Explosive Reference to Putative Baha'is

In the 1987 book "Secret Armies, The Explosive Inside Story of the World's Most Elite Warriers," by James Adams, there is a reference to the Baha'i Faith that, if true, would be, as the title says, pretty explosive. A non-Baha'i, a distant friend of an acquaintance of local believers, came across it and had some questions about whether it is true. Our LSA secretary wrote the National Assembly of Canada about it but they had heard nothing about it. I am the source of last resort here. I know nothing about it, but I am sharing the reference on this blog in hopes that maybe one of my readers may be able to supply more details.

I expect that this is either the usual calumny coming from these quarters, or that the "Baha'is" mentioned here were covenant breakers, since it is common knowledge that among them was the physical granddaughter of Baha'u'llah, who was (many years before this) jailed for terrorist activities. I cannot imagine a Baha'i in good standing doing what this describes. Any help you could offer would be appreciated by all of us here.

from: pp. 252-253, SECRET ARMIES, Chapter Twenty, Congress Bites the Bullet,  


"The deaths of the Marines once again brought Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North to the fore. He and National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane were so shocked at the tragedy and at America's apparent inability to do anything about it that they decided to respond themselves. They found out that responsibility for the bombing lay with Hezbollah, a shadowy Iranian-supported terrorist organization with bases in Lebanon. North encouraged the Lebanese Deuxieme Bureau to find and arm some Lebanese Baha'is who on 8 March 1985 planted a bomb intended to kill one of Hezbollah's leaders. The bomb missed its target, however, and killed eighty innocent civilians."

A footnote points to an unnamed article of 5 December, 1986 in the Washington post as substantiation. Since this book, very sloppily, does not even give a page number, the only way to find this article would be to read the whole paper for that day. I live in the sticks and do not have access to a university library, so that is as far as I can go.

from:  APRIL 03, 2009

Car Bombing

Dear Friends,

My thanks to Jean and Andrew for their kind, prompt and efficient response to my research query about the Beirut car bombing of twenty years ago. I am sending their answer out as a separate post today but will combine them with yesterday's blog post on the Badi' blog itself. This is an important protection issue and I do not want people reading the question without the answer.

Dear John,

Regarding your question in your recent post in the Badi Blog:

The article in question from the December 5, 1986 Washington Post is by Jim Hoagland. It is called "The Marine Connection", on page A2 and contains 750 words. It starts like this:

"BERLIN Inevitably, Robert McFarlane and Oliver North fade into one-dimensional symbols as revelation tumbles after revelation in the damaging scandal now gripping Washington. Rambo to some, incompetent and perhaps evil bunglers to many more, the two men have become blank screens onto which we all project our feelings about six years of Ronald Reagan's leadership."

This much I was able to get out of the Washington Post archive, as it was the only article that comes up when searching using the given date and the keyword Hezbollah.

Without a subscription I cannot read the whole article BUT I did manage to figure out one more thing: the article does seem to mention Baha'is but does not seem to mention Lebanon or Lebanese.  I figured this out by re-searching for the same article variously with the keywords Lebanon, Lebanese, Baha'i or Baha'is instead of Hezbollah.

… using this method and some good logical deduction regarding what keywords to choose we could probably reconstruct the article substantially after about a hundred searches. But I leave that for another day. The page the article is on can also be purchased as a "page print".

I hope this helps.

Kind wishes,
Andrew

Oh one more thing.  There is a short (235 word) article in the Washington Post of a week later, on December 12, page A22, by FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH, Vice Chairman, National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of the United States New Haven, Conn., entitled, "'Malicious Gossip' about the Baha'is". Presumably this is a letter responding to the Jim Hoagland article.

Cheers,
Andrew

Hi John,

I think "out-7.pdf" is the article you want, on page 2 of the December 5 1986 Post.

Not much of a reference if you ask me.

Here are some online references to the March 8 1985 bombing. All of them attribute the bombing to other organizations or do not include any attribution.

http://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/27/world/casey-reported-behind-85-lebanon-bombing.html

http://www.nmhschool.org/tthornton/mehistorydatabase/civil_war_in_lebanon.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Beirut_car_bombing

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/march/8/newsid_2516000/2516407.stm

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/target/etc/cron.html (see entry for 20 Sept 1984)

See the out-8 document, a letter to the editor from Firuz Kazemzadeh condemning Hoagland's article. The next reference to Baha'is in the Post was on 22 Dec, in an opinion piece on political prisoners.

I also searched the historical NYT, WSJ and Post from 12/01/1986 to 12/31/1988 to see if any other articles appeared, perhaps a followup or a retraction by Hoagland in another of his weekly columns (every Friday, page a2 of the Post)  The only result that turned up was Kazemzadeh's letter to the editor. (not the original column by Hoagland, which leads me to believe that other search terms might work)

Search terms used:  Jim Hoagland :AND: Baha'i, Baha'i :AND: Lebanon, Baha'i :AND: lebanese.  Not sure what else might work.

I think you (and Dr. Kazemzadeh) are correct about someone identifying an opportunity for calumny, whether it was the anonymous intelligence operative or someone else who passed along the story to him.

Best,
Jean

JET: A final note on spies. I am a fan of spy fiction, but in the real world spying will surely be one of the first things eliminated by a world government. And thank God for that. This calumny against the totally non-political Baha'is given by a wholly untraceable source is an example of the gossip and backbiting that passes for information in the so-called intelligence community.