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  Solid Gold Intelligence

  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.

  Attacking the US Embassy … 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

  Prowling for Hostages

  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

  The kidnappings drew attention to the Shi’a cause but also convinced many foreigners to leave or avoid Lebanon, fulfilling one of Hezbollah’s primary objectives of “expel[ling] the Americans[,] the French and their allies definitely from Lebanon, putting an end to any colonialist entity on our land.”97 In the process the West began to view Hezbollah “as a crazy and fanatic religious group, bent on martyrdom through suicide-operations, and engaged in the random abduction of foreigners, under the assumed strict control and direction of Iran’s clerical establishment.”98

  Throughout the 1980s, Hezbollah’s actions were influenced, if not directed, by the Iranian regime. In fact the organization’s founding letter states, “We obey the orders of one leader, wise and just, that of our tutor and faqih (jurist) who fulfills all the necessary conditions: Ruhollah Musawi Khomeini. God save him!”99 Over time Hezbollah became somewhat more independent from its state sponsor, but at the time the group was run as a virtual extension of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. David Jacobsen, the head of the American University of Beirut Medical Center, kidnapped in 1985, would later recall that after he had reached out to Fadlallah in a “private initiative,” Fadlallah had explained that “only the Iranian chargé d’affaires could release those held.” Fadlallah described the Hezbollah captors as “nothing more than the Iranian ‘hunting dogs.’”100

  In June 1986, the US government got its first direct acknowledgment from an Iranian official that Tehran held sway, if not complete control, over the kidnappers. An American envoy asked Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, then–speaker of the Iranian parliament (Majlis), “what sign of sincerity Iran required from the United States” for Tehran to use its influence over Hezbollah to win the release of US hostages. After launching into a tirade against US policy, Rafsanjani implied that Iran would consider future discussions with the United States if Washington adopted “a new attitude.” In a memo summarizing international efforts to secure the release of US hostages in Lebanon, the CIA director’s “Hostage Location Task Force” concluded that the meeting was “noteworthy in that Rafsanjani acknowledged that Tehran had influence with the captors.”101

  And yet that influence was limited, as the chief of the CIA’s Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis noted in a memo penned two years later. “We continue to believe that Iran is unable unilaterally to order the release of Western hostages and must bargain with Hezbollah on the terms of any release.” The key, the memo concluded, would be sweetening the deal for the key hostage holder, Imad Mughniyeh. “Mughniyeh,” the CIA assessed, “may be willing to release one or a few U.S. hostages in exchange for ransom money or Iranian promises of assistance in future operations against Kuwait.”102 The CIA understood the central role Mughniyeh still played in the hostage drama and the limitations of Iran’s influence over him when it came to his prized bargaining chips. “The last two hostages who have been freed were held by Imad Mughniyeh’s Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO),” the CIA noted in March 1991. “Mughniyeh most likely would resent Iranian efforts to secure the release of another IJO hostage at this time, viewing any such request as an Iranian effort to draw down his pool of hostages first.”103

  The adoption of kidnapping reflected the judgment that taking Western hostages provided Hezbollah—and, by extension, Iran—significant leverage over Western governments. Often, Hezbollah kidnapped Westerners in order to pressure the hostages’ governments to secure the release of incarcerated Shi’a. In other cases hostages were taken as a means to pressure Western governments against funding or arming Iraq in its war against Iran. They later became pawns in the arms-for-hostages Iran-Contra affair. When kidnappings failed to sufficiently pressure foreign governments or secure a desired response, Hezbollah would threaten hostages’ lives to increase pressure on their governments to negotiate for their release.104 Nonetheless, only five Westerners died or were executed while held hostage by Hezbollah between 1982 and 1992.105 According to former hostage David Jacobsen, when fellow captive William Buckley—the CIA station chief in Beirut—died in captivity, reportedly from drowning in his own lung fluids as a result of torture, it “really shook up our kidnappers.”106

  Late 1983 saw a lull in kidnappings over several months, until early 1984, possibly because Hezbollah was distracted by its efforts to expand beyond the Bekaa Valley to southern Lebanon and Beirut. And what operational resources the young movement had available were being used to carry out the more spectacular Beirut bombings. Many more kidnappings would follow, but not before Hezbollah and other pro-Iran Shi’a militants carried out a string of attacks on Western targets in Kuwait at Iran’s behest. Those events would shape the Western hostage crisis in Lebanon for years to come.

  The Kuwait 17

  On December 12, 1983, terrorists carried out a series of seven coordinated bombings in Kuwait, all within two hours, at the American and French embassies, the Kuwaiti airport, near the Raytheon Corporation’s grounds, at a Kuwait National Petroleum Company oil rig, and at a government-owned power station. The seventh explosive, outside a post office, was defused.107 Six people were killed and some eighty-seven wounded in the attacks.108 The string of bombings was executed at Iran’s behest by Lebanese and Iraqi Shi’a militants.109 In a 1986 report the CIA assessed that while Iran’s support for terrorism was meant to further its national interest, including dissuading Kuwait from supporting Iraq militarily in the Iran-Iraq War, this support also stemmed from the clerical regime’s perception “that it has a religious duty to export its Islamic revolution and to wage, by whatever means, a constant struggle against the perceived oppressor states.”110 The Kuwait bombings were the first in a long chain of such attacks.

  In these attacks, senior Hezbollah operatives, joined by their Iraqi compatriots, acted in the explicit service of Iran rather than in the group’s immediate interests. But in the aftermath of the bombings, Hezbollah would carry out many more attacks, at home and abroad, seeking the release of members jailed in Kuwait. Though he later denied the group played any role in the kidnappings of Westerners in Lebanon, Hezbollah deputy chief Naim Qassem once acknowledged that the Kuwait episode “was t
he starting point for the idea of hostages, to impose pressure for the release of prisoners in Israel and elsewhere.”111

  The bombings took Kuwaiti officials by surprise, but the damage could have been much worse had the bombs been properly wired. As it happened, faulty engineering prevented three quarters of the explosives planted at the American embassy compound from detonating, saving many lives.112 Shoddy planning also reduced the destructiveness of the attacks: a truck carrying 200 gas cylinders primed to explode at the National Petroleum Company site went off 150 yards from a refinery and just a few yards shy of a pile of flammable chemicals. More adept operational planning might also have resulted in the destruction of Kuwait’s primary water-desalination plant, located within the premises, leaving the desert nation nearly devoid of fresh water.113

  Credit for the bombings went to the Iraqi-based Dawa group, as well as the IJO, which claimed responsibility in a call to a French news agency in Beirut. By then, Islamic Jihad was already recognized as a cover name Hezbollah used in such calls.114 Dawa, a group of Iraqi Shi’a established in 1968, was one element in an amorphous, Iran-sponsored Shi’a network particularly active in and around Lebanon in the mid-1980s. Still composed primarily of Iraqis, Dawa carried out most of its activity, and was headquartered, in Iran.115 Signaling the intimate links between Dawa and Hezbollah, Sheikh Subhi al-Tufayli, one of Hezbollah’s founders, acknowledged that “Hezbollah is in essence the Dawa party.”116 Fadlallah, meanwhile, headed the Lebanese branch of the Dawa Party.