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`Professional' Terrorist Mughniyah Was Elusive

Other News Materials 14 February 2008 10:27 (UTC +04:00)

(Los Angeles Times) - For more than two decades, Imad Mughniyah was among the most wanted terrorists on earth, a top Hezbollah commander with close ties to Iranian intelligence who was pursued by the United States, Israel and other nations for attacks that killed hundreds of their civilians and soldiers.

Known as the Fox, Mughniyah was a frustratingly elusive figure to his pursuers -- accused of many acts of terror, convicted of none.

Mughniyah was believed to have orchestrated strikes by the Islamist militant group on a U.S. Marine barracks, the American embassy and other American targets in Lebanon, which ended in President Reagan ordering the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the troubled Middle East nation in 1984.

Attacks on an Israeli embassy and Jewish community center in Argentina in the 1990s that killed 114 people were also attributed to him, and for that, Interpol last year issued a "Red Letter" arrest warrant for him and five Iranian officials.

Mughniyah was said to have amassed a small army of loyal Hezbollah soldiers of his own, as well as an arsenal of missiles stockpiled in southern Lebanon that number in the thousands, and could strike several of Israel's most populous cities.

As recently as 2006, Mughniyah was believed to be involved in the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers that led to a war between Hezbollah militants and Israel. He may also have spent time on the ground in Iraq as part of an effort by Iran to destabilize its U.S.-occupied neighbor and support a Shiite uprising.

And his prolific use of truck bombs is said to have so impressed Osama bin Laden when the two met in the mid-1990s that the al-Qaida leader used them as the blueprint for attacks by his own fledgling organization.

Through it all, Mughniyah, who was 45, remained a ghost-like figure. Current and former intelligence officials from the United States, Israel and some other countries said Wednesday they were never sure what the elusive chief of international activities for Hezbollah, the Party of God, was up to.

Former CIA agent Robert Baer said Mughniyah eliminated every piece of paperwork about himself, including the passport photo in Lebanese government files. "He erased his past," Baer said.

Mughniyah changed his radio frequency every day, never took the same route from one place to another and only met in buildings with more than one exit, Baer said. "In terms of terrorism, he was the best there was, truly a professional. I chased him for 15 years, but saying I chased him implies that I actually got close to him. And I'm not sure that I ever did."

Mughniyah began his career as a teenager during the Lebanese civil war and was later trained by Yasir Arafat's Fatah movement, Baer said. He became a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization leader's personal security detail. When the PLO left Lebanon in 1982, Mughniyah joined Hezbollah, serving as a bodyguard before rising quickly through the ranks.

Intelligence officials said they could never pin down his exact role as a liaison between Hezbollah and the intelligence services of Iran and Syria, which support the U.S.-designated terrorist organization.

Matthew Levitt, a former senior counter-terrorism official for the Treasury Department, discounted speculation that Mughniyah had been marginalized in recent years. "He continued to operate as he was," said Levitt, now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Though Mughniyah traveled widely, shuttling from Lebanon to Iran to Syria and back again, he did so clandestinely. Even the Israelis, with one of the most vaunted intelligence agencies in the world, could not capture him.

"He moved in the shadows," said Dr. Magnus Ranstorp of the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defense College, whose book on Hezbollah is used by many U.S. intelligence agencies as a primer.

Despite their lack of intelligence on him, the hunt for Mughniyah was intensely personal for the American military and the CIA, which suffered casualties in Hezbollah attacks and kidnappings.

The Justice Department indicted Mughniyah in 1985 for the hijacking of a TWA plane and shooting of a passenger Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem. Agents from the FBI, along with the CIA, had been hunting him ever since. "Certainly within the U.S. intelligence community, some were as eager to get Imad Mughniyah as they were Bin Laden," said Ranstorp. "I'm sure there will be champagne corks popping" in Washington.

"Many people in the intelligence community, successive U.S. presidents, have waited for this day, to extract a price for the American lives that he has taken. There are people who have spent most of their career trying to track this guy down."

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