Newt talks with James M. Scott about the tragic 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, which resulted in the deaths of 241 U.S. Marines, 58 French soldiers, and six civilians. This event marked the deadliest single-day loss for the U.S. Marine Corps since World War II and continues to impact United States foreign policy. James M. Scott is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and co-author with Jack Carr, of the new book "TARGETED: BERUIT – The 1983 Marine Barracks Bombing and the Untold True Origin Story of the War on Terror," which provides an in-depth account of the attack based on survivor interviews, military records, and personal documents. Their conversation covers the historical context of U.S. involvement in Lebanon, the complexities of the region's political landscape, and the strategic missteps that led to the bombing. Additionally, Scott shares insights into his career as a military historian and his experiences leading battlefield tours.
On this episode of News World. On October twenty third, nineteen eighty three, the United States Marine Corps experienced its greatest single day loss of life since the Battle of Iwajima, when a truck packed with explosives crashed into their headquarters in barracks in Beirut Lebanon. This horrifying terrorist attack, which killed two hundred and forty one US Marines, fifty eight French soldiers, and six civilians, continues to influence US foreign policy and haunts the Marine Corps this day. Now the full story is revealed and the new book targeted the route the nineteen eighty three Marine Barracks bombing and the Untold True Origin Story of the War on Terror by Jack Carr and historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist James M. Scott. Based on comprehensive interviews with survivors, extensive military records, as well as personal letters, diaries, and photographs, this is the authoritative account of the deadly attack. So I am really pleased, in the midst of everything we're watching in the Middle East to welcome my guest, James M. Scott. He is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, former Nieman Fellow, at Harvard, the author of Target Tokyo, Black Snow Rampage, The War Below, and The Attack on the Liberty. He is currently the Scholar and Residence at the Citadel. James, welcome, Thank you for joining me on this world, and congratulations to both you and Jack. Targeted Beirut debuted at number five on the New York Times Nonfiction bestseller list this week. That is a major accomplishment.
Thank you so much, newod and thank you for having us on. It's a real privilege and honor to join you and to be able to talk a little bit about this tragic moment in American history.
Before we began to discuss target a Beirut. What was your experience like when you became a twenty sixteen Pulitzer Prize finalist in history for your book Target Tokyo, Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid that Avenge Pearl Harbor.
It was a total surprise. In fact, I'll never forget that day. I was actually helping my daughter, who was then in the third grade, with her homework after school, and suddenly my cell phone just blew up with notifications and I looked down and it was thirty or forty emails, a whole bunch of Twitter notifications, and I was looking through and I saw an email from a buddy of mine who's a former journalist, being like, hey, you know, congratulations. You know you didn't quite get it, but you're at least a finalist. And I'm like finalist for what? And I kept going through, and then I saw an email from my editor with the news and was totally blown away by it. I was not aware that, you know, Norton, my publisher, had even submitted the book for consideration. At some point along the way. They had mentioned that, you know, award season they submit books and things of that nature. But it totally caught me off guard. And so it was a pretty awesome day. As you can imagine, what led you to become a writer. I always enjoyed writing. I always enjoyed the creativity behind it, you know, And of course I always loved history, and so for me it was an unusual path into it, and that I finished up in college and my first job out of college was actually as a public school teacher in Japan, and so most of my work, of course has been dealing with the Pacific War in World War two, and so here I was twenty two to twenty three years old, teaching school in the nineteen nineties in Japan, and there were still a lot of survivors of World War two and veterans around there at that time period. And I'll never forget I went to Hiroshima one weekend, saw the museum there in the Gimbaco Dome. And then about two weeks later, I flew to Hawaii and met my parents, and my father had been a naval officers retired, I went and visit Pearl Harbor, and so for the span of about two weeks, I kind of saw the book ends of America's experience in World War Two. It just lit a fire, you know. I started reading everything I could get my hands on and about World War Two. I came back to the United States, I knew I wanted to write, which journalism was about the only thing you could do where you could actually earn a paycheck and scribble words for a living. So I ended up as a newspaper reporter for a few years, covered the military. And it was fortunate enough when I was about the age of thirty to get an even fellowship, and I went off and I could see what was happening in the print business at that time, and I realized that newspapers might not be around and thirty or forty years, at least in the form they were then. So I needed to kind of reinvent myself, and so I met a book agent, sold my first book, and here we are twenty years later and working on book seven. It's been a real, real, awesome journey.
That's really tremendous. I have to ask you one question about Target Tokyo, because I've always been intrigued with the origins. There was such an unlikely event, and in many ways such an American event. Two package Army Air Corps bombers, put them on a carrier and basically engage in psychological warfare. What's your sense of where that idea came from. It's so unlike the bureaucracy, it's so daring. What was the origin of that?
It's really a unique origin. I mean, of course, at that moment, you know, in those dark early days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR was really pushing his service chiefs to find a way to strike back at Japan. Of course, there was no real way for us to do it, at least initially because you know, so many of our forward bases had fallen, you know, Guam, Wake the Philippines was under siege at that moment, and our aircraft carriers, which had fortunately escaped destruction at Pearl Harbor, were simply too valuable to risks sending all the way into the enemy's backyard, and so it really seemed like there was no viable way to attack Japan until Ernest King, who was the chief Naval Operations at the time, one of his senior staffers, who was a submariner of all things, happened to be down at Norfolk checking out on the Horn, which was a new carrier about to come online, and he happened to see naval aviators practicing takeoffs on an air strip that was designed to look like have sort of chalked out to where an aircraft carrier deck would be to kind of give them a sense of their distances. And that vision just sparked an idea. He said, what if instead of using naval planes, you know, which have a short range, you know, single engine planes, what if we swap those out for twin engine army bombers. And that's really the spark that triggered the idea. Of course, vetting that idea would then fall to you know, more experienced airmen, you know, both with the army forces and of course the Navy, but the lion's share of it fell to Jimmy Doolotle at that point.
Was there substantial resistance to doing it?
No, there wasn't. This period of time, I mean, America is really looking for any way to strike back possible, and so a lot of the service rivalries and things of that nature really kind of fell to the wayside. And I'll say this, sixteen weeks is all it took to prepare and execute this audacious raid. You think about trying to put together a joint operation like this nowadays. I mean, God, in sixteen weeks, it would be impossible, you know, but yet here they were, and they were able to do it. You know, it required the Navy, It required ten thousand sailors, you know, sixteen bombers, a task force of shifts steam all the way across the Pacific. I mean, you know, they had to reconfigure these bombers so that they could cover the distance. You strip out the added weight, add more fuel, figure out airfields in China. I mean, it's an incredible operation to be put together in such a short period of time.
It's a great topic. Now with your new book, you were co author with Jack Carr, who has become very successful as a novelist. Amazingly so. He's a former Naval seal and spend twenty years in Navy special warfare. I'm curious what was it like to work together to start.
Co Jack's an awesome guy. I didn't know him personally when he first reached out to me. In the last couple of years, we've subsequently become really great friends, great collaborators. So just to kind of back up a little bit, so Jack had the idea for wanting to sort of start a series of books looking at terrorism events and sort of the effects of that on American policy, on American survivors, and things of that nature. And so he was looking to partner with somebody who had a background and doing the research and military history, and so he'd read some of my books and he reached out to me. I didn't know Jack personally at the time. I knew of his work. I'd watched the television show The Terminal List, I'd read the books. In fact, I just finished reading one of them when he reached out to me. So it was very serendipitous, and he came to me initially with the idea of Beirut. He said, you know, this is the origin of so much of it. I'd like to start there. And it just so happened that I was going to a conference that weekend, military conference, and I happened to be there with Charlie Neimeier, who's a friend of mine who is the former director of Marine Corps History. And I asked Charlie, and so I Charlie had been approached about doing this project on Bayroute. You know, what kind of stuff do you guys have in the Marine Corps archives? He said, Man, We've got everything, he said, we have the monthly command chronologies, we've got the weekly sit reps, we've got the daily message traffic, We've got an entire oral history collection that was done in nineteen eighty two, nineteen eighty three. And he's like, furthermore, this topic really needs to be done. And then I remembered a buddy of mine from my master's program at the Citadel had talked about Beirut periodically, you know'd come up in time or two in classes, and so I texted him and I said, you know, Mark, you had some connection to be root. Remind me what it was. And he immediately texted me back and he said that was one of the rescuers that day. And He's like, I can put you in touch with as many people as you want to, and so you know, here it was literally in the span of weekend. Jack and reached out. I'm hearing from the director of Marine Corps History that they've got all the documents that we need. A buddy of mine can put us in touch with the survivors. I mean, it was just green lights, go go, go go, and so Jack and I jumped on it right away. We had phenomenal cooperation from the Marines that were there. We did over one hundred hours of interviews with survivors, you know, men who were there, who were buried under the rubble, who worked on top of the rubble pile, with the widows of men who were killed, the children, the parents. We got over a thousand pages of diaries and letters from the men who were there. And then of course we married that with all the archival material from the Marines and the Reagan Library and some smaller institutions as.
Well, let's go back though to the beginning.
Why is the United States and Lebanon.
Yeah, so Lebanon's a mess. And I'm sure you recall this from your time in Congress those days. You know, it was coming out of a long civil war that started the nineteen seventies, a lot of secretary and violence between the Christians, the Sunnis, and the Shiahs. Of course PLO. The Palestinians had been sort of decamped from Jordan into Beirut. They were using Beirut to attack the Israelis. The Israelis were responding, and then Syria, which also wanted its share of Lebanon, that was there as well. And then, of course, amid all this chaos, the Iranians send in their own revolutionary guardsmen to sort of set up terraced training camps. And so all of this sort of mess is brewing and whatnot, and sort of into this, the United States decides to send eighteen hundred Marines is a stabilizing force, and the Marines were part of a larger multinational peacekeeping force. There were Italians, French, and British troops there as well, but the idea was that these international troops would sort of provide stability there while the PLO left and hopefully the Lebanese National Government could sort of get on its feet and sort of get things going again and bring back a sense of stability that had long been lacking since the nineteen seventies there. So that's kind of the backdrop for how the US Marines ended up in Lebanon.
We gradually seem to be more and more entangled in the region and can't quite get out of it. And in that setting you have the Iranians, in particular, methodically, I think, trying to figure out how to go after us. At that point, what's happening. There's almost this horrifying inevitability leading up to the bombing.
Yeah, there really is. And you know, it's kind of like the Wild West in Lebanon at that point. You know, there's all these different groups with competing interests. You know, it's essentially a civil war in which other foreign countries have sort of layered their own interest on top of you know, the Iranians, the Israelis as Syrians, and of course Iran at this point is really looking to spread its revolution and they see an opportunity and the chaos of Lebanon and so they come in and they set up in the Pacava Valley, which is this sort of lawless region up here Syria terrorist training camps. This is going to be the incubator for their revolution that they're going to spread here. And they also see an opportunity to tap into the disenfranchised Shia, who are sort of the low folks on the social demographic ladder there, and sort of tap into how disenfranchised they are and to recruit them to their cause. And of course the Marines can see all this unfolding because here they are, they're based at the Beirut International Airport, and they're surrounded by these impoverished shantytowns, and they can see how the demographics are changing in the communities around them where they're patrolling. The women and children who are there initially suddenly start to vanish and they're being replaced by young, military aged males who are armed, and this coincides with an escalation and violence against the Marines. Here. The Marines are kind of like along the others, trying to put their fingers in the dam to keep the chaos of Lebanon from spiraling out of control. Into this comes these Iranian bad actors, and they see this as an opportunity to target the Americans to affect US foreign policy, and that's the play here. So that's kind of what we see happening, and you see it begins gradually. It begins initially in March of nineteen eighty three with some attacks on patrols and things like that. It's going to ramp up with the attack on the US embassy in April of nineteen eighty three, which is effectively a trial run for the type of bombing that's going to happen against the Marines. In this case, it's also a suicide bomber targets. The embassy destroys the front of the building, killed sixty three people, including seventeen Americans. And then throughout that summer the Marines are going to start becoming victims of snipers, artillery rounds, and things like that leading up to the October attack on the headquarters and barracks.
Basically, are we trying to prop up a Lebanese government that is in a sense multi religious or what's our mission?
Yeah, So our mission effectively is to prop up the Lebanese central government, which is Christian at that point, effectively try to prop up the status quo since the end of World War Two, this sort of as you were just explaining, sort of this hodgepodge of you know, Christian, Sunnis and Shias have managed to govern together, and we're trying to kind of prop that up. And we're also trying to pressure the Christians to say, all right, you've got to start giving up some of your power and you've got to have some power sharing here, because what's happened in those decades, you know, those four decades since the end of World War two, is that the demographics have changed. Christians are no longer the dominant population there. You know, you've got an explosion, particularly in the Shia community, and so the equation you used to distribute power in nineteen forty seven is not equal to what it is in nineteen eighty three, and so the Christians are going to have to give up power. So that's all part of the dialogue that the United States is trying to have at that time. Now, the challenge, of course, is that the American mission changes. So when we initially go in in late nineteen eighty two, it's really to get the Palestinians out to get Yaser air Fat and his fighters out of there, and then, of course, you know, we decide we're going to stay a little bit longer to try to sort of quail things. But then if you look at Reagan's National Security Directive, he actually starts moving from just a security thing to all right, how can we sort of prop up and sort of get their government back on its feet and sort of really kind of get into the realm of nation building in some way. That, of course, is a much different mission. It's a bigger, longer mission, and of course it's going to be what results in this tug of war inside the administration between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Defense Department and the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor. And so the mission that the Americans initially go in with is going to ultimately change, and it's going to best be described by Colonel Timothy Garrity, who's the commander of the Marine, saying, the mission changed, but no one changed the mission. And that's kind of the situation the Marines find themselves caught in as things begin to escalate in nineteen eighty three.
Who was responsible? How was it planned by the bad guys?
We talked about just a minute earlier about the bombing of the US embassy, and that was kind of a trial balloon and just to sort of gauge, you know, whether or not such attacks would work. And of course this is the beginning of hes Blah. And what it's happened is as the Iranians come in and they set up this terror training camp and they're sort of tapping these young sheite groups to want to go into terrorism and to fund them and equip them and whatnot. You see a couple of these groups sort of rise up during this time period of nineteen eighty two early nineteen eighty three, and these groups are eventually going to merge under our RAN's direction and become hes Blah. And so their first attack, of course, is against the US embassy, and it is a suicide car bomber. And of course we didn't have the type of security that you now see commonplace and a lot of our embassies. I mean, they were literally saw horses outside things like that, and so the driver was able really to get right up in front and ran right into the front of the US embassy, and that taught a very important lesson about American security. And so they took that same idea one hundred and eighty eight days later and applied it to the Marine headquarters and barracks, only this time it was six to nine times more explosive, a bigger vehicle. It was a truck, far more explosives that were there with the exact same mo and how to do it. And of course the Americans at that point didn't have the kind of security because again this is where their mission was kind of murky. You know, on the one hand, you're there to be a stabilizing force and show the flag and whatnot, and you can't do that if you're living in sort of a bunker environment, you know, with massive amounts of dragons, teeth and fortifications and things like that. So that was kind of where the struggle really came down upon the commander of the Marines. There is, on the one hand, I'm here to show the flag and on the other hand, I've got to protect my marines. But I can't do both. Can't have a bunker mentality and still be the face of the United States. And so that kind of left them in this limbo, and the Iranians were able to exploit that and to get past their security. They picked a Sunday morning. They went in at dawn six twenty one am. They'd been studying the Americans. They knew that on Sunday mornings they slept in, you know, that there wouldn't be much activity there, that that would be a critical time to maximize their efforts to break through our security. And that's exactly what happened.
Doesn't it surprise you looking back that we didn't have more of a defense.
In depth, Yeah, it does. And the car bomb was such a common thing in Lebanon at that point if you go back and you look at the media accounts. I mean, these things were going off every week throughout a route, but they were different. Car bombs at that time were stagnant. You know, you parked a car, you walked away, you remotely detonated it. This was a significant change that we didn't appreciate. After the bombing of the embassy, a suicide bomber. Up until this point, that was a novel that hadn't really happened, and of course we didn't piece it together, nor did the Lebanese. In fact, the Lebanese were telling the Americans, you know, hey, the embassy attack, it's different, but it's a one off. You know, they didn't see this foreshadowing a new trend in terrorism and warfare until after the marine bombing. And of course nowadays we have way more security, we've learned the lesson. We've had our embassies hit in Kenya and Tanzania. You know, we've had lots of these kinds of attacks around. But you got to remember at this point, this was kind of new for the Americans. At that point, they Route nineteen eighty three is really it's the turning point. And that's of course why we wanted to focus on this one year, this one moment in history, because it is it is the fulcrum on which so much shifts.
To what instead. Were the Iranians involved.
The Ranians were the ones that were providing the training, the equipment of the explosives. They were the ones that actually gave them the local fighters. They're the ones that gave them the idea to go after the Marines. So the Iranians were pulling the strings on this one hundred percent.
We did vote to keep the Marines in Lebanon before this happened, and I have to admit I was one of the people who actually voted yes that we should keep them there because we were responding to the Reagan administration's desire to show strength, which of course then kind of fell apart. But if I remember correctly, the person we thought was the primary planner was only finally killed by the Israelis sometime in the last couple of months. We knew who he was, we couldn't get him for all these years.
Yeah, Another one of the folks involved was just killed just a couple of weeks ago, and so it's been drip by drip kind of getting the payback for these attacks all these years later.
When you looked at this whole thing and immersed yourself in it, were we right to pull out him? And was there any practical way to have stabilized Lebanon at a reasonable price.
Up until the disintegration of the central government in early nineteen eighty four. That's when I think it really all completely falls apart. There's no doubt looking back that this was a very very difficult political diplomatic mission to pull off, in part because the leader at that time, I mean, I mean Jamael was just not a very likable figure for most people in Lebanon. I mean, not only did the Sunnies and she is not trust him, but a lot of the Christians didn't like him either. And he was kind of an heir apparent to his older brother Bashir, who was killed and sassinated and who was a much more popular figure and a much more commanding figure. And so his brother really was just not a dynamic political leader.
Do we think the older brother was assassinated by the Syrians.
He wasn't assassinated by the Syrians.
There's this whole story of the Assad regime deliberately destabilizing Lebanon to expand Syrian influence. When you really try to put all this up on a whiteboard, you realize how many different players there are, how many different factions. It's mind blowing.
It is well, and the Syrians didn't like Vashir because they felt he was too close to the Israelis. And so the root of all this is really that tug of war between Israel and Syria over who's going to control their neighbor here, and so they're both kind of playing this tug a war with Lebanon, and so Bashir was much closer with the Israelis. The Americans liked him, and so the Syrians did not like him, and so once he's killed, they immediately pick his brother to be sort of the air apparent. You gotta remember, this isn't like a true democracy where everybody goes out and votes. It's kind of like the party elders all get together and sort of pick him. And so they pick a me and Jimmiel, and he's just a weak figure who was nothing like his brother, and he is who America has no choice but to sort of latch onto at this point to prop up. And so that's what I'm saying, like it's a really really difficult proposition from the moment we arrived there, that this is who We're pinning the hopes of the United States on this guy, and he's just unable to pull it off. And as the situation gets worse and worse and worse, his credibility erodes, until eventually it all collapses. After the bombing of the American Marine barricks a few months later, it all collapses in February. The army collapses, the government collapses, and at that point it's just evolving back into civil war. And that's when the Americans just says, you know what, with throwing her hands up, we're out. And that was what Casper Weinberger and the Joint chiefs wanted all along. You know, they saw Lebanon as a side show from the larger fight, which was the Cold War, and you know, they didn't want to get pulled into a proxy battle here. They were the ones that were pushing back all along, whereas the State Department and National Security Council staff were the ones wanting to push ahead in Lebanon.
I had noticed in your bio that you like to lead battlefield tours. How did that start and what kind of battlefields do you go on?
I started to you know, spent much my career writing about World War Two, and you've written about World War Two as well. I mean, it's such a great fascinating topic. A number of years ago, the National World War Two Museum in New Orleans had asked me to help put together tours for them, and so we did put together a tour on the Philippines. So we do the Battle of Manila, we do the Baton Death March, Krigador, and so I've led that tour for them for a number of years. I also do their Victory in the Pacific tour, which is Guam, Saipan, Tinian and Ewejima and also Pearl Harber and then I also work with another company out of the UK called the Cultural Experience, who does similar tours. I do it for them. I do a Philippines store as well, but I also do a Last Year of the War in Japan's We do Okinawa, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Tokyo and the firebombing raids. You know, I love it. I tried a lot of these places for my research, you know, when I'm doing interviews and things like that for different books, and so then the opportunity to take guests and go experience them, I love doing it.
So if somebody wants to go on a military tour with you, is there a website or where do they go?
Yeah, go to James Mscott dot com and I have on their events and Tours page and you can click on there. You'll see all the tours I have coming up in the next year or two. I've got four coming up. In twenty twenty five, I'm doing a Marianna's tour, and I'm doing a Tokyo tour, and then in the spring of twenty twenty six, I'm doing two back to back Philippines tours. And then another Marianna's tour, so it's going out to the Pacific, and I love it. I mean, you go to a place like Corrigador, which is the fortified island right off of the Philippines, and it's just ponting. You can go through the tunnels that the Americans had there, you know, the old officer housing is there, the hospital, the barracks. I mean, it's just a real opportunity to see and experience what World War two must have been like.
That's remarkab what you mentioned. The Philippines campaign. My wife, Callista's uncle is buried in the military cemetery and Luzan.
Oh. Yeah, that's the largest point outside the US, seventeen thousand people buried right there in Manila.
He was killed very late in the war, during the final phase of that campaign. She had other relatives who fought in Europe who survived, okay, but the family always felt as a tragedy. You know, that's a remarkable place. I'm a historian by training, and we have too few people who take the time to understand how history occurs and to understand the different components. And if you study Beirut or if you study the Philippines or you name it. You'll approach today's problems differently if you have some sense of the complexity of history and of being cautious. I mean that it often doesn't quite evolve the way you think it will. And I think what you're doing, both in your writing and in your battlefield tours, it's a terrific contribution to helping people better understand the world we live in. I want to thank you for joining me. Your new book with Jackcarr, Targeted Beyroot, the nineteen eighty three Marine Barracks Bombing and the untold True Origin story of the war and Terror is a tremendous book, as I said earlier, New York Times bestseller, already available on Amazon and bookstores everywhere. And we're also going to include your personal link for people may want to come and take a historic tour with you, which is an extra bonus I think coming out of this conversation, James, I really appreciate your sharing your ideas and your knowledge with us.
It's been a privilege and honor. Thank you so much for having me on.
Thank you to my guest James M. Scott. You can get a link to buy his new book with Jackcarr targeted Bayroot on our show page at neutworld dot com. New World is produced by Gangli three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Friendley. Special thanks to the team at Gingrish three sixty. If you've been enjoying news World, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of New World can sign up for my three freeweekly columns at Gingrish three sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm new Gingrich. This is newts World