After Decades, Official Admits Iran Aided Beirut Attack Murdering Hundreds Of Marines

After four decades, an Iranian official has admitted that the theocratic Iranian regime aided murderous attacks in which hundreds of Americans were killed.

In April 1983, the terrorist group Hezbollah bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, murdering 63 people, including 17 Americans. Months later, two suicide truck bombers blew up a barracks in Lebanon, murdering 220 U.S. Marines, 18 U.S. Navy sailors, and 3 U.S. Army soldiers. That attack was the deadliest single-day death toll for the U.S. Marines since the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.

In 2001, families of the Americans who were killed or wounded in the attacks filed suit against Iran; Iran always denied it had taken part in the attacks.

But now, Iran’s representative to Lebanon admitted he aided the effort to target American military members. As the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) translated, Sayyed Issa Tabatabai stated:

I quickly went to Lebanon and provided what was needed in order to [carry out] martyrdom operations in the place where the Americans and Israelis were. … The efforts to establish [Hezbollah] started in [Lebanon’s] Baalbek area, where members of [Iran’s] Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) arrived. I had no part in establishing the [political] party [Hezbollah], but God made it possible for me to continue the military activity with the group that had cooperated with us prior to the [Islamic] Revolution’s victory. …

With the victory of the Islamic Revolution, Hezbollah was established. For two years, [Hezbollah’s] military base was located in my home. ‘The group’ [supporters of the Islamic Revolution] signed a contract declaring their willingness to become martyrs. Perhaps more than 70 signed this contract in my home.

“The state-controlled Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) quickly scrubbed the damning disclosure that Tabatabai made about Iran’s role in the suicide bombings of Americans, but MEMRI preserved a copy,” Fox News reported.

Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute told Fox News Digital, “Americans have astonished both Iranians and the victims of Iranian terrorism with the diplomatic contortions undertaken to avoid holding Iran to account. Now that the supreme leader’s representative has confessed, the questions are: (1) Will Americans who carried water for Iranian terrorism apologize? (2) Will Iran pay compensation to the victims of their terror? If [President] Biden prices five Americans at $6 billion, the U.S. should demand no less than $289.2 billion from Iran today.”

Banafsheh Zand, an Iranian-American expert, said, “Given the Biden [and French President Emmanuel Macron] administrations’ desperation for any facsimile of a deal with the Khomeinist regime, they will likely sweep this under the rug.”

“The complicity of Iran in the 1983 attack was established conclusively at trial by the testimony of Admiral James A. Lyons, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Plans, Policy and Operations from 1983-85,” a memo from Peterson v. Islamic Republic Of Iran noted.