Warriors of God (71 page)

“I saw him not so long ago at a meeting and I had no idea he was Mughniyah,” a grizzled Hezbollah veteran called Abu Hussein told me days later in Mughniyah's natal village of Teir Dibna in south Lebanon. “He used Hajj Radwan as his name. None of us knew it was him.”

Mughniyah had attended a reception in the Kfar Susa neighborhood of Damascus to mark the anniversary of the Islamic revolution in Iran. The party was a who's who of radical Palestinians, Hezbollah officials, top Syrian officers, and Iranian diplomats. Mughniyah left the party before midnight and crossed the road to his car. A suspected remote control bomb blew up his vehicle as he started the car, killing him instantly.

Mughniyah had artfully evaded his pursuers for nearly three decades. But his enemies had caught up with him in, of all places, Damascus, where one would have thought he could enjoy a degree of security.

Israel, of course, was the chief suspect, despite its denials. Danny Yatom, the former head of Mossad, described Mughniyah's death as “a great achievement for the free world in its fight on terror.”

“There are numerous intelligence agencies and countries that have been pursuing him, and the one that was successful in reaching him [has proven itself] to have a high intelligence and operational capability,” Yatom said, with perhaps just a hint of self-congratulation.

Israel had operated in Damascus before, assassinating a top Hamas military commander in 2004, also in a car bomb explosion. Anis Naqqash, Mughniyah's old friend, who only on the death of his onetime student began publicly admitting their long-standing association, believes that Mughniyah simply made a fatal mistake.

“He stayed in one home in Damascus for more than six months and was receiving important people,” he told me, adding that Ramadan Shalah, the head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Khaled Meshaal, the leader of Hamas, were regular visitors to his home.

“Even if they didn't know he was Imad, they knew it was an important Hezbollah person meeting with top Palestinians, Syrians, and Iranians. Maybe they were able to obtain a photograph and begin finding out who he was.”

But surely a man with such a high sense of personal security, who had eluded his enemies for so long, would not make such a fundamental error?

Naqqash nodded in agreement.

“I told him this was a big mistake he was making. He never made such mistakes before. He didn't make such mistakes when he was living in Tehran. I didn't even know his home in Tehran. He kept it a secret. But it was not a secret in Damascus, and Damascus is not a safe city.”

Naqqash believes that Mughniyah had burned himself out in the wake of the 2006 war and had grown weary of a life of secrecy. “The actual strategy of Hezbollah for the next war was planned by Imad immediately after the 2006 war,” he said. “He immediately understood what he needed to do. It took him, according to his friends, six months to make the picture complete, and then he said ‘go implement this.' I think after 2006, he achieved something very big and became tired of the constant secrecy.”

The veil of silence that had shrouded Mughniyah for more than two decades was ripped open upon his death as Hezbollah elevated him to
the pantheon of the movement's greatest martyrs, forming a trinity alongside Sheikh Ragheb Harb and Sayyed Abbas Mussawi. Two days after his death, tens of thousands of Hezbollah supporters crammed into a vast hall in the southern suburbs of Beirut or stood in the pouring rain outside for Mughniyah's funeral. It was an occasion typical of Hezbollah's sense of pomp and ceremony, with banners, brass bands, flags, politicians in dark suits and open-necked shirts, and clerics in robes and turbans. Black-suited security officers clutching walkie-talkies connected to earpieces marshaled the mourners through a row of metal detectors at the entrance of the auditorium and guided them to the thousands of white plastic chairs. Sitting in a line below the stage and facing the crowd were some of Hezbollah's top leaders, including Sheikh Naim Qassem, Sheikh Nabil Qawq, and Hussein Khalil, Nasrallah's senior adviser, there to receive the flow of delegations and individuals coming to pay condolences.

Mughniyah's refrigerated coffin lay in state on the stage, draped in a yellow Hezbollah flag, four black-uniformed and bereted fighters standing at attention alongside it. Mughniyah's plump face gazed out at the throng from several large portraits mounted around the stage.

Addressing the audience from a giant video screen, Nasrallah vowed to wage “open war” against Israel in response to Mughniyah's assassination, adding that the slain military commander had left behind him “tens of thousands” of well-trained combatants “ready for martyrdom.” “Hajj Imad's blood will mark the beginning of the downfall of the state of Israel,” he vowed.

The commemorations continued a week later when Hezbollah marked the annual “Day of the Resistance” with another huge ceremony in the southern suburbs. The brother of Sheikh Ragheb Harb sat next to Mughniyah's father. Yasser Mussawi, the thickly bearded son of Sayyed Abbas Mussawi, was there as well. Then onto the stage strode a young man, ramrod straight, a grim expression on his clean-shaven face. He was dressed in a neat camouflage uniform and forage cap. This was Jihad Mughniyah, Imad's seventeen-year-old son. He launched into a passionate oration, lauding his late father and vowing his continued commitment to the cause.

“We are here today on the path of Imam Hussein … and we are going to stay on this path, the way of resistance and with Nasrallah,” he thundered to a deafening chorus of “Yes to Nasrallah!” from the crowd.

His fervor, self-confidence, and rhetoric stirred much of the audience to tears. Even the tough security officers in their black suits and earphones were openly sobbing into their handkerchiefs. It was an extraordinary performance from a teenager, and I could not help but wonder whether we were looking at a future leader of the Islamic Resistance.

Even before Lebanese security services began unmasking cells of Israeli-paid agents, the police's technical department was painstakingly connecting together another secret network of individuals, this one allegedly linked to the assassination of Rafik Hariri. The network was discovered early in the investigation. The UN investigation's initial progress report in October 2005 detailed the discovery of a network of six prepaid telephone cards. The people using these cards had been in proximity to Hariri for several weeks, suggesting they were monitoring his movements, and had also lined the route taken by the former premier's motorcade on the day of his assassination. The persons using the cell phone cards called only one another, and the last calls occurred a few minutes before the explosion that killed Hariri and twenty-one others. The technical department had teased out a network of conspirators from all the other millions of phone calls made each day in Lebanon, but their identities remained unknown.

Then, in the spring of 2009, rumors began to circulate that the Hariri investigation was heading in a dramatic new direction—toward Hezbollah. I first heard the rumor during a visit to Washington and New York in April, where the news was conveyed in whispers and sly, knowing nods and winks. The speculation exploded into the open a month later when the German news magazine
Der Spiegel
revealed that the investigation had found another cell phone network that had led them to Hezbollah. The breakthrough reportedly came when Abed al-Majid
Ghamloush, apparently a Hezbollah operative from the southern Lebanese village of Roumin, used one of the “hot” cell phones to call his girlfriend, enabling investigators to identify him. From Ghamloush, who vanished and has not been seen since, investigators were able to pinpoint who they believe is the mastermind of the operation: a man known only as Hajj Salim, a top Hezbollah intelligence officer from the Nabatiyah area.

The
Der Spiegel
story was greeted with shock, dismay, skepticism, and denials in Lebanon. The notion that Hezbollah might have been involved in the Hariri assassination was a near-taboo subject, too awful to contemplate, and one that threatened to disrupt the relative political harmony that had existed in Lebanon since the Doha accord ended the May 2008 fighting.

Four people were subsequently named in the first set of indictments connected to the Hariri murder case, which were submitted to the Lebanese authorities in June 2011. Among the four was Mustafa Badreddine, a top Hezbollah security officer who had spent the latter half of the 1980s languishing in a Kuwaiti prison; his brother-in-law, Imad Mughniyah, had allegedly abducted Westerners in Lebanon in an attempt to secure his release. According to the charge, Badreddine was responsible for planning Hariri's assassination, while another Hezbollah operative, Salim Ayyache, also named on the indictment, oversaw the operation on the ground.

The missing ingredient in this latest sensational twist was a motive. There was no obvious reason why Hezbollah would want Hariri dead. Even as Hariri's relations with the Syrian leadership and its Lebanese allies were steadily worsening during the fall of 2004, Nasrallah must have realized that Hariri posed no real threat to Syria's status in Lebanon, nor to Hezbollah itself. Hariri was a pragmatist and a compromiser whose primary interest was to secure a free hand to implement his economic and reconstruction policies without obstruction from President Lahoud. He was not on a moral crusade to oust Syria from Lebanon and to disarm Hezbollah. On the contrary, right up until the end he was signaling a desire for a rapprochement with Damascus.

More important, while Hezbollah may have had the technical and
logistical expertise to kill Hariri, it did not have the political latitude to independently undertake an assassination of such strategic import. If, on the other hand, the Syrians decided that Hariri must be eliminated and persuaded the Iranians to tap Hezbollah for the job, one can only wonder what was passing through Nasrallah's mind those many late nights sitting opposite the doomed Hariri, sipping coffee and munching on fruit, chuckling at each other's jokes and discussing the woes of Lebanon and the region, knowing all the time that his guest was to die in a matter of weeks.

However, there is a view that Nasrallah in fact knew nothing of the plot until after Hariri's death. The assassination, so the theory goes, was subcontracted to a special intelligence unit inside Hezbollah that acted independently from the organization as a whole. Rumors have linked Imad Mughniyah's name to such a unit, which raises intriguing questions over the circumstances of his car bomb immolation in Damascus. Did the Syrians engineer Mughniyah's death, thereby severing in one sharp blow the link connecting the team that carried out the Hariri assassination to those who gave the order? Some Hezbollah people have privately muttered dark thoughts about Syrian culpability in Hajj Radwan's demise. Mughniyah's death even provoked a rare public disagreement between Syria and Iran when an anonymous Syrian official described as “categorically baseless” an announcement by an Iranian official two days earlier that the two countries had decided to form a joint investigation into Mughniyah's death. Damascus said that the investigation would be conducted by the “competent Syrian authorities alone,” although no results have ever been released, assuming there was a probe in the first place.

Hezbollah has spent years carefully crafting its image as a champion of anti-Israel resistance, expelling the Israelis from occupied Lebanese land in 2000, defeating them six years later, and lending support to the Palestinian cause. Therefore, accusations of Hezbollah complicity in Hariri's assassination threatened to undermine Nasrallah's leadership and discredit his organization as a gang of Shia assassins who had murdered not only a prominent Sunni leader but presumably some of the
other Lebanese journalists, politicians, and security officers killed over the following three years.

In 2010, as the first set of indictments drew closer to being issued, Hezbollah sought to mitigate the damage to its reputation by mounting a carefully planned and skillfully implemented public relations campaign that chiefly attempted to discredit the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, the Netherlands-based judicial body established by the UN to try suspects in the Hariri case. In tandem with the campaign, Saad Hariri, the prime minister, came under increasing pressure to endorse Hezbollah's view that the tribunal was politically tainted and to announce publicly that Lebanon would cease all cooperation with it. Since being appointed prime minister in 2009, Hariri had already undertaken the difficult step of reconciling with Bashar al-Assad, whom he continued to believe ordered the assassination of his father. But disavowing the tribunal was a demand he could not accept.

In January 2011, just as the tribunal's prosecutor was completing his first set of indictments, which media reports said would name Hezbollah operatives, Hezbollah and its allies in Hariri's coalition government resigned en masse, toppling the cabinet. Within days, Najib Mikati, a billionaire businessman from Tripoli, a close friend of Assad and a political moderate, was appointed prime minister. As Lebanon steadily slid back into Syria's political orbit, Hariri and the tattered remnants of the March 14 parliamentary coalition suddenly found themselves on the opposition benches for the first time since the tumultuous Beirut Spring six years earlier.

The dilemma facing Hezbollah over the investigation into the Hariri assassination is but one component of a broader paradox that has dogged the organization since its inception in the 1980s. For all the progress Hezbollah has made in its three decades of existence, it remains beholden to two potentially conflicting dynamics: its military and ideological
submission to Iran and its social and political obligations to its Shia constituency in Lebanon. The two are not necessarily mutually compatible, but Hezbollah needs both if it wishes to survive in its current form.

Iran provided the critical state support in terms of weapons, logistics, training, and funds that allowed Hezbollah to become arguably the most powerful nonstate military organization in the world. Such comprehensive and sustained backing comes with a hefty price tag: total obedience.