IMAD MUGHNIYEH WAS BORN the eldest son of a poor farming family in Tayr Dibba, a Shiite village in southern Lebanon, in 1962. The Mughniyeh family was devout and traditional, but there wasn't anything unusual about them -- and certainly not anything that hinted at the path that the son would follow. Roughly a decade after Imad's birth, his father, Fayez, a fruit seller, moved his family to Beirut's southern suburbs. According to a number of people who knew him at that time, Imad attended a Shiite school and was an excellent student.
But when the Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975, Mughniyeh turned up at a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Beirut and asked for military training. Anis Naccache, a Shiite militant Lebanese nationalist and later a successful businessman, remembers him as a politically aware boy. The Palestinians provided Mughniyeh with rudimentary small-arms training. He was 13.
By 1979, he was enrolled in the American University of Beirut's engineering school and was increasingly politicized amid the tumult of Islamic revolution in nearby Iran and a deepening sectarian divide at home in Lebanon. Mughniyeh and his cousin Mustafa Badr al-Din joined the Palestinian resistance movement Fatah, which had been expelled from Jordan. The appearance of Fatah roiled the fragile Lebanese political environment, and the group had become a participant in the then four-year-old Lebanese civil war. A Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) veteran remembers that Mughniyeh and his cousin brought with them "about 100 fighters from the southern suburbs -- a kind of roving Shiite fight club."
Mughniyeh stood out. "He was a superb soldier," this veteran says. "He was courageous and a natural leader." Soon after, this same veteran notes, Shiite political operative Ali Hassan Deeb recommended him to the senior commander of Fatah's elite Force 17 commando unit. In late 1981, according to a senior Hezbollah official, Naccache introduced Mughniyeh to Iranian diplomat Ahmad Motevaselian in Beirut. The 1979 Iranian revolution had brought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power, and the new Islamist government was eager to fund a militant vanguard that could export its revolution to Lebanon -- and strike a blow against Israel.
At Motevaselian's behest, Mughniyeh paid his first visit to Tehran and built ties that would prove crucial, particularly after the Israelis invaded Lebanon in June 1982 to destroy the PLO stronghold in Beirut, according to a Hezbollah official who was a lifelong friend. One month after the invasion, Tehran pressed Syria, which had sent troops into Lebanon, to approve the deployment of 1,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps soldiers to an abandoned Lebanese military base in the Bekaa Valley. Once they had secured their foothold in Lebanon, the Iranian vanguard provided military training to the most important of Lebanon's Shiite movements, including Mughniyeh's Shiite militia, now called Islamic Jihad.
The turning point in Mughniyeh's career came that same month, when Motevaselian, two Iranian diplomats, and an Iranian photographer were kidnapped by the right-wing Christian Lebanese Forces. The four would never be heard from again. In response, the Iranians loosed Islamic Jihad on the Americans, who had deployed Marines to Lebanon as part of an international peacekeeping force. Iran saw them as supporting Israel's Christian allies, and Mughniyeh's fighters traded sniper fire with U.S. forces, who occupied a base near southern Beirut's Shiite suburbs, throughout the end of 1982 -- stepping up their attacks in September after a Christian militia slaughtered at least 1,700 Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps while Israeli soldiers looked on.
In April 1983, a van carrying 400 pounds of explosives destroyed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including Robert Ames, the head of the CIA's Near East division. The attack was followed that October by the simultaneous truck bombings of the U.S. Marine and French paratroop barracks in southern Beirut, killing 241 American and 58 French soldiers.
The CIA investigation that followed showed that Islamic Jihad operatives planned the attack in a series of meetings inside the Iranian Embassy in Damascus, according to a CIA officer who served in the region at the time. Mughniyeh provided intelligence on the American deployment, this officer says, and recruited the bombers. "This was Mughniyeh's operation. He was the mastermind."
Bill Pierce/Time & Life Pictures
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