See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (16 page)

‘The target’s not Syrian,’ I said. ‘It’s Hezbollah. I want to grab a member of the Islamic Jihad.’

‘Forget it,’ the captain said, without any hesitation. He spoke English with an American accent, although he never volunteered his name.’ You want to whack him, fine. But you’ll never find anyone to do a kidnapping in the southern suburbs.’

Jean and the captain again spoke to each other privately. I picked up the cutoff M-16. The action was Teflon-coated to reduce noise.

‘There’s one person just maybe crazy enough to try something like this,’ the captain said,’ but we haven’t worked with him in years. He’s too crazy.’

‘Does it make any difference?’ I asked. ‘He either brings the guy across the Green Line or he doesn’t. I’ll only pay a success fee.’

The captain agreed to see if he could re-contact him.

When we got outside, I asked Jean who the two officers were. Both, he said, had gone AWOL from the Lebanese army and were now members of an anti-Syrian guerrilla group working in the Biqa Valley. They’d carried out several successful attacks on the Syrians, but they had lost people each time. ‘In another six months there won’t be any of them left,’ Jean said.

A week later at dusk he picked me up in Babda, a Christian neighborhood that bordered the southern suburbs. We waited in Jean’s Range Rover until dark, then drove slowly down the hill. The closer we got to the Green Line, the more the buildings started to look like sand castles washed over by a wave. The last buildings before the fields that separated Babda from the southern suburbs had been reduced to piles of rubble.

We passed through three checkpoints manned by the Lebanese Forces. Everyone knew Jean and waved him through. The last was a four-by-five hole dug in the rubble. Two grunts jumped up when they heard the truck approach and looked at us as if we were ghosts. We left the Range Rover with them and walked.

We were in no-man’s-land now, only about a hundred yards from Hezbollah’s pickets. This was the sector Mughniyah fought in, for Fatah, in the 1970s. Although I wasn’t supposed to know about it, we were following a route the Lebanese Forces used to supply Hezbollah with weapons and ammunition. Earlier that year when a war broke out between Hezbollah and its secular rival, Amal, the Lebanese Forces backed Hezbollah on the theory that Syria was supporting Amal. Only in the Middle East could a radical Christian group ally with a radical Islamic group.

We waited for about twenty minutes, sitting in some high grass, listening to the thump of a heavy machine gun and the occasional explosion from a rocket-propelled grenade. I noticed that Jean was unarmed, but what good would a pistol do if Hezbollah decided to jump us?

Out in the darkness a shadow began making its way toward us, zigzagging across the open space to navigate a minefield. In time, the shadow turned into a man with a neatly trimmed beard. He wore a polo shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots. I’ll call him Isam.

Isam and Jean hugged. Jean asked the man about his children; he knew all six by name. This went on for about five minutes before Jean told him why we came. By then we had done all the beating around the bush I could stand. I told Isam straight on that I wanted to grab someone who lived in Ayn Al-Dilbah.

‘Do you know anything about Ayn Al-Dilbah?’ Isam asked. I don’t , think he was daunted by the prospect; he was just taking my measure.

I ignored him. ‘It’s Imad Mughniyah I want.’

The man looked at me more closely now. He turned to Jean and asked, ‘Is he serious?’ Jean nodded.

Isam turned back to me and said: ‘I’ll kill him for two thousand dollars. A thousand in advance.’

‘I want him alive.’

‘Then find someone else.’

We listened to the gunfire in silence. It was closer now.

‘How do I know you can do anything in Ayn Al-Dilbah, anyhow?’ I asked.

Isam laughed. ‘Mr. Jean didn’t tell you who I am? I’ve killed more people than your marines and the New Jersey put together.’

‘Isam once set off eleven car bombs - simultaneously,’ Jean said. way of an explanation.

To the average reader, that might not seem like something to brag about, but for a terrorist in Lebanon, it was like winning three gold medals at the Olympics.

Shots were whistling over us now: It was time to leave. I quickly told Isam we’d meet the following week. In the meantime, I said, go back and start collecting everything you can on Mughniyah - where he lived, the descriptions of his cars, the names of his closest contacts. I added that I needed pictures of Mughniyah’s home. Before Isam could say anything. I put ten new hundred-dollar bills in his pocket. Money, I wanted him to know, was not going to be a problem.

I knew, of course, that Mughniyah didn’t really live anywhere. With the CIA and just about everyone else after him, he never spent the same night under the same roof or exited a building the same way he came in. He changed cars more often than he changed his underwear. But I wanted to see what Isam brought back before I could begin to trust him.

The next week Isam got to the meeting before we did. He was carrying a sheaf of notes and an envelope of pictures.

‘Here is where Mughniyah spent two nights last week,’ he said as he handed me a picture. I recognized the two-story building, a religious school in the southern suburbs.

‘What is this?’ I asked.

‘Mughniyah’s sister-in-law lives there. Every few weeks he spends the night there. But he never announces when he’s coming. He just shows up, usually alone.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘My cousin works in the school. She’s seen him come and go. She lives in Ayn Al-Dilbah and has known his family since she was a child.’

The next day I went through the stuff Isam had given me. When I finally deciphered his cribbed notes, it was obvious Isam was well plugged into the Ayn Al-Dilbah gang. He had it all - cars, addresses, telephone numbers.

Isam didn’t show up for the next meeting, or the one after that. Jean was worried. Neither of us relished sitting in no-man’s-land for hours on end. Finally, on the third night, Isam did show. He ignored me when I asked where he’d been.

‘This week Mughniyah is going to be back at the school. He has to be. Someone from Tehran is coming to see him there,’ Isam said.’ We may never have another chance.’

‘How could you possibly grab him there?’ I asked.

‘I told you before: I can kill him, but you’re out of your mind if you think I will kidnap him.’

I let Isam talk.

‘In front of the school there is a parking lot, and in the back an alley. What I propose is to put a car on each side and detonate them simultaneously. I figure a thousand kilos of Semtex will tidy up your little problem.’

It was what we call a muffler charge, and Isam was right. Two car bombs on either side of a two-story building would definitely bring it down and kill everyone inside.

‘Can you be sure Mughniyah will be there?’ I asked.

‘My cousin will tell me.’

‘What do you need to start?’

‘Two thousand up front and ten thousand afterward - after Mughniyah is dead.’

It didn’t take me long to decide. I’d joined the CIA as a prank. And yeah, some where along the line I was converted and became an information junkie. I was obsessed with finding out who bombed the embassy. But none of it meant I’d been handed the moral authority to decide who needed to be killed. I’d leave that up to the politicians in Washington.

I told Isam to go back and collect more information. I never reported the incident to headquarters, and I would never see Isam again. Do I regret it now? Sure. Whether Imad Mughniyah is in league with Osama bin Laden, I really don’t know, but I am certain there’s not a dime’s worth of real difference between the two of them. If we had accepted back then that we were at war with terrorists, Washington might have been more inclined to approve the operation Isam proposed, and I would have been more inclined to force the issue with my superiors in Langley. But we didn’t, and like so many other problems, we let this one fester in place.

Seven years after we declined to go after Imad Mughniyah with maximum lethal force, the man who had launched him so successfully on his blood-drenched career would be awarded the Nobel Prize for peace. What a lot of people forget about Yasir Arafat, especially since the 1993 Oslo agreement and the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize that he shared with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin of Israelis that he started out life as an Islamic fundamentalist. Even after he became chairman of the umbrella Palestine Liberation Organization, he never cut his ties with either Sunni or Shi’a fundamentalists. They were a reliable source of political strength for him.

Arafat was born Muhammad Abd-al-Rauf Arafat al-Qudwa in 1929. The Qudwas were a branch of the prominent Huysayni clan, famous for its religious scholars. One member of the clan, Mufti of Jerusalem, had supported Adolf Hitler during World War II. Arafat grew up in Egypt, studied civil engineering at the University of Cairo, and for a time headed the Palestinian Students’ Union there. After graduation, he served in the Egyptian army as a second lieutenant. It was then that he joined the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Later, he was arrested twice for his Brotherhood activities. Eventually forced to leave Egypt, Arafat moved to Kuwait, a country more tolerant of extreme religious views. There he founded Fatah in the late fifties, mainly drawing on members of the Muslim Brotherhood and Palestinians living in the Gulf.

Even after Arafat rose to prominence with Fatah’s first attack on Israel on January 1, 1965, Arab leaders remained suspicious of his fundamentalist ties. When Egyptian president Abdul Nasser received Arafat in Egypt for the first time, he insisted that his guest submit to a body search, apparently convinced Arafat was more interested in assassinating him than in liberating Palestine.

Arafat’s interest in Islam remained dormant until 1977, when an Islamic current started to sweep across the Middle East. Always alert to shifting winds, Arafat ordered Abu Jihad, his principal deputy, to harness the Fatah believers into a single organization to be called the Committee of 77. Operational control was given to a convert to Islam, Munir Shafiq Asal. Asal’s first task, in turn, was to recruit and indoctrinate young believers, both Palestinians and Lebanese, through an already existing organization called the Student Cells. The most capable members of the Student Cells were inducted into one of Fatah’s intelligence organizations. That is how Imad Mughniyah, Ali Dib, and Salah first became associated.

Eventually Arafat flew a little too close to the Islamic flame. Not only had he started recruiting young Palestinian and Lebanese believers into Fatah’s ranks, he also began providing important support to the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. After the Hama insurrection in 1982, when the Syrian army sifted through the rubble, it came across American military communications equipment. Syrian president Hafiz Al-Asad at first suspected the CIA, but then he realized the equipment had come from Fatah, which had been training and supplying the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood with the purpose of bringing down Asad. Asad considered going after Arafat right away, then decided to wait and take his revenge at a time of his choosing. Asad understood that revenge is a dish best served cold.

It came on May 17, 1983. Syria encouraged two minor Fatah members, Sa’id Muragha (Abu Musa) and Nimr Salih (Abu Salih), to break away from Fatah and form their own organization. Five weeks later, on June 24, Asad formally expelled Arafat from Syria. Arafat was forced to set up in Tripoli, Lebanon, but in less than five months Abu Musa and Abu Salih, backed by Syrian forces, attacked Arafat all over Lebanon. It was all over on December 20, 1983, when, under a steady Syrian bombardment, five Greek-chartered ships evacuated Arafat and four thousand followers from Tripoli’s port. The French navy provided an armed escort to protect them from the Israeli air force attack. Arafat ended up in Tunis, isolated and out of the mainstream of Palestinian politics. The lesson he learned was that while Islam is a potent force, it’s not always a good idea to show your hand. Arafat would never again get caught in the Hama trap.

Another thing that has gotten glossed over in the wake of Arafat’s successes in Oslo and Stockholm is that, in a large sense, the 1979 Iranian Islamic revolution was suckled on the Palestinian teat. In 1972 Ayatollah Khomeini and Arafat signed an accord in Najaf, Iraq, to train Islamic fighters at Fatah camps in southern Lebanon. Almost every leader of the Iranian revolution passed through these camps, from Khomeini’s son Ahmad Khomeini to Mustafa Chamran, the first commander of the Iranian Pasdaran. When the Shah fled Iran on January 16, 1979, and Khomeini returned to Iran two weeks later, it wasn’t in the least surprising that the first telephone call Khomeini received in his new office was from Yasir Arafat.

Almost nine months later, on October 19, 1979 - two weeks before Iranians seized the US embassy in Tehran - Arafat flew there to congratulate Khomeini in person. Their discussions were more than ceremonial. On November 18, 1979, Arafat issued orders to all Fatah cadres to provide ‘any assistance’ requested to ‘protect’ the Iranian revolution. Although at the time the US was in the dark about ‘any assistance,’ we weren’t for long.

In February 1980, a Lebanese Sunni, Anis Naqqash, attempted to assassinate former Shapour Bakhtiar in Paris, where the former Iranian prime minister was living as a political refugee. Naqqash fumbled the operation, killing an old lady and a policeman instead; he was arrested and given a life sentence. At first his participation made no sense at all. Why would a Lebanese Sunni attempt to kill an ex-Iranian prime minister? Then it became evident that Arafat had loaned Naqqash to Iran to assassinate Bakhtiar. After all, Arafat already had a functioning terrorist network in Paris. It would be years before Iran could put together one of its own.

Beyond the Bakhtiar attempt, it soon became clear Arafat had put his entire worldwide terrorist network at Iran’s disposal. And when he was forced out of Beirut in 1982, he handed it over lock, stock, and barrel to the Iranians for safekeeping. Many of the cadres went to the Pasdaran. That’s how Mughniyah and most of his underlings and associates found their way to the Iranians. In one of those reversals of fortune that affect even terrorist organizations, Ali Dib, who had been Mughniyah’s boss in Force 17, started working for Mughniyah.