Embassy bombings spur security boost

America’s other Army: Inside the Foreign Service

Sixth in a series

It was lunchtime on April 18, 1983, and the cafeteria of the American Embassy in Beirut was buzzing with customers.

At about 1 p.m., a powerful blast tore apart the front of the seven-story building. The bomb, hidden in a van reportedly stolen from the embassy 10 months earlier, killed 63 employees, including 17 Americans.

It was the first time that a U.S. embassy had become a terrorist target, and it forever changed the way the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS), the State Department’s law-enforcement division, operates around the world.

“The bombings of the embassy in West Beirut in 1983 and of the embassy annex in East Beirut in 1984 were a major catalyst for creating the Bureau of Diplomatic Security,” which oversees the DSS, said John C. Murphy, special agent in charge of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s protective detail and a DSS agent for 29 years.

The annex was a former apartment building rented by the embassy after the first bombing.

Also in 1983, terrorists attacked the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut and the embassy in Kuwait.

“The number of our agents has more than tripled since then to 1,500, and we’ve adopted more stringent standards for our overseas buildings,” Mr. Murphy said during an interview on Mr. Powell’s plane last week as the secretary returned from a visit to Europe.

The increased attention to security still was not enough: On Aug. 7, 1998, terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network blew up the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Almost 300 people, including 12 Americans, were killed in the first attack and 10 in the second. More than 5,000 were wounded.

A State Department report later found that the U.S. government was not prepared for those assaults despite the history of the past 15 years, but DSS officials say they had done all they could.

“It wasn’t that we didn’t see it coming; our directions were to prevent bombings. That was an absolute priority, but with well over 200 facilities around the world, we could only do so much with the budget and time constraints we had,” a senior security official said.

He said new embassies were being built to higher security standards even before 1998, “but you can’t change every building overnight. It’s a massive and very expensive undertaking.”

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