1 The Preamble to Disaster The shahada [martyrs] are the candles of society. They burn themselves out and illuminate society. If they do not shed their light, no organization can shine. -Iranian Ayatollah Morteza Mutaharri The Israeli military headquarters in Tyre was a seven-story high-rise situated inland from the sea and controlled most of Israel''s security and intelligence operations in southern Lebanon. The building was the administrative nerve center for Israel Defense Forces units operating in the area, and it housed two companies of Border Guard policemen as well. The Border Guards, Israel''s paramilitary police arm, were in Lebanon to maintain law and order in the towns and villages of southern Lebanon. The policemen represented the mosaic of Israeli society and included Jews, Druzes, Bedouins, and Circassians. Many of the Border Guard personnel spoke Arabic, and many had spent careers policing a hostile population in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The building was more than just a military garrison. The Tyre facility was the Israeli intelligence hub in southern Lebanon. A''man, Israeli military intelligence, ran many of its human intelligence (HUMINT) operations. Handlers from the ultrasecretive Unit 504, the military intelligence unit that ran agents behind enemy lines, used the regional headquarters as a safe and comfortable location where assets could be debriefed and espionage endeavors coordinated. The Shin Bet, Israel''s domestic counterintelligence and counterterrorist agency, was also based inside the building. The Shin Bet was responsible for all counterterrorist investigations in southern Lebanon and for rounding up the last vestiges of Arafat''s legions in southern Lebanon. Business was booming for the Shin Bet. The basement holding cells were full of Lebanese and Palestinian men suspected of belonging to one popular front or another.

The detained were often a remarkable source of information. Many of the men serving inside the headquarters building were reservists-from Israel''s citizen army, doing their annual thirty-day stint of call-up service. The reservists were a mixture of middle-aged men happy to have a few weeks away from wives and kids, and men young enough still to be in school, still trying to save enough to get married, and still holding on to dreams of lives out of uniform. Captain Dubi Eichnold, the commander of the Military Police investigative unit at the base, was preparing a small party for some of the officers that evening, November 11, 1982; it was to be a celebration to mark the halfway point of the reservist stint for him and his team. A small feast, including snacks and soft drinks, was being readied for the party. Everyone was itching to go home. Captain Eichnold was already sitting with a few of his fellow officers in the mess hall at 7:00 that Thursday morning. The officers were in full kit, battle rattle at their sides.

An electric space heater failed to mitigate the bone-numbing cold and the officers wore their olive green winter parkas as they guzzled cup after cup of army-issue rocket-fuel-grade coffee. Upstairs, the Border Guard''s morning garrison was getting ready for morning roll call. Downstairs, the prisoners in the holding cell had already eaten. Some were in the middle of morning prayers. The military policeman standing guard outside next to a small embankment of sand bags could hear the clanking of metal forks scraping plastic plates and he smelled the eggs cooking. He hoped that someone would bring him a cup of coffee soon. A white Peugeot 504 appeared from the west, speeding toward the headquarters building. The rain had intensified.

The sky darkened. At 7:15 on the morning of November 11, 1982, the Israeli military headquarters in Tyre collapsed in a blinding flash of light, the seven stories reduced to rubble beneath a rising plume of black smoke. At the time, more than a hundred Israeli soldiers, policemen, and spies had been inside the building; many of those not killed instantly became trapped inside tiny air pockets, their bodies bloodied by the explosion and debris. The Israel Defense Forces had little experience in pulling survivors out of a building hit by a catastrophic blast-there had never been a need; a terrorist might throw a hand grenade into a crowded cinema, but he didnÕt demolish a building. Rescues were done painstakingly by hand. Combat engineers were flown in, and helicopters shuttled the wounded to awaiting trauma care thirty-five miles away at the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa. The dead were removed, the shattered bodies covered with coarse, olive-colored blankets. Rain created puddles that formed cement-like patches of caked-together blood and dust.

By nightfall, the magnitude of the calamity was apparent: sixty-seven IDF and Border Guard personnel were dead, along with nine Shin Bet agents and fifteen local detainees. November 11, 1982, was one of the deadliest days in Israeli military history. Few understood it yet, but the attack represented a new struggle for Lebanon''s soul-and one that would be pursued with a new tactic, suicide bombing. The man responsible for the destruction wasn''t even a man yet. Ahmed Qasir was a fifteen-year-old boy when he drove the explosive-laden Peugeot 504 that destroyed the Israeli military headquarters. He had lived an unexceptional existence in the Shiite village of Dir Qanoun an-Nahr, located in the foothills ten miles north of Tyre-a setting more akin to the last century but beset by the horrors of twentieth-century destruction. He attended the local mosque, but left school after the fifth grade to work at his father''s vegetable stall in the village market. According to reports, Ahmed was never a shooter-someone who took up arms against the Palestinians or the Israelis-but he did associate with local young men who carried their AK-47s openly, and he began to embrace the Khomeini-brand fanaticism-laced Shiite Islam.

Young and impressionable, Ahmed Qasir was obviously infatuated by the powerful and indomitable men in camouflage fatigues and Ray-Ban sunglasses. He felt a sense of pride and privilege being in their company, and a sense of duty when they asked him to carry out small-scale reconnaissance sorties in and around Beirut, smuggling armaments and monitoring the movements of Israeli patrols. Qasir soon began to borrow his father''s truck for daylong assignments. He never had a driver''s license and his feet barely reached the pedals. His father never knew where he was going, or what he was doing. On the morning of November 11, Qasir disappeared-never to be heard from again. His parents were certain that he had been kidnapped-possibly killed-by Christian militiamen. Qasir''s martyrdom should have been celebrated in Dir Qanoun an-Nahr.

The old women of the village would have brought pots of food; the men, including village elders and the local imam, would have been huddled in the living room, drinking sweet tea with mint leaves and chain-smoking cigarettes while proudly gazing at a framed portrait of Ahmed Qasir displayed on a chair with red velvet cushions. But the notion of the boy''s martyrdom had yet to be publicly revealed. The men who sent Ahmed Qasir on his mission, the men who purchased the Peugeot and wired it with explosives-including several members of Syrian intelligence and a few senior men who spoke Farsi-were able to convince the teenager that by blowing himself up, he would be reenacting the sacrifice of Imam Hussein, the core of the Shiite faith, and that as a result he would secure his spot in paradise. Yet the facilitators of this new brand of terror wanted to keep the Tyre operation a secret. Ahmed''s parents wouldn''t learn of their son''s fate until two and a half years later, when a shrine to the martyr was built in Ba''albek. They did not know what would have motivated the youngster to perpetrate such an act. Tehran''s emissaries tasked with introducing to Lebanon the cult of the suicide bomber, a tactic that had become a common weapon in the Iran-Iraq War, were determined to redraw the map of the Middle East, a region engulfed in the flames of fundamentalist Islamic fervor. Ahmed Qasir would be the first of what was to be a legion of martyrs fighting both Israel and the United States.

November 11, 1982, would be known as the Day of Martyrs. There werenÕt supposed to be any martyrs, of course. Israel had never intended to be at war with LebanonÕs Shiites. On the morning of June 6, 1982, five months before the attack on the HQ in Tyre, sixty thousand Israeli troops crossed into Lebanon in a three-pronged invasion to remove the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure that threatened the residents of northern Israel. The objective of the incursion, claimed Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon, was to push Palestinian forces twenty-five miles to the north of the Israeli frontier. The Israeli operation was dubbed ÒPeace for Galilee.Ó The war had erupted like many Middle Eastern bloodbaths-with a spark: pro-Iraqi terrorists from the Abu Nidal faction shot and almost killed Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador to London. In retaliation, Israeli warplanes attacked Palestinian terror targets throughout Lebanon; the Palestinians then launched rocket barrages against the towns and cities of Israel''s north.

The war to secure Galilee commenced. The assassination attempt on the ambassador in London was nothing more than a pretext. For years Israeli intelligence had been working with Lebanon''s Maronite Christians to initiate a new regime in Beirut that would rid the.