SpyTalk

The Marines stationed at Beirut airport in 1983 could have had plenty of time to prepare for the suicide bomber that struck with devastating consequences 25 years ago this week, their commander says.

But the eavesdropping National Security Agency's intercept of an Iranian telephone call that gave the order got stuck "in the intelligence pipeline."

In all, 241 Marines, soldiers and sailors died in the Oct. 23, 1983 attack.

"Unknown to us at the time, the National Security Agency had made a diplomatic communications intercept on 26 September ...  in which the Iranian Intelligence Service provided explicit instructions to the Iranian ambassador in Damascus (a known terrorist) to attack the Marines at Beirut International Airport," says Marine Col. Colonel Timothy J. Geraghty, writing in the latest issue of Proceedings, a publication of the U.S. Naval Institute.

"The suicide attackers struck us 28 days later, with word of the intercept stuck in the intelligence pipeline until days after the attack."

The two bombings - French paratroopers would be struck two minutes later, with the loss of 58 lives  - will be marked with a candlelight vigil at dawn Thursday in North Carolina, where a Beirut memorial is etched with the names of the fallen.

A different kind of ceremony will mark the bombings in Tehran, writes Geraghty, who also spent seven years in the CIA's Special Operations Group.

"In the Iranian Behesht-E-Zahra cemetery in southern Tehran, there will also be a ceremony at a monument erected in 2004 to commemorate the Beirut suicide bombers. In attendance will likely be some dressed as suicide bombers, chanting the standard 'death to America' and 'death to Israel.'"

In paying solemn tribute to the fallen men of his 24th Marine Amphibious Group, Geraghty also rues that President Ronald Reagan had abandoned America's military neutrality in the raging Lebanese civil war.

"It is noteworthy that the United States provided direct naval gunfire support -- which I strongly opposed for a week -- to the Lebanese Army at a mountain village called Suq-al-Garb on 19 September and that the French conducted an air strike on 23 September in the Bekaa Valley," he writes.

"American support removed any lingering doubts of our neutrality, and I stated to my staff at the time that we were going to pay in blood for this decision."

The attacks, which went unanswered by U.S. military action, "became a turning point in the unbounded use of terrorism by radical Islamic fanatics worldwide," Geraghty writes.