On March 8, a massive car bomb ripped through the Bir al-Abed district of southern Beirut, killing more than ninety people. The target of the bomb attack was Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, who narrowly escaped injury as he was leaving his mosque. One of his bodyguards, Jihad Mughniyah, a brother of Imad, was killed in the explosion. Hezbollah strung a banner above the bomb site with the words “Made in the USA.”
The CIA denied all knowledge of the attack, claiming that rogue elements from one of its secret counterterrorism units were responsible. According to Lebanese intelligence veterans, the blame rests with the CIA’s then Beirut station chief, who ran an unauthorized operation using CIA-trained personnel from the Mukafaha counterterrorism unit of Lebanese military intelligence to create a “balance of terror” with the Shia militants responsible for the U.S. marine barracks bombing and other attacks.
Given the hidden nature of Hezbollah’s leadership at the time, the more visible Fadlallah was often cited as being either the head of the party, or at the very least its “spiritual leader.” In fact, Fadlallah never had any organizational role in Hezbollah; even the term “spiritual leader” was inaccurate. Although he was revered by many Hezbollah members, Fadlallah always eschewed participation in a formal political organization.
Perhaps the most valuable cooperation between the United States and Lebanon in the hunt for the kidnap victims was the establishment of an electronic listening facility operated by Lebanese military intelligence and funded by the CIA. Following the abduction of William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, in 1984, the Americans sought the help of the Israelis, who had a listening post on the summit of Barouk Mountain, the highest point in southern Lebanon. But the Israelis, who resented the U.S. military involvement in Lebanon, refused to provide any assistance. The CIA turned to the Lebanese and under a “gentleman’s agreement” helped fund and build a sophisticated multi-million-dollar signals intelligence (SIGINT) site near the frost-shattered summit of Mount Sannine, at eight thousand feet, Lebanon’s third-highest mountain. The facility, run by the Signals Service of Lebanese military intelligence, was staffed with personnel fluent in Farsi, Hebrew, English, and French. The Sannine listening post could intercept radio communications throughout the Middle East as far as Iran to the east and southern Europe to the west. Intelligence gleaned by the facility was shared with the CIA. A former CIA field officer acknowledged that the listening post was the source of much valuable intelligence on the hostages and on the structure and activities of the nascent Hezbollah. The focus of the intelligence gathering was on Baalbek, a few dozen miles to the east in the Bekaa Valley and easily visible from Jabal Sannine on cloudless days. It was known that William Buckley was one of several Western hostages then held at the Sheikh Abdullah barracks.16
According to a former Lebanese Signals Service officer, the Sannine facility in 1986 intercepted a voice frequency sample of Imad Mughniyah, which was used to trace the Hezbollah militant to the luxurious Le Crillon hotel on the Champs Elysées in Paris. The DGSE, France’s intelligence service, was alerted, and officers met with Mughniyah in his hotel room, according to the former officer. Mughniyah, who was traveling under a false name, was not arrested and was allowed to leave France. The secret meeting bolstered the belief that France eventually cut a deal with the kidnappers that led in 1990 to the release of Anis Naqqash along with four accomplices and the unfreezing of financial assets and military hardware for Iran.
The Russians resorted to more forceful measures when four of their diplomats were abducted in 1985 by Ali Deeb, also known as Abu Hassan Salameh, a top Hezbollah operative who had been a close colleague of Mughniyah since the 1970s and whose name the CIA had linked to the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1983.17 Two days after the Russians were kidnapped, one of them was killed, and his body was thrown onto the street a few hundred yards from the Soviet embassy. In response, the KGB, assisted by the Druze militia of Walid Jumblatt (the son of the National Movement leader, Kamal), kidnapped and killed a relative of Deeb. The body was delivered to Hezbollah with a message that other leaders would be similarly disposed of unless the three surviving diplomats were released at once. The Russians were freed, promptly and unharmed, near the Soviet embassy.
Lingering questions over the kidnapping crisis of the 1980s continue to haunt Hezbollah’s leadership to this day. Sheikh Sobhi Tufayli’s home on a lonely road outside Baalbek is within clear view of the whitewashed walls and watchtowers of the Sheikh Abdullah barracks where so many of the hostages were held. But the former Hezbollah leader, who is at odds with the current party leadership, consistently maintains that the abductions of foreigners had “nothing to do with Hezbollah. Nothing at all.” The kidnappings, he avers, were a “mistake” that “ruined the image of the resistance and the image of Islam.”
But Tufayli has a curious story concerning his alleged attempts to end the hostage crisis when he was in telephone contact with the kidnappers in May 1986. The Syrians were urging Tufayli to conclude a deal to release the hostages. The Hezbollah chief reassured them that an agreement had been reached and he expected the release of the hostages within days. However, the arrangement collapsed, Tufayli claims, when just three days after securing the pledge from the kidnappers, Robert McFarlane, then the recently retired U.S. national security advisor, made his now infamous secret trip to Tehran accompanied by Colonel Oliver North as part of the arms-for-hostages affair known as Irangate. “We discovered then that the hostages were a big treasure for Iran,” Tufayli recalls. “They wanted to sell the hostages piece for piece.”
By the early 1990s, the kidnapping crisis was over. Mustafa Badreddine and the Dawa prisoners in Kuwait escaped from prison during Iraq’s August 1990 invasion of the emirate; the radicals held in France had been released; the Iran-Iraq war had ended, and Tehran was looking for a new relationship with the West.
Commenting on the kidnapping crisis several years later, Nasrallah admitted, with some understatement, “I cannot, of course, say that the Islamic scene is a total stranger to the incident [abductions of Westerners] and that the kidnappers were Arab nationalists or communists.”18 He said that the Kuwait seventeen had friends and relatives in “Islamic circles,” “but the fact remains that they were not members of Hezbollah and they acted on an individual basis.” Ultimately, he argued, Hezbollah wanted to see the end of kidnappings “since its fallout ended up entirely on the party’s shoulders.”
“A World Stronger Than Flesh or Bone”
The Israelis completed the phased pullback to the border on schedule and by the end of June 1985 occupied a strip of territory varying in depth from three to twenty-two miles. The new occupation zone was an enlarged version of the old “Haddad enclave” and in several places overlapped with the operational areas of some UNIFIL battalions. The new zone also included a fingerlike extension of territory that ran up to the Christian-populated mountain town of Jezzine, almost twenty miles north of the border.
Israel’s pullback to the border area necessitated a change in the nature of resistance operations by Amal, Hezbollah, and the secular groups of the National Resistance Movement. Before 1985 the resistance organizations had often operated from within the occupied areas, but now there was a defined and guarded front line separating the Israeli troops and their Lebanese allies from the resistance factions. The new situation imposed advantages and disadvantages for Hezbollah. Close-quarter attacks against Israeli troops now required the additional hazard of first penetrating the zone before bombs could be planted and ambushes mounted. On the other hand, the existence of a front line meant that the resistance groups were no longer surrounded by the enemy but had an area of operational and logistical security to the rear to regroup and plan, relatively safe from attack or arrest.
A major base of operations was established in an area known as Mlita on the rocky, forested slopes of Jabal Safi, which lies on the western edge of the occupied Jezzine enclave. Hidden in the mottled shadows beneath the dense canopy of s
tubby oak trees and camouflage netting, Hezbollah fighters dug foxholes and small shelters from which they launched operations against Israeli and SLA outposts dotting the mountainous skyline on the other side of a gaping valley to the east.
Shortly after Hezbollah moved onto the hillside, the fighters began expanding upon a shallow cave that had been used as a shelter against periodic Israeli air strikes and shelling. Using picks and pneumatic drills, they methodically dug a tunnel with adjacent rooms and chambers that eventually stretched some six hundred feet into the mountain. It took three years to construct the bunker system, the first of a chain of underground strongholds built by Hezbollah in the remoter frontline districts. They lined the passageways and rooms with soldered steel plates. The estimated one thousand tons of rock spoil were carefully scattered around the hillside beneath the trees and bushes so as not to betray the digging activity to Israeli aircraft patrolling overhead. The bunker contained sleeping quarters, a bathroom and latrine, and an operations room where attacks were planned and the aftermaths assessed. Lighting was provided by fluorescent tubes hooked up to car batteries.
Sayyed Abbas Mussawi was a regular visitor to the Mlita base, trudging up the steep, rocky slopes, his portly frame swaddled in a camouflage uniform while still retaining his clerical turban. The leader of the Islamic Resistance would pray at a niche in the rocks, his sonorous, gravelly voice wafting through the bushes and trees a source of comfort to the fighters assembled there.
Abu Hadi, a short, wiry Hezbollah fighter with a thick jet-black beard and inquisitive eyes, was just fifteen years old when he was sent to the Mlita base in 1986 as a fresh recruit into the Islamic Resistance. “I used to be scared at first,” he recalls. “I felt like I was entering a world stronger than flesh or bone.”
One evening shortly after he arrived, he saw Mussawi praying and weeping at his customary alcove among the rocks. Abu Hadi wanted to ask why he was crying, but was too shy to approach the venerated Islamic Resistance commander. “I kept the question with me for three months and then I found myself sitting next to him one day, so I asked him,” Abu Hadi says. “He said, ‘Every time I come here I feel that much closer to God. I see the eyes of the sky and the maker of the world who rejects oppression and reminds me that whoever fights oppression fights with God.’ I lost my fear at that moment. I felt armed by God and I grew stronger and stronger until I became a true resistance fighter and I still carry this identity with pride. I have five children today, yet I would gladly sacrifice them all for this holy cause.”
A “Society of Resistance”
Once the Israelis had retreated into their border zone, Hezbollah began to organize itself for the first time in the newly liberated areas of the south. The region was split into four administrative enclaves facing the occupation zone: the Iqlim al-Touffah adjacent to the occupied Jezzine sector, Nabatiyah in the northern sector, Tibnine in the center, and Tyre in the west.19 The enclaves were further subdivided into qita’at, or sectors, of around twelve villages each.
In addition to the full-time fighters in the military wing, Hezbollah formed the tabbiyya, or mobilization, essentially a village guard unit of part-time fighters. Among the duties of the tabbiyya was to help expand Hezbollah’s influence in the villages through such activities as hanging up posters, banners, and flags and distributing Hezbollah’s literature, including the weekly Al-Ahad newspaper. Twice a week, the tabbiyya organized prayer sessions at the local mosque, which would be followed by religious lessons. The village guards each received a month or two of military training to prepare them, mainly for fire support roles in attacks on Israeli and SLA compounds. They could be farmers, schoolteachers, or mechanics during the day only to exchange their plows, books, and wrenches for rifles, RPGs, and mortars at night. The village guard units also were responsible for the nighttime haras, or guardian, duties in their respective villages to protect against Israeli commando raids. Over the years, the village guard units gained considerable combat experience, regularly topped up with refresher training courses. Their effectiveness would be proven during the 2006 war, when they defended their villages against invading Israeli troops.
In each village, Hezbollah appointed a raabet, or link, a liaison officer who was responsible for the party’s local activities. Each week, the village liaison officers would hold administrative meetings with the commander of the south. At the time, there was no administrative separation between the full-time Islamic Resistance combatants and the tabbiyya: Hezbollah’s chief for the south was responsible for both elements.
Hezbollah, determined to be the dominant force fighting the Israelis, mounted a campaign of recruitment, intimidation, and violence against its potential rivals within the broader resistance movement. In 1986, during clashes between Hezbollah and the communists in Beirut, Nasrallah said, “Our strategy is to build a future for ourselves through confrontation with the Zionist enemy. Let [the communists] therefore leave us alone to fight Israel, for we have no ambitions in the liberated areas of the south; the border zone is a different matter and should be left to us.”20
Hezbollah officials approached Amal fighters to persuade them to join their party and continue fighting the Israelis under the banner of the Islamic Resistance. Some accepted, drawn by the relatively sizable salaries that the well-funded Hezbollah could afford to offer. Others declined, preferring to remain with Amal or quit the resistance altogether.
Nasser Abu Khalil, an Amal cell commander and confederate of Mohammed Saad, recalls being paid a visit by Sayyed Abbas Mussawi. “He tried to recruit me, but I told him no,” he says. “Hezbollah was very active in their recruiting. One minute an Amal leader was fighting with Amal, the next minute he was fighting with Hezbollah.”
Hezbollah’s effort to spread its influence throughout the south was underpinned by an extensive multi-million-dollar social welfare program to alleviate the poverty and lack of state utilities in Shia-populated areas. It began in the wake of the 1982 invasion as the first IRGC trainers entered the Bekaa Valley, when the Khomeini Support Committee was established to bring aid, such as food, clothing, and monthly stipends, to impoverished families and a twenty-four-bed Imam Khomeini Hospital was opened in Baalbek. That same year, the Martyrs’ Foundation was created to support the families of dead resistance fighters through the provision of pensions, and free health and education for children.
When Hezbollah’s influence reached the teeming slums of southern Beirut, trucks were purchased and volunteers hired to remove the mountains of garbage that had remained uncollected for years. Hezbollah launched a construction organ in 1985, Jihad al-Bina, the Holy Struggle for Construction, that initially rebuilt war-damaged homes and buildings. One of its first tasks was to repair the damage caused by the massive car bomb that came close to killing Fadlallah in March 1985. Jihad al-Bina also established infrastructure for sewage disposal and delivered drinking water to households by truck. Over the years, the organization has expanded its services around the country, building and rehabilitating dozens of schools, hospitals, clinics, mosques, homes, and shops. It offers agricultural assistance to farmers, digging wells and providing financial credit and advice on land reclamation and crop cultivation.
In the aftermath of Israeli offensives against southern Lebanon in the 1990s, Jihad al-Bina’s teams of volunteers quickly and efficiently surveyed damaged properties and began reconstruction plans even as politicians squabbled over how to spend foreign relief aid. Even during routine periods of daily conflict in the south, homes that had been struck by shellfire or machine gun rounds were speedily patched up by Jihad al-Bina.
Hezbollah’s social welfare network astutely filled the void left by a neglectful Lebanese state, deliberately creating a culture of dependency that bonded Lebanon’s Shias to the organization. It was the bedrock upon which Hezbollah could build its “society of resistance,” an all-inclusive vision of a steadfast and resolute community existing in a constant state of war readiness to confront the enduring threat posed
by Israel. Although Hezbollah’s leaders have never disguised its goal of creating a “society of resistance,” it is only in recent years, as the debate over Hezbollah’s arms has come to dominate the political agenda in Lebanon, that the concept has been articulated more clearly on a public level.
In 2007, Sheikh Naim Qassem, the diminutive gray-bearded deputy leader of Hezbollah who often expounds upon the party’s ideology, described resistance as “a societal vision in all its dimensions, for it is a military, cultural, political, and media resistance.”21 Hezbollah, he said, had always sought to build a “society of resistance” rather than limit it to a “group of resistance,” meaning a military organization operating independently of the society in which it exists. In Hezbollah’s concept of the “society of resistance” lie echoes of Mao Tse-tung’s famous principle of guerrilla warfare in which he likened guerrillas to “fish” swimming in the “sea” of the peasantry—the sea sustains and supports the fish in the same way that the peasantry sustains and supports the guerrillas. But Hezbollah takes the idea further than merely rallying the local population behind the guerrillas. For Hezbollah, the local population—Mao’s peasantry—are also the guerrillas, both directly as combatants and indirectly in support roles.
“The resistance community is an integration of the people, whereby everyone gives, with each member of this society living their own normal life, of going to school, attending universities, working in factories, businesses, and the like, but should a confrontation arise requiring his involvement, his participation will be according to the confrontation requirements,” Qassem explained.22 Those requirements could involve frontline fighting, providing logistical support, defending rear areas, speaking in support of the cause to the media, or simply enduring the privations and sacrifices of warfare with stoicism and steadfastness. Hezbollah’s social welfare networks help sustain the community’s will to embrace resistance. If your house is blown up by Israeli jets, never mind, Hezbollah will build you a new one. If your husband is killed fighting the Israelis, he will be honored and memorialized as a martyr, and you and your children will be provided for. “Thus the whole society becomes a resistance society; it provides what is required of it, then goes back to the normalcy of daily life,” Qassem adds. “Hence a resistance society is not one in which arms are randomly distributed to all the people, but such a community governs energies and capacities into an integrated process of confrontation.”
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