Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  Hezbollah had an acute understanding of the critical role played by information operations—or psychological warfare—in its guerrilla campaign against the Israeli occupation. It tailored its campaign to its three targets—the home front, Israel, and the international community. Domestically, Hezbollah sought to allay the suspicions of non-Shia communities by downplaying its broader ideological goals of an Islamic state and its ties to Iran, presenting itself as a national resistance movement serving the interests of all Lebanese by opposing the Israeli occupation. It fostered hostility toward Israel by broadcasting on Al-Manar horrific footage of Lebanese civilian casualties and then bolstering a sense of pride and determination with its combat videos.

  On the international front, Hezbollah opened a foreign press office in the early 1990s and readily granted interviews to the Western media. Hezbollah’s spokesmen promoted the notion that Israel’s occupation of Lebanon was illegal, brutal, and unjustified and that Hezbollah was simply resisting an occupation, just like any other national liberation movement, a right enshrined in international law. Its spokesmen often used as an analogy for a Western audience the French resistance to the Nazi occupation of France in World War II.

  As for the enemy, Hezbollah relentlessly hammered home the message that Israel’s determination to stay in south Lebanon was futile. The longer Israeli troops stayed in Lebanon, the more of them Hezbollah would kill. After some moral agonizing, Israeli television stations began broadcasting Hezbollah’s combat videos, allowing an Israeli audience frontline views of a war that the IDF had deliberately tried to obscure from the public. “Riveted, Israelis watched them with a mixture of horror and fascination,” wrote the author of a report on Hezbollah’s psychological warfare campaign. “The cumulative psychological effect of these images was great, inducing, among other things, a persuasive belief in Hezbollah’s military prowess.”12

  Such was the importance attached to information operations that Hezbollah’s entire resistance campaign could be termed “a guerrilla war psychologically waged,” meaning that the pace and variety of military operations were dictated more by the propaganda accrued than by purely military gains.13 Certainly, a bland Hezbollah press statement announcing a deadly roadside bomb attack against IDF troops could not produce the same impact as actually watching the operation on television that evening and seeing a squad of soldiers disappearing into a cloud of flame, smoke, and dust. Hezbollah’s storming assaults on SLA frontline outposts carried no real military value in themselves, but the images of fighters weaving through minefields, shrugging off mortar explosions, and pouring machine gun fire over the sandbagged ramparts into SLA compounds had a great impact on the psychological front. Although often blurred and shaky, the footage of combat operations, along with a steady diet of slick propaganda videos depicting resolute resistance fighters marching across landscapes resembling south Lebanon and montages of past attacks set to stirring martial tunes, had an incalculable effect in boosting popular support in Lebanon and the Arab world for Hezbollah’s military campaign.

  To further its penetration of the Israeli home front, Hezbollah began in 1996 to air propaganda clips in Hebrew, directly addressing Israeli soldiers and civilians and warning them of the dangers of remaining in south Lebanon. The clips are prepared by the Hebrew Observation Department, a special section within Al-Manar that monitors Israeli television and radio broadcasts and scans news websites 24 hours a day. The clips are distributed to Al-Manar’s news departments for inclusion in news bulletins, and also used in propaganda messages.

  Most of the staff in the Hebrew Observation Department are former detainees who learned the language while in Israeli prisons. One of them, Ahmad Ammar, was captured in 1986 with two comrades while planting roadside bombs in the occupation zone. He was sentenced by an Israeli court to seven years in jail. His term was subsequently extended on the basis that he continued to represent a threat to Israel. He and his fellow Hezbollah inmates began learning Hebrew as a means of communicating with their guards. Arabic and Hebrew share many linguistic similarities, and it took Ahmad only six months to become conversant. “We found it a great opportunity to learn about the enemy, their culture, who they are. Hebrew was our link to them,” he said. “According to the Prophet Mohammed, whoever learns the language of a new nation avoids its evil.”

  The department’s work is not limited to providing material for propaganda and news segments. While Hezbollah’s field reconnaissance and network of agents in the zone provided useful tactical intelligence, the department’s Hebrew speakers probed deeper, amassing detailed information on Israeli politics, economy, and society. The information is carefully analyzed and helps Hezbollah build a comprehensive and incisive portrait of its enemy. Hezbollah believes that in order to defeat and destroy its Israeli enemies, it must understand them first.

  “We know their priorities, their economy, their political structure, their institutions, and the variety of opinions and thoughts they hold,” said Hassan Ezzieddine, in 2001 the head of Hezbollah’s media relations department. “The more we know about them, the more we know their weak points. This makes it easier for us to confront them.”

  Moonlight Meetings with the Mujahideen

  One of the key—but still largely undisclosed—factors behind Hezbollah’s emerging battlefield successes in the early 1990s was the extensive intelligence penetration of the occupation zone by the Islamic Resistance and the military intelligence services of Lebanon and Syria. The intelligence network was not limited to Shia residents of the zone or press-ganged Shia conscripts in the SLA who might have sympathy for Hezbollah. It included senior Maronite and Druze civilians and officers in the SLA from villages like Qlaya, the militia’s heartland, who had earned the trust of the IDF over many years of collaboration and loyal service. It was a hugely effective strategy: by the end of the decade, the SLA had been so thoroughly penetrated at all levels that the IDF could no longer trust its Lebanese ally.

  “Hassan” was one of Hezbollah’s most effective agents operating in the western sector of the occupation zone in the 1990s. Tall and powerfully built with a big bony face, hollow cheeks, and thick black beard, Hassan was a member of a prominent family in a Shia village in the western sector of the occupation zone. He joined Hezbollah in 1987 and soon began working from his village, providing information on IDF and SLA movements in the western sector and liaising with fighters penetrating the zone. “I met the mujahideen at night in open areas and received from them weapons and ammunition,” Hassan says.

  The equipment included large quantities of explosives for IEDs, antitank missiles, rocket-propelled grenades, antipersonnel mines, bombs specially designed to be fitted to vehicles, and M-16 and AK-47 assault rifles. “It would take several trips over consecutive nights to pick up all the weapons and I’d hide them in prearranged locations,” he says. “When I received a call from the resistance, I would collect all the weapons by car and distribute them to locations for collection by the mujahideen.”

  He worked alone and in total secrecy to the extent that even his wife was long unaware that he was an agent with Hezbollah. “When she found out, she was very happy,” Hassan recalls.

  Hassan’s village was known as a bastion of support for Hezbollah, and it was often subject to punitive measures by the SLA, such as expulsions of residents, house searches, arrests, interrogations, and beatings. In July 1999, Hassan helped carry out an IED assassination attempt against the local head of the SLA’s Unit 504 intelligence wing. The SLA officer survived the bomb attack and launched a crackdown, conducting house-to-house searches and preventing anyone from leaving the zone. The SLA came for Hassan one night, smashing down his front door and taking him to Khiam prison, where he was severely tortured. He was stripped naked and repeatedly submerged in a tank of water, his head held down by the boot of the interrogator. Electrodes were placed in the water and kept there until he passed out. Other forms of torture included electrodes attached to his tongue, earlobes, and penis;
buckets of hot and cold water thrown over him; suspension by his wrists from a pole with his legs pulled apart by chains; and being repeatedly punched and kicked about the body and face. The interrogators made sure that his clothes and mattress were always soaking wet, despite the cold winter weather. He spent a total of fifty-two days in solitary confinement. One of the cells measured only six square feet.

  Hassan was freed when the prison was liberated in May 2000 during the IDF withdrawal. After an audience with Nasrallah in Beirut, he returned to his home village, where he continues to work with the Islamic Resistance. The secrecy of his affiliation with Hezbollah, however, has long gone: the interior walls of his small home are plastered with posters of Nasrallah, Hezbollah “martyrs,” and pictures of resistance fighters.

  The “Button Pushers”

  The Shia residents of the zone were naturally treated with suspicion by the IDF and SLA, even those Shia conscripts serving with the militia. But much of the intelligence work inside the zone was carried out by Christians, who, by virtue of their religion, were held in greater trust by the IDF and had better access to the SLA. One of the top agents for Lebanese military intelligence was a Maronite who was recruited in 1989 and whom we shall call “the Postman.”

  “I knew one day that the Israelis would leave, and I love my country,” the Postman recalls. “It was an easy choice to make.”

  At first, the Postman relayed snippets of information via a contact who lived in the zone but traveled regularly to Beirut. Later, when Lebanon’s cell phone network was installed, he directly contacted his handlers in the offices of military intelligence in Sidon. Although he was not formally in the SLA, he was friends with all the top leadership and was a trusted figure. Often invited to meetings with SLA commanders, the Postman would dial a number and leave the line open so that his handlers could listen in on the conversation.

  He built up his network of agents slowly, both Christians and Muslims, militiamen and civilians. “I recruited about twenty people inside the SLA, Christians and Muslims, including senior officers. I would select certain people I could trust. I would watch them for some time and then assess that even if they refused to work with me, they would not turn me in,” he says.

  It required a strong sense of judgment and steely nerves to attempt recruiting SLA officers. If he miscalculated, the Postman could find himself thrown into Khiam prison, or, worse, shot in the head and dumped in a ditch. It was a twisted world of conflicting loyalties, paranoia, treachery, greed, fear, suspicion, and violent death.

  The IEDs were usually planted by Hezbollah specialists who would set up the devices sometimes weeks, or even months, ahead of time. These bombs were often detonated by specially selected “button pushers” living inside the zone, whose identities were undisclosed even to other agents in the zone.

  One of the more sensational intelligence coups involved Raja Ward, a tough Druze from Hasbayya who was deputy chief of SLA intelligence in the eastern sector. Ward was persuaded to defect from the SLA after he fell in love with a young woman whose family was closely connected to the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. One day in June 1998, he turned himself in at a Lebanese army checkpoint just north of the occupation zone. In a deal to protect himself from judicial retribution, he handed over a notebook containing the names of dozens of agents working for Israeli intelligence. Ward’s defection caused an uproar when it was discovered that the formerly trusted SLA officer had just broken open one of Israel’s biggest intelligence rings in Lebanon. The following month, a Lebanese court indicted seventy-seven people on charges of spying for Israel.

  However, of all the Lebanese spies operating in the treacherous shadows of the occupation zone, none achieved greater success and notoriety than Ramzi Nohra. His remarkable career as an intelligence agent helped Hezbollah inflict some of its deadliest blows against Israel, both during and after the occupation.

  The Unflappable Ramzi Nohra

  When I met Ramzi for the first time in 2001, it was clear that he knew he was a marked man. The windows set in the thick stone walls of his ostentatious stone mansion in Ibl es-Saqi village near Marjayoun were fitted with tinted panes of bulletproof glass. Electronically controlled steel shutters provided additional protection against would-be assassins. Cameras were mounted on all sides of the building, covering every square inch of Ramzi’s property as well as the approaches along the main road outside.

  Ramzi was short and slim, with a mop of dark hair neatly parted in the middle and a scar on one cheek symbolizing his violent past. His stooped shoulders and intense, calculating gaze gave him a certain vulturine quality.

  In a small, cozy reception room, a large television was tuned to Hezbollah’s Al-Manar station. On a shelf above the television were three smaller monitors, each screen split into four separate wide-angle black-and-white views of the outside of his mansion. As Ramzi talked, his eyes kept straying instinctively to the twelve tiny screens. An AK-47 rifle protruded carelessly from beneath a sofa, and a 9 mm automatic pistol was tucked into the side of his armchair.

  Over the course of two decades, Ramzi had amassed considerable wealth through smuggling drugs from Lebanon into Israel, an activity that was tacitly facilitated during the years of occupation by the Israeli authorities, who recruited him as an informer and turned a blind eye to his illicit pursuits. However, his lucrative and relatively peaceful existence came to an end in the mid-1990s when he was tapped to carry out an audacious kidnapping inside the occupation zone, the first of several key secret operations that would turn Ramzi into a legend in the intelligence services of Lebanon, Israel, and Syria.

  The target of the abduction was Ahmad Hallaq, the same ferocious militiaman who had captured an Israeli tank in 1982 during the fierce fighting at Khalde at the southern end of Beirut. A towering man of imposing physique and sporting a thick bushy black beard, Hallaq was ruthless and fearless in equal measure, earning the respect of his enemies and the dread of his subordinates. As a member of As-Saiqa, the Syrian-backed Palestinian faction, he gained notoriety in the civil war for wedging his captured enemies inside columns of car tires doused in gasoline and setting them alight.

  “Hallaq didn’t know what fear was. He was an unbelievable person, utterly ruthless, a real killer. No one messed with him,” recalls one of Hallaq’s former lieutenants.

  At the end of the civil war in 1990, a bored Hallaq was approached by men claiming to be with the CIA, who offered him money to trace American hostages in Lebanon. He later learned that his handlers were in fact from Mossad and he was now an agent on behalf of his former enemy.

  In 1994, Hallaq was asked to make contact with Fuad Mughniyah, Imad’s brother, a midlevel Hezbollah security chief who owned a tile and plumbing business in Beirut’s southern suburbs. Mughniyah had served in As-Saiqa before 1982, and he and Hallaq had known each other for years. After realizing that Mughniyah was immune to recruitment and difficult to kidnap, the Israelis instructed Hallaq to assassinate him instead. On December 21, Hallaq parked a gray Volkswagen van packed with 120 pounds of explosive outside Mughniyah’s warehouse in the southern suburbs of Beirut. He walked inside the building to ensure Mughniyah was present and found his intended victim sitting behind a desk. After a moment’s pleasantries, Hallaq stepped outside, moved to a safe distance, and detonated the bomb. The blast ripped apart the front of the shop, instantly killing Mughniyah and three passersby.

  Hallaq departed Beirut immediately and crossed into the occupation zone the following day. However, his wife, Hanan, was arrested along with two other confederates. It turned out that one of Mughniyah’s colleagues who survived the blast told investigators that Hallaq had been in the shop moments before the bomb exploded.

  After a few months in the Far East, Hallaq returned to Israel and begged for his old job back. The Israelis agreed and put him through an intensive training program to increase his physical fitness and shooting skills. He even served on a couple of missions with Mossad. One of them, according to Palestinia
n and former Lebanese intelligence sources, was the assassination of Fathi Shiqaqi, the head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), who was gunned down by hit men in Malta in October 1995.

  Mossad gave him a new identity, Michel Kheir Amine, and a bodyguard, Mohammed al-Gharamti, better known as Abu Arida, a notorious collaborator who had run the Sidon port in the early years of the Israeli occupation before fleeing the city with his men in 1985. In November 1995, Hallaq and Abu Arida moved to Qlaya village in the occupation zone.

  “Hezbollah Will Use Chain Saws on Me”

  Lebanese and Syrian military intelligence soon learned that the newly arrived Michel Kheir Amine was in fact Ahmad Hallaq, Mughniyah’s assassin, and they hatched a plot to have him kidnapped from the occupation zone and brought to Beirut. They tapped Ramzi Nohra and his brother Mufid for the job.

  Ramzi knew that his relationship with Israel was a death sentence once the occupation was over, so he agreed to work with the Lebanese and Syrians as a double agent. He befriended Hallaq, inviting him to his house regularly to drink whisky and discuss means of jointly smuggling drugs into Israel. “I repeated these evenings several times,” Ramzi recalls. “Hallaq thought I was with Israeli intelligence. Hallaq told the Israelis that he trusted me.”

  Ramzi and Mufid assembled a team that included Bassem Hasbani, a local agent for Lebanese military intelligence, Maher Touma, and Fadi Qassar, a taxi driver who regularly plied the route between the occupation zone and Beirut.

  On the morning of February 20, 1996, Ramzi drove to Qlaya and invited Hallaq to lunch at his home in Ibl es-Saqi. Back at Ramzi’s house, they were joined by Maher Touma, one of the other conspirators. The three men settled into their chairs, and Hallaq began drinking whisky, which Ramzi and Mufid had laced with valium pills crushed to powder. Mufid and Fadi, the taxi driver, were hiding in a nearby room armed with silenced Ingram machine pistols. Once Hallaq was befuddled by the whisky and pills, Mufid decided to spring the trap. Bursting into the room, machine gun cocked, he yelled dramatically, “Lebanese resistance! Nobody move!” An astonished Hallaq reached for his pistol, but Mufid smashed his gun on Hallaq’s head, gashing it open.