Passing the Buck

As the bombing of the American embassy annex in East Beirut became a campaign issue, the swirl of political rhetoric threatened to obscure the hard particulars of just what happened and why. Yet the inquiries into the attack have more than a whipped-up partisan urgency: last week a telephone caller, saying he represented the same fanatic Muslim group that claimed responsibility for the embassy bombing, told a leftist Lebanese newspaper that another "big operation will be carried out against American interests soon."

A similar public warning had been made before the latest bomb attack--a fact that made especially feeble Ronald Reagan's attempt to blame the lapse in security on cutbacks in CIA operations before he took office. Although there was a steady reduction in intelligence operations through the mid-1970s, President Carter began beefing up the agency's budget in 1979.

The two greatest intelligence problems in Lebanon, in fact, were of distinctly recent origin. Seven CIA employees were among those killed in the April 1983 truck bombing of the American embassy in West Beirut. In addition, the U.S. lost many of its best local intelligence sources as a result of the P.L.O.'s expulsion from Lebanon.

If information concerning terrorist threats remained so scarce and fuzzy, critics argue, then more extensive security precautions should have automatically been taken. And the Administration, at least at lower levels, did have a warning from the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency before the attack, a report presciently titled, "High Threat Against U.S. Personnel and Facilities Continues." It said that the new East Beirut embassy was "highly vulnerable to... vehicular bombing."

Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger downplays those early warnings. "Well," he said, "they were noted." The Administration blames shipping problems and local construction delays for the fact that a protective steel entrance gate had not yet been installed and that the heavy-duty windows and doors for the building were still on order. Weinberger describes how much worse the devastation would have been had the bomber made it into the embassy building.

Pentagon and State Department officials beg the point when they suggest that sturdier barriers might have forced the , terrorists to resort to aerial bombardment. Several Administration officials insist that no embassy, even in Beirut, should be turned into a fortress. Says Weinberger: "The desire is to have an embassy open to the public." Two more serious questions may be why the embassy staff had been transferred on July 31 to the building before security measures were installed, and why the Americans harbored a kind of blind faith in the safety of the new location in Christian East Beirut.

A special team of analysts dispatched from Washington is still picking through the wreckage, but President Reagan got a 15-minute preliminary report last week. No real dereliction is apparent, the team believes, although prudent jury-rigged security measures, like a sand-filled dump-truck blockade, might have prevented the attack. "In hindsight," says Under Secretary of State for Management Ronald Spiers, "they are dead right. But that's a degree of micromanagement you cannot conduct from Washington."

Some of these makeshift measures were put into effect in East Beirut last week. No civilian visitors were being allowed into the embassy annex. In the roadway outside, a Jeep and a pickup truck were protectively parked between the cement obstacles. Beside the ravaged building, a U.S. soldier sat behind his 106-mm antitank cannon, loaded and pointed at the road. "All I have to do," explained the new American paladin, "is close the breech and fire."