Hezbollah (85 page)

The next day in central Bangkok, police rushed to the scene of an explosion in the early afternoon at a home rented by a group of Iranians. Two barefoot men fled the house, but a third was injured and tried to hail a taxi to escape. When the taxi refused to stop, the injured man threw a bomb at the car, destroying half the vehicle and injuring the driver and four bystanders. Police soon cornered the injured suspect, who tried to throw another explosive at them but was too weak; the resulting explosion blew off both his legs. The other two men were soon caught—one was detained at the airport as he tried to catch a flight to Malaysia; the other managed to escape to Malaysia, where he was arrested boarding a flight to Iran. A fourth suspect, an Iranian woman who rented the house, was believed to have fled to Iran.
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Unlike the Hezbollah plot foiled just weeks earlier in Thailand, in this plot Qods Force operatives were targeting Israeli diplomats, Thai investigators determined. At the scene of the explosion, authorities found several undetonated devices, all homemade magnetic sticky bombs of the same type used in India and Georgia.
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In time, investigators would tie the three attacks together not only based on the explosives used but through phone records, travel documents, and money transfers. About a dozen Qods Force operatives coordinated their preparations for the attacks, which began ten months earlier in April 2011—not long after press reports tied the Stuxnet virus to Israel and the United States and the sticky bomb assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Majid Shahriari to Israel. That month, Iranian operatives traveled to India and Thailand to scope out targets, followed by more trips in the summer and fall of 2011 to rent apartments, hire local help, arrange finances, and conduct surveillance. During his 2011 reconnaissance visits to India, Houshang Afshar Irani, identified by Indian police as the assailant who attached the bomb to the Israeli diplomatic vehicle in New Delhi, used a cell phone number that was also used in June 2011 in Tbilisi, Georgia.
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According to Israeli officials, cell phone calls and text messages among operatives in Thailand, India, and Baku also link the attacks.
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Based on these findings and more, US counterterrorism officials concluded that Iran was tied to the terrorist plots in Azerbaijan, Georgia, India and Thailand.
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In the case of the Thailand plot, senior Qods Force commander Majid Alavi reportedly arrived on-scene on January 19, 2012, traveling through Malaysia on a diplomatic passport bearing a fictitious name. Responsible for Qods Force Unit 400, Alavi previously tracked Iranian dissidents in places as varied as London and
Los Angeles. It was Alavi who ordered the attacks on Israeli diplomats to occur as close to the anniversary of Mughniyeh’s death as possible.
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Yet despite the hands-on oversight of senior Qods Force officers, the attacks not only failed but demonstrated sloppy tradecraft and operational security—the very strengths for which the Qods Force is usually known. Aside from reusing phone numbers and SIM cards across multiple operations, operatives traveled on Iranian passports, checked into hotels as Iranians, carried Iranian currency in their wallets, and in at least one instance took out time from their surveillance to party with prostitutes. A group photo on one of the women’s cell phones helped identify accomplices who fled the country.
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In the words of one flabbergasted analyst, “It’s as if there’s a systematic policy of Iran recruiting low-rent, downright kooky terrorists.”
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Instead of restoring Iran’s damaged prestige, the attacks only further underscored Iran’s operational limitations. Following the Green Revolution in Iran, the Qods Force gained prominence at the expense of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security over the latter’s perceived soft-handed approach to suppressing political protests in Iran. Within the Qods Force, quick promotions of mediocre managers diluted the group’s professional capabilities at the management level.
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The problem was compounded when, desperate to quickly implement its new attack strategy and exact revenge for covert attacks against its nuclear program, the Qods Force traded speed for tradecraft, cut corners, and reaped what it sowed. Qods Force planners were stretched thin by the rapid tempo of their new attack plan and were forced to throw together random teams of operatives who had not trained together.
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Worse, despite Iran’s preference for signature attacks targeting embassies, diplomats, or other official targets—and despite concerns by US intelligence that Iran was developing contingency plans for such attacks targeting the United States and its allies—Iranian planners found their chosen targets too well protected and settled for less-hardened targets.
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In the end, not one of the five planned attacks could be considered an operational success. Ever since, Israeli officials say, the frustrated Iranian operatives have been “trying harder than ever” to execute successful attacks.
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The operational tempo continued apace. In March 2012, the Israeli National Security Council’s Counterterrorism Bureau warned of terrorist threats against Jewish and Israeli targets in Turkey. According to the Turkish press, the warning came less than a week after Israeli intelligence tipped off Turkish authorities about a Qods Force plot to be carried out by at least four individuals who crossed the border from Iran armed with weapons and materials.
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The plot, again targeting Israeli diplomats, had originally been timed to coincide with the other plots in February but was postponed.
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In May, yet another Hezbollah attack targeting Israeli tourists was thwarted, this time at the Johannesburg airport in South Africa.
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Also in March, forty-year-old Hamid Kashkouli, an Iranian PhD student at the University of Pune in India, was deported for spying on Israeli nationals, a Jewish center, and a synagogue. According to Indian police, Kashkouli, who worked as a paid undercover agent of the Iranian government, traveled regularly to the Iranian consulate in Mumbai, where Iranian government officials reportedly met him, according to
his driver. Intercepted emails revealed he was providing Iranian officials with pictures of Jewish people in the area and reporting on their business dealings.
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In June 2012, authorities in Nairobi, Kenya, arrested two Iranian nationals, both of them purportedly Qods Force operatives.
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Prior to the two men’s arrest, Kenyan police reported, they had scouted out the Israeli embassy, the British High Commission, and other sites, leading authorities to conclude the pair was planning attacks targeting Israeli, American, British, or Saudi Arabian interests in Kenya or elsewhere in Africa.
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The day after their arrest, one of the two operatives led authorities to thirty-three pounds of RDX explosives hidden under a bush at the Mombasa Golf Club, overlooking the Indian Ocean.
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Seemingly to deflect attention from Iran, the Iranian operatives apparently partnered with al-Shabab, the al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group in Somalia. This tie underscored how desperate Tehran was to see successful attacks carried out. That interest has only grown more acute, as efforts to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program—from sanctions to assassinations to covert sabotage of equipment—continue to gain momentum.

A month after the Kenya plot was exposed, a Hezbollah operative targeting Israeli tourists in Cyprus was arrested. In October 2012, the Cypriot secret service foiled another attempt against Israeli tourists on cruise ships arriving at the Limassol port.
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Tragically, Israeli tourists in Burgas, Bulgaria, were less fortunate. In the months that followed, more threats arose, prompting travel advisories from Cyprus and Greece to Thailand, Bulgaria, and Ukraine.
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All told, more than twenty terror attacks by Hezbollah or Qods Force operatives were thwarted over the fifteen-month period between May 2011 and July 2012; by another count, nine plots were uncovered over the first nine months of 2012.
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The key to all these attacks, however, whether carried out by Hezbollah or the Qods Force, was deniability. Both Hezbollah and Tehran wanted attacks carried out, but neither wanted to invite a full-fledged military response targeting them back in Lebanon or Iran. Ever since the July 2006 war, Nasrallah has reportedly refused to approve any attacks along the Israeli-Lebanese border for fear of sparking another full-scale war with Israel.
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Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, while Hezbollah and the Qods Force have worked together on some plots—Baku in 2008 and Istanbul in 2009, among others—in other cases they failed to deconflict their operational activities and found themselves engaged in completely disparate operations in the same place. When Hezbollah operatives laid the groundwork for a bombing in late 2011–early 2012 in Bangkok, they were apparently unaware that the Qods Force was also preparing an attack there. Whether the Qods Force was, in turn, ignorant of Hezbollah’s activities there is unclear, but the Iranians appear not to have known Hezbollah was using Bangkok as an explosives distribution hub. And even once Hezbollah operative Hussein Atris was arrested in January 2012, the Qods Force operation there was not suspended. Similarly, within days after the explosion in Burgas, Bulgaria—while the investigation into the bombing and the search for accomplices was at its height—Bulgarian authorities reportedly caught a Qods Force operative scoping out a synagogue in the country’s capital, Sofia.
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Meanwhile, even as Hezbollah remains committed to exacting revenge for Mughniyeh’s death, IJO leaders grudgingly began to appreciate the difficulty of hitting a high-level Israeli target abroad. Such targets are typically well protected, so while Hezbollah operational planners continued to search for viable targets abroad, they initiated parallel plans for attacks targeting Israeli officials inside Israel.
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Leveraging networks of criminal associates who typically trade intelligence for drugs, and sometimes recruiting Israeli-Arabs through ideological appeals to spy for the group, Hezbollah pursued at least two plots targeting Israeli officials within the country within a three-month period in 2012, both of which were thwarted.

In June 2012, Israeli authorities arrested eleven men caught smuggling twenty kilograms of C4 explosives into Israel from Lebanon. According to authorities, the explosives crossed the border with the help of an Israeli-Arab resident from Ghajar, a small town that straddles the Blue Line demarcating Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. The facilitator, who was known to authorities as a drug smuggler with ties to Hezbollah, hid the bag of explosives in a field he owned before passing it along in a series of exchanges among drug smugglers who believed, according to Israeli security officials, they were smuggling drugs, not explosives. Abed Zoabi, a drug smuggler from Nazareth who received the explosives, reportedly helped smuggle Israeli cell phone SIM cards through Jordan to Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon so that he and George Nimer, a Lebanese drug dealer with ties to Hezbollah, could communicate directly with greater security.
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According to Israeli officials, the explosives were intended to be used in one or more attacks targeting Israeli officials within the country.
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September brought another arrest, this time of an Israeli-Arab accused of collecting intelligence for Hezbollah on Israeli public figures, army bases, defense manufacturing plants, and weapons storage facilities over a three-year period. Like several other Hezbollah spies before him, Milad Khatib was reportedly recruited by a Hezbollah agent in Denmark. The two would meet in several European countries, as well as Turkey, investigators said. According to Israeli officials, Israeli president Shimon Peres visited Khatib’s village in August, at which time Khatib took note of Peres’s security detail, his vehicle, and more. His indictment indicates that Khatib was arrested before he could pass this information over to his Hezbollah handlers.
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In July 2012, National Counterterrorism Center director Matthew Olsen warned that while Iran and Hezbollah had not yet hit targets in the United States, US officials worry that could soon change. “We’re seeing a general uptick in the level of activity around the world,” he noted, adding that “both Hezbollah and the Qods Force have demonstrated an ability to operate essentially globally.” In fact, the Hezbollah–Qods Force threat has sometimes eclipsed that of al-Qaeda. “There are times when we are briefing the White House [on terror threats and] at the top of the list [is] Hezbollah or Iran,” according to Olsen.
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To be sure, Hezbollah’s international campaign brought unwanted attention to the group’s terrorist activities. Meanwhile, Hezbollah has been engaged in a host of other activities that have also tarnished the group’s image. Taken together, these events present Hezbollah with the greatest set of challenges it has ever faced, and offer the international community an opportunity to counter Hezbollah’s militant capabilities and political appeal like never before.

Hezbollah’s role in Iran’s shadow war, along with its own interest in targeting senior Israeli officials, has cast the group as a dangerous terrorist network capable of operating everywhere from Europe to Africa and Asia to the Americas. As tensions continue to mount over Iran’s nuclear program, Hezbollah’s strategic relationship with Iran—and the role it has already played in Tehran’s shadow war with the West—gives officials worldwide ample cause for alarm.

At home, too, Hezbollah remains a destabilizing force, refusing to relinquish its private stockpile of arms to the Lebanese Army, despite periodic explosions of poorly stored weapons in which Lebanese citizens are killed. “We consider our arms like blood flowing in our veins,” Hezbollah Shura Council member Mohammad Yazbek explained in October 2012, pledging not to turn over the party’s weapons “no matter what the costs are.”
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The indictment of the four Hezbollah members accused of assassinating Rafiq Hariri and the internecine Sunni-Shi’a violence in West Beirut in 2008 also stalk the group on the home front. In 2012, when the government of New Zealand blacklisted Hezbollah’s military wing, it did so in part based on a determination that the group’s “pre-planned and well-coordinated operation” to take over West Beirut, and the group’s use of machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades during street battles, fit its definition of a terrorist act.
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