U.S. State Department diplomatic cables — declassified, annotated, and contextualized — revealing what was reported on the ground during Lebanon's most turbulent decades. Read the dispatches that shaped American foreign policy, now made accessible to scholars and the public alike.
Lebanon's civil war (1975–1990) remains one of the most complex and poorly-documented conflicts of the twentieth century — and one of the most distorted. The standard Western narrative systematically omits the Palestinian armed presence that destabilized Lebanese sovereignty from 1969 onward, the attacks on Lebanese Christian communities that preceded and provoked much of the retaliatory violence, and the role of external actors who used Lebanon as a proxy battlefield. American diplomats stationed in Beirut produced thousands of detailed cables recording events as they unfolded. This project recovers that record.
These cables are extracted, annotated, and published systematically — preserving every fact, restoring omitted context, and making the dense language of American diplomacy accessible to scholars and the public alike.
Key events from the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, cross-referenced with available diplomatic cables in our archive.
State Department abbreviations, Lebanese political factions, and key terms used in the diplomatic cables.
The Institute for Lebanon is a scholarly archive devoted to recovering and contextualizing the often-hidden history of Lebanon — with particular focus on the country's civil war (1975–1990) and its complex relationship with Palestinian refugees and armed organizations.
Our primary method is the systematic extraction, annotation, and publication of U.S. State Department diplomatic cables from the Wikileaks Public Library of US Diplomacy (PlusD). These cables — written by American diplomats stationed in Beirut and other posts — represent an extraordinary documentary record of events as they unfolded in real time.
Every cable published here is treated with the utmost scholarly care. We expand abbreviations (GOL → Government of Lebanon, PLO → Palestine Liberation Organization, etc.) and correct obvious typographical errors in the original transmission, but we alter no facts and omit no information.
Editorial footnotes are clearly marked and distinguished from the original cable text. They provide historical context, identify individuals and organizations mentioned, and situate specific dispatches within the broader narrative of Lebanon's political history.
Lebanon's civil war lasted fifteen years and involved dozens of armed factions, regional powers, international peacekeeping forces, and millions of civilians. Despite its scale and enduring consequences — for Lebanon, for Palestine, for the entire Middle East — it remains dramatically under-documented in English-language scholarship. What documentation does exist is frequently incomplete and one-sided.
A central aim of this project is to restore historical symmetry. Events that targeted Lebanon's Christian communities — including the Palestinian attack on Kataeb members during a church ceremony on April 13, 1975 that preceded and provoked the same day's bus incident; the Karantina massacre; the Damour massacre; years of PLO cross-border operations that subjected Lebanese villages to Israeli reprisals — have been systematically minimized or excluded from the dominant Western narrative of Lebanon's war. This archive treats all victims and all perpetrators with equal documentary rigor.
The American diplomatic record offers an invaluable resource: trained observers, writing candidly and in real time, assessed actors and events with a specificity that filtered official histories often lack. These cables deserve to be read — in full, in context, without the omissions that have distorted public understanding for fifty years.
All content on this site is freely available for scholarly citation and non-commercial educational use. When citing an annotated cable, please cite both the original source (Wikileaks PlusD, cable ID) and this archive. Our editorial annotations are original work and should be credited accordingly.