Hezbollah (9 page)

A decade would pass before US intelligence would get another opportunity to capture Mughniyeh. In 1995, intelligence indicated that Mughniyeh was traveling under an assumed name on a flight from Khartoum to Tehran that was scheduled to make a stop in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. US officials asked their Saudi counterparts to detain Mughniyeh, which they did not do, while FBI agents jumped on a plane to arrest him. But Saudi officials denied the FBI plane landing rights, allowing the Fox to slip away once more.
⁶⁰
The following year, a month after Hezbollah helped its Saudi affiliate bomb the Khobar Towers military barracks near Dharan, Saudi Arabia, information arose suggesting Mughniyeh was aboard the
Ibn Tufail
, a boat sailing in the Arabian Gulf. Navy ships trailed the
Ibn Tufail
while a team of navy SEALs prepared a snatch-and-grab operation to be executed the following day off the coast of Qatar. The operation was called off, however, when senior American decision makers deemed the intelligence insufficient to warrant such a risky operation.
⁶¹

A decade earlier, in June 1985, the now infamous photo of Mughniyeh holding a gun to the head of the pilot of hijacked TWA flight 847 had made Hezbollah a household name (see
chapter 3
). Although it was only in the weeks following the September 11 attacks that Mughniyeh was added to the FBI’s new list of Most Wanted Terrorists, in large part based on the TWA hijacking indictment, US intelligence agencies were already keenly focused on him for his role in the Beirut bombings and the kidnappings that followed. US intelligence reports from the 1980s through at least 1991 refer to him as “hostage holder Imad Mughniyeh” and as “leader of the Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO).”
⁶²
By the time he was killed in a Damascus car bombing in February 2008, Mughniyeh not only was considered the second most important figure in Hezbollah after Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, he was believed to simultaneously hold a formal commission in the IRGC.
⁶³

Mughniyeh frequently consulted with Iranian intelligence and IRGC officials, according to US intelligence sources. An Iranian official sat on the Hezbollah Shura Council in 1992, and around the same time two Iranians—including the deputy commander of the IRGC—were members of Hezbollah’s military committee. The IRGC ran Hezbollah’s intelligence planning section until 1989, when a Lebanese candidate was finally deemed capable of doing the job. Over the years, senior IRGC Qods Force and Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) officials would periodically visit Lebanon to work with Hezbollah and assess the group’s security.
⁶⁴
And when Mughniyeh wanted to target US interests, he would seek Iranian consent. For example, in December 1991 the CIA worried over intelligence suggesting that Hezbollah planned to attack US interests in Beirut in the ensuing weeks. Iran would likely oppose more Hezbollah kidnappings, the CIA assessed, since Tehran wanted to preserve its political capital from the recent release of some hostages.
However, the agency warned, “It is possible that Tehran has approved low-level terrorist operations against US interests—such as sniper attacks—to allow Hezbollah elements to vent their animosity toward the United States. These Hezbollah elements may include former hostage holder Imad Mughniyeh.” Other sources, the CIA added, suggested Hezbollah was planning a car bomb attack targeting the US ambassador, attacks targeting CIA officers in Beirut, and a plot to attach an explosive device to an embassy employee’s car or nearby vehicle.
⁶⁵

Two decades after the marine barracks bombing, a civil suit brought against the Islamic Republic of Iran by the family members of the soldiers killed and wounded in the attack established that the bombings were carried out by Hezbollah with Syrian and Iranian oversight. According to the testimony of former US military officials, two days after the bombing—on October 25, 1983—the chief of naval intelligence notified Adm. James Lyons, then deputy chief of naval operations, of an intercepted message from September 26, 1983, just a few weeks before the barracks bombing. Sent from MOIS in Tehran, the message instructed the Iranian ambassador in Damascus, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, to contact Husayn al-Musawi, the leader of Islamic Amal (a key precursor to Hezbollah), and to direct him to “take spectacular action against the United States Marines” and the multinational coalition in Lebanon.
⁶⁶
In the words of Col. Timothy Geraghty, commander of the marine unit in Beirut at the time of the bombing, “If there was ever a 24-karat gold document, this was it. This is not something from the third cousin of the fourth wife of Muhammad the taxicab driver.”
⁶⁷
US signals intelligence had caught Iranian officials instructing a Hezbollah leader to carry out an attack targeting US Marines in Lebanon, but the military bureaucracy prevented that information from getting where it needed to be in time to prevent the attack.
⁶⁸

Lawyers for the families in the marine barracks bombing suit found a former Hezbollah member—referred to as Mahmoud—who testified that Ambassador Mohtashemi followed orders and contacted an Islamic Revolutionary Guardsman named Kanani, who commanded the IRGC’s Lebanon headquarters.
⁶⁹
Imad Mughniyeh and his brother-in-law Mustafa Badreddine were named operation leaders after a meeting that included Kanani, Musawi, and then–Hezbollah security official Hassan Nasrallah. Planning meetings were held at the Iranian embassy in Damascus, often chaired by Ambassador Mohtashemi, who helped establish Hezbollah in the first instance.
⁷⁰

The operatives involved in the attack monitored the US Marine barracks for months, noting delivery times and routes, the marines’ late wake-up on Sunday mornings, and even the color of the delivery trucks.
⁷¹
The red van that slammed into the French barracks was identical to a delivery van used by a vegetable vendor in the neighborhood.
⁷²
The vehicle to be used in the US barracks attack was fitted with explosives, likely at or near the shared Hezbollah-IRGC headquarters at the Sheikh Abdullah Barracks in the Bekaa Valley, but was delivered to Beirut only a
few days before the attack.
⁷³
Ten days after the bombings of the US and French installations, a similar truck bombing targeted the Israeli military headquarters building in Tyre, killing twenty-nine Israelis and injuring more than thirty, the second attack on that facility.

A 1983 Department of Defense report on the October bombing revealed that US forces in Lebanon were aware of the threat. The MNF’s intelligence support issued more than a hundred reports warning of terrorist bombing attacks between May and November 1983. But while there was a lot of noise, the US investigation concluded, the reports held no specific intelligence that could have successfully been acted upon to thwart the attack. The assessment continued: “The fact that political and sectarian affinity is reinforced by family and clan solidarity, particularly among radical Shiites, makes timely intelligence penetration problematic at best.”
⁷⁴
The Defense Department report was released just two months after the October 1983 marine barracks attack. But before the lessons could be learned, Hezbollah struck again.

At 11:30
AM
on September 20, 1984, a truck carrying more than a thousand pounds of explosives ripped off the front of the new, five-story US embassy building in Beirut, killing twenty-four and injuring scores more. The embassy had opened just weeks earlier, following the destruction of the previous embassy in April 1983. The US ambassador, although buried under the rubble, escaped with only minor injuries.
⁷⁵

Islamic Jihad again claimed responsibility in a telephone call “for blowing up a car rigged with explosives which was driven by one of our suicide commandos into a housing compound for the employees of the American Embassy in Beirut.” The operation underscored Hezbollah’s pledge “not to allow a single American to remain on Lebanese soil.” The caller also warned people “to stay away from American institutions and gathering points, especially the embassy,” since more attacks could follow.
⁷⁶

The new embassy had been described as Fortress America, a supremely secure facility supposedly immune to the kinds of attacks that flattened the previous embassy and marine barracks.
⁷⁷
But the embassy had been hurriedly relocated from West Beirut to the city’s northeast fringe. The protective steel gate had not yet been installed, and rooftop cameras were not yet activated.
⁷⁸
Now, with the six-week-old embassy evacuated, the ambassador’s residence in East Beirut became the temporary embassy, complete with antiaircraft guns and a no-fly zone above. Gradually, the American diplomatic corps left Beirut by way of helicopters to Cyprus. A year after the second embassy bombing, Lebanon held new elections, by which point the once-strong force of 190 American diplomatic officials had shriveled to 6.
⁷⁹

There is no question that Iran directed the Beirut bombings. According to the testimony of a former Hezbollah member, the suicide bomber who drove the truck that October morning was Iranian. “The Iranians took no chance that Hezbollah in its formative stages would not cooperate and instead had the truck actually driven by an Iranian,” lawyers concluded based on the Hezbollah member’s testimony.
⁸⁰
FBI agents investigating the 1984 embassy bombing found traces of pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) explosive on a piece of concrete rubble at the scene. The FBI determined the PETN was produced in Iran, one of several factors that led a US federal judge to find Iran “liable” for the bombings in a 2003 ruling.
⁸¹

Between 1983 and 1988, Iran’s government spent $50 million to $150 million financing terrorist organizations in the Near East, focusing its efforts on Lebanon in order to spur the withdrawal of Western forces from the country.
⁸²
In 1983, according to testimony, Hezbollah acted “almost entirely … under the order of the Iranians and [was] financed almost entirely by the Iranians.”
⁸³

Although it ultimately became a strong, unified movement, Hezbollah in its early years resembled a secretive cluster of Shi’a militant groups more than it did a structured sociopolitical organization.
⁸⁴
Various Shi’a militant cells or factions took Westerners hostage, as did other groups not affiliated with Hezbollah. The tradition of kidnapping in Lebanon runs deep, as explained by one Lebanon watcher: “There was no ‘kidnapping-central’ but a cabal of militants, some certainly linked to Hezbollah, others in various other gangs and groups, including some that were in the hostage business, selling and trading hostages for profit.”
⁸⁵

According to Magnus Ranstorp, who wrote the definitive work on Hezbollah and the Western hostage crisis, decisions relating to hostage taking had to be cleared first by the organization’s highest leadership command, despite the many competing sectarian militias, the clerical factionalism within many of these groups (including Hezbollah), and the fact that some abductions were carried out by specific clans for their own interests. Such clearance helped Hezbollah ensure that “all acts of hostage-taking also coincided with the collective interest of the organization as a whole,” no matter who carried them out—or why.
⁸⁶
Once hostages were captured, however, different Hezbollah clans or family factions had significant input on their release. “Hezbollah does not speak with one voice on this issue,” the CIA noted in 1991. “Last-minute maneuvering and reversals by individual [Hezbollah] leaders appear to have derailed agreements on more than one occasion.” In the context of one prisoner swap effort, the CIA noted that Mughniyeh “had been uncharacteristically quiet during this latest round of hostage-related activity, so he presumably is not opposed to it.”
⁸⁷
The reference to Mughniyeh, never known for speaking publicly, being “uncharacteristically quiet” suggests that US intelligence had other means of listening to his chatter.

The “core group of kidnappers of Western hostages,” later investigation and the testimony of former hostages would reveal, involved only “a dozen men from various Hezbollah clans, most notably the Mughniyeh and Hamadi clans.”
⁸⁸
This helps explain why Western intelligence found it so difficult to crack what they assumed were larger and disparate kidnapping networks. Based on familial and religious bonds and personally and ideologically committed to Hezbollah, this small band of kidnappers made itself very difficult to infiltrate. At the time, however, the CIA was
busy sorting out what it described as “the numerous quasi-independent Shia fundamentalist gangs that prowl the streets of West Beirut.”
⁸⁹

“Hizbullah has never been involved in or responsible for any of these [kidnapping] incidents,” Sheikh Naim Qassem, Hezbollah’s deputy chief, wrote in 2005.
⁹⁰
In fact the group diverted attention from itself by using a variety of aliases or fictitious names to claim responsibility in calls to media outlets. The ruse enabled Hezbollah to avoid retaliation and confuse investigators.
⁹¹
Released hostages later revealed that their own kidnappers had kidnapped others using different cover names.
⁹²
The aliases most frequently used to claim responsibility for the kidnappings were Islamic Jihad, the Revolutionary Justice Organization, the Oppressed on Earth, the Holy Fighters for Freedom, and the Defense of the Free People.
⁹³

By 1984, Lebanon had the highest number of international terrorist incidents in the world, an unenviable honor it would hold for four consecutive years.
⁹⁴
Between January 1982 and August 1988 approximately 40 percent of international kidnappings worldwide took place in Lebanon. Hezbollah claimed responsibility under various cover names for fifty-one of these ninety-six kidnappings, which targeted American, French, British, Soviet, West German, Saudi, Cypriot, Kuwaiti, Swiss, Iraqi, and Indian citizens.
⁹⁵
Beirut, the CIA concluded in 1987, had become a “terrorist Mecca” serving as a “key terrorist headquarters” in the region.
⁹⁶