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Janet Lee Stevens (1951-1983) was a journalist, human rights advocate, translator, and scholar of popular Arabic theater who died in the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, on April 18, 1983.

Early life and education
Born in Saginaw, Michigan, on December 1, 1951, Janet Lee Stevens grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, where she graduated from Northside High School. She attended Stetson University and earned a Bachelor’s degree in International Studies in 1972.[1]  She moved to Philadelphia to study Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania, and started the PhD program in 1973. She won a fellowship to study Arabic at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) at the American University in Cairo in the 1974-75 academic year.[2]  Around this time she also held a Fulbright scholarship.[3]  In the late 1970s she contributed articles to the journal MERIP Reports under her own name and under the pseudonym of June Disney.[4]  She moved to Beirut in 1982, during the Lebanese Civil War, and worked as a free-lance journalist and translator in association with several newspapers, including the Lebanese English-medium Monday Morning; the Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun; the Arabic Lebanese weekly al-Kifah al-Arabi; The New York Guardian; the International Herald Tribune; the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; and the Philadelphia Inquirer.[5]  At the time of her death she was finishing a PhD dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania on popular Arabic theater, under the supervision of the Arabic literary scholar and translator, Roger Allen.

Advocacy and journalism
As a longtime human rights activist, associated with Amnesty International and other organizations, Janet Lee Stevens advocated for prisoners of conscience.[6]  In the early 1970s she researched cases of political prisoners in Tunisia under the regime of Habib Bourguiba. A colleague later attributed the release of several Tunisian prisoners to her efforts.[7]

While living in Tunis in the 1970s, Janet Lee Stevens also participated in an activist, leftist theater group. This group performed Arabic plays in private homes, streets, and markets for popular audiences.[8]  She was married during this time to the Tunisian playwright Taoufik Jebali, who years later wrote dialogue for the 1990 film of Férid Boughedir, Halfaouine: Boy of the Terraces.[9]

While living in Beirut in 1982 and 1983, Janet Lee Stevens frequently visited the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps and became an advocate for the Palestinian residents, who were mostly refugees of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and their descendants. She also volunteered at two of the refugee camp hospitals, called Akka Hospital and Gaza Hospital. The writer Kai Bird observed that some people at the time considered her a “partisan journalist” while others suspected her of working for an intelligence agency.[10]  She befriended Dr. Fathi Arafat, the medical doctor who founded and directed the Palestine Red Crescent Society.[11] She knew Fathi’s brother, Yasir Arafat, who was chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and she interviewed him on several occasions.[12]

The Palestinians called Janet Lee Stevens “the little drummer girl” because of her staunch support for their cause. In 1982, she gave the British novelist David Cromwell, also known as John le Carré, a tour of the Sabra and Shatila camps.[13] Janet Lee Stevens inspired the title of John le Carré’s novel, The Little Drummer Girl, which was published in 1983, made into a movie in 1984, and developed as a BBC/AMS television miniseries in 2018.[14]  According to one source, Stevens and Cromwell/Le Carré became friends; he consulted her on possible sites for filming in the region; and she was scheduled to fly to Cyprus to see him a day after the bombing in which she died.[15]

The writer Kai Bird claimed that on August 8, 1982, shortly before Yasir Arafat’s departure for Tunis, Janet Lee Stevens visited Arafat in his bunker, begged him not to leave with his PLO fighters, and warned him of the dangers the Palestinian women and children would face if left alone in the camps.[16] Bird traced this account of Stevens’s meeting with Arafat to the Lebanese Shi’a, Imad Mughniyah, Arafat’s bodyguard at the time, who went on to become a leader in Hizbollah. Mughniyah later orchestrated a string of kidnappings and attacks, including the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut of October 1983, the hijacking of TWA flight 847 in June 1985, the bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in March 1992, and the bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in June 1996.[17]

Franklin Lamb, a human rights activist who was in Lebanon with Janet Lee Stevens at this time, claimed that when the PLO withdrew from Lebanon in August 1982, she had an invitation to travel with Yasir Arafat on the boat which left Beirut harbor for exile in Tunisia. She missed the boat, Lamb later wrote, because she was visiting Palestinian women in the South Beiruti camp of Burj al Barajneh. [18]

One month after the withdrawal of the PLO fighters to Tunis, on September 16-18, 1982, a massacre occurred in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in southern Beirut. This massacre was the work of the Phalange, a mostly Maronite Christian right-wing militia, which acted with the knowledge of allies in the Israeli Defense Forces, including Ariel Sharon, in order to uproot residual PLO elements at a time when Israeli forces were poised to enter West Beirut. Janet Lee Stevens toured Sabra and Shatila immediately after the massacre; witnessed the Red Crescent’s efforts to collect the dead bodies, some of which she reported showed evidence of rape and mutilation; and recorded interviews with survivors.[19]

Death
Janet Lee Stevens was visiting the U.S. Embassy in Beirut on April 18, 1993 to meet William McIntyre, Deputy Director of USAID in Lebanon, for an interview about U.S. aid in Lebanon.

Stevens and McIntyre were lunching together in the embassy cafeteria when a truck carrying 2,000 pounds of explosives crashed into the building and blew up. Seven floors in the middle of the building collapsed and “pancaked”.[20]  The bombs killed sixty-three people, among them seventeen Americans. At least eight of the dead were CIA officers, including Robert Ames, the CIA’s leading Middle East expert. The remainder were Lebanese staff and others. About 120 more people were injured. The Islamic Jihad Organization claimed responsibility for this attack.[21]  This organization had links to the Lebanese Shi’a party, Hizbollah, and operated with support from the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which objected to Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon in June 1982 in response to PLO attacks.

Stevens and McIntyre died instantly in the explosion. Stevens’s former employer, Shigeo Arata, Beirut correspondent for the Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun, later identified her body in the hospital morgue of the American University of Beirut.[22]

Janet Lee Stevens was said to have been pregnant at the time of her death.[23]  Franklin Lamb, who later became executive of the Sabra and Shatila Foundation, identified himself as the partner of Janet Lee Stevens and claimed that they were expecting a baby boy when she died.[24]

According to the UCC Palestine Solidarity Campaign, a group of students and staff University College Cork engaged in recording the history of Palestinian political advocacy, Janet Lee Stevens went to the U.S. embassy on the day of her death for a purpose. She was trying to urge William McIntyre to pledge more U.S. aid to Palestinian refugees and Lebanese Shi’a groups in Lebanon.[25]

Janet Lee Stevens was among the Americans honored at a memorial service for the victims of the U.S. embassy bombing, which was held at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. Her brother, Scott Stevens, later testified before a federal court that the U.S. government charged her family $2,100 to bring her body back from Beirut, because she was not an embassy employee.[26]

Legal and Political Aftermath
Twenty years after the bombing of the U.S. embassy, the family of Janet Lee Stevens, representing one of eighty plaintiffs of the dead and injured, filed a civil suit in U.S. Federal District Court of Washington, DC against the Islamic Republic of Iran and its Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). This case, Damarell vs. the Islamic Republic of Iran, was decided on September 8, 2003 and cited evidence that agents of the Iranian government had supported, funded, and planned the embassy attack.[27]  Among those who testified were Janet Lee Stevens’s identical twin sister, Jo Ann Stevens; and her brothers Hazen H. Stevens and Scott C. Stevens. Lawyers for the plaintiffs connected the embassy bombing attack to other events in which they claimed Iranian government complicity: the suicide bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps in Lebanon in October 1983; the assassination of Malcolm Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut, in 1984; the bombing of the U.S. Embassy Annex in East Beirut, Lebanon, in September 1984; and the kidnapping between 1982 and 1991 of 50 hostages who included American, British, French, and German nationals.

In Damarell vs. the Islamic Republic of Iran, the court decided for the plaintiffs and ordered Iran to pay damages, including $13,449,000 to members of the Stevens family, including her three siblings, the estate of Janet Lee Stevens, and the estate of her late father, Hazen Stevens. The Iranian government did not respond to the case, and did not pay.

On April 28, 2015, the journalist Kai Bird, writing in The New York Times discussed Damarell v. the Islamic Republic of Iran, in conjunction with a second case, Peterson v. the Islamic Republic of Iran (2007). The latter case was filed by one thousand plaintiffs, relatives of the 241 people killed in the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks on October 23, 1983. Bird argued that the failure of the Iranian government to pay settlements in both cases would pose for the Obama administration “a major stumbling block to any diplomatic resolution of Washington’s troubled relations with Iran”[28] at a time when the member states of the U.N. Security Council were negotiating over Iran’s nuclear program.

Bird also claimed that Ali Reza Asgari, the Iranian Revolutionary guard identified as having masterminded the embassy attack in which Janet Lee Stevens and others died, later defected to the United States. Without citing his sources, Bird alleged that President George W. Bush, authorized granting asylum and witness protection to Asgari in return for information about the Iranian nuclear program.[29] The CIA rejected Bird’s claims through a spokesperson.[30] Claims about Asgari have continued to surface, most recently in a March 10, 2019 article in The Hill urging President Donald J. Trump to expose details that may also bear upon the kidnapping of the former FBI agent and CIA consultant Robert Levinson who disappeared in Iran in 2007.[31]

The Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, a foundation based in Washington, DC which describes itself a as center for promoting human rights and democracy in Iran, features Janet Lee Stevens in its database called “Omid, a Memorial in Defense of Human Rights in Iran”.[32]   Founded in 2002, this database originally included people whom it described as “victims of the Islamic Republic” and its human rights abuses since 1979, although it has since expanded to cover victims of human rights abuses perpetrated by all Iranian governments since December 10, 1948, when the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights with Iran as a signatory.. [33]

An organization called Peace Monuments around the World listed Janet Lee Stevens among “77 Notable Peacemakers in Palestine and Israel.”[34]

Cultural Legacies
Friends, family, and professors established a Janet Lee Stevens Memorial Fund at the University of Pennsylvania. The fund intended to honor Stevens’s legacy of fostering cultural understanding vis-à-vis the Arab world. Professor Thomas Naff originally administered the award, which was given in 1986 and 1987 following a nomination procedure which awarded an individual outside the university a $1000 prize for promoting Arab-American understanding.[35]

In 1993, the winners of this award were Jack Shaheen, professor of mass communications and author of the book Reel Bad Arabs, and Grace Halsell, journalist and author of Journey to Jerusalem.[36]

Beginning in 1996, when George McGovern, Senator of South Dakota and 1972 Democratic party nominee for U.S. President, came to speak at Penn, the Janet Lee Stevens Fund supported an annual lecture series.[37]  Other distinguished speakers included Professor John L. Esposito, Director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, who lectured on “The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality” in 2003.[38] The final speaker in the series in 2005 was the Palestinian-Israeli-American musician Simon Shaheen. Shaheen is a composer and performer of oud and violin, who also directs the Arab Music Retreat, an annual program of Arabic music hosted at Mount Holyoke College to promote cultural understanding through the study and performance of classical and neoclassical music from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan.[39]

Since 2002, the Janet Lee Stevens Fund has supported an annual grant program at the University of Pennsylvania for an MA or PhD student who demonstrates academic excellence, a commitment to Arabic study, and a record of promoting cultural understanding. It was originally called “The Janet Lee Stevens Award for the Promotion of American-Arab Understanding.”[40]  Past winners include the political scientist Murad Idris, author of War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought.[41]

During her time as a doctoral student at Penn, Janet Lee Stevens introduced her mentor, Roger Allen, to the novels of the Saudi-Iraqi writer, Abdul Rahman Munif. In 1987, Roger Allen published a translation of Munif’s Endings, and dedicated it to the memory of Janet Lee Stevens.[42]

Paragraph
[1]Damarell v. Islamic Republic of Iran.

[2]Burr Van Atta, “Janet Lee Stevens, 32, Journalist,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 22, 1983, p. 32.

[3]Kai Bird, The Good Spy: The Life and Times of Robert Ames(New York: Crown Publishers, 2014), p. 276.

[4]Stuart Schaar, “Janet Lee Stevens”, MERIP Reports, June 1983, p. 39.

[5]Burr Van Atta, “Janet Lee Stevens, 32, Journalist,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 22, 1983, p. 32; Stuart Schaar, “Janet Lee Stevens”, MERIP Reports, June 1983, p. 39.

[6]Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, “Janet Lee Stevens”, https://www.iranrights.org/memorial/story/33087/janet-lee-stevens(Accessed March 14, 2019).

[7]Stuart Schaar, “Janet Lee Stevens”, MERIP Reports, June 1983, p. 39.

[8]Stuart Schaar, “Janet Lee Stevens”, MERIP Reports, June 1983, p. 39.

[9]Kai Bird, The Good Spy: The Life and Times of Robert Ames(New York: Crown Publishers, 2014), p. 276; Halfaouine: Boy of the Terraces, directed by Férid Boughedir (1990), Full Cst & Crew, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090665/fullcredits(Accessed March 14, 2019).

[10]Kai Bird, The Good Spy: The Life and Times of Robert Ames(New York: Crown Publishers, 2014), p. 276.

[11]Franklin Lamb, “After 25 Years, Who Remembers?” (letter written to Janet Lee Stevens from Sabra-Shatila Camp), September 13, 2007, https://electronicintifada.net/content/after-25-years-who-remembers/7140(Accessed March 14, 2019).

[12]Kai Bird, The Good Spy: The Life and Times of Robert Ames(New York: Crown Publishers, 2014), p. 276.

[13]Kai Bird, The Good Spy: The Life and Times of Robert Ames(New York: Crown Publishers, 2014), p. 276; Aaron Leibel, “Secretly Speaking with Arab and Israeli Operatives”, Review of The Good Spy, by Kai Bird, Washington Jewish Week, August 12, 2015, https://washingtonjewishweek.com/24214/secretly-speaking-with-arab-and-israeli-operatives/arts/arts_features/books/(Accessed March 14, 2019).

[14]John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl(London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1983); George Roy Hill, director, The Little Drummer Girl, feature film, 1984; British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC One), The Little Drummer Girl, television miniseries, 2018.

[15]Kai Bird, The Good Spy: The Life and Times of Robert Ames(New York: Crown Publishers, 2014), p. 303.

[16]Kai Bird, The Good Spy: The Life and Times of Robert Ames(New York: Crown Publishers, 2014), pp. 278, 287.

[17]Kai Bird, The Good Spy: The Life and Times of Robert Ames(New York: Crown Publishers, 2014), p. 329-30.

[18] https://adonis49.wordpress.com/tag/janet-lee-stevens/(Accessed March 14, 2019).

[19]Franklin Lamb, “After 25 Years, Who Remembers?” (letter written to Janet Lee Stevens from Sabra-Shatila Camp), September 13, 2007, https://electronicintifada.net/content/after-25-years-who-remembers/7140(Accessed March 14, 2019).

[20]Damarell v. Islamic Republic of Iran.

[21]Central Intelligence Agency, “Flashback: April 18, 1983: U.S. Embassy Attacked in Beirut,” https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2014-featured-story-archive/flashback-april-18-1983-u-s-embassy-bombed-in-beirut.html(Accessed March 14, 2019).

[22]Steve Harvey, “Ex-Atlantan Killed in Beirut Blast,” The Atlanta Constitution, April 22, 182, p. 11A.

[23]Kai Bird, The Good Spy: The Life and Times of Robert Ames(New York: Crown Publishers, 2014), p. 303.

[24]Franklin Lamb, “After 25 Years, Who Remembers?” (letter written to Janet Lee Stevens from Sabra-Shatila Camp), September 13, 2007, https://electronicintifada.net/content/after-25-years-who-remembers/7140(Accessed March 14, 2019).

[25]Palestine: Information with Provenance (PIWP) Database, “Janet Lee Stevens”, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/authors.php?auid=20020(Accessed March 14, 2019).

[26] https://www.leagle.com/decision/2003386281fsupp2d1051378(See section I-4).

[27]Damarell v. Islamic Republic of Iran, [How do I cite this?]

[28]Kai Bird, “The Ghosts That Haunt an Iran Accord,” Op-Ed, The New York Times, April 28, 2015

[29]Kai Bird, “The Ghosts That Haunt an Iran Accord,” Op-Ed, The New York Times, April 28, 2015; Jeff Stein, “Top Iran Terrorist under CIA Protection in U.S., Book Says,” May 19, 2014, https://www.newsweek.com/top-iran-terrorist-under-cia-protection-us-book-says-251378(Accessed March 14, 2019);

[30]Jeff Stein, “Top Iran Terrorist under CIA Protection in U.S., Book Says,” Newsweek, May 19, 2014.

[31]Barry Meier, “President Trump Should Unmask Tehran’s Deceptions in the Levinson Case,” The Hill, March 10, 2019, https://thehill.com/opinion/international/433247-president-trump-should-unmask-tehrans-deceptions-in-the-levinson-case(Accessed March 14, 2019).

[32]Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, “Janet Lee Stevens”, https://www.iranrights.org/memorial/story/33087/janet-lee-stevens(Accessed March 14, 2019).

[33]Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, “About the Memorial,” https://www.iranrights.org/memorial/about(Accessed March 14, 2019).

[34]Peace Monuments around the World, “77 Notable Peacemakers in Palestine and Israel”, http://peace.maripo.com/n_palestine.htm, no date (Accessed March 15, 2019).

[35]The Link(published by Americans for Middle East Understanding), Vol. 19, No. 5, December 1986, p. 14, http://ameu.org/getattachment/0ac57681-cb8e-44cd-af80-36a90f4520b1/The-Demographic-War-for-Palestine.aspx(Accessed March 14, 2019).

[36]“Stevens Award Committee Honors Halsell, Shaheen,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September/October 1993, p. 62.

[37]Michael Mugmon, “George McGovern Talks on Arab Issues,” The Daily Pennsylvanian, November 15, 1996, https://www.thedp.com/article/1996/11/george_mcgovern_talks_on_arab_issues(Accessed March 14, 2019).

[38]Middle East Center, University of Pennsylvania, Events Archive, November 3, 2003, https://www.sas.upenn.edu/mec/events/archive/2003(Accessed March 14, 2019).

[39]Middle East Center, University of Pennsylvania, “A Concert of Arab and Middle Eastern Fusion Music,” October 7, 2005, https://www.sas.upenn.edu/mec/events/2005/october/concert-arab-and-middle-eastern-fusion-music(Accessed March 14, 2019); “Arab Music Retreat: Heritage without Boundaries,” http://arabicmusicretreat.org(Accessed March 15, 2019).

[40]“Janet Lee Stevens,” The Beirut Memorial On Line [sic], http://www.beirut-memorial.org/history/stevens.html(last updated April 20, 2000) (Accessed March 14, 2019).

[41]Middle East Center, University of Pennsylvania, “Janet Lee Stevens Award for Arabic and Islamic Studies,” https://www.sas.upenn.edu/mec/opportunities/janetleestevens(Accessed April 14, 2019).

[42]‘Abd al-Rahman Munif, Endings, Translated by Roger Allen (London: Quartet Books, 1988), p. iv.