IT WAS NOW CLEAR that the constellation of organizations that flocked to Iran's Bekaa camp in 1982 had been transformed from a "fight club" into a kind of family-run Murder Inc., subcontracted by Iran to exact a price for Israel's invasion of Lebanon, America's intervention there, and U.S. support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War.
But the United States wasn't taking these punches sitting down. In March 1985, using Saudi assets, CIA-hired operatives detonated a car bomb outside the residence of Sheikh Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, a prominent Shiite cleric. The explosion killed 80 people, including Mughniyeh's brother Jihad, while only slightly injuring Fadlallah. It was a blunder: Fadlallah was an important Shiite figure, if hardly the "spiritual head" of Hezbollah, which had emerged by this time as the leader of Lebanon's Shiite political groups. But the attempted assassination escalated America's conflict with Hezbollah and Iran.
As the blood feud grew, Mughniyeh played a central role in the emerging shadow war between America and Iran. In June 1985, he and three others hijacked TWA Flight 847 and demanded the release of 700 Shiite prisoners held by Israel -- as well as his cousin Badr al-Din, who had been jailed in Kuwait since masterminding the 1983 U.S. Embassy bombing there, which killed six. The flight's odyssey was finally resolved when Israel agreed to release some 700 Shiite militants it had imprisoned, but only after the beaten body of murdered U.S. Navy serviceman Robert Stethem was thrown from the plane.
A season of hostage takings, then just beginning, accelerated: Presbyterian missionary Benjamin Weir, reporters Terry Anderson and Charles Glass, educator Thomas Sutherland, and dozens more were abducted from Beirut's streets and held in clandestine locations. Veteran Middle East reporter Robert Fisk, seeking Anderson's release, remembers meeting Mughniyeh in Tehran during this period. "Mughniyeh's handshake was like a vise grip, and he wouldn't let go," Fisk told a Western journalist. "His defining trait was that he was a very, very angry man. He also had this absolute confidence in his own view of the world."
From the U.S. standpoint, the most important hostages were William Buckley, the CIA's Beirut station chief, and Marine Col. Rich Higgins, taken at gunpoint while serving as part of the U.N. peacekeeping mission. The CIA quickly concluded that the two kidnappings had all the hallmarks of a Mughniyeh operation: meticulously planned, elegantly conducted -- and virtually unpredictable. Buckley's kidnapping sparked recriminations among CIA professionals, who proved powerless to find him.
Chip Beck, a U.S. State Department official, Navy officer, professional artist -- and Buckley's close friend -- was tasked with providing a sketch of Mughniyeh. "There wasn't much to work with," he told me recently, "since so few people had ever seen him."
The Higgins kidnapping, for which CIA professionals continue to hold Mughniyeh responsible, proved an even greater insult, particularly after U.S. officials received a videotape of his torture. The video, delivered to the Americans, reflected a graphic exercise in animalistic vengeance. "Unforgettable," as one former intelligence officer who saw it says. But the message was also ruthlessly clinical: Top this.
Higgins's tortured remains were found in a garbage bag near a southern Beirut mosque in December 1991. A few days later, Buckley's body was found dumped on Beirut's airport road.
IN JANUARY 1995, according to a senior Hezbollah official, Mughniyeh fled to Iran. He was being hounded by the United States and Israelis; his brother Jihad had been assassinated; and his best friend, cousin Badr al-Din, had spent seven years in a Kuwaiti prison, gaining release only after Saddam Hussein's military occupied Kuwait in August 1990.
Despite all this and a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head, Mughniyeh remained unscathed. This was primarily due to the care he took to protect his identity. He never talked of his operations, never agreed to an interview, never allowed his picture to be taken. He never spoke of his past, his family, or his life. According to a senior Islamist official who first met him in 1990 and got to know him as "Hajj Radwan," Mughniyeh rarely returned to his village to see his father and mother. On a number of occasions, according to published reports, because he was fluent in Arabic and Farsi, he served as an interpreter at meetings between Iranians and foreign leaders, but without telling Iran's visitors who he was.
From 1995 to 2006, Mughniyeh shuttled between Tehran, Damascus, and Beirut, eluding capture. There were some close scrapes. He boarded a flight to Saudi Arabia in late 1995, but the Saudis refused an American request to apprehend him, instead denying the airliner landing rights. U.S. intelligence officers concluded that the Saudis feared that cooperating in Mughniyeh's capture would lead to violent retribution. In 1996, he was spotted aboard a ship in Doha, Qatar, but the CIA moved too slowly to catch him. His legend grew with each escape: Stories spread that he met bin Laden, commanded Iran's operations in Basra, Iraq, in 2006 during the U.S. war in that country, had two plastic surgeries, and somehow owned a bakery in Beirut, where he could be seen, every morning, at a nearby coffee shop.
The most believable Mughniyeh story comes from the senior Islamist official who filled me in on Mughniyeh's past. Over a quiet dinner in Beirut in late 2011, the official told me that Mughniyeh had been married with two boys and a girl and been living in Lebanon, with a second wife in Damascus. "I first met Hajj Radwan in 1990," he told me, "and I met him quite by accident several times thereafter. I had no idea he was Imad Mughniyeh."
He said he spotted Mughniyeh in 1992 at a southern Beirut store that sold decorative bathroom tiles and plumbing fixtures. What my source didn't know at the time was that the shop was owned by Mughniyeh's brother Fuad, who served as a midlevel Hezbollah security official. The shop was across the street from a prominent mosque frequented by Hezbollah's senior leadership. One day, he was picking up supplies and found Mughniyeh standing behind the counter. Mughniyeh greeted my source with a grin and said he was "filling in" for Fuad -- "a close friend of mine," my source recalled, shaking his head in disbelief. "He waited on me."
But while my source didn't know then that the shop's owner was Mughniyeh's brother, the Israelis did. On Dec. 21, 1994, Ahmad Hallaq, a former Palestinian militiaman recruited by the Israelis, planted 120 pounds of explosives in a gray Volkswagen van outside Fuad's store, walked inside to confirm that his target, Fuad, was there, and then, after walking a safe distance away, triggered the bomb. The blast, Nicholas Blanford wrote, "ripped apart the front of the shop, instantly killing [Fuad] Mughniyah and three passersby."
Israel had good reason to target anyone close to Imad Mughniyeh: He had become indispensable to Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's chief, who was then shaping a strategy to pry Israel out of southern Lebanon, where Israel had set up a security zone. Later, after Israel's June 2000 withdrawal from the south, Nasrallah called on Mughniyeh to design a plan to deploy Hezbollah's Iranian-supplied, Russian-made Kornet and RPG-29 anti-tank rockets against Israeli armor. A senior Hezbollah official confirmed to me that Mughniyeh actually came up with Hezbollah's anti-tank training regimen, which paid off six years later. During the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the Israel Defense Forces were badly bloodied, losing more than 40 armored vehicles to Hezbollah's anti-tank squads.
But while Mughniyeh was a hero for Hezbollah, his welcome was wearing thin in Syria. The Syrians always had a loveless marriage with Iran -- and Hezbollah. Syrian President Hafez al-Assad had only reluctantly agreed to the deployment of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps training units to the Bekaa Valley in 1982, and then insisted that the deployment be scaled back. His son and successor, Bashar, followed suit: He maintained strong ties to Tehran, while registering discomfort with Iran's anti-Baath strategy in the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion of neighboring Iraq.
Relations soured further after the 2006 Lebanon war. Facing domestic economic pressures as a result of U.S.-imposed sanctions, the Syrian president pursued deeper ties with the West -- over Iranian objections. "I want to make this clear: Syria views itself as a Mediterranean country," Imad Moustapha, then Syria's ambassador to the United States, pointedly told me in 2007. "We look west -- not east. We look to America for leadership." The statement, shocking at the time, reflected Syria's desire to normalize relations with Washington -- a fact that discomfited Tehran.
Hezbollah had its own problems with Damascus. Movement leaders were bitter about Syria's February 2007 decision to open a communications channel with Israel through Turkey, and with Assad's decision to send the Sunni Islamist militants of Fatah al-Islam into the Lebanese city of Tripoli, where they sparked a bitter conflict in a Palestinian refugee camp in May 2007 that claimed hundreds of lives. Syria's move in Tripoli roiled Hezbollah leaders, who accused Assad of purposely attempting to destabilize the Lebanese government -- at their expense. "We know who's responsible for Tripoli, even if you and your journalist friends don't," a Hezbollah official told me at the time.
Ties between Damascus and Hezbollah reached a low point that September when Israeli jets bombed Syria's clandestine nuclear reactor under construction in the country's north and Assad's regime refused to respond militarily. In private, a senior Hezbollah leader with whom I spoke accused Syria of "flirting with the Zionists."
Peter Jordan/Time & Life Pictures
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