American Diplomat Survived Israeli Assassination Attempt

A new memoir by an American diplomat shines light on the lengths Israel may have gone to undermine the Palestinians and advance its own interests.

John Gunther Dean is a distinguished foreign service officer whose career took him from West Africa to Denmark, Thailand, India, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos [where he negotiated a coalition government that prevented civil war] and finally to Lebanon in 1980.

A fluent French speaker raised in a Jewish family, Ambassador Dean's appointment to Lebanon was met with some opposition by Congressional members who thought a Jewish-American serving as ambassador in war-torn Lebanon where Israel was a player in the war would not be able to serve objectively. Dean resented such assertions, and given his conduct in Lebanon justifiable so.

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[The Green Line in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. Wikipedia.]

Between 1970 and 1982, the Palestine Liberation Organization established a state-within-a-state in Lebanon after the PLO was kicked out of Jordan in a failed coup attempt against the Hashimite Kingdom in what become known as Black September.

The PLO used Lebanon was a planning base for attacks against Israel and Israeli targets in Europe. In its war against the Palestinians, Israel continually sought to undermine the PLO in Lebanon and sided with their enemies in the civil war of 1975-1990. With its invasion of the country in 1982, Israel was with American assistance able to force the PLO out of Beirut and to Tunis. But before they could do that, Ambassador Dean recognized early on that the Palestinians were not going to give up their struggle thus negotiations for some sort of settlement with their organizations was needed. This was a time when the United States and the entire Western world still declared the PLO to be a terrorist organization and shunned contacts with it. It would not be until October 1991 when the United States would start official talks with the PLO in the Madrid regional peace conference, and even then the PLO had to be part of the Jordanian delegation.

Ambassador Dean though did not wait for the right conference. Instead, within his proper ambassadorial boundaries he pursued minimal talks with the PLO. When Israel found out about his they worried about the consequences of such talks. If the United States recognized the PLO and started negotiations then that would undermine Israel's objective to sideline and the Palestinians and deny them their due. Therefore the Israelis decided, according to Ambassador Dean, to nip the talks in the bud. In that cause, Ambassador Dean writes in his memoir, Danger Zones: A Diplomat's Fight for America's Interests, that we has the target of an Israeli assassination attempt.

"I was the target of an assassination attempt by terrorists using automatic rifles and antitank weapons that had been made in the United States and shipped to Israel," he wrote in his memoir. Adding, "Weapons financed and given by the United States to Israel were used in an attempt to kill an American diplomat!"

Surviving the attempt, the ambassador contacted the State Department for information. Their words were always inconclusive, he states.

It is not entirely clear if Israel was behind the attempt. There is no hard proof, only a hunch by the ambassador. Further, Lebanon was then in dizzying civil war where American diplomats had already become the target of attacks by Shia militias after the United States had actively joined the war on the side of the right-wing Christian Phalange and Lebanese Forces group.

Nonetheless, the ambassador started to publicize his concern that Israel may have been the culprit. It was then, he writes, that he came under attacks in what he terms a "Stalinist" manner. The State Department declared him mentally unstable and dismembered him from the foreign service.

The ambassador then had to embark on a long journey to clear his name. Fortunately for him, he was finally able to.

Suddenly his health record was cleared and his security clearance restored. He was presented with the Distinguished Service Award and received a warm letter of praise from Secretary of State George Shultz. "Years later," he wrote in his memoir, "I learned who had ordered the bogus diagnosis of mental incapacity against me. It was the same man who had so effusively praised me once I was gone--George Shultz."

Why was he the target of attacks? After all, many other American ambassador have may what can be seen as fanciful claims against other governments. Ambassador Dean attributes his firing and tarnishing to the influence of pro-Israel groups who sought to protect the Jewish state from such a nefarious accusation.