Outright Assassination Read online

  There are still many questions that have never been fully answered regarding the incident at Jummaizeh, particularly the question was it premeditated? One view is that it was a spontaneous clash but the government capitalized on it for its own good:

  . . . the government may well have wanted to exploit the tension between the Phalanges and the PPS [SNP] in order to work for the elimination of the latter. But it must be remembered that the Phalanges, though generally cooperating with Khuri, were opponents of Sulh. So were the leaders of the PPS who, ever since the advent of Za’im, had blamed Sulh for conspiring against them. At that particular time, the Phalanges were also critical of Khuri, accusing him of having used the government to throw its weight against their candidates in Beirut in the 1947 elections (and even once before, in the 1945 by-elections in the Biqa). Moreover, in the wake of the June incident, the government had some fifty Phalanges men arrested. The regime’s relations with the Phalanges became even more tense after a second major incident, which occurred on 18 July 1949, this time involving the Phalanges and a group of communist port workers in Beirut.44

  The alternative view is that the government had foreknowledge of the incident and possibly direct involvement in its planning and execution. It rejects any overtly political interpretation of the incident as highly speculative, particularly where unconscious motivations may have played a larger than usual role. Pointing to the government’s disproportionate response to the belligerent parties, proponents of this view see the incident more as a sequence in an unfolding cycle of violence and suspicion rather than as an isolated event. It was part of a general pattern in which the conspiracy was orchestrated by the government “which withdrew its security forces from the place at the zero hour, according to information leaked out by concerned parties.”45 Naturally, a panicking government that has already decided the fate of its adversary is not one that would wait around patiently for a pretext to emerge to make its move: it creates the pretext.

  Following the incident at Jummaizeh orders went out to security forces to track down Sa’adeh. The government justified its action on the ground that Sa’adeh was preparing a massive armed coup against the regime. It gave no further details about the plot except to say that the SNP leader had “a systematic plan” to stir up internal riots as preparatory to a military takeover. Recently acquired documents reveal a more somber view of the so-called plan.46 At any rate, Sa’adeh escaped before the Lebanese Gendarmerie arrived at his house and arrested whoever was there. He spent the next few days moving about the Lebanese capital until he made his way to Alley in the Shouf. At some point in this escapade he received a signal from Zaim to come back to Syria. The details are unclear. The message was conveyed to him through Major Toufiq Bashur, a senior officer in the Syrian army and a personal friend of Sa’adeh, who in turn enlisted the help of a party member, Najib Bulus, to reach the SNP leader. Bulus later recounted:

  As I drove to Beirut I noticed a Lebanese Security vehicle following me from a distance. In Beirut I contacted comrade Elias Saad, a relative, and asked him to meet me at once . . . the meeting took place at Café Mansour. Again I noticed a Lebanese Security Patrol near my car. I asked Saad to find out for me Sa’adeh’s whereabouts. A short time later he returned with an answer but forgot to bring with him the password that I would require to state to see Sa’adeh. I said to him “stay put to deceive the security patrol outside. I will leave from the Café’s backdoor.”47

  Bulus goes on to say:

  I took the first taxi to al-Hadath and got out at mid point in the street where the building was situated. When I approached the entrance the guards called out “stop, stop.” I said “Long live Syria. I am comrade Najib Bulus. I am here to see Sa’adeh.” When the guards asked for the password I replied, “I don’t know it.” But Sa’adeh, who knew me, heard my voice and instructed the guards to let me in. I found him sitting in a small and shabby room. He asked me “What news do you bring me?” I conveyed to him the message that I had been asked to deliver by Major Bashur. He said “Are you certain it was Major Bashur who gave you this message?” “Yes,” I replied. He then said: “Inform the Major that I agree to the meeting and to start making arrangements.” He thanked me and implored me to take care on the way back.48

  Sa’adeh arrived in Damascus on 14 June. Several conjectures have been offered as to how he crossed into Syria but the most widely accepted one is that when he arrived at the Lebanese border checkpoint the driver occupied the attending officers with the necessary paperwork while Sa’adeh slipped across on foot over a side hill. Once the car crossed into the vacant stretch that separates the Lebanese checkpoint from the Syrian checkpoint, Sa’adeh strolled down to the main highway and climbed back. The attending officer at the Syrian checkpoint turned out to be an SNP member and instantly passed the vehicle through.49

  Sabri Qubbani was among the first to welcome Sa’adeh. “He was sitting in a private section of the room with two army officers. The three of them, dressed in khaki shirts and khaki pants and with hair unkempt, appeared to be in a state of emergency. They were sitting around a large table covered with pieces of paper and letters.”50 Although outwardly calm, Sa’adeh was akin to a volcano waiting to erupt. Two days later, Zaim scheduled an evening meeting at his private residence but later changed it to the General Staff Office. Qubbani attributed the eleventh-hour venue change to Zaim’s desire “to parade his power and supremacy at work before Sa’adeh. He wanted to lure Sa’adeh into his den where the military police, armed with Tommy Guns, cram the place, on the stairs and behind doors so that if he hollers the walls would shudder at his thunderous voice.”51 Qubbani knew Zaim like the back of his hand and keenly shared his thoughts with Sa’adeh. While waiting their turn to see Zaim, he made several crucial observations to Sa’adeh which the latter took with him to the meeting.

  Predictably, Zaim put on a remarkable act to impress his guest. “Welcome. Thank God you are safe”52 he said before launching into a tirade against the Khoury regime. Sa’adeh was more cautious. He assured the Syrian leader that all earlier reports of an SNP plot to overthrow the regime in Lebanon were idle talk and that the weapons confiscated by the Lebanese army in the previous days “were ordinary weapons of the kind you would expect to find in Lebanese villages.”53 Describing the occasion as a “historic meeting,” Qubbani also confirmed that the two men discussed security arrangements, including the flow of arms and ammunitions, but insisted that it was strictly for deterrent purposes:

  Sa’adah did not want to raise weapons in the face of the Lebanese regime. The idea never even occurred to him, and so he never prepared for that day . . . Five hundred guns with their ammunition were enough to stop [the Lebanese regime] from pursuing its virulent campaign against the party without even needing to use them.54

  Contrary to the impression sometimes given in the press and other publications, Sa’adeh’s primary concern was to break the cordon around his supporters in Lebanon, not to topple the regime. The thought of party members made homeless, jailed and atrociously tortured in Lebanon troubled him every step along the way. His words to Qubbani are revealing:

  My only concern right now is for the party members who have been banished or arrested and the torture they are enduring. Some have their lost their businesses and had to close down for the sake of their beliefs; others have fallen while trying to escape with party documents containing members names and other matters. I hope to God we succeed and triumph after all the enormous sacrifices we have made.55

  Already an independent report published by an-Nahar immediately after the Jummaizeh clash had adjudged his party’s ammunition and weapons cache as hardly regime-threatening.56 Yet, the Lebanese government continued to insist that this one shortcoming did not diminish the value of the remaining evidence, which was ample to prove Sa’adeh guilty.

  Meanwhile, Zaim responded to his guest with outlandish offers of “weapons and ammunition on a large scale as soon as a truce with the Jews is signed.”57 He vowed
to remain a loyal friend “to the very end”58 and indeed presented Sa’adeh with his own personal pistol as a token of their friendship. As the two men rose to their feet, Zaim offered his guest the protection of his security guards but the SNP leader politely declined the offer. Instructions then went out to Qubbani to act as a liaison officer with Sa’adeh and to Colonel Ibrahim al-Husseini, Zaim’s Chief of Security, to look after the logistics.

  On the surface, the meeting was both constructive and businesslike. It was much more relaxed and well-intended than the first meeting and provided a promise for further progress. Sa’adeh got his wish and the promise of Syrian support against the Lebanese regime and Zaim gained an ally and relative bargaining strength vis-à-vis his Lebanese foes. The outlook for Sa’adeh looked even rosier as the deal concretized:

  I bid [Sa’adeh] goodbye and headed straight to Lieutenant Colonel al-Husseini. He was a very hard man to catch . . . The moment I phoned him, he dropped everything and the two of us headed in his car to Sa’adeh’s headquarters. Every now and then I would point the driver in the right direction . . . It turned out, by sheer coincidence, that Sa’adeh’s headquarters was situated not far from the Colonel’s own house. On the way, I briefly explained to al-Husseini the gravity of the mission and the importance of the party and the scope of its movement as well as its impact on the future of Arab unity and national duty, which is an incentive for us to extend help as far as we possibly can . . . I left, confident that things were moving steadily toward the target we all held in common.59

  While the SNP looked hopefully for new revelations which it supposed would finally yield decisive proof of its innocence, Sa’adeh took the offensive yet again, with a sensational new expose that poured more fuel on the raging fire.60 More than that, Sa’adeh now sought to re-draw the battle lines with the Khoury regime: “At this stage in the war that the Lebanese Government has declared, trampling over the most sacred principles of national life, I dare the government to accept the following challenge: to pick out a time and place for a single decisive battle between the power of the [Syrian] National Party and that of the government and its sectarian allies using all the weapons kept with its army but allowing the officers and regular soldiers to choose between fighting or not fighting the [Syrian] National Party.”61

  The expose was widely circulated among party members in Syria and Lebanon. Smuggling it into Lebanon wasn’t difficult62 and brought with it swift retaliation from the Lebanese government. The government took the statement “as evidence that the party’s strength was intact and that its campaign against it had failed to undermine the party or sap its power.”63 Predictably, the security forces of the state were unleashed on suspected SNP pockets resulting in the arrest of many more. In the process one party member was reported killed and the house of another was burned to the ground after it was ransacked.

  Critics were not amused. They adjudged the renewed drive against the Syrian nationalists as a potent ingredient of the government’s failure to contain Sa’adeh and questioned the utility of using strong-arm tactics while Zaim was courting Sa’adeh. The press was equally disappointed and ruthlessly disparaged the government. Al-Sayyad wrote:

  The plan was supposed to be carried out with precision, and Antun Sa’adeh was supposedly heading the list of those to be arrested, especially given that he had been under close surveillance from the moment the Security Council had decided [to dissolve the SNP]. Yet what took place was, in every sense, inexplicable. Antun Sa’adeh, George Abdul Massih, and other party cadres have managed to escape, despite the secrecy that was maintained and Sa’adeh’s presence in Beirut, and at Al-Jumaizzah in particular, the night he fled.64

  An-Nahar dropped a bigger bombshell by reporting in bold print that the government had been unable to find a single pertinent document implicating Sa’adeh in a plot to overthrow the regime.65 The so-called plot apparently amounted to little more than consultations with Lebanese army officers in broad daylight, hardly a plan to overthrow the regime.

  To a large extent, it consisted simply of encouraging public discontent to force the regime to step down.66 Less helpful was the booty seized from SNP offices: a short instructional manual “on what course of action party members should follow in the event of a military coup or a revolution.”67 No weapons of significant value or quantity were discovered.

  The Charge of Treason

  Suddenly, it seemed necessary to do something if the pretense of central authority and that of government righteousness were to be maintained. Official and private investigations went on fitfully, but neither turned up much.68 Incredibly, no effort was made to consider alternative solutions even as both sides traded invectives. The persistence and passion with which each side maintained its arguments now mattered just as much as the arguments themselves. With Sa’adeh on the offensive and local critics not far off, the government came up with a novel idea reminiscent of the famous bordereau in the Dreyfus Affair in France almost fifty years before. It made the incredible claim that Sa’adeh was an Israeli collaborator and that, in exchange for Jewish support, he had passed very important and sensitive military information about the Arab campaign in Palestine. In the political context of the day, it was a most sensational allegation. The government made the denunciation public with all the fanfare of an espionage scandal claiming that it had crushing proof. On June 20, it published the text of a letter containing specific instructions from Sa’adeh to his aide-de-camp in Haifa, Muhammad Jamil Yunis, to contact the Israelis and ask for financial and military assistance. The next day the Public Prosecutor gave the claim a cloak of judicial legality by formally charging Sa’adeh with subversion. The indictment against Sa’adeh contained three astonishing claims:

  That Sa’adeh had sought help from a foreign state and that this state now was Israel.

  That “the purpose was not merely to stage a military coup in Lebanon and seize the reins of power in it, but also to undermine the Syrian state and Husni Zaim in particular on account of his firm stand against the Zionists.”

  That “the contact [between Sa’adeh and the Israelis] reached the point of an actual treaty whereby Israel agreed to supply the party with weapons and funds to carry out a military coup in Lebanon and destabilize the Zaim regime in Syria.”69

  Now the Sa’adeh case created an enormous uproar, with the many anti-SNP newspapers and politicians screaming about treason. Even those who did not scream much about the SNP were generally still strident about the treason and its irresolute prosecution. They knew little about the charges and the evidence, but this did not matter: loyalist newspapers daily published further details of supposed evidence, retelling as factual the rumours then current. When rumours did not suffice, fresh stories were invented by the ever imaginative press. Outside government circles, the publication of the letter caused a stir and led to speculation about its authenticity. Making the most of so sensational a story, the popular daily an-Nahar published an elaborate review of the indictment. It found no single item of substantial evidential value in it and doubted if the relevant documents, especially the supposed treaty between Sa’adeh and the Israelis, could be produced.70 The paper stopped short of dismissing the letter as a hoax, if only for the sake of circulation. Other newspapers and public forums then entered the fray and the issue became an occasion for attention-getting for the government.

  Meanwhile, Sa’adeh considered the matter so urgent that he drafted a reply and dispatched it to the Arab News Agency, which in turn cabled it to its Cairo office for broadcasting on Arab radio stations and for circulation to affiliated newspapers.71 The dispatch was not published, most likely at the behest of the Egyptian government.72 Eventually, the Damascene daily al-Alam published a shorter version of it with a supplementary foreword from Qubbani “to divert attention away from Sa’adeh’s location.”73 Its content was robust, declaring in the most categorical terms the letter as a gross forgery.74

  As the Lebanese debated the treason charge against Sa’adeh, directed
towards confirming or refuting the authenticity of the purported letter, Solh actively sought ways to clear the air with Damascus. He enlisted the help of Saudi Arabia and Egypt and began to make positive overtures to the Syrian leader.75 With their suspicions already aroused by the presence of Sa’adeh in Damascus, the Saudi and Egyptian governments reciprocated by bringing their own pressure to bear on Zaim.76 The man entrusted with the task of swaying Zaim was Muhsin al-Barrazi, the then Syrian ambassador in Cairo. He returned to Syria at the behest of King Faruq to coordinate the talks. Barrazi was Solh’s brother-in-law. A gullible dupe and a facile manipulator of words, he was close to the ruling families in both Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Mohammad Fadhel Jamali in his Experiences in Arab Affairs describes him as “the one who feeds the Egyptian papers with the help of Saudi money.”77 Barrazi was prolific in his new role. Within days of his arrival he managed to draw Zaim away from the Greater Syria concept and into the Egyptian-Saudi bloc. The Damascene newspaper, an-Nasr, in its issue of 22 June, quoted the Syrian leader as saying:

  I want to make it clear that the Greater Syria project has become out of date for two reasons. First, the rapid progress and the industrial and agricultural improvement which Syria will enjoy shortly will open a deep gap between Syria and the Hashimite governments. Secondly, I have decided to join the Saudi-Egyptian camp because those two kingdoms have demonstrated extreme friendship, assistance, and nobility toward new Syria. It is my opinion that this strong unity between Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia will be a strong front against the Greater Syria project.78