew up the barracks of the U.S Marines and French paratroopers stationed at the Beirut airport, killing 241 U.S. servicemen and 58 Frenchmen. It wasn’t Hezbollah’s first terrorist operation, but this attack, the most memorable in Lebanon’s vicious and chaotic 15-year-long civil war, marked the Party of God’s entry onto the world stage. 

Three decades later, thanks to the efforts of Israeli Hezbollah expert Shimon Shapira, we now know that one of the men responsible for the attack was an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander named Hossein Dehghan — the man Iranian president Hassan Rouhani recently tapped to be his defense minister. In other words, Hezbollah and the Islamic Republic of Iran have been joined at the hip from the very beginning, even before the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Of course, that’s not the standard account of Hezbollah, the historical narrative jointly constructed and largely agreed upon by Middle East experts, journalists, some Western and Arab intelligence officials, and even Hezbollah figures themselves. This account holds that Hezbollah was founded in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley in 1982 to fight, or “resist,” the Israeli invasion of that year. On this reading, the belief — held by the organization’s many critics, targets, and enemies — that Hezbollah is little more than an IRGC battalion on the eastern Mediterranean is simply part of a U.S.-Israeli disinformation campaign meant to smear a national resistance movement fighting for the liberation of Lebanese lands. Sure, Hezbollah was founded with some help from Iranian officials, and still receives financial assistance from Tehran, but the organization is strictly a Lebanese affair. It was engendered by Israel’s 1982 invasion and subsequent occupation of Lebanon. The occupation, as one author sympathetic to the group put it, is Hezbollah’s “raison d’être.”  

Even former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak contends that it was the Israeli occupation that gave birth to Hezbollah. “It was our stay [in Lebanon] that established [Hezbollah],” Israel’s most decorated soldier said in 2010. “Hezbollah got stronger not as a result of our exit from Lebanon but as a result of our stay in Lebanon.” Perhaps Barak was simply keen to defend his decision to withdraw Israeli troops from Lebanon in 2000, for his account is simply not true.

The big bang theory of Hezbollah that puts the Israeli occupation at the alpha point is based not in fact but in legend — it’s an Israel-centric myth that makes the Jewish state Hezbollah’s motivation and prime mover. In reality, the story of Hezbollah’s origins is a story about Iran, featuring the anti-shah revolutionaries active in Lebanon in the 1970s, years before Israel’s intervention. Thus, to uncover Hezbollah’s roots, it is necessary to mine the accounts of Iranian cadres operating in Lebanon a decade before Israel invaded. 

There we find that, contrary to the common wisdom, Hezbollah didn’t arise as a resistance movement to the Israeli occupation. Rather, it was born from the struggle between Iranian revolutionary factions opposed to the shah. Lebanon was a critical front for this rivalry between Hezbollah’s Iranian progenitors and their domestic adversaries. Accordingly, an accurate understanding of this history gives us not only the true story of Hezbollah’s beginnings, but also an insight into the origins of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Those early internal conflicts and impulses, played out in Lebanon as well as Iran, also provide a roadmap for reading the nature of the current regime in Tehran, its motivations and concerns, its strategies and gambits as it moves toward acquiring a nuclear weapon and challenging the American order in the Middle East. 

For Iranian revolutionary activists, Lebanon in the early to mid 1970s was valuable ground, not because it bordered Israel, but because it was a free zone in which to pursue their anti-shah activity. Though the Lebanese government maintained relations with Iran, the weakness of the state presented opportunities unavailable elsewhere in the Middle East. The autonomy of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the most significant military outfit in Lebanon after it was pushed out of Jordan in 1970, and the military training camps it ran in Lebanon afforded the anti-shah opposition — often traveling with fake Palestinian identity papers — many benefits. There they could operate and organize freely, acquire military training and weapons, make contacts with other revolutionary organizations, form alliances, and establish networks of support for their fight against the Pahlavi regime. 

Another attraction for the Iranians was Lebanon’s large Shiite population, especially the influential Iranian-born cleric Musa al-Sadr, who proved helpful to many of the Iranian oppositionists. Both Sadr’s network and the PLO’s would continue to prove critical even after the Iranian revolution, in the ensuing power struggle between Iran’s revolutionary factions. 

Of the several Iranian groups operating in Lebanon in the 1970s, two main factions are of note. One comprised figures from the Liberation Movement of Iran (LMI), such as Mostafa Chamran, who served as defense minister after the fall of the shah. In Lebanon, Chamran and the LMI worked closely with Sadr, whom LMI leaders knew from his student days in Tehran, and who was the uncle of one of the group’s leaders in exile. 

Sadr also relied on the Palestinians for training his newly formed Amal militia. His concern wasn’t fighting Israel but rather protecting his and the Shiite community’s interests from other Lebanese factions with the onset of the Lebanese civil war. He and Chamran were ambivalent about the Palestinians, and in 1976, when Sadr aligned with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad and supported Syria’s entry into Lebanon, the divide only widened. The PLO and its allies on the Lebanese left opposed Syria and sharply criticized Sadr. Moreover, Palestinian attacks on Israel from south Lebanon put Shiite villagers in the face of Israeli retaliation, a danger that worried both Sadr and Chamran. It wasn’t long, then, before Amal came into conflict with the same Palestinian factions that had trained Sadr’s men. 

In contrast, the other main faction of Iranian revolutionaries operating in Lebanon maintained close relations with the PLO and mistrusted Sadr and the LMI. This faction was made up of devotees of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and after the Iranian revolution became part of the Islamic Republic party. Many of them also became top commanders in the IRGC and the Office of Liberation Movements (OLM), charged with establishing contacts with and supporting revolutionary movements abroad. In effect, the OLM was the precursor of the Quds Force, the overseas operations arm of the IRGC. It was set up under the supervision of Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a close associate of Khomeini and his heir apparent, and was headed by his son, Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Montazeri. 

Others associated with the Khomeinist faction working in Lebanon included Jalaleddin Farsi, a close associate of Montazeri who was the party’s candidate in Iran’s first presidential election after the revolution, and Hojjatoleslam Ali Akbar Mohtashami, a student of Khomeini who later became ambassador to Syria and would play a critical role in the emergence of Hezbollah. Another important figure in this camp who played a key role in forming Hezbollah was Mohammad Saleh Hosseini, a founding member of the IRGC. 

An excerpt from, “Syria and Lebanon: a fateful entanglement” By David A. Korn, Royal Institute of International Affairs, September 1986:

For most Syrians, an independent Lebanon has always seemed an anomaly, a product of foreign interference. This attitude, of course, overlooks Lebanon’s distinctive characteristics, but there is an element of truth in it. From the sixteenth century onwards, France saw in the protection and the prosperity of the Maronites of Mount Lebanon a special calling for itself. Tsarist Russia made itself the patron of the Syrian Eastern Orthodox community, and Britain took the Druze under its wing. When France took over its Syrian protectorate at the close of the Second World War, it promptly set about the business of creating a state for the Maronites. The mere confines of the autonomous Christian mutassarifiye of Mount Lebanon, set up by the Ottomans at France’s insistence in 1860, were deemed too exiguous to support a viable modern entity. The French resolved this problem by stretching the lines on the map to embrace areas to the north and south inhabited mainly by Sunni and Shiite Moslems and Druze. Within the expanded borders, Christians predominated by a narrow margin, 52 to 48 per cent, according to a census taken in 1932.

France’s action was not applauded in Syria. The King- Crane Commission, sent to Syria and Palestine in 1920 by President Wilson, reported that a majority of Syrians opposed separate status for Lebanon and at the most would accept autonomy for Maronite Mount Lebanon within a Syrian state. When it became independent in 1943, Syria would gladly have undone the handiwork of French colonialism on its western border. The French gave the Syrians no chance to do so; they proclaimed Lebanon’s independence a few hours ahead of Syria’s. In the years that immediately followed, Damascus continued to talk about ‘reincorporating Lebanon. But govern ments there were too weak and too entangled in Syria’s own domestic turmoil, and they changed too frequently, to do more than talk. Lebanon, meanwhile, gained recognition as an independent state and status in the international community; it joined the United Nations and became a founding and active member of the Arab League. Syria gradually came to terms with Lebanon’s separate existence, though it never formally accepted its new neighbour. It never established diplomatic relations with Lebanon; Syrian leaders preferred to deal face to face with the Lebanese rather than through the traditional intermediary of embassies. And on the rationale that Syrians and Lebanese were ‘one people’, the Syrian state never required visas or other special documentation for Lebanese entering its territory.

An excerpt from, “The Ongoing Battle for Beirut: Old Dynamics and New Trends” (PDF) By Benedetta Berti, Institute For National Security Studies, December 2011, Pg. 41 – 46:

Iranian involvement in Lebanon is at once unexceptional and unique: unexceptional because in the context of domestic Lebanese politics, the direct involvement of external actors – regional as well as global – is hardly a surprising or unusual phenomenon. On the contrary, by mapping some of the most prominent partnerships between Lebanese and foreign players, this study demonstrates that Lebanon has historically been a regional playground for third parties to both intervene and compete for power and influence. Under these parameters, the Islamic Republic’s interest in the Lebanese political arena is hardly exceptional, and in fact matches the role and interests of the other major regional powers. 

At the same time, Iranian involvement in Lebanon differs from that of other foreign powers in at least one important way: no other state can claim an equally solid and longstanding alliance, both ideologically and politically, with a local political actor. The relationship between Iran and Hizbollah is in this sense unique. While all major political parties in Lebanon depend to a certain degree on other regional and global actors for sponsorship and funding, none has an external relationship as pervasive or pivotal as Hizbollah’s with Iran. Similarly, no state has invested as much in local Lebanese actors as Iran has invested in the Lebanese-Shiite militia. As discussed in the previous chapter, Syria’s alliances with local actors have been characterized by an opportunistic approach; the country has shifted its support according to changing domestic and geopolitical considerations. In contrast, other alliances, such as the alliance between the Christian Maronites and Israel during the civil war, or between Saudi Arabia and the Sunni community, have not developed as much as the Iranian-Hizbollah partnership.

This solid and special relationship, which began in the immediate aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, builds upon the preexisting ties between the Shiite community of Lebanon and its Iranian counterpart. Such ties date as far back as the sixteenth century when the new rulers of Iran, the Safavid dynasty, adopted Shiism as the new official religion of their empire, moving away from the traditional version of Sunni Islam previously practiced in the area corresponding to modern day Iran. To this end, the new Safavid rulers brought Shiite clerics to their new empire to help them educate their subjects on Shiite Islam, turning to Lebanon (the Jamal Abel area), where a Shiite community was already established since the eleventh century. In the following centuries, contact between the Iranian and Lebanese Shiite communities continued, although the Lebanese community always maintained its own separate identity and over the years established stronger bonds with Iraq than with Persian-speaking Iran. Nonetheless, the common Shiite identity and the historic ties between the Lebanese and Iranian Shiites constituted the basis for the modern partnership between Iran and Hizbollah. At the same time, such a relationship, as well as Iranian interests in Lebanon, far exceeds the links created by the shared Shiite identity.

First, the connection between the Lebanese Hizbollah and Iran is ideological, and the Lebanese organization’s belief system is strongly grounded in the teachings of the Iranian Revolution. Moreover, the Iranian interest in supporting the creation of Hizbollah reflected the Islamic Republic’s early drive to export Khomeini’s revolution outside its own borders. To achieve this political and ideological objective, Iran looked very closely at Lebanon, where the fact that the Shiite community was the largest religious minority within the country, combined with the structural weakness of the Lebanese state and the vacuum of power created by the civil war, offered a particularly fertile environment for attempting to export the revolution. Indeed, within Iran, support for Hizbollah has been used to show the regime’s “purity” and adherence to the teaching of the Islamic Revolution, which suits the more conservative hardliners within the regime.

In addition, since its initial establishment Hizbollah has become strategically important for Iran, and Iranian involvement in Lebanon has focused on protecting and promoting the Lebanese-Shiite organization. 

Hizbollah has served as a poster child for the Iranian Revolution, while Tehran has used the group’s resistance against Israel as a means to earn political leverage within the region, as well as to foster concepts like “panIslamic unity” to gain popularity in the largely Arab and Sunni region. As such, in a regional perspective, Iranian interest in Lebanon through its alliance with Hizbollah is aimed at increasing the country’s leverage when it comes to shaping regional dynamics, especially the evolution of the ArabIsraeli conflict. 

Finally, Tehran’s assessment of Lebanon as a proxy theater of confrontation with Israel reflects another main reason behind the Islamic Republic’s involvement in Lebanon. Along with ideological and political considerations, Iran, through Hizbollah, looks at Lebanon from a security perspective. Accordingly, Hizbollah can act not only to increase Iranian leverage with respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict, but it can also serve for power projection and deterrence against the country’s enemies. 

Thus even if Iranian ties with Lebanon are not as established or extensive as those between Lebanon and Syria, Iranian interest in Lebanon, and especially in its local strategic partner, Hizbollah, is nonetheless solidly grounded in ideology, politics, and security. As such, since its creation in 1979 the Islamic Republic has taken an active role in the Lebanese political arena.

Iran in Lebanon before Hizbollah (1943-1982) 

A common perception especially among Western analysts portrays Hizbollah as a “foreign actor” created ad hoc by the Islamic Republic to advance its objectives and impose them upon Lebanon. In fact, however, the process that led to the rise of Hizbollah should be viewed as a confluence of the ideals of the Iranian Revolution with the culmination of an internal Lebanese process of communal and religious politicization of the Lebanese Shiite population. 

Since the establishment of modern day Lebanon, the Lebanese Shiites, historically concentrated in the peripheral areas of southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, have been second class citizens, politically underrepresented, marginalized, economically underdeveloped, and lacking a communal ethos. It was only when these conditions slowly began to change in the 1950s that the community gradually began to join together to assert its socio-political rights. This process was triggered by the introduction of wide economic and social reforms, which led both to the gradual improvement of the general economic conditions, and to an accelerated process of immigration and urbanization. This resulted in the internal migration of part of the Shiite community to the suburbs of Beirut. Away from their native villages and far from the overbearing authority of their local political bosses (zuama), these Shiite immigrants began to come together as a community, not motivated by religion as much as by concrete economic and social grievances. As such, the new Shiite political activism of the 1950s was mostly channeled through non-Shiite organizations like the Lebanese Communist Party and the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party.

At this stage, under the rule of the Shah, the relationship between the Lebanese Shiite community and the Iranian state was minimal and limited to the funding of a number of Shiite social institutions (such as schools). In fact, Iran was involved in Lebanon mostly to counter the appeal of ideologies deemed as radical, like Nasserism, and to ensure the regional status quo. Accordingly, the Shah was mostly allied with the Maronite Christians.

The pattern of involvement gradually started to change by the end of the decade and intensified in the 1960s, coinciding with a shift in the political mobilization of the Lebanese Shiites. This change was possible due to the rise of Musa al-Sadr as charismatic leader of the Shiite community and his distinctively Shiite political movement. Musa al-Sadr, born in Qom, Iran, arrived in Lebanon in 1957, where he became the religious leader of Tyre in southern Lebanon. Although an Iranian national, his agenda was consistently Lebanese, and although a cleric, his campaigns were directed at secular goals. His objective was to unite and empower the Shiite community, as well as increase the community’s political and social rights. Toward these aims, he did not hesitate to enter into alliances with powerful local and regional powers. For example, he solidified ties with the Assad regime in Syria by issuing a fatwa that declared the Alawites a legitimate sect within Shiism.

In this context, Sadr also engaged with the Shah of Iran, accepting Iranian funding of Lebanese Shiite social institutions, but refusing both direct payments as well as attempts to recruit him. The relationship with the Shah, however, began to deteriorate during the 1970s, with Sadr gradually becoming more critical of the Iranian government and with numerous Iranian dissenters finding their way to Lebanon to spread their anti-Shah message and to receive military training (mostly through the PLO).

During the early 1970s, as Lebanon gradually started to drift into civil war, the Shiite community became increasingly organized under Sadr’s leadership. This started with the creation of the first Lebanese-Shiite sociopolitical movement, the Movement of the Dispossessed, Harakat alMahrumim, and continued with the establishment of the movement’s armed wing in 1974, Harakat Amal. 

The civil war, which had a disproportionately heavy impact upon the local Shiite community, and the trauma of the first Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon in 1978 had a powerful effect upon Shiite politicization and militancy. This process was heightened in 1978 with the “disappearance” of Musa al-Sadr, who never returned from a trip to Libya, where he was likely murdered by Qaddafi’s regime. This episode fueled religious fervor among the local Shiites and was compared by some of his followers to the occultation of the twelfth Imam.18 With the disappearance of Sadr, the Shiite community found itself internally divided, with a rising group of clerics, led by mujtahid Sheikh Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, criticizing Amal’s secular and moderate orientation. In contrast with Amal’s Lebanese, secular, and reformist agenda, this group – comprising mostly people returning from Iraq, where they had been active in the revivalist Shiite movement, Hizb al-Dawa – proposed a new stage of political activism, based on an ideology of self-empowerment grounded in a collective and transnational Islamic identity.

Although until this point the process of political mobilization was mostly a Lebanese affair, the transition from these two separate stages of political activism and the rise of Hizbollah as a transnational and revolutionary Shiite organization in Lebanon could not have developed without the Iranian Revolution. In fact, it was the message of liberation and Shiite empowerment of the Iranian Revolution and its ideological legacy and repercussions across the region that constituted the foundation for the rise of an alternative Lebanese Shiite movement. 

In turn, the ideological affinity between the nascent Lebanese movement and revolutionary Iran, especially with its focus on exporting the revolution, ensured that Iranian involvement and assistance would be present from the outset. Moreover, Iranian involvement in the domestic Shiite community’s affairs was largely seen in a positive light by the Lebanese Shiites: they understood that all the other major parties in the civil war were already backed strongly by foreign powers, and they therefore believed that Iranian involvement would help them address the imbalance. Bolstered by Iranian support, this initially loose coalition of clerics and militants eventually coalesced to form what today is known as Hizbollah, intended as a response to the second Israeli invasion of Lebanon, in 1982. 

An excerpt from, “Israel and Lebanon: A History” By Leslie Susser, My Jewish Learning: