The Lebanon I love will rise once more

19 July 2006

Richard Beeston has known Beirut for five decades, since the days when Kim Philby lived there. Here he recounts a recent visit to the city he loves

In no time at all Beirut had become a sophisticated, cosmopolitan centre for the Arab world where most of the inter-national banks, insurance companies and corporations had their regional headquarters, the international press their Middle East bureaux, and the airlines their main offices. It was the crossroads for travellers to Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and the favoured resort for increasingly rich Arabs from the Gulf. It was unique, the wonder of the Arab world, likened by many to Lawrence Durrell’s fictitious Alexandria, but a reality. Today that Beirut is almost unrecognisable, first rising from the ashes of a vicious 15-year civil war and now, in the past week, returning to the abyss.

We foreigners, for the most part, lived in Ras Beirut (which became more widely and notoriously known as West Beirut during the civil war), preferring the easygoing mixture of Christians and Muslims and Westerners to the Christian suburb of Ashrafieh. It was a delightful combination of small cafés and nightclubs, the liberal student atmosphere of the American University of Beirut, French boutiques and probably the most stylish hotel in the Middle East, the St Georges.

The pool at the Hotel St Georges flaunted the best displays of bikinis and brown limbs and the bar provided the best rumour mill for correspondents covering the political upheavals in the Arab world. A short walk along the bay, Kim Philby set up his headquarters at the Hotel Normandie, next to the superb colonial French restaurant Lucullus, and a few doors away from the Grand Hotel Bassoul where all the grand visitors to the Levant stayed at the turn of the century.

Up the road was the British Embassy, always known to the locals as the ‘Spears Mission’ — a reference to Major General Sir Edward Spears who kicked the French out of the Levant. Next to it, a sort of branch office, was Joe’s Bar. There the MI6 station chief Paul Paulson, the battle-scarred Black Watch military attaché Colonel Alec Brody and the Embassy first secretary John Julius Norwich retired for lunchtime drinks, usually joined by the ‘fourth man’, Kim Philby, inevitably nursing his morning hangover, to review Lebanon’s fast-changing political scene.

Today we tend to think of the Middle East as a region gripped by unparalleled crises like those in Iraq and Palestine. Back then it was just as unstable. Only the settings and the characters have changed.

Egypt’s charismatic leader, President Gamal Abdel Nasser was the cloud on the horizon in the mid-1950s. While Lebanon managed to shrug off the upheavals in the Arab world caused by the Suez crisis, the country suffered a brief but bloody sectarian conflict in 1958. It was snuffed out by 40,000 US marines, whose tanks I watched landing on the beach and threading their way through sunbathers and soft-drinks sellers. Within months the marines had left, business was booming and no one imagined that the real civil war would break out 17 years later.