Do not let any other review dissuade you from taking on this book.
I’ve read some other reviews that mark down the work for not providing “context” to some of the events that occur in the book. This is not an analysis of the thousands of years that went into building the hatred and mixed allegiances, sometimes at seemingly cross purposes, between all the myriad players in the Mideast (Israel, Lebanon, Shiites, Shia, Druze, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Palestinians, and on and on and on). That is an encyclopedia in and of itself. Nor is it a work on the economic/political state of Lebanon during the periods covered. Nor is it a work on “tradecraft” teaching the reader the ins and outs of operating as a CIA operative under foreign duress. Expecting these topics to be covered in-depth is a setup for disappointment.
Instead the book is a high level coverage of the entanglement between two men of global import—the CIA Chief of Station for Lebanon in the early 80’s, William Buckley and the designer of his kidnapping and execution, Imad Mughniyeh.
While the covers of the work highlight the CIA and Buckley, the work extends both Buckley’s arrival and after his death and is far more about Mughniyeh and Iran’s influence via Mughniyeh than it is Buckley. Buckley ends up simply as one of many victims of Iran’s terrorist mastermind who would, as the book covers, ultimately meet his own demise at the hands of Mossad and the CIA himself in downtown Damascus but not until some 20+ years after his Buckley affairs.
One of the authors, Fred Burton, had first hand experience with the horrors of Beirut in the 80’s having himself been involved in the investigation and attempts to resolve Buckley’s kidnapping and investigation and arrests around the first WTC bombing. This experience lends weight to the connections between the seemingly endless terrorist events emanating from Mughniyeh, Tehran, Hezbollah, and the Bekaa Valley. Killings and bombings that are commonly forgotten in soft Western minds are recounted here (‘83 US Embassy bombing, ‘83 Beirut US Army barracks bombing, TWA flight 847, bombings of Saudi’s Khobar Towers, dozens of kidnappings, bombings in South America, training of killers in Iraq in the ‘00s, IED designs and proliferation and on and on). Mughniyeh could easily be argued as being far more an influential terrorist and killer of Americans than any other.
I think what I came away with the most is the feeling that the West’s attitude towards these forces still lags behind the threat. We retreat into our malls and our phones and have little concept of the conflict we are in the middle of. Even if we ignore it, it does not ignore us. Our government institutions fail to deal with it effectively even when it kills our our citizens or takes them hostage and carves up their bodies in the most horrific ways possible. The only ones who know it and deal with effectively are those on the front lines like Buckley and others who stand as some sort of ill-served, unsupported, miss-understood, oft-forgotten buffer between our society and those who would see it and us brought to ruin.
A great education on the core terrorist events of the past 40 years, those behind them, the thinking that went into them and the West’s failure to deal with it effectively, Beirut Rules should be required reading for anyone trying to understand our interaction with terrorism in the MidEast.