Beirut

Beirut is the capital of Lebanon.¹ The events on this page run from 1954 to 1991. In that period the city housed the Central Intelligence Agency station that handled Lebanese affairs, served as the meeting ground of British, American, Israeli and Palestinian services, and was the place where Americans were seized and held and where bombs killed Americans in 1983 and 1984.

Philby and the 1963 Departure

Kim Philby, the British intelligence officer recruited into Soviet intelligence at Cambridge University in 1934, disappeared from Beirut on January 23, 1963. Ben Macintyre's account, based on British files and interviews, dates the departure to that day.² On July 1, 1963 the Foreign Office told the House of Commons that it had made inquiries about Philby's whereabouts "from the Governments in both Cairo and Beirut, without success." The statement added that "when he left Beirut he may have gone to one of the countries of the Soviet bloc."³ Macintyre places Philby in Moscow by July of that year.² The departure is also recorded on the James Jesus Angleton page, which dates Philby's disappearance from Beirut to the same day.⁴

Robert Maheu and the 1954 Papers

On September 24, 1954 Paul Gerrity of Maheu Associates called on State Department officials with a file containing a statement attributed to Cotopadis on the negotiation of the Onassis agreement with the Saudi government. Gerrity said that Stavros Niarchos had bought the statement and photostats, that a second copy was held by the CIA in Washington, and that a third copy was "in possession of Mr. Maheu who was in Beirut." Gerrity said the papers should reach King Saud quickly, before any publicity about bribery in the Onassis agreement. The official John Jernegan said the CIA should remain the channel.⁵ The Senate committee later described Robert Maheu as an ex-FBI agent who had entered a career as a private investigator in 1954.⁶

Saddam Hussein and the 1959 Attempt

On April 10, 2003 the journalist Richard Sale reported in United Press International that Saddam Hussein had been part of a CIA-authorized squad tasked with the 1959 attempt on Abd al-Karim Qasim. After the attempt failed, he crossed into Syria and was transferred by Egyptian intelligence agents to Beirut. The report states: "While Saddam was in Beirut, the CIA paid for Saddam's apartment and put him through a brief training course, former CIA officials said."⁷ Sale attributed the Beirut account to former officials and to the writer Adel Darwish, who said the CIA handler was an Iraqi dentist working for the CIA and Egyptian intelligence.⁷

MI6 and the Nasser Plots

Stephen Dorril reported in 1985 that Wilbur Crane Eveland's memoir Ropes of Sand describes a Beirut meeting at which a drunk envoy of the MI6 deputy director George Young said that "Teams had been fielded to assassinate Nasser." Dorril placed the remark among the British plans against Gamal Abdel Nasser in the period of the Suez crisis.⁸

Black September and Operation Spring of Youth

Operation Spring of Youth, the April 1973 Israeli operation in Beirut that targeted the Black September leadership, was led on the ground by Ehud Barak, then commanding the Sayeret Matkal reconnaissance unit, who is recorded as having led the ground team disguised as a woman.⁹ Barak's later career took him to the head of Israeli military intelligence in 1983 and to the post of chief of the General Staff.⁹

The 1981 Beirut Cable on Osirak

The Israeli strike on the Iraqi reactor at Osirak took place on June 7, 1981. The Security Council resolution that condemned it, Resolution 487 of June 19, 1981, was adopted unanimously, and its text refers to the "premeditated Israeli air attack on Iraqi nuclear installations on 7 June 1981."¹⁰ On June 11 the U.S. embassy in Beirut cabled Washington that Yasir Arafat, speaking at a graduation ceremony for Palestinian commandos in Beirut the previous day, had claimed that the raid "had been carried out with full assistance from American satellites and radar." The cable reports that Arafat also claimed the raid took place "with the official approval of the Pentagon."¹¹ The same cable reports that the Beirut newspaper As-Safir, citing "East European and Arab diplomatic sources," charged that U.S. AWACS aircraft had charted the route used by the Israeli aircraft and provided air cover over Saudi Arabia, and that a CIA network in Iraq had helped gather information about the Iraqi missile system.¹¹

The 1982 War and the Siege of West Beirut

The Israeli campaign in Lebanon, which the Israeli government called Peace for the Galilee, began on June 6, 1982. According to the Kahan Commission, Israeli forces took over the suburbs of Beirut on June 12 to 14 and linked up with the Christian forces who controlled East Beirut, and on June 25 the encirclement of West Beirut was completed. About one and a half months of negotiations on the evacuation of the Palestinian fighters and the Syrian forces followed.¹² After a negotiation mediated by the American diplomat Philip Habib, Arafat and approximately fifteen thousand PLO personnel left Beirut by sea in August 1982 for Tunis and other Arab capitals.¹³

Frank Terpil, the former CIA officer, is recorded as having kept contacts with Palestinian clients from his Lebanon assignments, including reportedly figures connected to the PLO leadership in Beirut before the 1982 Israeli invasion.¹⁴ Robert Ames of the CIA had developed a relationship with the PLO intelligence chief Ali Hassan Salameh, a Black September commander who was also a CIA asset before his assassination by Mossad in 1979.¹⁵

The Mossad, the Phalangists and the Kahan Commission

The Israeli Commission of Inquiry into the Events at the Refugee Camps in Beirut, chaired by Justice Yitzhak Kahan and known as the Kahan Commission, reported on February 8, 1983. Its report states that the link between the Christian forces and Israel was formed shortly after the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, that Israel supplied the Christian forces with arms, uniforms, training and instruction, and that "the Mossad was the organization that actually handled the relations between the Phalangists and Israel, and its representatives maintained close contacts with the Phalangist leadership."¹⁶ The Mossad and Israeli military intelligence disagreed about the relationship. The report states that the Mossad, "to a not inconsiderable extent under the influence of constant and close contact with the Phalangist elite," felt positively about strengthening it, while military intelligence emphasized the danger in the link because of the organization's unreliability and military weakness. The head of the Mossad testified on December 27, 1982 that "subjective, and not only objective, relations also emerged."¹⁷

On the afternoon of September 14, 1982 a large bomb exploded in a building in the Ashrafiyeh district of Beirut where the Phalangist leader and president-elect Bashir Gemayel was meeting with Phalangist commanders. The report records that the news reached the Prime Minister, the Defense Minister and the Chief of Staff, and that Israeli forces entered West Beirut the next morning.¹⁸ Defense Minister Ariel Sharon went from the forward command post to Phalangist headquarters on September 15. The record of that meeting, which the commission cites as exhibit 79, was attended by Phalangist commanders, Sharon, the director of military intelligence, the head of the General Security Services and representatives of the Mossad, and in it Sharon stated that the Phalangist army would also have to enter West Beirut after the Israeli forces.¹⁹

On Thursday, September 16, 1982 at about 6 p.m. members of the Phalangists entered the Shatila camp from the west and south in two groups. The Divisional Intelligence Officer on the roof of the forward command post tried to follow their movements with binoculars and could not.²⁰ That evening a Phalangist officer in the camps was overheard on the Phalangist radio asking a commander what to do with 45 people; the reported reply, which the commission cites from the testimony of Brigadier General Amos Yaron, was to do with them what God orders.²¹ During the night between Thursday and Friday a Phalangist liaison officer asked for more illumination, and a staff officer at the command post answered that the Phalangists had killed 300 people and that he was unwilling to provide it; limited illumination was nevertheless ordered.²² The head of the Mossad gave the Cabinet a briefing on the situation after Bashir's assassination at the session of September 16 at 19:30 hours and made no reference to the Phalangists' entry into the camps.²³

The commission's summary states that the massacre was carried out by a Phalangist unit acting on its own, but that its entry was known to Israel. It found that no Israeli was directly responsible, and that Israel bore indirect responsibility because the Israeli forces held the area.²⁴ The report found that Prime Minister Menachem Begin bore responsibility for not exercising greater involvement and awareness in introducing the Phalangists into the camps, that Sharon was responsible for ignoring the danger of bloodshed and revenge when he approved the entry, that Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir erred by not acting after he was alerted by the Communications Minister, and that Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan did not give the appropriate orders. Of Sharon it said that he "bears personal responsibility" and that it was fitting for him to draw the appropriate personal conclusions, and if necessary for the Prime Minister to consider removing him from office.²⁵ The commission recommended that the Director of Military Intelligence, Major General Yehoshua Saguy, not continue in that post, and that Brigadier General Amos Yaron not serve as a field commander for three years.²⁵ On the head of the Mossad the report found that he had learned of the Phalangists' role only at the Cabinet session of September 16, and that he was nevertheless obligated to express his opinion on the dangers there.²⁶

The head of the Mossad received cables from the Mossad representative in Beirut on Friday, September 15, reporting the meetings of the Chief of Staff and the Defense Minister with the Phalangist leaders. The report records that neither cable mentioned a role for the Phalangists in the camps, and that a third cable sent on Thursday at noon stated that a coordination meeting with the commander of the northern front had taken place to prepare the Phalangists for operations to clear the city.²⁷

Ari Ben-Menashe wrote that Sharon was aware in advance that the massacres were likely, and that a letter from Pierre Gemayel, leader of the Christian forces, to Sharon indicated an intention to seek revenge for the assassination of his son Bashir and that many Palestinians would die; Ben-Menashe wrote that the letter was delivered to Sharon's office and read by Moshe Hebroni and Saguy.²⁸ Seymour Hersh writes in chapter 21 of The Samson Option that Sharon's plan for the invasion had the Israeli forces act as an anti-Syrian blocking force while the Phalangists cleaned out the city of PLO followers, that the Phalangists failed to move, and that the Israeli Air Force was called on to bomb Beirut.²⁹ The Sabra and Shatila refugee camps are in Beirut, and the killings there are covered on the page for the Sabra and Shatila massacres.

The April 1983 Embassy Bombing

On April 18, 1983 a car bomb struck the United States Embassy in Beirut. Seventeen Americans died in the attack, among them Robert C. Ames, the CIA's chief Middle East analyst, and several other CIA officers.³⁰ Imad Mughniyah is recorded as having overseen the bombing, which killed sixty-three people in all, mostly CIA and embassy staff.³¹ A column by Jack Anderson published on May 10, 1983 reported that the National Security Agency had intercepted communications, and that the CIA had gathered human intelligence, warning that a pro-Iranian Shiite group planned to bomb the embassy about a month before the attack. The column said the warnings were hedged with the statement that the information could not be verified, and that the CIA had lost seven people in the bombing. It described the material as contained in the National Intelligence Daily of April 20, a document circulated to fewer than one hundred officials, and said Anderson's associate Dale Van Atta had reviewed it.³²

The October 1983 Marine Barracks Bombing

On October 23, 1983 a truck carrying the equivalent of more than twelve thousand pounds of TNT crashed through the perimeter of the compound of the U.S. contingent of the Multinational Force at Beirut International Airport, entered the Battalion Landing Team Headquarters building and detonated; 241 American servicemen were killed.³³ A Department of Defense commission chaired by Admiral Robert L. J. Long investigated the attack. Frederic C. Hof, writing on the commission's report, quotes its central message: the attack was "tantamount to an act of war using the medium of terrorism."³⁴ The commission concluded that the bombing "was committed by a revolutionary organization within the cognizance of, and with possible support from two neighboring states," and that it met the criteria of a terrorist act as defined in Department of Defense Directive 2000.12. Hof records the commission's description of Lebanon as "a veritable jungle of threats."³⁵ Hof writes that the Shiite neighbors of the Marines in Beirut's southern suburbs had regarded the American forces as protectors after the September 1982 Sabra and Shatila killings and by October 1983 viewed them as partisans of their enemies, and that the United States had in September 1983 entered the Lebanese conflict openly with naval gunfire on Suq al-Gharb on behalf of Gemayel's army.³⁶

On November 17, 1983 the RAND analyst Brian Michael Jenkins gave the commission a briefing on the attack, later published as a RAND note titled "The Lessons of Beirut." The note describes the attack as one calculated to cause heavy casualties, involving a vehicle loaded with explosives, with "a high probability that the attack was instigated by a government."³⁷

A Washington Post report of February 1984 by Bob Woodward, Richard Harwood and Christian Williams, in the CIA reading room, stated that three days before the bombing a man named Hassan Hamiz was given a voucher for approximately $50,000 that could be cashed only at Iranian embassies in Beirut or Damascus, according to reliable intelligence reports, and that after the bombing it was cashed at the embassy in Damascus. The report described the payment as believed to be a primary link in the financing of the two suicide truck-bomb attacks of that morning, which also killed 58 soldiers at the French military headquarters. It described Hamiz as a fixer with very close relations with the Iranian ambassador in Damascus, Ali Akbar Mohtashami, whom the CIA had identified as a key figure in Middle East terrorism. Among the thirteen individuals the report said intelligence services had tied to the bombings was Hussein Musawi, who the report said had denied a direct or indirect role while praising the bombing. The cleric Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, described as the leader of Hezbollah, denied involvement in an interview in Beirut and called the charges a frame-up by Phalangist militiamen and Lebanese Army intelligence.³⁸

A CIA reading room file of 1984 press clippings carries the headlines "Americans in Beirut threatened" and "New peril for Beirut Yanks," and reports that a "new strategy" had followed the October bombing of the barracks.³⁹

Carter Cornick, a former FBI special agent, is recorded in a 1990 resume packet as having supervised the investigations of the 1983 bombings of the American embassy and the Marine compound in Beirut, and of the 1984 seizure of American hostages in Lebanon. The packet also credits him with creating the bureau's crisis management protocol for special events.⁴⁰ In August 1988 United Press International reported that Cornick and the former assistant United States attorney Eugene Propper had formed Counter Terrorism Consultants, Inc., a security consultancy seeded with about $500,000 from investors the founders declined to name. The UPI report also said Cornick had directed the investigations into the bombing of the U.S. Embassy and the Marine barracks in Beirut.⁴¹ E. Lawrence Barcella, Jr. is recorded as having worked on the inquiries into the 1983 bombings of the American embassies in Beirut and Kuwait and of the Marine garrison in Beirut.⁴²

Imad Mughniyah's page records that six months after the embassy attack he also oversaw the Marine barracks bombing, in which 241 service personnel died, including 220 Marines.³¹

The Inman Panel

After the second attack on the embassy in Beirut in September 1984, the State Department asked Congress for $366 million and 247 additional positions for security.⁴³ The Secretary of State's Advisory Panel on Overseas Security, appointed in July 1984 and headed by the retired vice admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former deputy director of Central Intelligence, made 91 recommendations in June 1985. The Washington Post reported that they included strengthening security at 126 of the department's 262 embassies and consulates and creating a diplomatic security bureau with more than 1,000 officers, at a cost of $3.5 billion over five years for rebuilding and refurbishing.⁴⁴ The panel recommended creation of a Bureau for Diplomatic Security reporting to the Under Secretary for Management.⁴⁵ At a House subcommittee hearing on diplomatic security on November 13, 1985, the chairman criticized the Administration for failing to supply a legislative package from the Inman recommendations more than four months after the report.⁴⁶

William Buckley

William Buckley, a lieutenant colonel of the United States Army who served as the CIA's chief of station in Beirut, was kidnapped in the city on March 16, 1984.⁴⁷ The CIA's own memorial page lists him as an officer of the agency and a lieutenant colonel of the Army.⁴⁷ The Washington Post reported that he had been assigned to Lebanon in mid-1983 to help the Lebanese develop methods for thwarting terrorism and to rebuild the American intelligence presence after the embassy bombing, and that the CIA called his kidnapping its "private hostage crisis."³⁰ The District Court for the District of Columbia, in Surette v. Islamic Republic of Iran (2002), found that he was held for 444 days and died in captivity on June 3, 1985.⁴⁸ The court's findings describe him as "the highest-ranking CIA official in Beirut," a position that was an "open secret" within the official Lebanese government and among the violent religious factions vying for power in the city.⁴⁹

Iran-Contra records place the first reports of his death in the autumn of 1985. In the spring of 1985 reports reached the CIA that Buckley was being tortured, and according to former Attorney General Edwin Meese, his fate was of special concern to William Casey.⁵⁰ Lawrence Walsh's final report records that in early October 1985 "the terrorist group believed to be holding the hostages in Beirut reported that Buckley was dead."⁵¹ The report of the Tower Commission quotes a memorandum that Oliver North sent on December 5, 1985, which states: "We are relatively confident of information that former Beirut Chief of Station, Bill Buckley, is dead."⁵² His remains were found on a Beirut highway in December 1991.⁵³

Buckley was also the subject of remote viewing tasks. A May 4, 1984 memorandum by Lieutenant Colonel Brian Buzby of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command argued that the Center Lane program should continue, because it "has established the feasibility and soundness of the remote viewing phenomenon as an intelligence collection tool."⁵⁴ The memorandum's attached summary covers the Buckley case.⁵⁵ The Stargate Project record places eleven remote viewing interviews on Buckley between March 21 and April 20, 1984, made at the request of the CIA.⁵⁵

A November 1984 final report from SRI International, prepared under a Grill Flame contract with the Defense Intelligence Agency and written by Harold Puthoff, Edwin C. May and Beverly Humphrey, carries a "Search Task, U.S. Envoy to Beirut, Buckley." Its product states that the individual of interest was alive, "in Lebanon but not in Beirut proper," south of the city, and it names a town called Jdaide.⁵⁶

The Hostage Channel and Terry Waite

By the end of June 1985 six Americans were being held in Beirut by pro-Iranian Shiite groups: Buckley, the Presbyterian minister Benjamin Weir, the Catholic priest Lawrence Martin Jenco, the Associated Press reporter Terry Anderson, the hospital administrator David Jacobsen, and the university dean Thomas P. Sutherland.⁵⁷ Walsh records that on September 14, 1985 a second shipment of 408 TOW missiles went from Israel to Iran, "finally resulting in the release of one American hostage, Reverend Benjamin Weir," and that Michael Ledeen said the release "confirmed the legitimacy of Ghorbanifar as a channel to powerful people in Iran." Officials had expected more, particularly the release of Buckley, whom the administration had sought first.⁵⁸ A note by the Shultz aide Nicholas Platt of September 15, 1985, recording that "Polecat [is] beginning to Pay off" and that Weir "has been released," is quoted in the report.⁵⁹ Walsh also reproduces a State Department cable of September 17, 1985 addressed to the embassies in Beirut, Damascus and London.⁶⁰

The report records that Poindexter's plan for the May 1986 Tehran trip by Robert McFarlane called for two American hostages to be released to the U.S. ambassador in Beirut when the American party arrived in Tehran, two more after a second aircraft carrying HAWK parts left Tel Aviv, and, after a third aircraft, for the remains of Buckley to be turned over.⁶¹ On May 27, 1986 the Iranian adviser told the American delegation that the hostage-holders in Beirut had been contacted and had put heavy conditions on the release, including the release of Dawa prisoners held in Kuwait.⁶² The release of Father Jenco on July 26, 1986 was attributed to the Iranians in a July 28 memorandum from Casey to John Poindexter.⁶³ Walsh also records the account of Ledeen that the CIA official Shackley asked in April or May 1985 about ransoming Buckley.⁶⁴

Israeli accounts of the same period were published in the Israeli press in December 1986. Yoel Marcus of Haaretz wrote, from Israeli sources, that in March 1985 Shimon Peres told his adviser Al Schwimmer that the Americans had asked for help freeing their hostages, particularly the CIA station chief in Beirut, William Buckley. Marcus wrote that Schwimmer suggested using Yaacov Nimrodi and "came up with the idea of 'arms for Buckley.'"⁶⁵ The New York Times correspondent Thomas L. Friedman reported that the Israeli account contained factual errors and conflicted with the American version, and Ledeen called it "total nonsense."⁶⁶

Terry Waite, the special representative of the Archbishop of Canterbury, visited Beirut in November 1985.⁶⁷ North's December 5, 1985 memorandum cites that November 14 visit, together with a separate contact through Canada, as the basis for the statement that the other five American hostages (Anderson, Jacobsen, Jenco, Kilburn and Sutherland) were then alive.⁵² The same memorandum says that Waite and others reported the hostage holders were under "immense political and military pressure from the Syrians, Druze, Phalange, and Amal."⁵² North wrote again on December 9, 1985: "Terry Waite, our only access to events in Lebanon, readily admits that his influence is marginal at best."⁶⁸ Waite was freed on November 18, 1991.⁶⁹

Ian Stuart Spiro is recorded as having lived in Beirut during the 1970s and 1980s, making contacts with Lebanese religious leaders and the Islamic Jihad, and as having helped negotiate the release of hostages according to the former hostage David Jacobsen.⁷⁰

Sun Streak, Middle East Collection 10 and the Lebanon Hostages

The Defense Intelligence Agency's Sun Streak program ran remote viewing tasks from 1987 through 1990, including tasks on the Lebanon hostages. Project 8806 was tasked to locate the building in Beirut where Waite was held. Viewers 003, 011 and 095 worked the target in sessions on February 16, 1988. The report of one session records that viewer 003 determined the direction to Waite's present location from a map of Lebanon.⁷¹

Project 8808 reports are headed "WRV," for written remote viewing, the method associated with Angela Dellafiora.⁷² A DIA operational report of February 24, 1988 on Project 8808 describes a Lebanese Christian who had served with the Amal militia, and identifies him as involved in the execution of the kidnapping of Marine lieutenant colonel William Richard Higgins, seized on February 17, 1988.⁷³ A session report from viewer 011 in the same project records the tasking "to determine the current location" of the same officer.⁷⁴ Higgins's mummified remains were found in a bag left in a school parking lot in southern Beirut about two and a half years later.⁷⁵ The Louis Andre page draws on the same reports for its account of viewer 079.⁷³

Lester Coleman, a DIA officer, is described in Cheri Seymour's account as having run a network of agents in Beirut for six years with the secret unit Middle East Collection 10 in Cyprus, with the mission of finding American hostages. Two senior members of the cell, Matthew Kevin Gannon and Major Charles Dennis McKee, were on Pan Am Flight 103 after returning from a mission in Beirut. After the explosion the Beirut end of the cell was reportedly "blown": the German Lebanese member Werner Tony Asmar was killed in a bomb explosion at his office in east Beirut on May 26, 1988, and the Lebanese army officer Charlie Frezeli was shot dead at his home in east Beirut in November 1989.⁷⁶ The account also describes a Beirut-Nicosia-United States pipeline of heroin, cash and documents running through the Euramae Trading Company.⁷⁷

The Army's Intelligence Support Activity

The United States Army Intelligence Support Activity page records that a five-person team of the unit returned to Beirut after the October 23, 1983 bombing, that in 1983 a survey team led by Lieutenant Colonel William V. Cowan had warned that the Marine headquarters was a tempting target, and that a 1985 message from North to Poindexter said "We already have one ISA officer in Beirut." It also records that in mid-September 1985 the CIA ordered the unit to cease contact with Lebanese Christian forces.⁷⁸ CBS News reported on November 22, 1985 that a Sea Spray helicopter had flown a representative of the Lebanese Christian leader Camille Chamoun out of Beirut to Israel in 1981.⁷⁹

FIDCO and the 1983 Reconstruction Letters

The July 12, 1983 letter from George K. Pender, signing as president of First Intercontinental Development Corporation (FIDCO), was addressed to Amin Gemayel, president of Lebanon. As reproduced by Cheri Seymour, the letter says that Pender had visited Beirut in February and May 1983 for meetings with the Chamouns, Maurice Ghanem and Mourad Baroudy, and that FIDCO offered to arrange financing for government-sector projects, including the rebuilding of Damour and Alkhyam. The letter asks to meet Gemayel in Washington on July 21, 1983 and states: "As per copy of attached letter, the White House is actively interested in our efforts."⁸⁰

BCCI, Bank of America and Mohammed Hammoud

Roy Carlson spent twenty years at Bank of America, was stationed in Tehran in the 1960s and in Beirut in the early 1970s, and advised Agha Hasan Abedi on the formation of BCCI in 1972. The Senate report on BCCI records this career.⁸¹

Mohammed Hammoud, a Lebanese merchant, is described in the Senate report by the former BCCI general manager in New York, Abdur Sakhia, who first knew him in Beirut, as "a small time money changer."⁸² Hammoud purchased the shares in First American that had been held by Clark Clifford and Robert Altman. The report records that Hammoud "had contact with officials from the State Department concerning the release of U.S. hostages from Beirut."⁸³ His U.S. real estate investments were managed by Charles W. Hostler, later U.S. ambassador to Bahrain, who had met Hammoud in the 1960s, when Hostler was a young Air Force officer attached to Lebanon, Jordan and Cyprus and based in Beirut.⁸³

According to Michael Pillsbury, Hammoud provided him with intelligence on U.S. hostages held in Lebanon, which Pillsbury then passed to U.S. government agencies. The report records this account and Pillsbury's denial of a separate allegation about the identification of Hammoud's body.⁸⁴ The report also records that Hammoud allegedly died in Geneva in 1990 while visiting his doctor, that he is buried in Beirut, and that insurance companies reportedly refused to pay on his life policy because his body was found to be several inches shorter than the height recorded at his last medical examination.⁸⁵

Other Records Placed in Beirut

An FBI memorandum of July 23, 1968 on the Sirhan investigation, in the CIA reading room, reports that a source told the bureau's Beirut representative that on June 22, 1968 Salim Lawzi, publisher of the Beirut newspaper Hawadith, told Anwar Jamal, press counselor of the United Arab Republic, that he had met Lebanese figures to organize Sirhan's defense; the memorandum records that the United Arab Republic considered Lawzi a strong pro-Nasserist who "sometimes strays for opportunistic reasons."⁸⁶

The Ninth Circuit's opinion in United States v. Abouammo describes a $100,000 wire in February 2015 to a Beirut account opened under the father's name of Ahmad Abouammo, the former Twitter employee convicted of acting as an agent of Saudi Arabia, followed by a second $100,000 wire in July 2015 to the same Lebanese account.⁸⁷

Carnegie Middle East Center

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace operates a Middle East center in Beirut. The Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center was founded in 2006. The endowment also runs centers in Asia, Berlin, Brussels and New Delhi.⁸⁸