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An Accidental American
by Alex Carr, Jenny Siler

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• ISBN: 9780812977080 (0812977084)
• Language: english
• Author: Alex Carr, Jenny Siler
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
• Genres: fiction, thriller, espionage, mystery
• Release date: April 17, 2007
• Format: paperback, 240 pages

About The Book

Forced out of a self-imposed exile, one woman faces a lifetime’s worth of secrets and betrayal — all in the name of staying alive.

Nicole Blake had planned to leave her criminal life in the past. She had done her time in a dank prison in Marseille and relinquished the world of forgery and counterfeiting for an unassuming career as a freelance consultant. Now her world is a small farm in the French Pyrenees, with daily fresh eggs and the companionship of her devoted dog.

But when U.S. intelligence operative John Valsamis shows up at her door, Nicole is reminded that she’ll always be an ex-con. Valsamis is after Nicole’s former lover, Rahim Ali, and soon Nicole finds herself back in Lisbon, tracking down Rahim in all their old haunts. Except now Rahim isn’t just a document forger — he’s a suspected terrorist.

Unwittingly drawn into an international web of fundamentalism, crime, and corruption, Nicole discovers that its threads stretch from the cobbled streets of Lisbon to the once-beautiful city of her birth, Beirut, and to the top levels of the government that sent Valsamis to find her. And as with any good web, the harder Nicole fights to free herself, the tighter it closes around her.

“Thought-provoking … The gritty atmosphere is perfectly drawn, and complex layers of lies and betrayal keep the reader happily guessing up to the end.”

— Publishers Weekly

“Chilling and utterly believable, An Accidental American hurls the reader into the dark and forbidding world of espionage. Not to be missed.”

— Gayle Lynds, author of The Last Spymaster

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THE MORTALIS DOSSIER- ALEX CARR’S NOTE ON THE BOMBING OF THE AMERICAN EMBASSY IN BEIRUT

On April 18, 1983, at one o’clock in the afternoon, a van carrying two

thousand pounds of explosives blew up outside the American embassy

in Beirut, killing sixty-three people. Among the victims were

seventeen Americans, eight of whom represented the Central Intelligence

Agency’s entire Middle East contingent. In the years preceding

the bombing, an increasing number of attacks on Western and

Israeli interests had been carried out by Palestinian and Muslim extremists,

but the Beirut bombing was widely seen as a watershed

event for American policies in the region. With the exception of the

seizure of the American embassy in Tehran four years earlier, an act

that was carried out within the framework of Iran’s Islamic revolution,

the embassy bombing represented the first time America had

been so directly and bloodily targeted by Islamic terrorists for its military

involvement in the Middle East.

It’s impossible to see why the United States was such an unwelcome

force without an understanding of the history of Lebanon and

the surrounding region, and of American and Western involvement

in the politics of the Middle East in general. Though Lebanon has

existed in one form or another since the ninth century b.c., the modern

country of Lebanon was not established until 1920, when it was

granted to the French as part of a system of mandates established for

the administration of former Turkish and German territories following

World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In fact, almost

all of what we think of as the modern Middle East was shaped

by these mandates.

America’s first direct intervention in Lebanese politics came in

1946. During World War II, Lebanon had been declared a free state

in order to liberate it from Vichy control. But when, after the war,

Lebanon eventually moved toward full independence, the French

balked, and the United States, Britain, and several Arab governments

stepped in to support Lebanese independence. It was at this time

that Lebanon’s system of political power sharing was devised. Well

aware of the country’s shaky precolonial past and determined to keep

Lebanon intact, the fledgling nationalist government agreed to split

power along sectarian lines, based on the numbers of the 1932 census.

It was a well-intentioned plan, but one that inadvertently set the

stage for decades of strife and civil war.

The power-sharing government’s first major stumbling block came

with the partitioning of the British Mandate of Palestine in the wake

of World War II, and the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that followed. The

ensuing influx of some 100,000 Palestinian refugees into Lebanon

proved a strain on the carefully crafted power-sharing system. Tensions

were further exacerbated in 1956, when Egyptian president

Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, provoking the

United States, along with Britain, France, and Israel, to respond with

military force. While Lebanese Muslims wanted the government to

back the newly created United Arab Republic, Christians fought to

keep the nation allied with the West. In 1958, with the country teetering

on the brink of civil war, the United States sent marines into

Lebanon to support the government of President Camille Chamoun,

thus inextricably linking itself with Christian forces.

It was an alliance that would be tested when, nearly two decades

later, sectarian rivalries finally erupted into full-scale civil war. While

Lebanon had enjoyed a period of relative peace and prosperity, tensions

between the United States and the Soviet Union, and between

the United States and Iran, had escalated significantly, as had tensions

between the Israelis and the Palestinians. By the spring of

1975 — when gunmen from the Christian Phalange militia attacked a

bus in the suburbs of Beirut and massacred twenty-seven Palestinians

on board in what is widely agreed to have been the first act of the

civil war — the forces at work in Lebanon were not merely internal

ones. The Cold War, as well as the larger Arab-Israeli conflict, were

both being played out in Lebanon, and would be throughout the

course of the war, as international players funneled weapons and

money to the various Christian, Muslim, and Druze militias.

The United States was a major player in the civil war from the beginning,

providing mainly covert support for the Christian government,

with whom it had traditionally been allied. But it wasn’t until

1982, after the Israeli siege of Beirut, the assassination of Phalange

leader Bachir Gemayel, and the horrific massacres at the Palestinian

refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, that U.S. troops, along with

other members of a multinational peacekeeping force, formally intervened

in the conflict. The United Nations — backed coalition was

meant as a neutral presence, but the complications of Cold War allegiances

and the United States’ traditionally close ties to Israel and

Lebanon’s Christian government meant that the Americans were inevitably

viewed by Muslim and Druze factions as anything but impartial.

It was in this environment, less than six months after the

Americans arrived as peacekeepers, that the embassy bombing took

place.

There can be no doubt that the main goal of the bombing was to

intimidate the United States into pulling its forces from Lebanon.

But there were other, less obvious but no less significant reasons behind

the attack. Responsibility for the bombing, and the subsequent

bombing of the marine barracks, was claimed by a radical wing of the

Iranian-backed Hezbollah. In the years leading up to these attacks,

Iran had taken an increasingly aggressive role in its support of

Lebanese Muslim militias, most of which were traditionally Shiite,

transforming what had once been a mainly political fight into a religious

and moral one. Not only did Muslim radicals want American

troops gone, but they wanted to rid the country of Western cultural

influence — which they saw as mainly American — as well. In the

bloody years to follow, the American University of Beirut, as well as

American and Western journalists, would be targets of a concerted

campaign of kidnapping and intimidation.

Under any other circumstances, the Islamicizing of the conflict

might have been yet another disturbing development in an already

wildly fractured situation. But in the hothouse of the Lebanese civil

war, Hezbollah’s fierce brand of anti-Americanism became not just a

Shia or Iranian cause but a Palestinian and therefore pan-Arab cause

as well. In the years since the embassy bombing, the cause has taken

on many faces, including that of the vast al-Qaeda network, but the

anger remains undiluted. Not only is anti-American thinking still

prevalent today in the Middle East, but it has become the uniting

force for radical Muslims the world over.

Former high-ranking members of the Reagan administration have

confirmed that how to respond to the embassy bombing and the

bombing of the marine barracks was a subject of debate at the time.

There was a clear split within the White House between those who

believed that force was the best response and those who argued that

the use of military power would only add to the problem by antagonizing

America’s remaining friends in the Arab world. The lessons of

Vietnam, along with the horrific loss of life in both attacks, no doubt

helped cement the decision to follow a policy of disengagement. In

the end, the choice was made to pull all American troops out of

Lebanon.

It’s no coincidence that I chose to make the 1983 bombing of the

American embassy in Beirut central to the plot of An Accidental

American. This is a novel about U.S. involvement in the politics of

the Middle East, and the embassy bombing has shaped American

policy in that region as few other events have. Disengagement is no

longer the United States’ response of choice when dealing with Islamic

extremism. In light of the September 11 attacks, it comes as no

surprise that American foreign policy leans heavily on the swift use

of military might. But the effects of the decisions made in the wake

of the Beirut bombings are also at the root of this powerful policy

shift. Those in Washington who argue in favor of unilateral military

action can point to the message that the earlier withdrawal sent:

namely, that the United States could be intimidated by terrorists.

Writing about events in which real people lost their lives is always

a delicate undertaking. Sixty-three people were killed in the embassy

bombing, and it is not my intention to dishonor them. While I do aim

for historical accuracy, my main focus as a writer is on my characters.

Truthfulness for me means looking back on the events of history

through the flawed lens of human perception. This means creating

characters who are as real as possible, and whose motives are often

less than pure and always complicated. I strongly believe that I can

best respect the real inhabitants of history by struggling to portray my

fictional inhabitants as honestly as possible.

Most of my fictionalization of the embassy bombing in An Accidental

American adheres closely to the facts. The van used to transport

the explosives to the embassy had, in fact, been stolen from the

embassy pool the summer before the bombing. It is universally acknowledged

that the Syrians, as well as the Iranians under the guise

of Hezbollah, were behind the attacks. Among the people killed that

day were the CIA’s chief Middle East analyst, Robert C. Ames, and

station chief Kenneth Haas. Both Ames and Haas were brilliant men

and rising stars, and the consequences of their deaths are still being

felt within the intelligence community. But the idea that a rogue CIA

official was actually behind the bombing is entirely fabricated, as are

all the characters involved.

In recent years, there seems to be a growing uncertainty concerning

what, exactly, separates fiction from nonfiction. The meteoric rise

of the memoir and other forms of “creative nonfiction” has further

blurred an already fuzzy line between minor embellishment and outright

fabrication — while the popularity of a certain kind of fiction,

which claims to illuminate long-concealed truths, has led readers to

confuse clever fabrication with fact. In the wake of this uncertainty

has come outrage and even anger. I have to admit, I don’t see what all

the fuss is about. Stories are meant to transport — at its best, historical

fiction can even offer us a wise perspective on our own condition —

and if readers are denied the joy of suspending their disbelief,

they might as well not read at all.

This doesn’t mean, however, that we should substitute the

watered-down truths of historical fiction for the real thing, or the

musings of a fiction writer, whose ultimate loyalty lies with his or her

story, for the more measured presentations of historians and journalists,

whose allegiances are with the truth. We live in a world in which

the costs of ignorance are simply too high.

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