Beirut 1983

At dawn on 23 October 1983 suicide bombers sent by Iran killed 241 Americans at the US Marine barracks in Beirut and 58 French soldiers at a base nearby. It was the opening salvo in a long war between the United States and the Islamic Republic that has shaken the world.

Michael Sheridan reported for Reuters from Lebanon, Iran and Syria on the retreat of the West. He went on patrol with the Marines, saw the failure of American diplomacy in Damascus and witnessed the Tehran show trial of the Communist Party as Ayatollah Khomeini destroyed secular politics in Iran.

Now, more than 40 years on, he has written a dramatic reconstruction of an autumn that shaped the decades to come, drawing on memoirs from Iran and Syria, plus unpublished interviews with radical Palestinians, to tell the story from all sides.

Soviet-era archives reveal that the Kremlin secretly backed Iran and that President Ronald Reagan stepped back to avoid the risk of a nuclear war. It was a bleak bargain with history that led to years of chaos in the Middle East up to the attack on Iran by the US and Israel in 2026.

Full of intrigue, espionage and revelation, Beirut 1983 reads like a Cold War thriller. It will chill anyone who recognises the same dangers the world faces today.