Craig Murray, “What the Hell is that?” (2025)
Currently visiting the Middle East as a citizen foreign-correspondent journalist, British ex-diplomat Craig Murray chanced to see part of the construction of the new US embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, and was astonished at the size of what looks (in this video mini-documentary) like a sprawling monster town. What he saw is apparently one quarter of the eventual embassy complex which apparently will house a total of 5,000 staff. Comparing what he knows of this new embassy and its projected staff with what embassies in foreign countries normally do (and with their usual staff levels), he declares that this new embassy cannot be what it purports to be. To underline what he says, Murray obtains copies of diplomatic lists of various foreign embassies in the United States: he finds the British embassy in Washington DC has 120 diplomatic staff and the Russian embassy in the same city has about 90 diplomatic staff. Including non-diplomatic staff and security guards, the total numbers of people in the British and Russian embassies in Washington DC respectively come to about 300 and 270. It is obvious that there can be no way that an American embassy in a small country, classified as a developing / lower-income country whose nominal GDP in 2020 amounted to US$19 billion, needs to be as large as it is and needs personnel numbering more than one thousand.
To make sense of this conundrum, Murray interviews two journalists, Leila Hatoum and Hassan Illaik, who inform him that the embassy will be performing several functions not usually associated with embassies: Hatoum says the embassy will house facilities for surveillance, espionage missions, logistics (military?), interrogation and torture. Underground dungeons that include detention cells, underground tunnels leading to the sea (for escape) and helicopter pads are included in the construction. While English language sub-titles were not provided for Illaik’s opinions which he expressed in Arabic, from what Murray says afterwards, Illaik must have said that the US embassy will be housing a shadow government that in effect will be Lebanon’s de facto colonial ruler, shaping Lebanon’s policies, infiltrating its media and major political, economic and cultural organisations, and moulding Lebanese people into a colonised people.
The British do not get off lightly either: Murray says that Mount Troodos, the highest point in Cyprus, is home to a British surveillance station that will coordinate with the new US embassy in Beirut to spy on a large area across the eastern Mediterranean region that takes in Greece, Turkey, the Levant and areas as far south as Israel and Egypt.
Murray’s question of what the purported US embassy in Beirut actually is ends up going unanswered but from what Hatoum and Illaik suggest, or might have suggested, the embassy will serve as a projection of US political and military power in a region of importance to the US, presumably for its energy resources but also for what it signifies in US geopolitical strategy and even in US religion and culture – the area is the birthplace of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – and those hundreds of millions of people unfortunate enough to have been born there are destined never to be the masters and mistresses of their own individual and collective fates.