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| Afghanistan/South Asia |
| 25 Years Ago the US Embassy in Islamabad Was Attacked and Destroyed |
| 2004-11-27 |
| From The Washington Post .... It was a little after lunchtime on Nov. 21, 1979. In a day of orchestrated anti-American outrage, Pakistanis were attacking several U.S. facilities across the country. Twenty-five years later, this outburst seems a thin slice of history, sandwiched between the taking of U.S. hostages in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Officially, Nov. 21 was quickly forgotten, seen by the United States as an aberration in its complex but generally productive relationship with Pakistan. .... By 1:40 p.m., nearly 140 people -- U.S. diplomats, Pakistani staff members, a visiting Time magazine correspondent -- had assembled in the vault, a suite of rooms on the top floor of the three-story embassy building. Marines had covered their retreat upstairs by tossing tear gas canisters as protesters broke their way into the embassy, shattering windows and setting fires in offices. As CIA officers began to destroy secret files and equipment, diplomats maintained contact with officials outside the embassy, including Ambassador Arthur W. Hummel Jr., who had left the building for lunch. He began demanding help from Pakistan's government. A nurse worked to halt Crowley's bleeding until he could be hospitalized. [Marine Cpl. Steven J. Crowley had been shot in the head.] Smoke started seeping into the vault. The people inside sat quietly, most of them on the floor, crowded into a space intended to hold far fewer occupants. The temperature rose, and the air, tainted by tear gas and smoke, grew hard to breathe. They took off extra clothing and passed around wet paper towels to use as filters. Time's Marcia Gauger, who had stopped by the embassy that day to have lunch with political counselor Herbert G. Hagerty, scribbled in a notebook, wondering how she might ensure that her record of events would survive, even if she did not. As the afternoon wore on, she would become convinced that she would die. Noises overhead indicated that protesters were on the roof of the building. Some fired bullets down ventilation shafts. The rioters began beating on a metal hatch connecting the vault to the roof. [Marine Master Sgt. Loyd G. ] Miller had men with guns stand guard under the hatch, prepared to kill anyone who broke through. .... Earlier that year, Shiite clerics in Iran had overthrown a U.S.-backed dictator. On Nov. 4, Iranian revolutionaries had seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and taken dozens of Americans hostage. On Nov. 20, a Saudi Arabian religious zealot had led a takeover of the Grand Mosque at Mecca. Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini immediately suggested that Americans were behind the attack on Islam's holiest place, a falsehood repeated in media reports the morning of Nov. 21. But some experts are now seeing a closer link between the motivations of the Pakistani students and the thinking of militant Muslims determined to wage war against the United States. Washington Post Managing Editor Steve Coll writes in his 2004 book, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, that the uprising was primarily led by the student wing of an Islamist group, Jamaat-e-Islami, that was rising in prominence and influence. When Osama bin Laden first traveled to Pakistan in 1980 or 1981, he visited Jamaat and donated money to the group, Coll writes. .... [At the Intenational School about five miles away] Beth Rideout, the 17-year-old president of the student body, took refuge in the school's music room. .... A few months earlier, she had begun dating Crowley, 20, of Long Island. He was blond and, at 6 feet 6 inches, a foot taller than she was. She found him chivalrous and cordial. He seemed a little embarrassed when she asked him to kiss her. A young boy whom Crowley had befriended had told Rideout a secret: Crowley had asked his mother to send him his high school class ring. The Rideouts had invited him over for Thanksgiving, which was the next day. Beth wondered whether he would ask her to wear his ring. Under the piano, she suddenly felt him near her. "I felt his spirit visit me," she recalls now. .... As evening approached, the vault's floor tiles began to buckle from the heat. A patch of carpeting smoldered. Many people were coughing as they struggled to breathe; some vomited. Hagerty and others began to hope that nightfall would quell the riot and allow an escape. It seemed their only way out. ..... By 6:30, the roof had gone quiet. Fields decided they had to get out. The hatch was too damaged to open from the inside. The only alternative was to send men out the door of the vault into the third-floor hallway to reach the roof by another route. Miller led a handful of Marines and staff members holding shotguns and pistols. The hallway was blackened by smoke and devoid of light. Gas masks afforded them some protection from tear gas but not from the fumes produced by the burning building. As they stepped out of the vault, felt their way along the hallway and climbed onto the roof, they did not know who might be waiting. They were authorized to shoot. "It was pretty harrowing," Miller says now. It was also the beginning of the end of their ordeal. The demonstrators had all but left the building, although some remained around the compound. The flames of the burning embassy rose up from the sides of the roof, lighting the night, as Marines and others walked the survivors of the vault to a place where they could descend by ladder to the ground. They breathed deeply in the cool air. After everyone was out, Miller climbed the ladder and went back into the vault. A few minutes later he reappeared, holding Crowley's body in a fireman's carry across his shoulders. The blood of the dead Marine stained Miller's shirt. Thanksgiving was somber. A search revealed the burned corpse of Army Warrant Officer Bryan Ellis, 30, who died at his apartment in the compound. Two Pakistani staff members, dead of asphyxiation, were found in the embassy. News reports indicated that two protesters were killed during the previous day's chaos. .... On Nov. 23, Beth Rideout flew out of Pakistan on a jumbo jet with about 400 other Americans, many never to return. She was in shock. She could feel others looking at her, the girlfriend of the dead Marine. She kept thinking how weird it was that Steve was flying home with them, except that he was in the hold of the aircraft. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. President Jimmy Carter sat next to his mother, Georgine, at the funeral. In an earlier phone call, he told her that Crowley died a hero. White House officials initially credited the Pakistani government with rescuing those in the vault, but Marcia Gauger disputed that assertion. "It was our Marine guards who saved us," she wrote in Time. "Nobody else." Loyd Miller, now 63, retired from the Marine Corps as a master gunnery sergeant in 1984. He received a medal honoring "exceptionally meritorious conduct" for his defense of the embassy; his detachment was also commended. Today he cares for his wife, a cancer patient, at their home in Fredericksburg. ..... |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |
| #4 As I am new to blogs and things I don't know where to put it but I love BugMeNot. Thanks to whoever gave the link. |
| Posted by: SwissTex 2004-11-27 6:40:46 PM |
| #3 Patience, young Jedi, all in good time...." |
| Posted by: Sgt. Mom 2004-11-27 5:46:21 PM |
| #2 I remember thinking that someone, somewhere would grease these suckers. I was wrong. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2004-11-27 5:37:50 PM |
| #1 "Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini immediately suggested that Americans were behind the attack on Islam’s holiest place, a falsehood repeated in media reports the morning of Nov. 21." I remember thinking at tht time that that was just one more little thing to hold against Khoumeini. And it was also my first inkling that we might very well be on a collision course with militant Islam... |
| Posted by: Sgt. Mom 2004-11-27 2:19:30 PM |