Sneak Attack

Reporters raid Camp Lejeune

The plan of attack well rehearsed and thorough. Leaving a fishing cabin rented under a false name, the group of eight split into three teams; two of them rode in vans loaded with unmarked cardboard cartons while the third left in a 17-ft. outboard motorboat. The van teams entered the huge U.S. Marine base at Camp Lejeune, N.C., through different gates and joined forces at the PX parking lot. They stopped briefly at Second Division headquarters, then drove to an on-base junior high school, where hundreds of unsuspecting students were attending classes. The boat team, meanwhile, sneaked undetected onto the base on the New River and, according to plan, faked engine trouble along "Generals' Row," the cluster of riverside houses occupied by the camp's commanding officers and their families.

Another bloody terrorist attack? Fortunately, no--only an elaborate hoax to demonstrate that just such an assault would be almost invitingly possible at Lejeune, home base of the Marine unit currently stationed off the shores of Lebanon.

In a story published last week by the Wilmington (N.C.) Morning Star, the paper identified the "attackers" as a team of its own reporters and photographers, plus a couple of friends. The "weapons" carried in the boxes were not bombs and guns but prewritten notes designed to point up lax security. At Second Division headquarters, for example, one of the van teams taped up a note in a rest room a short distance away from the office of the division commander, Major General Alfred Gray. "If this had been a bomb, it could have blown up this building," the note read. "Think about it."

The ruse was the idea of Star Managing Editor William Coughlin, 61, a former Los Angeles Times Beirut bureau chief. After the Oct. 23 truck-bomb attack on

Marine headquarters in Beirut, Coughlin became increasingly convinced that authorities at Lejeune were seriously underestimating the camp's vulnerability to terrorism. "Our concern was that there was no evidence of any change in security at Camp Lejeune," explained Coughlin.

"The Marines were still thinking like Marines, not like terrorists." Critics of the newspaper's ersatz raid said it was inappropriate because Lejeune is merely a training facility with no strategic value to an enemy. It was not necessary for the entire base to be totally sealed.

Camp authorities contended that they gained advance intelligence about the phony attack from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, a claim that is hotly disputed by Coughlin & Co. In any case, insisted Base Commander Major General Donald J. Fulham, there is no way to secure completely a 110,000-acre facility that is home to 40,000 servicemen and their families. Keeping the base relatively open, he said, was important to both the Marines and the surrounding community. To do otherwise would be "disrupting the American way of life."

Nonetheless, on the day following the Star's story, sentries began searching all trucks and vans at the camp's gates. Said a satisfied Coughlin of his ploy: "Apparently it worked."