Hezbollah Page 6

  Back in Lebanon Fadlallah’s role in politics was most clearly evidenced by his founding of the Muslim Student Union, a group of Shi’a students inspired by the Iranian revolution that met often in Fadlallah’s home. He was also instrumental in the creation of the Lebanese branch of the Dawa Party. Both groups were among the key constituent movements that would later coalesce into Hezbollah.22

  Ultimately, Fadlallah’s transformation from quietest to activist led him to support suicide bombings in Lebanon on religious grounds. “There is no difference between dying with a gun in your hand [and] exploding yourself,” he stated. “What is the difference between setting out for battle knowing you will die after killing ten [enemies], and setting out to the field and knowing you will die while killing them?”23 According to US intelligence analysts, what guided Fadlallah and other Hezbollah supporters as they considered backing violent attacks was “the degree to which the foreign presence threatens the Shia community—and its Hezbollah vanguard.” Through Hezbollah, the CIA assessed in 1986, “Fadlallah reveals the darker side of his political ideology, as well as a realistic appraisal of the Lebanese political situation: the use of violence is a necessity.”24

  Fadlallah’s exact role in Hezbollah has been debated by scholars and intelligence officials alike. In a 1985 assessment titled “Lebanon’s Khomeini: Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah,” the CIA reported that “Fadlallah plays an important role in the Hizballah terrorist network…. Besides serving as a spiritual leader, he coordinates radical Shia activities in Beirut.” Analysts assessed Fadlallah to be particularly dangerous “because he operates successfully as a fundamentalist religious leader and masks his role as [a] coordinator of terrorism.”25 By 1987 the CIA characterized the murky nature of his evolving relationship with Hezbollah as follows: “The key figure in the Islamic fundamentalist movement is Shaykh Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, who is considered by most Lebanese as the spiritual guide of Hezbollah—the most powerful radical group in Lebanon—although he is not himself part of the organization’s leadership.”26 But the very next year the agency appears to have come to a starkly different conclusion, stating that “Fadlallah’s emphasis on his religious role is intended to hide his decision making role in Hezbollah.”27

  When it came to actual operations, in August 1986 the CIA concluded that “Fadlallah would have approved of the suicide bombings of the US Marine barracks and similar attacks against the MNF in Beirut because their presence constituted a clear threat to the Hizballah and the Shia community.”28 But former CIA officer Bob Baer insisted Fadlallah offered no such approval. Fadlallah “wasn’t our friend, let’s get that straight, but that doesn’t mean he was a master terrorist. I can guarantee you, and I have seen every bit of intelligence, that Fadlallah had no connection [to the attacks]. He knew the people carrying out the terrorism attacks, but he had no connection in ordering them.”29 What ever his ties to the Beirut bombings or others who carried them out, by 1986 the CIA predicted, “If the Hezbollah continues on its present path, Fadlallah will be clearly identifiable as the Lebanese equivalent of Khomeini.”30

  But as Fadlallah’s relationship with Iran changed, so did his relationship with Hezbollah. Iran did not appreciate Fadlallah’s interference in operational planning, such as when Fadlallah prevented Hezbollah from following through on Iranian orders to attack Syrian security forces after their February 1987 takeover of West Beirut.31 Tehran, in turn, took to circumventing Fadlallah and dealing directly with Hezbollah officials through the Iranian embassies in Beirut and Damascus or through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) contingent in the Bekaa Valley. Iran also established the Council of Lebanon, a nine-member body including the Iranian ambassadors to Beirut and Damascus and the local IRGC commander as well as several Lebanese clerics, but not Fadlallah. Hezbollah’s intimate ties to the IRGC were further cemented by its reliance on the IRGC’s Sheikh Abdullah Barracks in the Bekaa Valley. The barracks served as Hezbollah’s “most important facility, serving as a primary garrison, base, and communications center,” even as it remained the IRGC’s headquarters in Lebanon. For his part, Fadlallah—whose influence remained significant as the head of the Lebanese Dawa Party, a key constituent element within Hezbollah—took to holding informal meetings with Lebanese Shi’a clerics and security officials as a means of circumventing Iran.32

  Even as Fadlallah’s ties frayed with Iran and likewise Hezbollah, he would always be revered by Lebanese Shi’a. He remained the most prominent Shi’a spiritual leader in Lebanon, having championed the use of violence to expel Western and Israeli forces from the country and dedicated his life to improving the lot of its Shi’a community. His charities remained sources of financial revenue for Hezbollah, as evidenced by US government action targeting such charities over the years, and he continued to have personal relationships with Hezbollah operatives, including a cell caught in Charlotte, North Carolina.

  However revered or marginalized Fadlallah might have been, by 1985 someone wanted him dead. On March 8, 1985, a car filled with 250 kilograms of explosives detonated near Fadlallah’s home in Bir al-Abid, killing 80 people and wounding more than 250 others.33 Fadlallah, who was leaving his mosque at the time, escaped unscathed, but several of his bodyguards—including Imad Mughniyeh’s brother Jihad—were killed. (Another of Mughniyeh’s brothers, Fuad, would be killed in 1994 when a bomb exploded outside a market Fuad owned near Fadlallah’s mosque.) Fadlallah’s followers hung a banner reading “Made in USA” in front of one of the blown-out buildings.34

  But was the United States involved? According to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, former CIA director William Casey admitted on his deathbed to arranging Fadlallah’s assassination plot in conjunction with the Saudis, who worked through back channels to fund Lebanese hired guns. Fadlallah “had been connected to all three bombings of American facilities in Beirut,” Woodward wrote. “He had to go.” But in a twist, Casey’s family denied Woodward ever visited Casey in the hospital. The Saudi press office and President Reagan also denied any involvement in the operation.35 In a letter to the Washington Post, responding to an article alleging an “indirect” CIA connection to the car bombing, the agency denied any ties to the attack and cited the findings of an investigation conducted by the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), which found “no evidence that any U.S. intelligence agency—any U.S. Government agency—has encouraged or participated in any terrorist activity in Lebanon.”36

  Such a complete exoneration, however, appears to be a stretch too far. In a 2001 interview a former chief of operations at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center explained that following the Beirut bombings the US government helped the Lebanese security service become a more professional intelligence entity in the hope the Lebanese would better deter terrorists on their soil. But according to the former operations chief, the Lebanese service “proved to be totally independent, non-responsive to CIA human rights guidelines. And they went out and killed people.” The attempt to kill Fadlallah did not occur with US encouragement or direction, he added, but it was carried out by this CIA-trained Lebanese security service.37

  In any event, Fadlallah laid blame for the attack squarely on the United States and pledged that Hezbollah would exact revenge by targeting US or other Western interests in countries like Bahrain, Kuwait, or Jordan. Iranian agents were already in place in several Gulf countries, Fadlallah warned, and Lebanese Shi’a agents would be sent to Jordan if an attack there were deemed feasible.38 By one account the Saudis, who facilitated the back-channel CIA payments to the Lebanese, subsequently paid Fadlallah $2 million to act as an “early warning system for terrorist attacks on Saudi and American facilities.” Fadlallah was reportedly never tied to acts of terrorism after this deal. “It was easier to bribe him than to kill him,” Saudi Prince Bandar allegedly quipped.39

  In 1995, a decade after the Bir al-Abid bombing, the United States listed Fadlallah as a Specially Designated Terrorist, presumably for the continued fina
ncial ties between his foundations and Hezbollah.40 But Fadlallah’s charities continued to attract US attention. In 2003, for example, Lebanon’s finance minister, Fouad Siniora, was prohibited from entering the United States due to a donation he had made to one of Fadlallah’s charities. The charity, al-Mabarrat, had an office in Dearborn, Michigan, that the FBI raided in 2007.41

  The Fox Who Never Sleeps

  According to the CIA, Hezbollah’s most infamous terrorist mastermind, Imad Mughniyeh, was a Fadlallah disciple. “Fadlallah aims to bring forth defenders of the faith who are indifferent to intimidation, contemptuous of foreign influence, devoted to Shia Islam, and whose self-control borders on fanaticism,” according to a 1986 CIA report. “Hajj Imad Mughniyeh, Fadlallah’s former bodyguard, spiritual disciple, and Hezbollah’s security official,” the report continued, “may well be an example of Fadlallah’s handiwork—a cunning, resourceful, coldly calculating adversary for whom virtually any act of violence or revenge performed in the name of Shiism is permissible.”42

  Nicknamed “the Fox” and “the One Who Never Sleeps,” Mughniyeh reportedly escaped to Iran after watching the bombing of the marine barracks from a rooftop with Mustapha Badreddine. According to the Australian government this trip led to the formal creation of the Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO), or what the Australian and British governments refer to as Hezbollah’s External Security Organization (ESO).43 He returned to Lebanon regularly, traveling on a false Iranian diplomatic passport, according to Lebanese officials. At some point in the late 1980s or early 1990s, once he was tied by name to the Beirut bombings and kidnappings, he reportedly moved his family to Tehran.44

  Little is known about Imad Fayez Mughniyeh’s early life. According to former CIA officer Robert Baer, “Mughniyeh systematically had all traces of himself removed. He erased himself. He had his records removed from high school, and his passport application was stolen. There are no civil records in Lebanon with his name in them.”45 Yet we know that he was born in the village of Tir Dibba in southern Lebanon in 1962 and that his family fled to the slums of south Beirut in the wake of Israeli attacks targeting Palestinian militants in the late 1970s. Growing up in the Ayn al-Dilbah neighborhood near the Beirut airport—within eyesight of the marine barracks he would later help destroy—he was deeply affected by the tumultuous times. Syria invaded Lebanon when he was thirteen years old. Five years later, when he was an engineering student at the American University of Beirut, Israel invaded. The following year the Israeli army laid siege to Beirut in an effort to expel the PLO from Lebanon, by which time Mughniyeh was already active in Yasser Arafat’s Fatah militia.46

  A clearer picture of Mughniyeh’s early years would emerge from the unlikely city of Buenos Aires, where the Hezbollah mastermind was indicted for his role in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center.47 Argentine prosecutors would learn of the American University graduate’s reported fluency in Arabic, English, Farsi, French, and German and his training by Arafat’s Fatah movement during Lebanon’s civil war. Mughniyeh later became a member of Arafat’s personal security detail, Force 17. According to the CIA, “Many Hezbollah leaders began their careers as Fatah militants before the Israeli invasion in 1982.”48 That year, when the PLO left Lebanon, Mughniyeh joined Hezbollah.49 He quickly became a central player in the group’s most sensitive activities. By 1982 or 1983, he reportedly joined Fadlallah’s Muslim Student Union, described as the student branch of the Dawa Party, and soon served as Fadlallah’s bodyguard. Not long after he played direct roles in the 1983–84 bombings of the US embassy and marine barracks in Beirut.50

  Appointed to Hezbollah’s Majlis al-Shura, or consultative council, in 1986, he would serve in multiple security posts and ultimately as chief of Hezbollah’s IJO, overseeing Hezbollah kidnapping operations together with Abdelhadi Hamadi and spearheading the group’s overseas operations in coordination with Iranian security and intelligence services.51 Not one to shy away from serving on the front lines, Mughniyeh was reported by the CIA to have served as a military commander in southern Lebanon as well.52 According to the former Middle East unit chief in the FBI’s Counterterrorism Section, Mughniyeh ran Hezbollah’s “terrorist side—not the guerilla arm, the terrorist arm.”53 A European Hezbollah expert described Mughniyeh as “an architect who unleashes violence on special occasions.”54 Together with Hassan Nasrallah, Mughniyeh represented the radical wing of Hezbollah. When Hezbollah first engaged in Lebanese politics, the CIA speculated that if such a move came at the expense of militancy, more radical elements like Nasrallah or Mughniyeh could split off.55 But Hezbollah averted such an outcome not only by maintaining its military and terrorist activities even as it engaged in politics but also because Nasrallah’s rise to the position of secretary-general ensured the group would remain on the radical track.

  While Hezbollah’s relationship with Syria would later become very close, in the 1980s it was often contentious. In 1987, Mughniyeh and other senior Hezbollah security officials were recalled to Tehran to prevent their capture following Hezbollah attacks against Syrian forces in West Beirut. Both Imad Mughniyeh and Abdelhadi Hamadi reportedly underwent training while in Iran as they waited for the security situation in Lebanon to improve. That likely took some time, considering Syria issued a warrant for Mughniyeh’s arrest in 1988.56

  Senior Hezbollah operatives would seek refuge in Iran for security reasons many more times over the years. For example, Mughniyeh and Hamadi fled to Iran twice in 1994, first after Israeli commandos kidnapped Hezbollah ally Mustafa Dirani in May and then after Mughniyeh’s brother, Fuad, was assassinated in December.57 Mughniyeh played a central role in the Hezbollah terror campaign carried out in Lebanon and Europe in the 1980s. Indeed, Mughniyeh and a small group of his lieutenants were the “senior commanders of the Hezbollah operations in Europe.”58

  Over the years the Fox would evade capture on several occasions. The first such evasion reportedly came in Paris in November 1985, when officials intercepted a voice frequency sample of Mughniyeh, who was tracked to a luxury hotel on Paris’s Champs Elysées, just around the corner from the US embassy. That same month, a US grand jury issued a sealed indictment against Mughniyeh and three other Hezbollah operatives for their roles in the hijacking of TWA flight 847 five months earlier. Why Mughniyeh was in Paris remains unknown, though speculation abounds that his presence involved negotiations over the release of four French hostages. Mughniyeh was traveling on a false identity, but the CIA provided French officials with a copy of the passport he was using. Instead of detaining him, French intelligence officials reportedly met Mughniyeh several times over a six-day period and allowed him to leave the country in return for the release of a French hostage.59

  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