THE COVENANT Love and Death in Beirut...

THE COVENANT Love and Death in Beirut by Barbara Newman with Barbara Rogan (Crown: $18.95; 242 pp.) “I am not forgiving. I’m not sweet, and I’m not easy to get along with,” Barbara Newman tells us. “What I am is relentless.” That she proves herself to be in this utterly captivating chronicle of the Byzantine machinations that maintain the precarious balance of power in Lebanon. Newman, an American reporter who gained national attention when she unraveled the story behind Karen Silkwood’s plutonium contamination, became the confidante and lover of Lebanese leader Bashir Gemayel after interviewing him for an ABC story in 1980. In 1982, she helped him win the presidency; three weeks after his election, however, he was assasinated.

Here, Newman sets out, with fierce determination, to find Gemayel’s murderers. Traveling to the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley, where opium poppies and marijuana grow with the aid of United Nations money ($54 million of which, she claims, is contributed by the U.S.), she finds evidence that Gemayel’s murder had been masterminded by his one-time security chief, Elie Hobeika. Visiting Hobeika, she confronts him with the charge: “A flicker of something that looked like amusement passed rapidly over his face. Then, he fell silent.”

“The Covenant” is marred somewhat by Newman’s reliance on pro-Israeli sources to put events in perspective (“What I was after,” she admits at one point, “and what the Israelis seemed willing to provide, was the context of terrorism”) and by her portrayal of Gemayel as the “hope of the country,” the man “who could heal the wounds of war.” Gemayel certainly kept the Christian Phalangists out of trouble: Soon after his death, they entered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, massacring over 900 Palestinians. But her hopes for him were more romantic than realistic, for the country’s Muslim majority deeply resented Gemayel for his ties to Israel, just as he understandably resented them for killing his baby daughter. As Newman herself admits toward the book’s end, after his daughter’s death, Gemayel “dried his tears and he said, ‘Okay, now we play by their rules. No matter how bitter, no matter how inhuman, we play by their rules.’ ” Gemayel thus favored the use of force, trapped, like so many leaders in the region, in that blinding cycle of terrorism, an eye for an eye for an eye