PICKING UP THE TRAIL of the embassy bombing was like putting together a Roman mosaic scattered in an earthquake and scorched by fire. You had no idea what was a lead and what wasn’t.
Actually, it was worse. Sitting in Christian East Beirut meant we were working in the dark. We couldn’t cross into West Beirut, where most of our best remaining agents were. On top of that, none of our agents was in a position to infiltrate Hizballah or any other radical Shi’a Islamic group, and no one could even get close to ’Imad Mughniyah or the IJO. That left us making do with what the CIA calls access agents—those who don’t know secrets themselves but can access people who do.
One of my best access agents was a freelance journalist I’ll call Farid. Although he was a Christian, Farid’s job allowed him to travel back and forth across the Green Line. A slight, balding man with a winning smile, Farid could pass unnoticed almost anywhere in the world. He had friends and contacts all over Lebanon and could talk to pretty much whomever he liked, with the exception of Mughniyah or Hizballah. The limitation was okay with me: Sidling up to the really toxic guys would only draw attention to Farid. Moreover, Hizballah was in a particularly foul mood in those days. The year before, on March 8, 1985, a car bomb had detonated in front of the apartment building of a Shi’a spiritual leader, Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, killing eighty people. Hizballah immediately accused the CIA of training the bombers. It was absurd—no one could teach the Lebanese anything about car bombs—but logic didn’t matter, since anyone who fell under Hizballah’s suspicion was summarily executed.
The first thing I asked Farid to do was to collect public records on people we suspected of being close to the IJO. To ease the burden on him, I rented a safe house in Sinn Al-Fill, a poor Christian neighborhood near the Green Line. I would always get to the meeting first so I could watch Farid maneuvering with his scuffed leather briefcase between the cars parked on the sidewalk and the vendors.
Once he was inside, I’d get him a soft drink and he would dump the contents of the briefcase onto the sofa between us—stacks of civil registration documents, political membership lists, old newspaper articles, and news photos from Hizballah demonstrations. Most of it was junk, but I never discouraged him from bringing it. It was up to me to pick through for that one gem I could use. I always paid Farid a bonus if he brought something good. Money was never a problem for the CIA in Beirut.
I had Farid collect the Lebanese civil registration documents for Muhammad Hammadah, one of the TWA-847 hijackers whom we suspected of being an active member of Mughniyah’s group. It took him about four weeks to put his hands on them, and then he couldn’t contain himself when he came to the meeting. He gleefully told me how he had finally found the right civil registration office, waltzed in, plunked down the equivalent of a nickel, and watched the clerk copy the page for the Hammadah family. No one asked any questions.
I picked it up as if it were a rare manuscript. There, in front of me, was the entire family, from Muhammad’s father, here ’Ali Hasan Hammadah, born in 1929 in Al-Sawanah, to his mother, Fatmah ’Abd-al-Hasan Dabbuk, born in 1931 in Khirbat Silm. All of his living siblings were listed, including Muhammad’s older brother ’Abd-al-Hadi Hammadah, a dangerous leader in Hizballah.
Someone who doesn’t make a living in counterterrorism might scratch his head and wonder why I’d risk an agent’s life for information like this, but in fact it represented the kind of detail that could break open a case. The records gave us addresses, telephone numbers, marriage ties. It helped us check the bona fides of other agents. Eventually, I or another case officer was sure to run into an agent who claimed to know Muhammad Hammadah. Now we could start vetting the agent by asking about the facts we already knew. The Hammadah civil registry, for instance, told us that Muhammad’s sister Samira had been born on February 13, 1969, and was still unmarried and living at the Hammadah home in Burj Al-Barajnah. If the contact didn’t know about her, something was wrong. Maybe he wasn’t as close to Muhammad as he claimed. Maybe he had been sent to draw us into an ambush. Knowledge was power, and self-preservation. Muhammad Hammadah eventually would be arrested on January 13, 1987, at FrankfurtAirport trying to smuggle through customs a bottle of methyl nitrate, a highly explosive, unstable liquid. It was probably intended to be used in terrorist attacks in France.
Farid even helped solve a terrorist case. On December 25, 1986, four Lebanese hijacked an Iraqi flight from Baghdad only to have it crash over Saudi Arabia, killing the hijackers along with most of the crew and passengers. The Iraqis told us one of the hijackers was Ri’bal Khalil Jallul, a young Shi’a from the southern suburbs. To confirm the story, Farid searched for and found a Jallul family registered as Burj Al-Barajanah, registration #117. Listed among the children of Khalil Jallul was a Ri’bal Khalil Jallul, born February 10, 1967. One of Farid’s subsources then found a Hizballah poster pasted on a mosque wall, a picture of a young martyr whom the caption identified as Ri’bal Jallul. Finally, Farid managed to dig up a copy of the passport Ri’bal had used. The name was an alias, but the passport photo matched the Hizballah poster. We’d come full circle, and one more piece of the mosaic was in place.
WHERE FARID LEFT OFF, telephone taps picked up.
In Beirut, everyone’s phone was tapped. You could walk down almost any street and see jerry-rigged telephone wires draped across the street. Part of it was just practical business. If you were to move into an apartment in, say, Hamra—Beirut’s old central business district—and find that there was no telephone line, you couldn’t ask the telephone company to come out and install a new line. The telephone company no longer existed, along with anything else that approached everyday infrastructure. What you did was find a working line and tie into it, legally or illegally. You might steal a line from one of Hamra’s mostly abandoned hotels. Since the hotel never got a bill, it wouldn’t know. Or you might just go down into the basement and hook up to your neighbor’s line in the telephone distribution box. With all this freelance telephone wiring going on, installing a tap was a cinch, which meant they were everywhere.
I went back through tap transcripts looking for a reference to a Ri’bal Jallul. I found a call between ’Abd-al-Hadi Hammadah, the brother of the TWA hijacker, and a Jihad Jallul. Since the Jalluls are a big family, I couldn’t be sure Ri’bal was related to Jihad. But in checking the Jallul registration records, I found a Jihad Khalil Jallul, undoubtedly Ri’bal’s older brother. I came across another interesting tap transcript from April 16, 1986: A Hizballah mole in the Lebanese police named Muhammad Murad had called what we suspected was an IJO office. He first asked for Mughniyah and was told he wasn’t there; he then asked in succession for ’Abd-al-Hadi Hammadah, Jihad Jallul, and Zuhayr Jallul. (Zuhayr was another brother of Ri’bal, according to the civil registration documents.) I now had Mughniyah tied, circumstantially at least, to the Iraq Air hijacking. For his part, Murad later helped kidnap four American professors at Beirut University College.
I didn’t stop there. I found out from another agent that the Jalluls lived in Mughniyah’s neighborhood, ’Ayn Al-Dilbah. I even got a sketch of the outside of their apartment, above a candy store and only a few blocks from Mughniyah’s house. We found out a lot of other things about Jihad—his car’s license-plate number, his telephone number, even the make of the pistol he carried. We got into his family history as well. His father was an alcoholic. Jihad had accidentally killed his mother while cleaning a gun in the kitchen.
I had five other agents doing the same thing as Farid. Piece by piece, I put together a picture of Mughniyah’s group. I would spend hours poring over the take, making connections between people, eliminating false leads, adding to my matrices. My makeshift charts started to look like the wiring diagram for a Boeing-747 cockpit. The mounting details made it easy to see how Mughniyah had been able to keep his group so secret. Everyone was either related by blood, had fought together in Fatah, or hailed from the ’Ayn Al-Dilbah neighborhood. We started calling them the ’Ayn Al-Dilbah gang, but it was those same bonds that made the IJO such a hard target to crack.
ONE NAME that kept popping up alongside Mughniyah’s was Husayn Khalil, but it wasn’t until Khalil’s involvement in the kidnapping of former ABC correspondent Charles Glass that he became worth zeroing in on.
Glass had come to Lebanon in June 1987 to do research for a book. Born to a Lebanese mother, he knew the country better than most American reporters and even earned a brief measure of celebrity by interviewing on camera the captain of TWA-847 through an open cockpit window in the middle of the hijacking. But apparently Glass didn’t know Lebanon well enough to avoid the fatal error of advertising his travel itinerary. As soon as the Iranians got wind of Glass’s plans to visit Sidon, a Pasdaran officer drove to Husayn Khalil’s house in the southern suburbs and ordered him to kidnap Glass. Although we knew when and where the kidnapping was going down—we even had the license number of one of the cars to be used—we had no way to get in touch with Glass. We watched helplessly as he was grabbed near the airport.
Although the horse was out of the barn, I had Farid run down everything he could on Khalil. It took him less than a week to come up with the family’s civil registration records. Khalil’s full name was Husayn ’Ali Husayn Jawad Khalil, born to ’Ali and Samira Khalil. He was married to the sister of ’Ali ’Ammar, a senior member of Hizballah who one day would be elected to the Lebanese parliament. Another agent brought me a handful of photos of Khalil.
The background data was all well and good, but it was only when I ran Khalil’s name by a former Fatah agent that his story became really interesting. Samir, as I’ll call the agent here, was a Lebanese military officer, but in 1975 Fatah had recruited him to stay out of the fighting for Beirut’s hotel district. After Arafat evacuated Beirut in 1982, Samir stopped working for Fatah, but he still kept in touch with some secret members left behind.
Samir and I met in his former mistress’s apartment in Ashrafiyah, on the Christian East side of Beirut. He always brought along one or two soldiers—as a Muslim, he could never be certain some Christian thugs might not try to grab him. I got used to the soldiers, but it was unnerving to see a pair with rocket-propelled grenades barring entry to the apartment.
About halfway through our first meeting after the Glass kidnapping, I handed Samir three pictures without saying a word. Two were of Palestinians who belonged to a left-wing group; I didn’t care about either of them. The third was of Khalil praying in a mosque, along with a large group of other worshipers.
Samir immediately handed me back the picture of Khalil. “That one there is Husayn Khalil,” he said, putting his index finger on Khalil’s face. “He was with Fatah in the seventies. I think he joined in 1971. We worked together for a couple of years.”
“And now?”
“In 1982 Khalil left Beirut just ahead of the Israelis. He signed up with Husayn Al-Musawi as chief of security. I heard he led the takeover of the Shaykh Abdallah barracks. I don’t know what’s happened to him since, but I’ll check.”
That afternoon I sent a cable to headquarters, asking for a complete trace on Khalil. What came back was stunning. Tucked away in a five-page cable was a tap transcript that placed Khalil as the Lebanese in charge of the married-officers’ quarters at the Shaykh Abdallah barracks in early 1985—at the same time the IJO hostages were held there. The authenticity of the information could not be challenged.
At our next meeting, Samir started droning on about the Shi’a fighting each other in the West. Finally, unable to contain myself, I interrupted: “Anything on Khalil?”
“Oh yeah, I almost forgot. I ran into one of his old colleagues from Tyre.”
“Khalil was in Tyre?”
“Yes, for a couple of years. After a stint in a Fatah student cell in Beirut, Khalil was recruited by Force 17 and transferred to Tyre. He worked for a guy I’m sure you’ve never heard of.”
“Try me.”
“Azmi Sughayr.”
I almost got up and kissed Samir. Sughayr was not a common name. It had to be the same Sughayr who recruited Jada’ to work in the embassy. If I was right, it was like hitting a grand slam to win the World Series. I had finally tied someone other than Jada’ to the bombing. Better by far, I had, for the first time, one person connected to both the hostages and the bombing. Khalil was all of a sudden a lot more important than Mughniyah.
I went back to headquarters and asked for everything on Sughayr. There was a lot. My predecessors in Beirut had done their jobs well. According to headquarters records, Sughayr had been born in Palestine in 1944 and joined Fatah’s elite security organization, which would become Force 17, in 1969. He fought for Yasir Arafat against the Jordanian army in 1970 and then in 1971 he joined Black September, a fictional organization used by Fatah to conduct terrorist operations. In 1973 Abu Iyad appointed him head of the Security Office for Foreign Operations. He was probably involved in almost every major Black September terrorist operation, including the massacre at the Munich Olympics. After putting in several years in Libya, he was appointed Fatah commander for Tyre in 1979. Shortly afterward Husayn Khalil had gone to work for him. In 1982, during the Israeli invasion, Fatah put out the false news that Sughayr had been killed. In fact, he stayed in Beirut to run resistance operations against Israel. Khalil apparently had studied at the feet of a master terrorist.
There was one piece of missing evidence that bothered me: What happened to Jada’ after he was released? It was a long shot, but I asked headquarters once again. Two days later I got my answer, and it was a lot more than I had hoped for. Jada’ had gone to Dubai, where he was taken in by a man named Anis ’Abdallah Hassan (Abu ’Ali), the head of a Fatah sleeper cell in the Gulf. The next day I went through our telephone tap records looking for an Abu ’Ali. I was about to give up when I found three calls from an IJO office to an Abu ’Ali in Dubai. Not only that, according to the taps, Abu ’Ali worked directly for ’Abd-Al-Latif Salah—Mughniyah’s associate and Yasir Arafat’s representative to the IJO.
This was all rock-solid evidence, and it was all consistent. You’ll have to take my word for it: Evidence doesn’t get much better in the intelligence business. Just as important, for all the twists and turns the story had taken—and I realize the reader has just been through quite a number of them—the intelligence had been gathered the way it has to be: at the ground level, through human sources, by wire taps, and by correlation with untold hours of similar research by predecessors who still cared about doing the job right.
The only conclusion a reasonable person could make was that a Fatah cell—with or without Yasir Arafat’s knowledge—blew up the American embassy in Beirut on April 18, 1983. Mughniyah and Khalil were almost definitely involved. There was only one significant question: Who gave the orders?
TO GET TO THE NEXT STEP, a lot of details needed filling in, like who actually drove the truck through the front door. If we could find that out, it might well lead us to the bombers.
The break came in October 1987. I was at my desk late in the afternoon when the embassy security officer came to say that a Mr. Walker wanted to see me. Mr. Walker was the code for a walk-in who wanted to see a CIA officer. It wouldn’t win any originality prizes, but I got the message.
As with any potential agent, I had to begin with the assumption that I would run him as an agent. That required protecting him from the very beginning, and it meant isolating him from the local guards, who could be working secretly for anyone. Rather than have Mr. Walker pass through the embassy check-in system, I went to the outer perimeter to meet him.
The man waiting for me was probably about thirty-five, although he could have passed for much older, and scarred all over, including a crater in the top of his head. Slight and gaunt, he wore a faded and patched shirt. His sandals flagged him as a Muslim. (Lebanese Christians usually opted for stylish European shoes.)
After he passed through the metal detector, I led him along the embassy’s metal labyrinthine sandbagged trenches, down a hill, and out a back exit, where I had prepositioned a car.
As soon as we turned onto the coastal highway, I asked Mr. Walker for his national identity card. When he pulled it from his shirt pocket and showed it to me, I almost drove off the road. He had the same family name as a member of Mughniyah’s group. I held my breath when I asked Mr. Walker—I’ll call him Hasan—if he was related to the terrorist of the same name. “He’s a first cousin,” he told me.
My objective became putting our relationship on a clandestine footing as quickly as possible. As the first cousin of a notorious IJO terrorist, Hasan had a half-life in Christian East Beirut of about five seconds. I needed to find a secure place to let him off and another secure spot to pick him up for the next meeting. The less terrain he had to cross in East Beirut to meet me, the better. I headed to Sinn Al-Fill, the same neighborhood where I met Farid.
We talked on the way. I wanted to know everything about him: where he lived, whether he was married, how many children he had. I also needed to learn whom he was close to in Hizballah and the IJO. He wasn’t a member of either, he told me, but even as he spoke, I was contemplating how to insert him into one of those assemblies of worthies.
We also talked about how he could justify coming across the Green Line to the east if challenged. It wasn’t as if you could pop over to Sinn Al-Fill to buy a pizza: No one crossed without a very good reason. We agreed that he would say he was buying Islamic books for a German scholar of Islam who lived in the east. Since the fictional German couldn’t go into the west, Hasan, if challenged, would explain that he did his buying for him. It wasn’t the most ingenious cover, but it was all I could come up with on short notice. I gave Hasan a sterile telephone number—one not associated with the office.
Finally, as I was about to drop Hasan off, I asked him why he had decided to meet with the CIA.
“I can’t stand the murder of innocent people. What Hizballah does is wrong.”
“But it’s risky,” I said. “You have children. If you’re caught, you’ll be tortured to death.”
“I know. But God protects me.”
I waited for Hasan to explain. I thought I knew where the conversation was going. I was wrong.
“I play Russian roulette,” Hasan said sheepishly.
I’d heard the rumor that fanatic Muslims had taken up the sport to test divine determination. A round in the chamber was God’s way of letting you know your time was up. But I never took the rumor seriously, at least until now. Before I let Hasan out, I made him promise to stop playing Russian roulette. Just meeting me, I told him, was all the fate he wanted to tempt.
HASAN JOINED HIZBALLAH, found a job in one of its offices, and turned into a fantastic agent, the CIA’s first in the group.
The analysts back home sent me reams of questions about what shaykh so-and-so thought about shaykh so-and-so, how much Hizballah was spending on its social welfare programs, or when it was going to enter mainstream Lebanese politics. But what interested me were ’Imad Mughniyah and the IJO.
Since you had to be recruited to the IJO, I asked Hasan to work the problem on the edges. Not surprisingly, my first order of business was the April 18, 1983, bombing. Hasan and I talked it over at length. I knew he was politically savvy, so I simply confessed that the U.S. government had no idea who blew up the embassy. The canned Middle East response was that it was inconceivable the CIA didn’t have a clue about a terrorist attack that killed seventeen Americans. Hasan didn’t go for it. “For lack of a better lead,” he said, “why not let’s start with ’Imad?” At that moment, I knew Hasan had as good a chance as any agent to come up with some of the answers I was after.
Hasan started praying at a mosque whose imam was close to Mughniyah. Hasan went every Friday and soon joined a religious study group. A good writer, he started crafting tracts for the imam. Because the imam knew Hasan was related to an IJO terrorist, he accepted him as one of the faithful.
One day when Hasan was alone with the imam, he decided the time was right to bring up the bombing. As we’d agreed, Hasan started with a ploy. Instead of charging ahead and asking who the suicide bomber was, he mentioned the name of a young man who had been in the imam’s congregation for many years but had disappeared. Lowering his voice conspiratorially, Hasan said he’d heard the young man was the suicide driver who blew up the U.S. embassy in April 1983.
“Where did you hear that?” the imam asked.
Hasan responded vaguely that he’d heard it from his IJO cousin. He knew the imam would never check back with his cousin.
“No,” the imam answered. “No, he was not the blessed martyr who destroyed the American spy nest.”
Hasan insisted he was right.
“No, you’re wrong.” The imam didn’t appreciate having his authority challenged. “It was Brother Hassuna. I know very well.”
“Who?”
“Muhammad Hassuna.”
THIS WAS THE FIRST TIME we’d ever had a name for the suicide bomber, but the story still needed to be nailed down. I invited Bernie back to Beirut to polygraph Hasan. Two days later he was scrambling out of the door of a Blackhawk.
It was another flawless day. Bernie was calmer than on his first visit; the fighting along the Green Line had died down. If everything went smoothly, Hasan would be in and out of the polygraph before lunch.
Things were going fine until we turned down the main street into Sinn Al-Fill. We were about three blocks from the pickup site when a blast from a .50-caliber machine gun hit a neon sign hanging over the road, spraying glass over the car. Just above our roof, wires sparked and sizzled. I looked at Bernie. The expression on his face seemed to say, “Do I shoot him for putting my life in danger, then run? Or do I just run?”
A second burst from the .50 thudded into the wall of a building farther down the street.
Bernie pointed at my foot. “That’s your foot. And right under it is the gas pedal. Now apply one to the other —and let’s get the fuck out of here!”
We found a quiet street out of the line of fire, and Bernie waited in the car, glumly resigned to spending the rest of the day with a lunatic, while I went looking for Hasan.
Eventually, he came walking down the main street of Sinn Al-Fill, looking like he was taking a stroll along the corniche. Although the shooting had stopped, the street was completely deserted. Maybe the Russian roulette paid off after all.
Hasan passed the polygraph with flying colors, including whether the imam had told him Hassuna was the suicide bomber.
The polygraph was a start, but I couldn’t rely on it. Perhaps the imam had lied to Hasan, or maybe he didn’t really know the identity of the suicide bomber and was simply covering up his ignorance. Since I couldn’t polygraph the imam, it was time to go back to the matrices.
Hassuna was not a common name in Lebanon. That helped. I had all of my agents look into the Hassuna family. Samir knew a Major Hassuna, and promised to check with him to see if any members of the family were missing. A week later he dropped the bombshell on me—one of Major Hassuna’s brothers, Muhammad, had died on the Iraq front in Iran.
“Iran?” I asked incredulously. “How’s that possible? Lebanese don’t simply pull up stakes and go fight for Iran.”
Samir shrugged. “I’ll find out.”
At the next meeting, Samir said that Major Hassuna had told him his family was nonpracticing Muslims. They rarely went to the mosque or read the Koran, but Muhammad was different. Their father was alcoholic and abusive, and Muhammad took it particularly badly. In his search for a deeper faith, he had embraced Shi’a Islam, and in early 1983 he had unexpectedly informed his family that he was going to Iran to fight in the war with Iraq. That was the last they heard of him until they received a letter from the Iranian embassy that Muhammad had died in a battle on the front. There were few remains, the letter said, and he was buried in a military cemetery in Iran. Included in the letter was a Polaroid of Muhammad’s gravestone. The major didn’t know anything more about his brother’s death.
I had Farid dig up the official records on Muhammad Hassuna. Although Hassuna had a passport, there was no record that he had ever traveled out of the country. According to the family civil registration records in Sidon, the Hassuna family’s residence was ’Awza’i, a neighborhood near the airport controlled by Hizballah.
ALTHOUGH I was a long way from producing evidence that would hold up in court, I was getting closer every day. I wrote up what I knew about Hassuna in a long, detailed intelligence report—the first in a series I would do on the bombing.
A few days later, headquarters advised that the report would not be disseminated. “While the information is compelling,” they wrote, “it is only of historical interest.” In plain English, the national security community no longer gave a damn who had bombed our embassy in Beirut.
IN A WAY, I could almost understand Washington’s not caring. The CIA was falling into the hands of people who had never put their lives on the line to learn about terrorism in places like Beirut. The embassy bombing for them wasn’t just ancient history; it was a distraction from their career ambitions. Why mess up a spotless record by bearing news of one of the agency’s darkest hours? I saw my job differently. If we didn’t know who we were up against, we wouldn’t know what they were capable of, and might not learn until they showed up on our shores, armed to the teeth.
Besides, there was still an outstanding arrest warrant for Mughniyah. All I needed was someone with the balls to exercise it.
I’ll call the man I found Jean. Jean was about thirty-two and, like Mughniyah, had spent his life fighting on the Green Line. The only difference was, he killed and kidnapped Muslims rather than the other way around. Jean had made a name for himself when he flattened a foreign embassy to improve his field of fire.
Jean was waiting for me at a nightclub called Dominos.
“I always knew one day the CIA would come knocking at my door when it had some work too dirty to do itself,” Jean said, shaking my hand.
I kept quiet while I looked around. Although it was already past eleven at night, Dominos was only now starting to fill up. Arms dealers, Colombian narcotics traffickers, Christian Gucci warlords—an entire demimonde did its business there. Aside from the inset lighting over the bar, Dominos was pitch black, and the music was just loud enough to mask a conversation but not drown it out.
I turned back to Jean. “I need a network in the west, people who are not going to waste my time.”
“I don’t do intelligence. Go talk to the Lebanese Forces if you want information.”
The Lebanese Forces were the main Christian militia. We both knew its intelligence wasn’t very good.
“It’s not information I’m after. I need to do an operation.”
Jean grinned. “So Syria has finally crossed the line.”
“No, I want to get someone in the southern suburbs.”
“A hit?”
“No. I need the guy alive.”
“Who is it?”
“You find me the people and we’ll talk.”
Jean wrote down the name of a video store in Zuq, an out-of-the-way neighborhood in East Beirut. “Tomorrow morning at ten.”
He was sitting in his Range Rover in front of the video store when I arrived. He got out and motioned me to follow him, and we walked through the store, out the back door, and into an apartment building through its alley entrance. The electricity was off. We climbed five flights of stairs.
A Lebanese army captain opened the door. A second officer was sitting behind him on the sofa. On the dining room table sat a cutoff M-16 with a suppressor and a laser sight: not exactly your standard-issue weapon for the Lebanese army.
The captain’s left hand looked like a webbed duck foot. My guess was that it had been mangled by an explosive charge. When he went into a corner of the room to talk with Jean, I noticed that one of his legs was shorter than the other as well.
“The captain is ready to hear you out,” Jean said when he turned back to me.
As soon as I started talking about needing a network in the west, the captain grinned just as Jean had.
“The target’s not Syrian,” I said. “It’s Hizballah. 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 recontact 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 Hizballah’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 Hizballah with weapons and ammunition. Earlier that year when a war broke out between Hizballah and its secular rival, Amal, the Lebanese Forces backed Hizballah 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 Hizballah 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, by 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, somewhere 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.