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Intelligence Community Case Method Program |
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Home | About Us | About the Case Method | ICCMP Services | Search Site |
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Intelligence Community Case Method Program |
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Home | About Us | About the Case Method | ICCMP Services | Search Site |
At 0622 hours on Sunday, 23 October 1983, an unidentified young man drove a yellow Mercedes stake-bed truck into a parking lot of the Beirut International Airport. Accelerating toward the four-story concrete building that housed the headquarters element of a US Marine Corps Batallion Landing Team (BLT), the man drove through a barbed wire and concertina fence and passed between two Marine guard posts without being engaged by fire. The truck then passed through an open gate and around some sewer pipe barriers, flattened the Seargeant of the Guard's sandbagged booth, and entered the lobby of the building. The driver then detonated a bomb loaded on the truck.
The explosion - roughly equivalent to that of some 12,000 lbs of TNT - lifted the building from its concrete pillar foundation. The building then collapsed, killing 241 of its estimated 350 occupants. It was the largest single-day loss of life in the Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima.