DANGER ZONES: A Diplomat's Fight for America's Interests 2009
by John Gunther Dean (Author)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 11 ratings
This action-packed memoir by a leading American diplomat provides provocative reflections on events and leaders, American and foreign, 1959 to 1989. Over the course of his career, Ambassador Dean found himself embroiled in controversy in hot spots in Asia and the Middle East. Serving several stints in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, he worked on development projects in all three countries and with the U.S. military in Central Vietnam in the early 1970s. He brokered the deal that ended the war in Laos and faced down an attempted coup d'état in 1973 against the neutralist regime of Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma.
As ambassador in Cambodia, he was the last man out on April 12, 1975, as the last helicopter left Phnom Penh and Khmer Rouge forces approached the city. He was notably willing to work with anyone and everyone-communists and capitalists, diplomats and spies, urbanites and peasants, entrenched leaders and emerging reformers, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists.
"A thoroughly readable, even fascinating, account of Dean's life and experiences as one of America's top twentieth-century diplomats." Robert V. Keeley, author, publisher, career diplomat, and former U.S. ambassador to Greece.
"Dean's career reflects his strongly held belief that America should lead through the good example of its own principled behavior and decency, not through brute force and threats." John V. Whitbeck, international lawyer and author of The World According to Whitbeck.
"Ambassador Dean comes across in this memoir as exactly what he is, a dedicated and talented man deeply proud of his record in the practice of American diplomacy." Bruce Laingen, U.S. ambassador (ret.) and former president, American Academy of Diplomacy.
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EAST ASIA
John Gunther Dean, US Diplomat Haunted by Cambodia, Dies
June 11, 2019 9:30 PM
By Associated Press
FILE - John Gunther Dean, the last U.S. Ambassador to Cambodia before it fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975, is interviewed by the Associated Press in Paris, March 19, 2015.
John Gunther Dean, a veteran American diplomat and five-time ambassador forever haunted by his role in the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Cambodia during the dying days of the Khmer Republic, has died. He was 93.
Dean, who later in his career fell out with the Washington foreign policy establishment over U.S. policy toward Israel and was forced to retire in the late 1980s, died June 6, his wife, Martine, and children announced in an online obituary.
The U.S. Embassy in India, Dean's last post where he served as ambassador from 1985-89, confirmed his death in a tweet mourning his passing. "He was a skilled diplomat that championed strong U.S.-India relations," it said. "Rest in peace and you will be forever missed."
Although Dean served as ambassador to Denmark, Lebanon, Thailand and India, he was perhaps best known for his 1974-75 tour as the top U.S. diplomat in Cambodia. Dean oversaw the evacuation of the embassy in Phnom Penh as the capital fell to the Khmer Rouge, trying desperately to secure passage out of the city for Cambodian officials and others who had battled against the communist insurgents even after the U.S. ended military assistance to the embattled government.
"We'd accepted responsibility for Cambodia and then walked out without fulfilling our promise," Dean said in a 2015 interview to mark the 40th anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh. "That's the worst thing a country can do. And I cried because I knew what was going to happen."
Many of those who could not get out, including one senior official who rebuffed Dean's offer of escape, were killed in the months and years during the Khmer Rouge's time in power memorialized in the Academy Award-winning film "The Killing Fields." As many as 2 million Cambodians — or 1 in 4 — would die from executions, starvation and torture during the more than three years the Khmer Rouge and its leader, Pol Pot, ruled the country with what many saw as an experiment in radical Marxist agrarianism.
"I failed," he told The Associated Press in the 2015 interview, which was conducted from his home in Paris, where he lived throughout most of his retirement. "I tried so hard. I took as many people as I could, hundreds of them, I took them out, but I couldn't take the whole nation out."
One, however, declined Dean's entreaties to leave. Prince Sirik Matak, a former deputy prime minister, wrote Dean a searing letter shortly before his death explaining why he would not accept and lamented that the United States was leaving its ally behind. "I never believed for a moment that you have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. I have only committed this mistake of believing in you the Americans," the prince wrote.
Dean described the letter in the AP interview as the "greatest accusation ever made by foreigners. It is wrenching, no? And put yourself in the role of the American representative."
His departure from Phnom Penh, carrying the embassy's American flag in a plastic bag under his arm, was captured by a photographer as he sped toward a helicopter landing site and became one of the most memorable images of the Vietnam War era.
After leaving Cambodia, Dean, a German-born Jew who spoke four languages, became ambassador to Denmark, followed by ambassadorial stints in Lebanon, Thailand and India.
While serving in Beirut, Dean became convinced that he had been the target of an Israeli-supported assassination attempt, a theory he wrote about in his 2009 memoir "Danger Zones: A Diplomat's Fight for America's Interests." In it, he also recounted his suspicion of Israeli involvement in the 1986 plane crash that killed Pakistani President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and his friend and colleague the U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Arnold Raphel.
Those allegations have never been proved, and his pursuit of the suspicions led Washington to bring his 30-year career to an abrupt halt in 1989.
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Reviews
John J. Eddy
5.0 out of 5 stars Diplomacy As It Should Be
Reviewed in the United States on 27 October 2013
Verified Purchase
Ambassador Dean, with whom I had the pleasure of working briefly in India, had professional enemies. Some were a great credit to him. He irritated his masters in Washington by too relentlessly pursuing what he thought was right for the United States despite their contrary views.
In Cambodia, he proposed suppressing the natural U.S. disgust for the communist Khmer Rouge and pushed for coopting them into a coalition government where they could be better controlled. As unpalatable as this thought may be, he makes a good case that doing so might have forestalled the later butchering by the Khmer Route of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians.
Ambassador Dean headed five embassies, a near record. I believe that in fairness he should have been promoted to the rank of Career Ambassador. His reputation was that of a tough overseer with an insistence upon discipline. There is no doubt that he chafed superiors. But he was also an imaginative and original thinker who inspired and brought out the best in subordinates.
He believed strongly in U.S. defense but also in the subordination of the military to the civilian. He gained the respect of the military by working harder, as he said, than any soldier ever did. He thought that the duty of a diplomat was to talk, not shoot, but to talk with U.S. interests uppermost in mind. He believed in "talking" with America's enemies, asking them what they wanted, not with a view to giving them everything they wanted, but to get what we most wanted.
Against my own expectations given Ambassador Dean's extraordinary career, I found that the beauty of this book was its simplicity, its lack of pomposity, and its pure love of country. Above all, its unabashed talk about the loves, fears, and hungers of other peoples, not just American, revealed how with a little more astute and practical understanding of other cultures, U.S. diplomacy might lead men and women to find a better way to get what they want than tearing at each other's throats.
5 people found this helpful
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Ted Marks
4.0 out of 5 stars The Curious Diplomatic Career of U.S. Ambassador John Gunther Dean
Reviewed in the United States on 13 December 2009
Verified Purchase
John Gunther Dean was one of America's distinguished diplomats who won kudos for his performance in Laos and Cambodia, among other places. One would think that his memoir would be equally distinguished. And it is, to a degree -- but his memoir also has a touch of the bizarre because his career ends like some Middle East spy mystery.
Dean's career figured prominently in recent American history. He served as America's chief diplomat in Laos, Cambodia, Denmark, Lebanon Thailand and India. Indeed, in 1973 he played a key role in brokering the peace settlement in Laos where he single-handedly put down an attempted coup that could have brought down the government of Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma even as the Laotian premier was close to reaching a peace agreement with the Pathet Lao. Moreover two years later, Dean was America's last man out of Cambodia when that country fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975. By all accounts his performance in that difficult assignment was exemplary.
So there was nothing bizarre about his career; it was the end of his career that leaves the reader on the edge of his or her seat. Mr. Dean reports that he was effectively dismissed from his last post in New Delhi in 1988. The State Department first told him that he was mentally unstable, and then, as soon as he submitted his retirement papers, exonerated him of that blasphemy.
Dean takes us through his entire career, describing in some detail the dramatic events in Laos and Cambodia as the American war in Indochina wound down. After Cambodia fell, he was named ambassador to Denmark and then Lebanon. In Beirut in 1980, he was the target of an assassination attempt by men who were armed with American weapons that had been sent to Israel. Dean never did get a full explanation of who was behind the assassination attempt, but he speculates that the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad was behind the incident, because Dean had made some belligerent public remarks about Israel's air strikes against Palestinian targets in Lebanon.
From Lebanon, Dean was posted to Thailand in 1981, and then was sent to New Delhi in 1985 as ambassador to India. It was in New Delhi that Dean developed concerns about the historic confrontation between India, primarily a Hindu country, and Pakistan, which was a Muslim state. Since the 1971 war between India and Pakistan, the United States had affected a clear "tilt" towards the Pakistanis, and because of that, India had developed a close security relationship with the Soviet Union. India developed its nuclear capacity in the early 1970s, and Pakistan was in the midst of developing its own nuclear weapons. Moreover, the Russians were in the midst of their own adventure in Afghanistan, so things were tense on the subcontinent to say the least.
Dean's story turns bizarre in August of 1988, when Pakistani military strongman Zia ul Haq was killed in the crash of his military aircraft with American Ambassador Arnold Raphel on board. Dean became suspicious of the events surrounding the crash of Zia's plane. After all, Muslim fundamentalists were fighting the Russians, and the fate of Pakistan had become enmeshed with the fate of Afghanistan. He expressed his concerns in cables back to Washington, and also discussed them with the ambassadors from England, Canada and France. It was at that point that he was called back to Washington for consultations, he thought, with senior members of the government, including the secretary of state. Those meetings were cancelled on his arrival in Washington, and Dean was told he had undergone a personality change that required him to take medical leave.
Several months later, in early 1989, Dean retired from the State Department. From 1996-2003 he gave an oral history to the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, and out of that oral history came this book. There are no final judgments in Dean's memoir, but it is well worth reading as it details the career of one of America's most colorful ambassadors.
10 people found this helpful
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S. A. Lambert
5.0 out of 5 stars Realistic view of diplomacy today
Reviewed in the United States on 21 February 2012
Verified Purchase
First, let me admit that I am personally acquainted with Ambassador Dean and was thus predisposed to like his book. It recounts his experiences in a number of extremely difficult posts, where he was bound to carry out the wishes of the U.S. administration (whatever its particular stripe at the time), but where he invoked President Kennedy's dictum that ambassadors must often act on their own initiative, especially when the government is too busy to worry about details. I don't think Kennedy put it in quite this way, but his message was clear--the ambassador was the U.S. government representative in the country and had full authority and responsibility to act as such.
In no way has this account been fictionalized. Dean retained every communication, both from the various government departments and from his office, to document events from his early days in Paris just prior to the Vietnam Peace Talks to his dangerous assignment in Beirut, to his final assignment in India, as negotiations with the Soviet Union over the fate of Afghanistan were conducted behind the scenes. All documents that have been declassified by the government are available online at the Jimmy Carter Library site.
It becomes readily apparent that Dean was a pro-active ambassador, to the dismay at times of his bosses at State. However, he believed in building connections, if not friendships, with the various factions in the countries where he served. These connections served U.S. interests well and have led to lasting gratitude on the part of many governments, attested to by the numerous honors bestowed upon Dean since his retirement. The story of his forced retirement in and of itself is worth reading about. This book might change attitudes about the importance of diplomacy, as well as the not-so-hidden agenda of one of our allies.
7 people found this helpful
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southasia
5.0 out of 5 stars What happened in Pakistan?
Reviewed in the United States on 22 April 2012
Verified Purchase
Ambassador Dean is one of the people who I deeply respect. Here was a guy who served as Ambassador to Laos and Cambodia during the volatile Vietnam war period, who was actually able to intervene in Laos to prevent a military coup, who was the last man out of the embassy in Phnom Penh, and who survived an attack BY UNKNOWN ELEMENTS (no, I don't believe they are unknown) in Lebanon. By the way, these things continue even today.
A holocaust survivor, like Kissinger, Ambassador Dean took his responsibilities as a diplomat very seriously. My own personal view is that he was gaslighted by our own administration, particularly after he pushed his viewpoint on the assassination of Ambassador Raphel in Pakistan. He was a standup guy who was just asking questions.
Ambassador Dean didn't deserve what he got. It's a sign of our own sociopathic foreign policy when our administration has to remove him.....since it would damage our relationships with other countries.
My hat's off to him. He did the right thing, and was punished for it.
6 people found this helpful
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Pauil Edelman
5.0 out of 5 stars A life lived In history
Reviewed in the United States on 29 January 2012
Verified Purchase
John Gunther Dean lived the histor of tumutumous evets since the 1940's. His family fled Hitler's Germany, started a new lif in the U S. John served in the army, comleted Harvard where I met him soon after we arrived in Cambridge. He joined the foreign service, hoping all along to bring warring parties togeh, but finding himsef in high diplomatic posts in the thick of problems incding Africa,India, Laos and too close exposure to the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia. His styl is clear and to the point and with a sense of humanit, even sympathizing with the terrible suffering of civilians uner the relentless bombog of German cities. Paul Edelman
3 people found this helpful
Report
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https://mondoweiss.net/2018/08/credence-ambassadors-assassinate/
New book gives credence to US ambassador’s claim that Israel tried to assassinate him in 1980
BY PHILIP WEISS AUGUST 22, 2018 45
JOHN GUNTHER DEAN, 2015. (AP PHOTO/JACQUES BRINON)
John Gunther Dean, now 92, and a former American ambassador to five countries, has long maintained that Israel was behind his attempted assassination on August 28, 1980, in a suburb of Beirut, which was attributed to a rightwing Lebanese group. Dean and his wife and daughter and son-in-law were in a motorcade and narrowly escaped serious injury.
Dean said that he was targeted because he was doing something regarded as antithetical to Israel’s interest: consulting with the Palestine Liberation Organization and its head, Yasser Arafat, at a time when such contacts were the third rail in US politics. He was also outspokenly critical of Israeli attacks on Lebanon.
A new book offers backing to Dean’s claim. But while that book has been highly-publicized, the question of whether Israel attacked our ambassador has gotten no attention in the press. That is not a surprise; for Dean has asserted that the case itself was never thoroughly investigated by the U.S. government.
Let’s begin this story where I first heard about it, from historian Remi Brulin’s twitter thread on May 30:
“On August 28, 1980, the three-car motorcade of John Gunther Dean, the American Ambassador to Lebanon, was attacked on the motorway by several assailants armed with automatic rifles as well as light anti-tank weapons or LAWs. The ambassador and his wife escaped unscathed.
“This attack is in RAND’s ‘terrorism’ database. Entry states that ‘responsibility for attack was later claimed by the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners, a shadowy right-wing group.’ Various media outlets at the time reported on FLLF taking credit for the attack…
“Over the years Ambassador Dean has repeatedly argued that Israel was behind the August 1980 attempt on his life. In an interview for the Oral History Project in September 2000, he explained how the Lebanese Intelligence services had managed to retrieve the empty canisters of two of the light anti-tank weapons (LAWs) that had been used during the attack on his motorcade and, during raiding a house by the intersection where the assault had taken place, found 8 more. Dean collected the numbers on the 10 missiles & sent them to Washington to be traced.
“Three weeks (and one angry phone call) later, the US Ambassador finally learned ‘where the light anti-tank weapons came from, where they were shipped to, on what date, who paid for them, and when they got to their destination.’
“The LAWs had been manufactured in the US and ‘were sold and shipped to Israel in 1974.’ In this interview, Dean further states that he “did find out a great deal about this incident’ over the following years, and calls this assassination attempt ‘one of the more unsavory episodes in our Middle Eastern history’ and ends by noting that ‘our Ambassador to Israel, Sam Lewis, took up this matter with the Israeli authorities.’
“Dean concludes: ‘I know as surely as I know anything that Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, was somehow involved in the attack. Undoubtedly using a proxy, our ally Israel had tried to kill me.’ [Haaretz covered Dean’s claim, made in his 2009 autobiography; so did The Nation]
“All of this has been known for years, although it is very rarely discussed in the US media. When discussed, Dean’s assertions/accusations are dismissed as conspiracy theories.
“In January however, a book was published that appears to reinforce the plausibility of Dean’s position. The book is Ronen Bergman’s Rise and Kill First. It has received rave reviews in the US press, and its author has been interviewed countless times since the book was published. The book focuses on Israeli ‘targeted assassinations’ and it contains one truly remarkable revelation.
“In 1979, [Rafael] Eitan and [Meir] Dagan [both brass in the Israel Defense Forces] created the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners, and ran that fictitious group from 1979 to 1983. In 1981 and 1982, Ariel Sharon used that Front to conduct a series of indiscriminate car bombings that killed hundreds of civilians.
“The objective of this massive ‘terrorist’ car bombing campaign was to ‘sow chaos’ amongst the Palestinian & Lebanese civilian population” and, in 1981-82, to provoke the PLO into resorting to ‘terrorism,’ thus providing Israel with an excuse to invade Lebanon.
“The FLLF operation is described in great details in Bergman’s book. His account is based solely on first hand accounts from Israeli officials involved in the operation or who were aware of it at the time. It is also described in detail in my article here [in Mondoweiss in May: The remarkable disappearing act of Israel’s car-bombing campaign in Lebanon or: What we (do not) talk about when we talk about ‘terrorism’].
“As I show in this article, not a SINGLE review of Bergman’s book in the US media has mentioned the FLLF operation. Nor has it been mentioned in a SINGLE of the countless interviews he has given on the topic over the last few months. The US media has thus been fully silent about the fact that Israeli officials directed a major & fully indiscriminate car bombing campaign that killed 100s of civilians in Lebanon. This silence also means that the US media has failed to notice the possible implications of this revelation about the Dean case.
“Bergman himself does not mention the assassination attempt against Dean. But we know that the FLLF took credit for this attack at the time. That Dean’s own investigation pointed to Israel & to its Lebanese proxies. And we now know that the FLLF was CREATED and RUN by Israel.
“None of this is absolutely conclusive, of course. Nonetheless, this topic might warrant investigation from US journalists (who might also want to write about the FLLF car bombing campaign, ie about Israeli officials resorting to ‘terrorism.'”
Brulin subsequently added this important comment:
Bergman does note on several occasions in his book that he is not allowed to write and talk about a lot of the operations that his sources talked to him about. I wonder if this FLLF operation vs Dean is one of those.
Let us add some details and context. Dean was born to a Jewish family in Germany in 1926 and escaped the Holocaust to the United States in 1938, later graduating from a Kansas City high school. It goes without saying that being ambassador to five countries, Cambodia, Denmark, Lebanon, Thailand and India, is a stellar career in foreign service.
I reached out to Dean and did not hear from him, but in his oral history, the ambassador says that the attack was a “horrible experience” that scarred his daughter.
The road at that stretch was wide and a Mercedes car was parked below a small hill overlooking the road. As we turned, our convoy took 21 rifle bullets and two grenades anti-tank fired against the car I was in. My wife threw herself on top of me and said: “Get your head down” because I was trying to look out and was stunned by the “fireworks”. When you have these light anti-tank weapons (LAWs) explode, there are a lot of sparks and explosions. The two LAWs fired at my car bounced off the rear of the car. I also noticed that on the window of my armored car there were some shots all very well centered where I was sitting, but they had not penetrated because the plastic windows were bullet-proof.
In his autobiography Danger Zones, Dean says he urged the State Department to investigate, but: “No matter how hard I tried, I could not get a straight answer from the State Department about what the U.S. had discovered in its investigations… I was simply told to resume my duties as ambassador. That was not so easy when I learned what the Lebanese intelligence agency found out [using the numbers on the weapons].”
Dean says he was clearly understood to be an enemy of Israel because on repeated occasions he had publicly condemned Israel’s attacks on Lebanon’s borders and air space, a stance the State Department usually did not take.
Scurrilous attacks on me in the Israeli Knesset and the Israeli press just prior to the assassination attempt indicate that the Israeli authorities were unhappy with the activist role I played in Lebanon, defending Lebanese sovereignty and maintaining an active relationship with the PLO–the very policies I was given to pursue by the president of the United States. The venomous talk in the Israeli Knesset by the right-wing parties portrayed me as a tool of the Palestinians. Because I was willing, even eager, to talk with all the factions in Lebanon’s civil war, I was suspected of being anti-Israel.
Dean said he had a “close working relationship” with the PLO– including calling on Yasser Arafat to help broker the release of 13 of 66 American hostages held by Iranians in Tehran in November 1979, those 13 being the women and African-Americans. “On a number of occasions the PLO helped me to get Americans released… American authorities considered the PLO a valid interlocutor for discussing ways of finding a nonmilitary solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
At that time, the PLO was verboten in official policy circles. Andrew Young was forced to resign as Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the U.N. in 1979 after the Israelis leaked the fact that he had met with a representative of the PLO. In 1977, Ted Koppel and Marvin Kalb wrote a thriller that turned on a US official having a supersecret meeting with a fictitious Palestinian group, and it leaking and the official being charged with betraying Israel. In 1976, the dissident Jewish peace group Breira came apart after Wolf Blitzer, who was at the time also working for the Israel lobby group AIPAC, reported in the Jerusalem Post that Breira members had met with PLO officials.
Dean had a reputation for being free-thinking in Washington circles. In 1988, when Dean was ambassador to India, Pakistani President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq died in Pakistan when his plane was sabotaged. Dean maintained that Israel was behind the assassination because it did not want Pakistan to obtain nuclear weapons, which it was then developing. Dean’s speculation was based in part on the fact that pro-Israel congressmen (Stephen Solarz and Tom Lantos) had visited him in New Delhi and pressed him to support Israel’s ally India over Pakistan and to seek to thwart Pakistan’s path toward nukes.
“The more I pushed for answers, the more officials from the Reagan administration pushed back,” he wrote. Within a year, Dean, 63, retired amid official questions about his sanity under “strain.” “The department’s first thought was to send me to an asylum.” Instead he was sent to Switzerland for “recuperation,” he writes in his autobiography. “This was the kind of technique that the Stalinist regime used to silence its critics in the Soviet Union.”
Ronen Bergman’s new book on the Israeli assassination and terrorism campaign contains no reference to the John Gunther Dean attack. I asked him via a twitter message why he had left it out, noting that his revelation about Israeli security officials establishing the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners gives credence to Dean’s claim. He did not respond.
The Israeli investigative reporter is now working for the New York Times, and lately reported in the Times on the killing of a Syrian rocket scientist in a car bomb attack in northwestern Syria on the night of August 4, evidently by Israel.
P.S. The US government has had a miserable record of investigating known Israeli attacks on Americans– on the USS Liberty in 1967 and Rachel Corrie in 2003.
Thanks to Donald Johnson.
===
https://www.dvidshub.net/video/99397/archive-wwii-ambassador-john-gunther-dean
https://mondoweiss.net/2018/08/credence-ambassadors-assassinate/
New book gives credence to US ambassador’s claim that Israel tried to assassinate him in 1980
BY PHILIP WEISS AUGUST 22, 2018 45
JOHN GUNTHER DEAN, 2015. (AP PHOTO/JACQUES BRINON)John Gunther Dean, now 92, and a former American ambassador to five countries, has long maintained that Israel was behind his attempted assassination on August 28, 1980, in a suburb of Beirut, which was attributed to a rightwing Lebanese group. Dean and his wife and daughter and son-in-law were in a motorcade and narrowly escaped serious injury.
Dean said that he was targeted because he was doing something regarded as antithetical to Israel’s interest: consulting with the Palestine Liberation Organization and its head, Yasser Arafat, at a time when such contacts were the third rail in US politics. He was also outspokenly critical of Israeli attacks on Lebanon.
A new book offers backing to Dean’s claim. But while that book has been highly-publicized, the question of whether Israel attacked our ambassador has gotten no attention in the press. That is not a surprise; for Dean has asserted that the case itself was never thoroughly investigated by the U.S. government.
Let’s begin this story where I first heard about it, from historian Remi Brulin’s twitter thread on May 30:
“On August 28, 1980, the three-car motorcade of John Gunther Dean, the American Ambassador to Lebanon, was attacked on the motorway by several assailants armed with automatic rifles as well as light anti-tank weapons or LAWs. The ambassador and his wife escaped unscathed.
“This attack is in RAND’s ‘terrorism’ database. Entry states that ‘responsibility for attack was later claimed by the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners, a shadowy right-wing group.’ Various media outlets at the time reported on FLLF taking credit for the attack…
“Over the years Ambassador Dean has repeatedly argued that Israel was behind the August 1980 attempt on his life. In an interview for the Oral History Project in September 2000, he explained how the Lebanese Intelligence services had managed to retrieve the empty canisters of two of the light anti-tank weapons (LAWs) that had been used during the attack on his motorcade and, during raiding a house by the intersection where the assault had taken place, found 8 more. Dean collected the numbers on the 10 missiles & sent them to Washington to be traced.
“Three weeks (and one angry phone call) later, the US Ambassador finally learned ‘where the light anti-tank weapons came from, where they were shipped to, on what date, who paid for them, and when they got to their destination.’
“The LAWs had been manufactured in the US and ‘were sold and shipped to Israel in 1974.’ In this interview, Dean further states that he “did find out a great deal about this incident’ over the following years, and calls this assassination attempt ‘one of the more unsavory episodes in our Middle Eastern history’ and ends by noting that ‘our Ambassador to Israel, Sam Lewis, took up this matter with the Israeli authorities.’
“Dean concludes: ‘I know as surely as I know anything that Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, was somehow involved in the attack. Undoubtedly using a proxy, our ally Israel had tried to kill me.’ [Haaretz covered Dean’s claim, made in his 2009 autobiography; so did The Nation]
“All of this has been known for years, although it is very rarely discussed in the US media. When discussed, Dean’s assertions/accusations are dismissed as conspiracy theories.
“In January however, a book was published that appears to reinforce the plausibility of Dean’s position. The book is Ronen Bergman’s Rise and Kill First. It has received rave reviews in the US press, and its author has been interviewed countless times since the book was published. The book focuses on Israeli ‘targeted assassinations’ and it contains one truly remarkable revelation.
“In 1979, [Rafael] Eitan and [Meir] Dagan [both brass in the Israel Defense Forces] created the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners, and ran that fictitious group from 1979 to 1983. In 1981 and 1982, Ariel Sharon used that Front to conduct a series of indiscriminate car bombings that killed hundreds of civilians.
“The objective of this massive ‘terrorist’ car bombing campaign was to ‘sow chaos’ amongst the Palestinian & Lebanese civilian population” and, in 1981-82, to provoke the PLO into resorting to ‘terrorism,’ thus providing Israel with an excuse to invade Lebanon.
“The FLLF operation is described in great details in Bergman’s book. His account is based solely on first hand accounts from Israeli officials involved in the operation or who were aware of it at the time. It is also described in detail in my article here [in Mondoweiss in May: The remarkable disappearing act of Israel’s car-bombing campaign in Lebanon or: What we (do not) talk about when we talk about ‘terrorism’].
“As I show in this article, not a SINGLE review of Bergman’s book in the US media has mentioned the FLLF operation. Nor has it been mentioned in a SINGLE of the countless interviews he has given on the topic over the last few months. The US media has thus been fully silent about the fact that Israeli officials directed a major & fully indiscriminate car bombing campaign that killed 100s of civilians in Lebanon. This silence also means that the US media has failed to notice the possible implications of this revelation about the Dean case.
“Bergman himself does not mention the assassination attempt against Dean. But we know that the FLLF took credit for this attack at the time. That Dean’s own investigation pointed to Israel & to its Lebanese proxies. And we now know that the FLLF was CREATED and RUN by Israel.
“None of this is absolutely conclusive, of course. Nonetheless, this topic might warrant investigation from US journalists (who might also want to write about the FLLF car bombing campaign, ie about Israeli officials resorting to ‘terrorism.'”
Brulin subsequently added this important comment:
Bergman does note on several occasions in his book that he is not allowed to write and talk about a lot of the operations that his sources talked to him about. I wonder if this FLLF operation vs Dean is one of those.
Let us add some details and context. Dean was born to a Jewish family in Germany in 1926 and escaped the Holocaust to the United States in 1938, later graduating from a Kansas City high school. It goes without saying that being ambassador to five countries, Cambodia, Denmark, Lebanon, Thailand and India, is a stellar career in foreign service.
I reached out to Dean and did not hear from him, but in his oral history, the ambassador says that the attack was a “horrible experience” that scarred his daughter.
The road at that stretch was wide and a Mercedes car was parked below a small hill overlooking the road. As we turned, our convoy took 21 rifle bullets and two grenades anti-tank fired against the car I was in. My wife threw herself on top of me and said: “Get your head down” because I was trying to look out and was stunned by the “fireworks”. When you have these light anti-tank weapons (LAWs) explode, there are a lot of sparks and explosions. The two LAWs fired at my car bounced off the rear of the car. I also noticed that on the window of my armored car there were some shots all very well centered where I was sitting, but they had not penetrated because the plastic windows were bullet-proof.
In his autobiography Danger Zones, Dean says he urged the State Department to investigate, but: “No matter how hard I tried, I could not get a straight answer from the State Department about what the U.S. had discovered in its investigations… I was simply told to resume my duties as ambassador. That was not so easy when I learned what the Lebanese intelligence agency found out [using the numbers on the weapons].”
Dean says he was clearly understood to be an enemy of Israel because on repeated occasions he had publicly condemned Israel’s attacks on Lebanon’s borders and air space, a stance the State Department usually did not take.
Scurrilous attacks on me in the Israeli Knesset and the Israeli press just prior to the assassination attempt indicate that the Israeli authorities were unhappy with the activist role I played in Lebanon, defending Lebanese sovereignty and maintaining an active relationship with the PLO–the very policies I was given to pursue by the president of the United States. The venomous talk in the Israeli Knesset by the right-wing parties portrayed me as a tool of the Palestinians. Because I was willing, even eager, to talk with all the factions in Lebanon’s civil war, I was suspected of being anti-Israel.
Dean said he had a “close working relationship” with the PLO– including calling on Yasser Arafat to help broker the release of 13 of 66 American hostages held by Iranians in Tehran in November 1979, those 13 being the women and African-Americans. “On a number of occasions the PLO helped me to get Americans released… American authorities considered the PLO a valid interlocutor for discussing ways of finding a nonmilitary solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
At that time, the PLO was verboten in official policy circles. Andrew Young was forced to resign as Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the U.N. in 1979 after the Israelis leaked the fact that he had met with a representative of the PLO. In 1977, Ted Koppel and Marvin Kalb wrote a thriller that turned on a US official having a supersecret meeting with a fictitious Palestinian group, and it leaking and the official being charged with betraying Israel. In 1976, the dissident Jewish peace group Breira came apart after Wolf Blitzer, who was at the time also working for the Israel lobby group AIPAC, reported in the Jerusalem Post that Breira members had met with PLO officials.
Dean had a reputation for being free-thinking in Washington circles. In 1988, when Dean was ambassador to India, Pakistani President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq died in Pakistan when his plane was sabotaged. Dean maintained that Israel was behind the assassination because it did not want Pakistan to obtain nuclear weapons, which it was then developing. Dean’s speculation was based in part on the fact that pro-Israel congressmen (Stephen Solarz and Tom Lantos) had visited him in New Delhi and pressed him to support Israel’s ally India over Pakistan and to seek to thwart Pakistan’s path toward nukes.
“The more I pushed for answers, the more officials from the Reagan administration pushed back,” he wrote. Within a year, Dean, 63, retired amid official questions about his sanity under “strain.” “The department’s first thought was to send me to an asylum.” Instead he was sent to Switzerland for “recuperation,” he writes in his autobiography. “This was the kind of technique that the Stalinist regime used to silence its critics in the Soviet Union.”
Ronen Bergman’s new book on the Israeli assassination and terrorism campaign contains no reference to the John Gunther Dean attack. I asked him via a twitter message why he had left it out, noting that his revelation about Israeli security officials establishing the Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners gives credence to Dean’s claim. He did not respond.
The Israeli investigative reporter is now working for the New York Times, and lately reported in the Times on the killing of a Syrian rocket scientist in a car bomb attack in northwestern Syria on the night of August 4, evidently by Israel.
P.S. The US government has had a miserable record of investigating known Israeli attacks on Americans– on the USS Liberty in 1967 and Rachel Corrie in 2003.
Thanks to Donald Johnson.
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https://www.dvidshub.net/video/99397/archive-wwii-ambassador-john-gunther-dean
Archive WWII: Ambassador John Gunther Dean
Remaining Time -3:57
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UNITED STATES
11.02.2010
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A U.S. Army World War II veteran, came to America in the late 1930s. A native German speaker, as well as being fluent in English, French and Dutch, was a perfect fit to work in the office of military intelligence at the infamous R.O. box 1142, a facility housing teams that interviewed prisoners of war. After World War II, Dean spent 39 years in the US Foreign Service eventually serving as the U.S. Ambassador to the Khmer Republic (Cambodia), Denmark, Lebanon, Thailand and India.
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EAST ASIAJohn Gunther Dean, US Diplomat Haunted by Cambodia, Dies
June 11, 2019 9:30 PM
By Associated Press
FILE - John Gunther Dean, the last U.S. Ambassador to Cambodia before it fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975, is interviewed by the Associated Press in Paris, March 19, 2015.John Gunther Dean, a veteran American diplomat and five-time ambassador forever haunted by his role in the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Cambodia during the dying days of the Khmer Republic, has died. He was 93.
Dean, who later in his career fell out with the Washington foreign policy establishment over U.S. policy toward Israel and was forced to retire in the late 1980s, died June 6, his wife, Martine, and children announced in an online obituary.
The U.S. Embassy in India, Dean's last post where he served as ambassador from 1985-89, confirmed his death in a tweet mourning his passing. "He was a skilled diplomat that championed strong U.S.-India relations," it said. "Rest in peace and you will be forever missed."
Although Dean served as ambassador to Denmark, Lebanon, Thailand and India, he was perhaps best known for his 1974-75 tour as the top U.S. diplomat in Cambodia. Dean oversaw the evacuation of the embassy in Phnom Penh as the capital fell to the Khmer Rouge, trying desperately to secure passage out of the city for Cambodian officials and others who had battled against the communist insurgents even after the U.S. ended military assistance to the embattled government.
"We'd accepted responsibility for Cambodia and then walked out without fulfilling our promise," Dean said in a 2015 interview to mark the 40th anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh. "That's the worst thing a country can do. And I cried because I knew what was going to happen."
Many of those who could not get out, including one senior official who rebuffed Dean's offer of escape, were killed in the months and years during the Khmer Rouge's time in power memorialized in the Academy Award-winning film "The Killing Fields." As many as 2 million Cambodians — or 1 in 4 — would die from executions, starvation and torture during the more than three years the Khmer Rouge and its leader, Pol Pot, ruled the country with what many saw as an experiment in radical Marxist agrarianism.
"I failed," he told The Associated Press in the 2015 interview, which was conducted from his home in Paris, where he lived throughout most of his retirement. "I tried so hard. I took as many people as I could, hundreds of them, I took them out, but I couldn't take the whole nation out."
One, however, declined Dean's entreaties to leave. Prince Sirik Matak, a former deputy prime minister, wrote Dean a searing letter shortly before his death explaining why he would not accept and lamented that the United States was leaving its ally behind. "I never believed for a moment that you have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. I have only committed this mistake of believing in you the Americans," the prince wrote.
Dean described the letter in the AP interview as the "greatest accusation ever made by foreigners. It is wrenching, no? And put yourself in the role of the American representative."
His departure from Phnom Penh, carrying the embassy's American flag in a plastic bag under his arm, was captured by a photographer as he sped toward a helicopter landing site and became one of the most memorable images of the Vietnam War era.
After leaving Cambodia, Dean, a German-born Jew who spoke four languages, became ambassador to Denmark, followed by ambassadorial stints in Lebanon, Thailand and India.
While serving in Beirut, Dean became convinced that he had been the target of an Israeli-supported assassination attempt, a theory he wrote about in his 2009 memoir "Danger Zones: A Diplomat's Fight for America's Interests." In it, he also recounted his suspicion of Israeli involvement in the 1986 plane crash that killed Pakistani President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and his friend and colleague the U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Arnold Raphel.
Those allegations have never been proved, and his pursuit of the suspicions led Washington to bring his 30-year career to an abrupt halt in 1989.
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