Warriors of God (23 page)

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 Palestinian 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.

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.

“Hallaq looked at me for help, still thinking I was an agent for Israeli intelligence,” Ramzi says. “But I told him ‘I know who you are. You are Ahmad Hallaq. I am not with the Israelis. You are very wrong.' When he heard me say that, Hallaq seemed to crumple.”

It took all four conspirators to subdue the burly ex-militiaman. They bound him with duct tape and injected him with more sedatives. The desperate Hallaq, his eyes wide with fear, begged his captors to kill him there and then. “Hezbollah will use chain saws on me for what I did to Mughniyah,” he wailed.

Having swaddled Hallaq with the tape, they dumped him unconscious into the trunk of a Mercedes taxi and drove in two cars to the crossing point in Jezzine. They were prepared to shoot their way through the SLA checkpoint at Jezzine, but drastic measures were unnecessary. Maher Touma's brother was a senior SLA officer in Jezzine and well known to the guards at the crossing. As Ramzi, Mufid, and Touma returned to Ibl es-Saqi, Hallaq was driven by Fadi Qassar through the two-mile no-man's-land to the first Lebanese army checkpoint, where intelligence agents were waiting to arrest him.

Toward the end of the next day, the Israelis realized that Hallaq was missing, and suspicion fell on the Nohra brothers. In the following days, the entire cell, apart from Mufid Nohra and Fadi Qassar, was rounded up and imprisoned in Israel. Mufid hid in a safe house before slipping out of the zone through the rugged ravines near Shebaa village.

The hapless Hallaq was subsequently convicted of murder in a military court in Beirut and sentenced to death. Shortly before dawn on September 21, 1996, the onetime militia chief and assassin was led from his cell into the courtyard of the Roumiyah prison in the hills east of Beirut and executed by firing squad.

After the success of the Hallaq abduction, the Lebanese authorities asked Mufid Nohra to prepare a plan to kidnap Abdel-Karim as-Saadi, also known as Abu Mohjen, the leader of the al Qaeda–linked Esbat al-Ansar group in the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp. Mufid drew up a scheme in which two dozen soldiers would charge into the densely populated camp and kill or capture Abu Mohjen. The Lebanese authorities were unimpressed and dropped the plan. Mufid also was
asked by Lebanese and Syrian military intelligence for the name of another senior collaborator with Israel who could be targeted for abduction. Mufid suggested Etienne Saqr, the leader of the ultranationalist Guardians of the Cedars militia, who had lived in Jezzine since the end of the civil war. That plan was also dropped, after the Syrians surmised that such an operation would upset Cardinal Nasrallah Sfeir, the Maronite patriarch.

As for Ramzi, he faced an array of charges in Israel, including kidnapping, supplying information to an enemy state, and even an old drug conviction. But protracted plea bargaining on the sidelines saw his sentence gradually reduced from ten years to four. Ramzi was led from the court and placed in solitary confinement in an Israeli prison. But his days as an agent for Lebanese intelligence were far from over.

By the mid-1990s, the reinvigorated resistance campaign in south Lebanon was exacting an increasing toll of Israeli and SLA casualties. Thirteen IDF soldiers were killed in 1992, twelve in 1993, and twenty-one in 1994. More significantly, the IDF–Hezbollah fatality ratio was narrowing in the latter's favor. In 1990, five Hezbollah fighters were killed for every IDF fatality, but by 1991, the figure had dropped to two Hezbollah dead for every Israeli soldier killed. A year later it had narrowed further, to 1.7 to 1, and it remained at around 1.5 to 1 for the rest of the decade.
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The rate of attacks was steadily increasing as well. UNIFIL recorded a total of eighty attacks for 1991 in its area of operations, which excluded those conducted in the northern sector above the Litani River. By 1994, the number of attacks in the UNIFIL area had risen to 146. An unofficial tally recorded by UNIFIL for all attacks against the IDF and SLA recorded the much larger figure of 644 operations for 1994, increasing to 908 for 1995.

Israel was conducting peace negotiations with Syria and Lebanon during this period, and the conflict in south Lebanon was initially seen as the last fling of die-hard militants from the war-torn 1980s. But it
gradually became evident to IDF commanders that what they were facing in south Lebanon was a full-fledged insurgency by an enemy trained and armed by Iran, politically protected by Syria, and implementing ever more effective and deadly tactics.

“We felt that the resistance had ended with the end of the civil war,” recalls Major General Moshe Kaplinsky, who was head of the IDF's Golani Brigade from 1993 to 1997. “Then it started with an attack here and there, but we didn't change our attitude. We were too conservative. We slowly realized between 1990 and 1993 that we were facing a guerrilla war. It took us too long to adjust our behavior.”

In a series of deadly assaults in July 1993, seven Israeli soldiers were killed and a barrage of Katyusha rockets struck northern Israel in response to IDF artillery shelling against Lebanese villages lying north of the zone. The IDF found itself caught in a trap largely of its own making: Hezbollah would kill Israeli soldiers in the zone, but when Israel's inevitable retaliatory artillery shelling or air strikes caused civilian casualties or damage, rockets would be fired into northern Israel. The problem for the IDF was that it had yet to figure out a way of striking back effectively at Hezbollah without risking Lebanese casualties and thus provoking the Katyusha salvos into the north. The IDF's main weapons in south Lebanon—artillery and air power—were too clumsy for the challenge it faced. It was like trying to swat a mosquito with a baseball bat in a china shop.

With seven soldiers killed in three weeks, a frustrated IDF lashed back, deliberately directing its firepower against civilian targets in south Lebanon in a week-long air and artillery offensive to inflict mass punishment on the Lebanese. There was no attempt to disguise the purpose of the operation; Israeli officials readily admitted that the aim was to batter south Lebanon and force the Lebanese government to curb Hezbollah. “We want Lebanese villagers to flee and we want to damage all those who were parties to Hezbollah's activities,” Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin told the Israeli Knesset.

Even the name for the offensive, Operation Accountability, left no room for doubt that this was a campaign of punishment and retribution. But the Israeli government was profoundly mistaken if it thought
that bombing south Lebanon would improve the IDF's position in the occupation zone. Syria was the true authority in Lebanon, and the suffering of civilians in south Lebanon was not going to persuade Hafez al-Assad to alter his policy of using Hezbollah to further his negotiating position in peace talks with Israel.

By the time a cease-fire went into effect on July 31, 1993, after seven days of fighting, almost 130 Lebanese civilians had died, with another 500 wounded. Around three hundred thousand civilians were temporarily displaced, and damage to Lebanon was estimated at $28.8 million. Hezbollah had fired some three hundred Katyusha rockets into the occupation zone and northern Israel, killing two Israeli civilians and wounding about twenty-four.

Operation Accountability ended with a secret unwritten agreement brokered by Warren Christopher, the U.S. secretary of state, in which both sides agreed not to target civilians. It meant that Israel could no longer shell and bomb Lebanese villages and Hezbollah could not fire rockets into northern Israel, but both sides could continue to kill each other's combatants in the occupation zone.