The retrospective assessment

Cable 1975BEIRUT03203 is Ambassador Godley’s first full strategic assessment of the Sidon crisis, filed from Beirut on the evening of March 12, 1975, three hours before the Council of Ministers convened. The cable is classified SECRET, with the additional compartments LIMDIS (Limited Distribution) and NOFORN (Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals). It was marked “Dept pass Secretary’s Party”, a routing instruction that directed the State Department to forward the cable to Kissinger’s traveling shuttle in the Middle East. The Department carried out the instruction the same day via cable STATE 057899.

The cable opens with a summary paragraph whose plain-language judgments are worth reading twice. The Sidon clashes have “dangerously aroused confessional feelings in Lebanon.” The GOL has been “further discredited in the eyes of a substantial portion of the Moslem population.” The Lebanese Army’s ability to control the fedayeen, already limited, has been “reduced significantly.” And — the operational finding of the cable — any Israeli retaliation for the March 5 Savoy Hotel attack “would force the Lebanese Army to respond or lose all credibility with the Lebanese public.”

In the voice of an Ambassador filing at the SECRET/LIMDIS/NOFORN level, these are serious judgments. Godley is not forecasting civil war; he is describing the conditions under which one would be initiated. He is also, in the closing paragraph, making a direct appeal to Israeli leadership to restrain itself — an appeal that, through the Department’s forwarding to Kissinger, would be placed in front of the Secretary at the decision point.

Musa Sadr joins the opposition

One paragraph of the cable deserves particular attention: the parenthetical noting that “This anti-GOL agitation has lately been joined by Shi’ite Imam Musa Sadr, who had remained curiously silent throughout most of last week’s troubles.”

Imam Musa al-Sadr, the Iranian-Lebanese Shia cleric who had founded the Movement of the Deprived the previous year, was the principal political organizer of Lebanon’s Shia community. His silence during the first two weeks of the Sidon crisis had been conspicuous. The fishermen at Sidon were predominantly Sunni; the fedayeen leading the occupation were Palestinians; the political mobilization around Saad’s death was Sunni-leftist. The Shia community could have stayed out of the confrontation entirely, and for most of the first two weeks Sadr had positioned them to do so.

Sadr’s decision, around March 10–11, to publicly align with the Sunni-leftist agitation changed the shape of the coalition. The organized Shia community now formally entered the anti-Frangieh opposition. Four months later, Sadr would publicly name the Amal Movement (Afwaj al-Muqawama al-Lubnaniyya) as the armed wing of the Movement of the Deprived. The trajectory from March 12, 1975 to the armed Shia politics of the later civil war runs through this moment.

Kanaan’s numerical disclosure

Paragraph 5 of the cable delivers the most operationally significant piece of intelligence in the entire Sidon diplomatic record. Brigadier Kanaan, the Lebanese Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, had briefed the U.S. Defense Attaché’s Office on the Army’s professional assessment of what had happened on the evening of March 1.

The figures were devastating. The Lebanese Army had committed 100 to 150 troops to the operation of reopening the main coastal road at Sidon. They had found themselves opposed by over 1,000 fedayeen, firing machine-guns, RPG rockets, and recoilless rifles from rooftop and other fortified positions in and around Sidon’s Old City. The numerical disadvantage was approximately 8:1, with the defender holding the terrain and the firepower. The Army killed 25 to 30 fedayeen during the fighting; Kanaan noted that the Army’s own losses would have been heavier had its troops not been using armored personnel carriers.

The figures answered a question the Embassy had left hanging through the first two weeks of the crisis: why had the Army not returned to Sidon? The answer was now documentary. The Army had been outnumbered 8:1 in an engagement it had initiated, on terrain of its adversary’s choosing, against a force firing from fortified positions with heavy infantry weapons. The return to Sidon in force would have required a substantially larger commitment of Army resources — and a political decision to accept the all-out confrontation with the fedayeen and their Lebanese sympathizers that such a commitment would have provoked. Kanaan’s later remark (in cable 03256) that the GOL and Army leadership “never entertained any intention of ‘smashing’ the fedayeen in Sidon” is the obverse of the numerical fact: the Army had neither the force structure nor the political authority for the operation the situation would have required.

Abu Saleh identified

The second revelation in paragraph 5 was the identity of the commander of the fedayeen force. Kanaan’s briefing identified the fedayeen operation in Sidon as “leftist” fedayeen elements — not only from the “rejectionist” groups but also elements from Sa’iqa and Fatah — who had taken advantage of the Sidon affair from the very start. Overall command, Kanaan told the Embassy, had been assumed by Fatah’s “leftist” military leader Abu Saleh, recently returned from exile in East Berlin.

The identification had three significant implications. First, the Sidon operation was not a spontaneous camp-militia response to the February 26 fishermen’s demonstration but a professionally-commanded Fatah leftist operation, executed under the direction of a senior Fatah commander. Second, the commander himself had direct East German intelligence connections; East Berlin in the 1970s hosted the Fatah left, provided Stasi security-service training to Palestinian commanders, and maintained direct political relations with the faction. Third, the fact that the command was held by Fatah’s leftist wing, rather than by the rejectionist factions (PFLP, DFLP), complicated any simple explanation of the operation as a rejectionist provocation against Arafat’s moderate leadership. Fatah’s own left wing, under a recognized Fatah commander, had executed the operation.

Abu Saleh (Nimr Saleh) would later break publicly with Arafat and lead Fatah al-Intifada against him in 1983; his leftist posture in March 1975 was an early marker of that eventual rupture. For the Embassy to name him in a SECRET/LIMDIS/NOFORN cable is the Lebanese Army’s fingerprinting of the operation, preserved in the diplomatic archive.

The warning to Israel

The closing paragraphs of cable 03203 deliver the operational warning. Paragraph 6: “Israeli retaliation against Lebanon in the near future for the Mar 5 terrorist raid on Tel Aviv would place the GOL in an impossible position vis-à-vis many of its own citizens, as well as the fedayeen, if it does not order the Army to respond.” Paragraph 7: “We hope Israeli leadership will think long and hard before undertaking action which could threaten the integrity of the present Lebanese regime and would almost certainly force the Lebanese Army (against its will but of necessity — i.e., to avoid being classed as traitors in Sunni, leftist and fedayeen eyes after ‘having killed brother Arabs’ in Sidon) to respond energetically to any Israeli action.”

This is not a routine diplomatic observation. The Ambassador is stating that the continued integrity of the Lebanese regime depends on Israeli restraint, and he is requesting that Israeli leadership understand this. In the diplomatic logic of the cable, the message will be conveyed to Israeli leadership through U.S. channels: the State Department will forward the cable to Kissinger, who is physically in Jerusalem conducting shuttle diplomacy, and the analysis will enter the active decision-making on the Israeli side.

The cable was forwarded that same day. State Department cable 057899 (signed by Acting Secretary Robert S. Ingersoll, Kissinger being in Israel) transmitted the verbatim text of BEIRUT 3203 to Secretary Kissinger’s traveling party via the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem. The reference line “TOSEC 523” identifies the cable as number 523 in the series of cables sent to the Secretary during this particular travel. The cable’s distribution was limited to the NSC Executive Secretariat and to the S/S office (the Secretary’s immediate staff).

As an administrative matter, the warning reached Kissinger. As a policy matter, no U.S.-sanctioned Israeli reprisal for the Savoy Hotel attack materialized in the immediate window. Kissinger’s shuttle collapsed on March 22 over Israeli refusal to accept partial withdrawal from the Mitla and Giddi passes, and the Secretary returned to Washington empty-handed. The eventual Israeli reprisal for the Savoy Hotel attack — Operation Marvad, the Mount Moussa raid — came nine months later, on December 2, 1975. By that point, the Lebanese civil war had been under way for eight months; the Lebanese regime Godley had tried to protect had effectively ceased to function.

The compromise solution

Cable 1975BEIRUT03256, filed 48 hours after 03203, records the political outcome of the March 12 Council of Ministers meeting. The compromise solution foreseen in the first cable had been achieved. The Sunni-leftist demand for a Command Council reorganizing the Army’s command had been referred to a special cabinet committee for “study” — the traditional Lebanese parliamentary device for deferring a demand indefinitely while allowing tempers to cool. The Economy Minister had been charged with satisfying the fishermen. Frangieh and Solh had agreed to transfer the Army’s Southern District commander and his intelligence officer to “other posts” — a lateral reassignment that conceded the appearance of the Sunni-leftist demand without actually conceding its substance.

The Solh cabinet survived. Confessional tensions were expected to subside. The Sidon general strike would soon be called off. In the short term, the political logic of the Lebanese system had once again produced a compromise that held the cabinet together.

But Godley’s comment paragraph records the residual fact: the fedayeen were showing “some reluctance to allow that city to revert to full GOL control.” The compromise had resolved the cabinet crisis; it had not dislodged the fedayeen from Sidon. Sidon’s dual-sovereignty condition — formally under Lebanese state authority, operationally under fedayeen control — would become the new normal and would persist through the civil war. The Lebanese Army would not return to the city in force until after the Syrian intervention of 1976.

The double game

The most politically consequential allegation in cable 03256 is Kanaan’s charge that the PLO leadership had been playing a “double game.” Arafat and the Fatah central command had publicly deployed Abu Za’im (Atallah Atallah, a senior Fatah intelligence officer who had been arrested by the Lebanese Army on March 2 and subsequently released) and Abu Hassan (Ali Hassan Salameh, Arafat’s senior intelligence operative) as mediators to negotiate with Abu Saleh. The Army had intercepted Fatah radio communications urging Abu Saleh and his associates to cooperate with the GOL. On the face of the evidence, Fatah was cooperating.

But Kanaan’s judgment was that the radio communications were themselves part of the performance, that the PLO leadership was pretending to cooperate with the GOL while privately doing nothing to reduce the fedayeen occupation of Sidon. The strategic logic, Kanaan told the Embassy, was that Arafat — having been “filled full of scare stories re an impending Lebanese Army attempt to ‘liquidate’ the fedayeen presence by Soviet officials — including Amb Soldatov — in recent weeks” — was “anxious to see the Army’s ability to confront the fedayeen further circumscribed” by the Sidon clashes and the confessional turmoil that followed.

The named identification of Aleksandr A. Soldatov, the Soviet Ambassador to Lebanon, in a SECRET/LIMDIS/NOFORN U.S. Embassy cable, as an active manipulator of Arafat’s political calculations is a significant diplomatic marker. The charge is routed through Lebanese Army G-2 intelligence; the Embassy does not independently confirm it but passes it forward as the professional judgment of the Lebanese Army’s operations chief. The cable was forwarded the same day to Secretary Kissinger’s Jerusalem shuttle. Whatever it would do with the allegation, the U.S. policy-making apparatus had now registered Soviet political-intelligence activity as a specific factor in the chain of events that produced the Sidon crisis.

The murky Syrian role

The final analytical paragraph of cable 03256 engages directly with the question of Syrian intentions. The Embassy identifies contradictory evidence: Syria had counselled Sa’iqa to withdraw from Sidon; but Sa’iqa leaders Zohayr and Majid Muhsen had not obeyed; and Kanaan categorically insists Sa’iqa elements participated in the clashes and in the occupation. The March 7 funeral procession for Saad in Sidon had featured “PLO and Sa’iqa units” in highly visible roles — an operational fact that confirmed Sa’iqa participation regardless of Syrian diplomatic claims.

Kanaan’s hypothesis was that the SARG may have encouraged the Sidon clashes in order to foment wider disturbances in Lebanon. The Syrian strategic calculation would have involved several elements: weakening the Frangieh regime, which was perceived in Damascus as aligned with Saudi Arabia and the West; creating political leverage for eventual Syrian intervention in Lebanon; disciplining the PLO by producing a crisis the PLO could not control; and blocking any Lebanese movement toward a bilateral initiative with Israel. In hindsight, the Syrian intervention in Lebanon would begin in April 1976, under cover of the civil war. The Sidon crisis of March 1975 may be read as an early marker of Syrian willingness to accept Lebanese destabilization as a strategic good.

The close of the record

Cables 03203 and 03256 together close the Sidon crisis diplomatic record. The sequence from 02611 (February 26) through 03256 (March 14) documents the crisis continuously over sixteen days. The final cable’s quiet closing sentence — “the Lebanese Army’s ability to correct this situation has been significantly diminished by the events of the past two weeks” — is the formal record of a strategic fact.

What the Embassy had been watching was the transition of Lebanon from a state that nominally controlled its territory into a state whose control over key urban areas had been transferred to armed groups it could not dislodge. Sidon became the model. Over the next four weeks — from March 14 to April 13, 1975 — the same process would begin to play out in Beirut. The Sidon crisis was not the first warning; it was the last one the Lebanese state received before the Ain al-Rummaneh bus attack began the civil war.

The forwarding of cable BEIRUT 3203 to Kissinger’s shuttle via STATE 057899 establishes the administrative record that the warning reached the highest level of U.S. policy-making at the active decision window. The forwarding did not produce an intervention. Neither the United States nor Israel did anything in the March window that would have changed the trajectory the cables had described. Four weeks after Godley filed the warning, the civil war began.