When Gerald Butt arrived in Beirut in early 1983 as the BBC’s Middle East correspondent, those supposedly in the know assured him and his wife, Lynne, that the civil war was over: that the Israelis were unwinding their 1982 Lebanon invasion-occupation; that western armies were there to keep the antagonists apart and to hold Syria and its allies at bay; and that the PLO and its fighters had left town. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
The Butts had been misinformed (as Gerald no doubt intuited). All those elements and more fused to reignite the civil war. Within weeks Gerald and his family were in the midst of renewed street warfare and inter-suburban shelling. In April 1983 an Islamist suicide bomber blew up the US embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people; six months later another jihadist killed 241 American servicemen at the US Marines’ base on the southern shores of Beirut, and 58 French servicemen died when their barracks in the city were similarly bombed. Hezbollah was in the making.
