The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (56 page)

If you count the U.S. embassy bombings and the marine barracks attack, Mughniyeh was responsible for more American deaths than anyone until the September 11, 2001, attacks on American soil by Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda. But the notion that Mughniyeh had a hand in the embassy and marine barracks attacks really only arose after the June 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847. Mughniyeh was indicted that year in a U.S. court for his role in the TWA hijacking and the death of U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem. It was Mughniyeh’s long résumé of post-1985 terrorist operations that has led many to assume that he must have been the mastermind of the 1983 attacks. “
When in doubt,” said one retired CIA officer, “and we are always in doubt about this, blame Mughniyeh.”

In any case, while there’s much that
isn’t
known about the elusive Mughniyeh, it
is
known that, sometime after Arafat’s departure from Beirut in August 1982, he offered his services to Shi’ite Lebanese political forces. Hezbollah—the Party of God—didn’t exist at the time, at least by that name. But a shadowy Shi’a resistance group known as Islamic Amal had formed that summer, inspired by the Iranian revolution.
Another group, the Islamic Jihad Organization, was probably the same entity under another name. Both parties eventually morphed into what we today call Hezbollah. But in late 1982 any Shi’a resistance was an effective arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. By offering his services to Islamic Amal, Mughniyeh was going to work for the Revolutionary Guard.

According to the journalist Hala Jaber, who in 1997 wrote
Hezbollah: Born with a Vengeance
, Mughniyeh had become thoroughly disillusioned with the PLO and “turned to the newly arrived Iranian Revolutionary Guards.” Jaber reports that the Revolutionary Guard initially tasked Mughniyeh to “
gather information and details about the American embassy and draw up a plan that would guarantee the maximum impact and leave no trace of the perpetrator.”

Mughniyeh was inventive. A well-known Lebanese member of Al-Fatah, Bilal Sharara, told the Beirut-based journalist Nicholas Blanford that Mughniyeh approached him in the autumn of 1982 with a novel and audacious plan. “
He wanted some explosives,” Sharara said, “and wondered whether I had some for him.” Mughniyeh explained that he had someone who was willing to blow himself up to attack the Israelis. “I laughed,” said Sharara, “and thought he was crazy. Who would want to blow himself up? No one had done anything like that at the time.” Blanford writes in his history of Hezbollah,
Warriors of God
, that Mughniyeh persuaded a childhood friend—Ahmad Qassir, age seventeen—to drive a white Peugeot sedan into the entrance of the Israeli army headquarters in Tyre. The car exploded and seventy-five Israeli soldiers were killed. This occurred on November 11, 1982—five months prior to the U.S. embassy attack. If Mughniyeh organized the Tyre suicide truck bomb, he could certainly have also been the mastermind behind the embassy bombing. Mossad later came to a qualified conclusion about Mughniyeh’s responsibility. “
We knew Mughniyeh was later responsible for many other terrorist acts,” said Yoram Hessel, a senior Mossad officer. “But he had to have had institutional backing.”

In March 1983,
Mughniyeh drove to Damascus for a meeting with
Iran’s Syrian ambassador, Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur. By Jaber’s account in her book about Hezbollah, the Iranian ambassador hosted the meeting in the presence of Syrian intelligence officers. On the agenda was a plan to expel the American, French, and other Multilateral Peacekeeping Forces from Lebanon. Mughniyeh proposed a series of truck-bomb operations modeled after the Tyre attack. If true, the result of this meeting was the April 18, 1983, suicide truck-bomb attack on the Beirut embassy.

Mughniyeh operated in the darkest of shadows. Eventually, he built a network of individuals he could absolutely trust because they were blood relatives. For decades, only two photographs of him seemed to exist, and they were of doubtful provenance. “
Imad was a very handsome young man, and very thin,” recalled Mustafa Zein, who knew him when he worked for Force 17. “I wouldn’t have recognized him from the photographs decades later.”

Unlike many of his Shi’a colleagues, Mughniyeh was not motivated by religiosity. The Israelis later recorded a phone conversation in which one of his friends said of him, “
He’s no great saint when it comes to religion, but his glorious military achievements make up for that and assure him a place in Paradise.”

Some sources claim that
Mughniyeh underwent plastic surgery to alter his appearance.
But this piece of his legend is apocryphal. He lived in Beirut, but unlike Ali Hassan Salameh he rotated randomly between different apartments and cities. By the mid-1980s, he understood very well that he was being hunted. But he was the most elusive of agents.
“Mugniyeh is probably the most intelligent, most capable operative we’ve ever run across, including the KGB or anybody else,” said Robert Baer. “He enters by one door, exits by another, changes his cars daily, never makes appointments on a telephone, never is predictable. He only uses people that are related to him that he can trust. He doesn’t just recruit people. He is the master terrorist, the grail that we have been after since 1983.” A former director general of the Mossad described Mughniyeh as “
very shrewd, very talented.… He was the liaison between Hezbollah and Iran—and he spent long periods of time
in Tehran.” Mughniyeh reportedly learned to speak Farsi like a native Persian.
The Iranians even gave him citizenship.

Mustafa Zein knew Mughniyeh. They were fellow Shi’ites, both sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, and they shared an admiration for the late Ali Hassan Salameh. They crossed paths again after the March 16, 1984, kidnapping of the Beirut CIA chief of station William F. Buckley. When Buckley disappeared, the CIA’s Sam Wyman implored Zein to fly back to Beirut from New York to negotiate his release. Zein knew going back to Beirut entailed obvious risks. But he did it, partly because the Agency told him the rescue effort was dubbed “
Operation Bob Ames.” Zein did his best. At one point, he had a face-to-face meeting with Mughniyeh in an effort to locate Buckley and other American hostages. Incredibly, he obtained photographs of the hostages posing with a contemporaneous copy of
Newsweek
magazine.
He passed these photos to the CIA. Negotiations ensued. Those holding the hostages made it clear that their key demand was the release of twenty-two Shi’ite prisoners in Kuwait who had been convicted of terrorism. They were known as the Dawa 22.

In the spring of 1985 Zein came back to Beirut. He thought he was close to a deal for the release of American hostages. By then, there were a half-dozen Americans in captivity. But on March 8, 1985, Zein narrowly missed being blown up with Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the spiritual guide of Hezbollah. The two men were about to get in Fadlallah’s SUV to drive a short distance when the ayatollah was detained at the last moment. But his car was nevertheless sent ahead, and just forty yards from Fadlallah’s home a parked car bomb with 440 pounds of explosives ignited. A seven-story building collapsed, killing eighty people. Mughniyeh’s brother—who was working as a bodyguard for Fadlallah—was killed along with many of his friends. But both Fadlallah and Zein escaped injury in what is known today as the B’ir al-Abed bombing. They just happened not to be in the SUV targeted by the assassins. According to Bob Woodward, the attempt
on Fadlallah’s life was a plot jointly organized by the Saudis and Bill Casey. The CIA director had been told that Fadlallah had “blessed” the suicide driver of the truck bomb that had killed Bob Ames. Woodward reported that Casey had a meeting in Washington with the Saudi ambassador Bandar bin Sultan, and the two men agreed on a joint operation funded with $3 million. “They knew that the chief supporter and symbol of terrorism,” wrote Woodward, “was the fundamentalist Muslim leader Sheikh Fadlallah, the leader of the Party of God, Hizbollah, in Beirut. Fadlallah had been connected to all three bombings of American facilities in Beirut. He had to go. The two men were in agreement.” According to Woodward, Casey got President Reagan to sign a presidential directive authorizing the covert operation. Lebanese operatives recruited from the Phalangist security forces were trained and funded by the CIA. This special force was designated the Foreign Works and Analysis Unit (FWAU). It was designed to launch retaliatory strikes against the terrorists who had blown up the U.S. embassy and the marine barracks in 1983.

But then it all went wrong. The FWAU unit targeted Ayatollah Fadlallah for assassination—but these Lebanese assassins didn’t care how many innocents were killed. Casey and Prince Bandar did not intend to kill eighty people. As painted by Woodward, the operation went awry. “
When Bandar saw the news account,” Woodward wrote, “he got stomach cramps.” Woodward reports that the Saudis took steps to blame the attack on other parties. Woodward quotes Bandar as saying, “I take a shot at you. You suspect me and then I turn in my chauffeur and say he did it. You would think I am no longer a suspect.” (Prince Bandar later denied any Saudi involvement in the bombing.) Woodward, of course, has no footnotes, just incredible access to incredible sources. But Mustafa
Zein also believes that Casey ordered the assassination attempt—and his source is Imad Mughniyeh, who he claims told him that he later found two men involved in the bomb attack that killed his brother, and they confessed that it had been a CIA operation. Again, as is the case with Woodward’s account, there is only an oral footnote for this story. Robert Baer and other CIA sources criticize
Woodward’s story and blame the Lebanese security forces for the bombing.

The B’ir al-Abed bombing sealed the fate of the American hostages. Mughniyeh and his Hezbollah friends hung a white sheet over the bomb site, proclaiming in black letters, “Made in America.” Zein’s negotiations ended. Buckley was alive as late as July 1985—but he died later that year, probably of dysentery or pneumonia. The other American hostages were not released for months or years to come.

The twenty-year-old Mughniyeh certainly had a role in the Beirut embassy bombing—perhaps he came up with the idea—but many others carried it out.
It was too technically complicated an operation for a twenty-year-old former Force 17 bodyguard to handle alone. Zein reports that in the spring of 1985—after Zein was nearly killed in the attempted assassination of Ayatollah Fadlallah—Mughniyeh told him that he hadn’t been involved in the embassy attack. He claimed that he’d been told that the truck bomb’s first target had been the U.S. marine barracks—but that at the last minute the suicide driver had been diverted to the embassy. He didn’t know why. Mughniyeh told Zein, “It was [Ali Reza] Asgari’s operation”—referring to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander who had recruited him in 1982.

American investigators eventually determined that the truck that plowed into the embassy was bought in Texas, was shipped to Dubai, and then somehow ended up in Beirut. It was packed with an estimated two thousand pounds of explosives.
A suicide driver was found to steer the truck into the embassy. But who assembled the bomb? Who financed the operation? Who bought the truck and explosives? These questions were not rigorously explored in a court of law for many years to come.

Finally, in March 2000, Anne Dammarell, one of the pluckiest survivors of the Beirut embassy bombing, read in the newspapers that Terry Anderson, an American journalist kidnapped in Beirut, had won a civil suit against the Islamic Republic of Iran. A U.S. District Court
in Washington, D.C., had awarded Anderson more than $41 million in compensatory damages for his six years in captivity. Dammarell called Anderson’s lawyer, Stuart H. Newberger of Crowell & Moring LLP, and asked if he would represent her and other survivors and relatives of the victims of the embassy bombing. Stu Newberger agreed. In 2002, the civil suit was filed in the name of Anne Dammarell but also on behalf of Yvonne Ames, her children, and a dozen other plaintiffs. A trial was held, and in September 2003 U.S. district court judge John D. Bates ruled that the Islamic Republic of Iran was responsible for the April 18, 1983, bombing.
The court determined that the bombing was carried out with technical assistance from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps stationed in the Bekaa Valley. Chemical analysis of the explosives used in the attack determined that the truck was loaded with about two thousand pounds of PETN (pentaerythritol tetranitrate), a military-grade explosive. Moreover, investigators determined that the PETN in question was not commercially available in Lebanon—but that this raw,
“bulk form” of PETN was manufactured in Iran for military purposes. This was not an easily assembled bomb. The materials came from a military factory in Iran.