Word: beirutization
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During the first days, as Flight 847 crisscrossed the Mediterranean from Athens to Beirut to Algiers, Reagan's advisers sent messages to various world leaders -- including Syria's Hafez Assad, Algeria's Chadli Bendjedid and Lebanon's Amin Gemayel -- asking them to use their influence to end the crisis. Though a number of hostages were released at each stop, none of the leaders was able to effect a quick resolution. Washington moved military forces, including elements of the Army's elite Delta Force, into the region. "Our hope was that the plane would never leave Algeria," says a State Department...
While the hostage crisis ostensibly revolved around a dispute between Lebanese , Shi'ites and the Israeli government, it was played out against the larger and ever tortured context of Middle East politics. The American diplomacy used in bringing the Beirut drama to a conclusion, moreover, produced some new twists and turns in the labyrinth of Washington's policy in the Middle East, an area of vital but sometimes conflicting U.S. concerns. For the Reagan Administration, the episode revealed some casting changes among principal characters, created some fresh strains between the U.S. and countries in the region, and may have even...
...exercise each day. Brown's contingent devised a game of imaginary golf, playing mind shots on a course laid out verbally by Robert Trautmann Jr., 37, a Laredo, Texas, developer. At one chilling point, one of the original two hijackers swaggered into the bunker-like room in West Beirut and said, "Hi, do you know me?" When no one answered, he waved a silver pistol in their faces and said, "Now do you remember me?" They assured him that they did. Once, Brown told the Boston Herald, "our guard fell asleep in our room with his pistol right there...
...Even if I tried to grab it and do something, it would have been total chaos, lots of people would have been killed. I just walked out and into the cockpit and said, 'Come here, will you? You left something in there.' You should have heard them laugh." In Beirut, Traugott was taken all over the city. Says he: "They took me out night after night, day after day. I was shown military complexes. I went to a funeral vigil in the middle of the night, down this alley, with a tank on each end of the alley, the tanks...
...kill me, that he had to beat me. I was crying and he had a tear in his eye. And the reason he did was not because of me, but apparently he had a wife and a baby girl that were killed by the American bombing during the Beirut crisis...