Lebanon, 1961 — dissident coup attempt
Event Summary
On the night of 31 December 1961 the Syrian Social Nationalist Party attempted a lightning coup in Lebanon against President Fouad Chehab, led by two SSNP members who were company commanders in the Lebanese army and supported by some 200 armed civilian party partisans. The plotters aimed to seize the Ministry of Defense, detain Chehab, and capture the radio station, and rebel army units moved on Beirut in the early hours cutting communication lines. But the operation was poorly synchronized, met fierce resistance from loyalist forces, and unraveled when the army chief of intelligence, alerted to the plot, summoned an armored unit whose tanks opened fire on the besiegers around the Defense Ministry.
The coup collapsed within hours, and all other parties rallied to Chehab. The state responded with a renewed proscription of the SSNP and the imprisonment or execution of many of its leaders, most of whom remained in prison or exile until a 1969 amnesty.
Researched Details
Researched
Independent research, added record by record. Hover any label for what it means.
Sources
Editorial Note
Cross-Reference
Datasets agree. At least two of the three reference datasets we check against carry this event, and none of them disagrees about its date or its result.
Identifiers for finding this same event in the other datasets:
- Cline Center id
66012311961- Albrecht/Koehler/Schutz (CAM) id
CAM-660-1961-12-31
How the match is made is described in crossref-report.md.
Outcome and Target
Coup Atlas research identifies the target as: President Fouad Chehab survived the SSNP coup attempt unharmed and completed his term in 1964.
Baseline coding: Coup attempt failed to remove the incumbent. Recorded leader fate: remained in office; not physically harmed. The baseline file does not name individual targets; researched names are kept in a separate layer.
Baseline Dataset Citation
Baseline Source-Document Entries
CSP
Luttwak
Wikipedia
New York Times
This is the citation trail carried by the baseline dataset, grouped by outlet and rejoined from the line-wrapped original. Coup Atlas has not independently re-checked every document; read the original before citing a specific claim. URLs the import damaged beyond safe repair are shown as plain text and listed in citations-report.md. How this list is built →