ISLAMABAD 25
Years Ago
was a taste of what was to come
MIDDLEEAST.ORG - MER - Washington - 27
November: Twenty-five
years ago, as hate-filled crowds invaded the American Embassy in
Islamabad and the 100+ Americans hiding in 'The Vault' feared they
would be killed, there was already in the air of international affairs
an omen of what was to come. What happened then
has since politically metasticized into what is happening today, an
escalating 'Clash of Civilizations' with the United States doubly
tinged with fundamentalist Crusading zealotry and Israeli Zionist
ideology. And the hatreds, despair, and sense of grievance
in many places in the world, including today's Pakistan, are still
growing....
A Day of Terror Recalled
1979 Embassy Siege In Islamabad Still Haunts Survivors
By Cameron W. Barr
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 27, 2004;
Page A20
Marine Master Sgt. Loyd G. Miller stood in the lobby of
the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, and deployed his troops.
Outside the locked gate of the 32-acre embassy compound, bus after bus
after bus disgorged crowds of student protesters.
"Kill the American dogs," some shouted.
Miller had five Marines under his command; he sent two to the
embassy's roof to assess the demonstration. He watched with growing
anxiety as protesters pulled down part of the compound's outer wall and
surged inside.
He heard gunshots. He knew the members of his Marine security
guard
detachment were not authorized to fire. He ran to the roof to see what
was happening.
Cpl. Steven J. Crowley was slumped over, bleeding from a
bullet
wound above his left ear. Miller helped carry the unconscious Marine
into the building. Staff members headed for the embassy's steel-encased
communications rooms, a secure area known as "the vault."
It was a little after lunchtime on Nov. 21, 1979. In a day of
orchestrated anti-American outrage, Pakistanis were attacking several
U.S. facilities across the country.
Twenty-five years later, this outburst seems a thin slice of
history, sandwiched between the taking of U.S. hostages in Iran and the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Officially, Nov. 21 was quickly
forgotten, seen by the United States as an aberration in its complex
but generally productive relationship with Pakistan.
For many of the people who endured the embassy attack and its
aftermath, these events linger, called to mind each year as
Thanksgiving approaches. "I came away from that with a really deep
understanding of the hostility that other nations hold toward America,"
said Beth Rideout, who as a high school senior was Crowley's girlfriend.
Some survivors have resolved to help make the United States
stronger. Others wish that Americans were wiser about the rest of the
world. In the years after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, that wish has
sometimes turned to despair.
"My own frustration -- great frustration -- with America is
that it
continues to be so inward looking, so negligent of the world," said
Raymond L. Rideout, Beth's father. In 1979, he was acting principal of
the International School of Islamabad, which was also attacked by
anti-American demonstrators. "Americans seem not to have a clue about
how the world thinks."
Retreating
to the Vault
By 1:40 p.m., nearly 140 people -- U.S. diplomats, Pakistani
staff
members, a visiting Time magazine correspondent -- had assembled in the
vault, a suite of rooms on the top floor of the three-story embassy
building. Marines had covered their retreat upstairs by tossing tear
gas canisters as protesters broke their way into the embassy,
shattering windows and setting fires in offices.
As CIA officers began to destroy secret files and equipment,
diplomats maintained contact with officials outside the embassy,
including Ambassador Arthur W. Hummel Jr., who had left the building
for lunch. He began demanding help from Pakistan's government. A nurse
worked to halt Crowley's bleeding until he could be hospitalized.
Smoke started seeping into the vault. The people inside sat
quietly,
most of them on the floor, crowded into a space intended to hold far
fewer occupants. The temperature rose, and the air, tainted by tear gas
and smoke, grew hard to breathe. They took off extra clothing and
passed around wet paper towels to use as filters.
Time's Marcia Gauger, who had stopped by the embassy that day
to
have lunch with political counselor Herbert G. Hagerty, scribbled in a
notebook, wondering how she might ensure that her record of events
would survive, even if she did not. As the afternoon wore on, she would
become convinced that she would die.
Noises overhead indicated that protesters were on the roof of
the
building. Some fired bullets down ventilation shafts. The rioters began
beating on a metal hatch connecting the vault to the roof. Miller had
men with guns stand guard under the hatch, prepared to kill anyone who
broke through.
Sitting in his home in Northwest Washington, 25 years after
enduring
this experience, Hagerty says it is tempting to draw a line between
Nov. 21 and the current conflict between militant Islam and the United
States. "But jihadism -- that wasn't the issue," he added. "The
Pakistanis were [mad] at us for reasons of their own." These included
the Carter administration's decision to cut off aid over concerns about
Pakistan's nuclear ambitions and U.S. criticism of the human rights
record of its dictator, Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq.
In trying to explain Nov. 21, U.S. officials have cited those
issues
and the atmosphere of the day. Earlier that year, Shiite clerics in
Iran had overthrown a U.S.-backed dictator. On Nov. 4, Iranian
revolutionaries had seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and taken dozens
of Americans hostage.
On Nov. 20, a Saudi Arabian religious zealot had led a
takeover of
the Grand Mosque at Mecca. Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
immediately suggested that Americans were behind the attack on Islam's
holiest place, a falsehood repeated in media reports the morning of
Nov. 21.
But some experts are now seeing a closer link between the
motivations of the Pakistani students and the thinking of militant
Muslims determined to wage war against the United States. Washington
Post Managing Editor Steve Coll writes in his 2004 book, "Ghost Wars:
The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, From the
Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001," that the uprising was primarily
led by the student wing of an Islamist group, Jamaat-e-Islami, that was
rising in prominence and influence. When Osama bin Laden first traveled
to Pakistan in 1980 or 1981, he visited Jamaat and donated money to the
group, Coll writes.
'I Felt
His Spirit'
About five miles away, on the other side of Islamabad,
administrators at the International School knew the embassy was under
siege and wondered what to do with the American children in their
charge. Some students had two parents inside a burning building whose
smoke was visible on the horizon.
Acting principal Rideout and other administrators canceled
afternoon
buses and called parents to pick up their children. By midafternoon,
mainly Americans were left. Beth Rideout, the 17-year-old president of
the student body, took refuge in the school's music room. A pretty girl
with high cheekbones who often tied her hair back, she sat under the
piano and comforted an elementary school student.
A few months earlier, she had begun dating Crowley, 20, of
Long
Island. He was blond and, at 6 feet 6 inches, a foot taller than she
was. She found him chivalrous and cordial. He seemed a little
embarrassed when she asked him to kiss her.
A young boy whom Crowley had befriended had told Rideout a
secret:
Crowley had asked his mother to send him his high school class ring.
The Rideouts had invited him over for Thanksgiving, which was the next
day. Beth wondered whether he would ask her to wear his ring.
Under the piano, she suddenly felt him near her. "I felt his
spirit visit me," she recalls now.
About this time, inside the vault, public affairs officer
James P.
Thurber took Gauger's notebook out of her hands. He wrote something
down and handed it back. When she read it, tears welled in her eyes:
"3:35 Marine died." Thurber told her that very few people in the vault
knew. He and other senior diplomats did not want morale to slide any
lower.
About 4 p.m., the occupants of the vault heard a helicopter
overhead, raising hopes that the Pakistani government would mount a
rescue. Then it flew away.
An hour later, a group of protesters briefly rampaged through
the
International School, shattering windows. The Americans hid, some in
darkened bathrooms, while Pakistani staff members and others fought off
the attackers.
As evening approached, the vault's floor tiles began to buckle
from
the heat. A patch of carpeting smoldered. Many people were coughing as
they struggled to breathe; some vomited. Hagerty and others began to
hope that nightfall would quell the riot and allow an escape. It seemed
their only way out.
Some who endured the attacks on the embassy and the school
later
concluded that the lack of a U.S. reaction made the United States look
weak. Adam Rice, who as a ninth-grader broke his wrist fleeing
protesters at the school, says the lesson of Iran and Pakistan was that
those hostile to Americans "can stick them in the eye, and they don't
do anything back."
He joined the Army after high school and served in
Afghanistan in
2002 as a Special Forces reservist, contributing to a strengthened U.S.
posture in the face of attack.
Adults also emerged from Nov. 21 with a new outlook. David C.
Fields, who as the embassy's administrative counselor took charge of
the staff members in the besieged embassy, has concentrated on security
and terrorism ever since. "I often tell people that terrorism is not
new; it didn't begin with 9/11. It's been around a long time."
Beginning
of the End
By 6:30, the roof had gone quiet. Fields decided they had to
get
out. The hatch was too damaged to open from the inside. The only
alternative was to send men out the door of the vault into the
third-floor hallway to reach the roof by another route.
Miller led a handful of Marines and staff members holding
shotguns
and pistols. The hallway was blackened by smoke and devoid of light.
Gas masks afforded them some protection from tear gas but not from the
fumes produced by the burning building.
As they stepped out of the vault, felt their way along the
hallway
and climbed onto the roof, they did not know who might be waiting. They
were authorized to shoot. "It was pretty harrowing," Miller says now.
It was also the beginning of the end of their ordeal. The demonstrators
had all but left the building, although some remained around the
compound.
The flames of the burning embassy rose up from the sides of
the
roof, lighting the night, as Marines and others walked the survivors of
the vault to a place where they could descend by ladder to the ground.
They breathed deeply in the cool air.
After everyone was out, Miller climbed the ladder and went
back into
the vault. A few minutes later he reappeared, holding Crowley's body in
a fireman's carry across his shoulders. The blood of the dead Marine
stained Miller's shirt.
Thanksgiving was somber. A search revealed the burned corpse
of Army
Warrant Officer Bryan Ellis, 30, who died at his apartment in the
compound. Two Pakistani staff members, dead of asphyxiation, were found
in the embassy. News reports indicated that two protesters were killed
during the previous day's chaos.
Embassy officials made plans to evacuate nonessential
personnel,
family members and other Americans who wished to leave the country.
At an Air Force boot camp in Texas, it took a young airman
named
David Miller a couple of days to confirm that the dead did not include
his father, Loyd. David Miller, a 1979 graduate of the International
School who now lives in Fredericksburg and is a fire-protection
consultant, remains influenced by the years he spent in Pakistan.
"I have a lot more sympathy for Muslim people because I lived
there," he says. The unrest of Nov. 21, which he experienced at a
distance, has helped to cement a bond between him and the people he
knew in Islamabad.
"Here in the Washington area, it's a bit different -- there
are a
lot of us," he says. Miller maintains friendships, attends reunions and
participates in a Web forum for alumni of the International School.
"It's natural to seek each other out. A lot of people don't understand
what we've gone through." They are also less interested in
international affairs, in spite of the events of the past few years, he
says.
"Most Americans are unequipped to make an opinion" about what
happens in the rest of world, Miller adds. "They don't have any
information, and they don't have any inclination to get any
information. They just don't care. . . . If I care, I call up some
people I went to high school with."
The
Return Home
On Nov. 23, Beth Rideout flew out of Pakistan on a jumbo jet
with
about 400 other Americans, many never to return. She was in shock. She
could feel others looking at her, the girlfriend of the dead Marine.
She kept thinking how weird it was that Steve was flying home with
them, except that he was in the hold of the aircraft.
He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. President Jimmy
Carter
sat next to his mother, Georgine, at the funeral. In an earlier phone
call, he told her that Crowley died a hero. White House officials
initially credited the Pakistani government with rescuing those in the
vault, but Marcia Gauger disputed that assertion. "It was our Marine
guards who saved us," she wrote in Time. "Nobody else."
Loyd Miller, now 63, retired from the Marine Corps as a master
gunnery sergeant in 1984. He received a medal honoring "exceptionally
meritorious conduct" for his defense of the embassy; his detachment was
also commended. Today he cares for his wife, a cancer patient, at their
home in Fredericksburg.
Rideout, a divorced mother of twins, lives in Traverse City,
Mich.,
and is working toward a degree in social work. She is 42. From time to
time, she has wondered what happened to Crowley's class ring.
Georgine Crowley hadn't sent it to Pakistan by the time Steve
was killed. She gave it to one of her seven surviving children.
What was not to be, might never have been. Would Rideout have
worn Crowley's ring? "I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have," she says.
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