Only one person was killed—a six-year-old girl, Avia Alizada, in the communal farming village of Gornot HaGalil—but the message that Nasrallah and Mughniyeh had delivered to Israel was clear: From now on, any action against Hezbollah would bring about a direct attack not only on the IDF but also against civilians in northern Israel.
Israel responded by shelling Shiite villages and bolstering its forces in southern Lebanon. The Israelis hoped that would be the end of this particular round of fighting, and that Hezbollah would feel at least temporarily satisfied in its own show of force as a response to the slaying of Mussawi.
Mughniyeh, however, was planning something far more grandiose than a few days of rocket barrages: He intended to target the thousands of Israelis serving abroad as diplomats and in other official capacities, as well as the world’s Jewish communities, for whose security Israel considered itself responsible. To him, the battlefield was global. Mughniyeh wanted to rewrite the rules of the game: Any attack on any important Hezbollah asset would draw a response not only in what he and Nasrallah called “the region” (Israel and Lebanon), but also beyond that region: Israeli and Jewish targets all across the globe.
He struck first in Turkey. On March 3, 1992, an explosive device went off near a synagogue in Istanbul, but, miraculously, no one was killed. Four days later, Ehud Sadan, the chief security officer at the Israeli embassy, was killed when a large bomb exploded under his car, planted by members of a group calling itself Hezbollah Turkey. From there, Mughniyeh targeted Argentina: On March 17, a terrorist exploded a car bomb outside the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing twenty-nine people, including four Israelis, five Argentinean Jews, and twenty children at a nearby school. Two hundred forty-two people were injured. In its claim of responsibility, delivered to a Western news agency in Beirut, the Islamic Jihad Organization declared that the action was dedicated to the memory of Hussein, Mussawi’s son, who burned to death with him in the vehicle, and that it was “one of our continuing strikes against the criminal Israeli enemy in an open-ended war, which will not cease until Israel is wiped out of existence.”
The Israelis were surprised by how quickly Mughniyeh had been able to pull off the attacks in Turkey and Argentina. Only later did it dawn on them that he had planned those operations, and surely many others, years in advance, to be executed only when the occasion arose. An in-depth investigation by the Mossad and the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC) revealed that the squad that carried out the Buenos Aires bombing was one of forty-five sleeper cells deployed all over the world, including Europe and the United States, by Hezbollah’s “special research apparatus—Unit 910.” This is the code name for the militia’s elite secret force, consisting of between two hundred and four hundred of its best and toughest fighters, most of them trained in Iran by the Revolutionary Guard’s Al-Quds Brigades.
“The aim of the cells is to provide an immediate response outside of the Middle East in the event of an Israeli attempt to strike at Hizballah in Lebanon,” said Stanley Bedlington of the CTC. The Buenos Aires bombers, for instance, were from a cell that had been cultivated in Ciudad del Este, a city in Paraguay, near the border with Brazil and Argentina and the great Iguazú Falls, where a large number of Shiite Lebanese émigrés had settled. Long before the hit on Mussawi, the cell had collected a great deal of information on possible Israeli targets, for use when the need arose. After the assassination, Mughniyeh ordered a team to leave Lebanon for Ciudad del Este, where the locals provided them with intelligence, vehicles, explosives, and a suicide bomber.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, though, the Israelis decided not to retaliate. Some Mossad operatives argued for an aggressive response in South America. A Mossad team visited Ciudad del Este. “A town called Hell,” they reported. “We’re speaking of a clear and present danger. The next attack is on its way.”
But the heads of the Mossad responded with apathy, largely because any other response would have entailed significant bureaucratic changes for the Mossad. If Israel started to consider Hezbollah a global threat, the matter would then fall under the Mossad’s responsibility and require vast institutional realignment, including an extensive deployment in South America, where its presence had hitherto been extremely thin. The top Mossad command instead preferred to regard the attack in Buenos Aires as an isolated, one-off event, a chance success for Hezbollah, and to continue seeing the Shiite organization as a localized phenomenon that the IDF and the Shin Bet had to handle in southern Lebanon. Nevertheless, Mughniyeh’s message was clearly understood, and Israel abstained for many years from any attempts on the lives of the heads of Hezbollah.
Mughniyeh felt he had achieved his goals in Buenos Aires, and for the time being he halted plans for more attacks outside the Middle East arena. But while he refrained from activating any sleeper cells, Mughniyeh continued his provocations in the Security Zone. From month to month and year to year, Hezbollah’s performance improved and its daring increased. With generous aid from Iran, it employed increasingly sophisticated electronic systems, monitored IDF radio communications, improved its roadside explosive devices so they would not respond to Israel’s remote detonation equipment, planted spies inside the SLA, sent suicide bombers against IDF troops, and carried out blitz raids aimed at conquering Israeli fortifications in southern Lebanon.
Nasrallah had a fine understanding of the Israeli public’s mood and its sensitivity to casualties. His militia shot video footage of its operations and broadcast it on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV station. Those clips were then picked up in Israel and often rebroadcast on Israeli channels. They had the intended effect, which was more strategic than tactical: Over time, watching the numerous videos of Hezbollah’s successes began to gnaw away at the national consensus to maintain an IDF presence in Lebanon. Israel responded with repeated bombardments against Hezbollah positions and settlements where it was active, killing both militia and civilians.
At some point, Mughniyeh apparently felt that Israel had crossed a red line. No one in Israel could point to a single, specific action that set him off, but two years after the Buenos Aires bombing, Mughniyeh staged another attack outside of the Middle East. On March 11, 1994, a suicide bomber drove a truck packed with tons of explosives from the outskirts of Bangkok toward the Israeli embassy. If the attack had been successful, it would have caused hundreds of casualties. Fortunately, the man had second thoughts about becoming a shahid, stopped the truck in the middle of the road, short of the embassy, and ran away.
This time, the Israelis decided a response was necessary. The question was what form the retaliation should take. At consultations in the prime minister’s office, AMAN officers said that it wasn’t enough to strike Hezbollah; rather, its sponsors, the Iranians, should be targeted. General Ali Reza Asgari, the commander of the IRGC’s Al-Quds Brigades, was a suitable candidate for assassination, they argued. This proposal would also have transferred responsibility for the operation to the Mossad.
But Prime Minister Rabin wasn’t keen to get the Iranians involved, and in any case, no one in Israeli intelligence knew where Asgari was or how to get close enough to kill him.
Rabin did endorse another target, however. That spring, two Unit 504 agents learned of a Hezbollah camp near Ein Dardara, close to the Lebanese-Syrian border, where an officers’ training course was under way. Aerial photographs from a Scout drone and radio communication monitoring by Unit 8200 confirmed it. Then, on June 2, after weeks of careful planning, Israeli Air Force Defender helicopters attacked. Cadets scattered in all directions, desperate for cover from the helicopters’ machine guns. Fifty of them were killed and another fifty wounded. Among the trainees were the sons of some senior Hezbollah officials and two others from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards who were related to officials in Tehran. “It was more or less the same as someone bombing Eton College in England,” said one Israeli official.
Hezbollah radio stations called th
e raid “barbaric” and promised “a comprehensive response at all levels.” Forty-six days later, Mughniyeh struck in Buenos Aires once again. On July 18, 1994, a suicide terrorist blew up a van packed with explosives in front of the Argentinean Jewish AMIA community center. The seven-story building collapsed, killing eighty-five and injuring hundreds. It took weeks to extricate all of the bodies from the wreckage.
This second bombing finally woke Israeli intelligence to the full reality of the international threat posed by Hezbollah. What two years before had seemed like a localized incident had turned out to be the work of a worldwide network, supported by Shiite communities and under the protection of Iranian embassies.
The Israelis grasped that these remarkable capabilities—“better than most of what we had ever seen from any Palestinian organization,” an AMAN operative said—sprang first and foremost from the mind of Imad Mughniyeh.
Retaliation, for the Israelis, would come in two stages. First, the Mossad would kill Mughniyeh’s other brother, Fouad. Then operatives would wait at Fouad’s funeral for Mughniyeh and either kill him there or, at the very least, start a surveillance operation against him, which would ultimately lead to an assassination. Fouad had to die because the Israelis didn’t have the slightest idea how else to find Mughniyeh, who remained no more than a grainy photograph in their files.
Caesarea, however, couldn’t pull off the job on its own in Beirut. So local agents had to be employed, and they eventually settled on a young Palestinian named Ahmad al-Halak, who had been taken prisoner by Israel in the Lebanon War in 1982 and recruited by the Mossad’s Junction division. Halak was something of a roughneck, with no discernible ideology other than money. He dealt in smuggled goods and protection rackets, which gave him access to the dodgier areas of Beirut that interested the Mossad. By 1994, he was one of Junction’s key agents in the city. Acting on orders from his case officer, whom he met from time to time in Cyprus, Halak found pretext for an ostensibly coincidental visit to Fouad Mughniyeh’s hardware store, in the Shiite neighborhood of al-Safir, and, over the next few months, made friends with him.
On December 21, 1994, a few minutes before 5 P.M., Halak and his wife, Hanan, parked their car outside Fouad’s store. Halak went inside to make sure Fouad was there, chatted with him briefly about a debt he had undertaken to collect for the store owner, and left. His wife quickly got out of the car, and the couple walked away. When they were about a hundred yards from the store, Halak turned around, looked at the store and the car parked outside, and put his hand into his pocket. Fifty kilograms of high explosives in the trunk of the car detonated, destroying Fouad’s store, killing him and three passersby, and seriously wounding fifteen others.
A statement issued by Hezbollah after the bombing read: “There is no doubt as to the identity of the criminal hand that committed this crime against civilians in a shopping area in the al-Safir neighborhood in Beirut. Today, after repeated threats, the Zionist enemy and his destructive agencies carried out a despicable crime against a number of people while they were doing their shopping.”
The funeral was held the next day. The Mossad had four lookouts posted at different points along the route and at the cemetery. But Mughniyeh saw through the ploy: He stayed away from the funeral, fearing the Mossad would be waiting for him.
Hezbollah, meanwhile, was quickly on Halak’s trail. He managed to escape by reaching the beach and rendezvousing with a submarine waiting to take him to Israel. (Hanan, who had planned to fly out of the country, was caught on her way to the airport, brutally interrogated, and sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor.) The Mossad sent Halak to a Southeast Asian country with a new identity, but he never fit in. “I don’t get these people; they’re small and strange,” he complained at a meeting with a Junction operative who was keeping in contact with him. After six months, the Mossad offered to place him in an Arab town in Galilee, but Halak insisted on returning to Lebanon. In March 1996, an Israeli double agent working for Hezbollah managed to lure him into accepting an invitation to lunch. Halak was drugged and taken by truck to Beirut, where he was tortured by Mughniyeh and his cohorts. Then he was handed over to the Lebanese authorities and indicted, sentenced to death, and executed by a firing squad.
—
MORE THAN THREE YEARS had passed since the hasty assassination of Abbas Mussawi. Many dozens of people had died in a bloody cycle of revenge, and yet Hezbollah had only grown stronger, with a new leader, Nasrallah, who was several times more powerful and effective than Mussawi had been.
“I did not accurately foresee Hezbollah’s reaction,” Major General Uri Sagie said. “I did not accurately evaluate Imad Mughniyeh.” And Defense Minister Arens admitted, “It was too hasty a decision-making process.”
As for then–chief of staff Ehud Barak, he admitted the facts, but not the error. “The question,” he said, “is how did things look at the time of the act? We had identified Mussawi as a threat, and we thought it was right to strike at him. This was correct thinking for that moment. It was very difficult to foresee then that he would be replaced by Nasrallah, who seemed less significant then and less influential, and that he would become a leader with such great power. It was also difficult to know that Mughniyeh would come to be his number two, who turned out to be super-talented at operations.”
By 1995, he remained alive, and he was now only one of Israel’s antagonists.
TWO BUSES, ONE FULL of Israeli soldiers, were parked in the lot of a roadside kiosk near Mehola, a settlement in the Jordan Valley, on April 16, 1993. After a little while, a car pulled off the road and slipped up close to the buses.
Then it exploded.
Set against the damage the terrorist intended to inflict, the actual number of casualties was fortunately relatively low. A Palestinian from the nearby village, who worked in a snack bar, was killed, and eight people were lightly wounded. But Shin Bet investigators noted that inside the car were the charred remains of its driver, along with cooking-gas cylinders used as explosive material. A suicide bomber.
By now, suicide attacks were common enough, but up until this point, they had all occurred in other places, not Israel. The Mehola attack began a wave of such bombings inside Israel. Within a year, suicide bombers were blowing themselves up all over the country. In eleven months, they killed more than one hundred Israelis and wounded more than a thousand.
Shin Bet’s top officials tried to understand where they had erred, and how the situation had become so horrific. They started tracing most of the attacks back to just three men. But two of them, Ahmed Yassin and Salah Shehade, were in Israeli prisons. And the third, Yahya Ayyash, was in Poland, or so they believed.
The Israelis had no idea how these three managed to communicate with each other, let alone how they had explosive devices prepared and how they successfully recruited and dispatched so many suicide bombers.
—
YASSIN WAS BORN IN the Palestinian village of Al-Jura, and became a refugee in the 1948 war, ending up in the Egyptian-ruled Gaza Strip with his family. Like many young Palestinians, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, where he met another refugee, two years older, by the name of Khalil al-Wazir, the charismatic leader who became known as Abu Jihad. Al-Wazir feared that being identified with the Brotherhood, then in conflict with the Egyptian government, could be an obstacle in his path, and he abandoned it to go his own way. But Yassin, quiet and introverted, felt that he had found his life’s true vocation, and he turned out to be a prodigy of Islamic studies.
After the Arab defeat in the Six-Day War of 1967, while al-Wazir launched a huge campaign of guerrilla warfare against Israel, believing that only force would finally destroy Israel, Yassin came to a different conclusion. He believed that the Arab defeat was the result of their own moral failings, and that secular and decadent regimes had strayed too far from Allah. Redemption, therefore, was to be found in devotion to Islam. “Al-Islam hua al-Khal,”
he said repeatedly—“Islam is the solution”—echoing in Arabic the same slogan Ruhollah Khomeini had used to rouse his followers in Farsi.
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, in an effort to build a movement based on Islamic values, with himself as its leader, Yassin set up mosques and Islamic educational institutes, as well as a network of welfare and social assistance bodies. A frail and slender man who spoke in a high-pitched voice and used a wheelchair—the result of a boyhood accident—Yassin appeared to be a sensitive social reformer, doing godly works in Gaza. Certainly, the Shin Bet assumed, he was no threat to Israel.
In fact, many Shin Bet operatives liked Yassin. In contrast to the PLO, he didn’t try to conceal his activities, and he even held long conversations with Israeli officials whenever they requested a meeting with him. “He was an excellent conversationalist, knowledgeable about Zionist history and Israeli politics, sharp-minded and very pleasant,” recalls a senior Shin Bet officer posted in Gaza at the time, code-named Aristo. “He was so different from the PLO terrorists whom we used to interrogate.”
With Arafat gathering support in the territories and recognition around the world, it seemed best to leave Yassin be. “In a certain sense, the Shin Bet grew the jihadist,” said Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, head of AMAN in the late 1980s.
“The agency was one of the factors which supported the Islamist elements,” said Ami Ayalon, head of the Shin Bet in the 1990s. “Our thinking was that in order to create a counterweight to the PLO’s Palestinian national movement, we’d encourage Islam, which does not have a nationalist element—at least that’s what we believed then.” The hope was that the Muslim clergy, increasingly popular thanks to their social activities in preschools, clinics, youth centers, and mosques, would drain support from Fatah and weaken Arafat.
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