Death in Damascus - I
His Untold Iraq Venture Crowned Mughniyeh's Depredations
The small bomb which blew away Imad Fayez Mughniyeh in the upscale Damascus Kafar Soussa neighborhood Tuesday night, Feb. 12, blasted a hole in the clandestine exploits of the longest-running and most secretive of Islamist master-terrorists.
Suddenly, his most spectacular bombings, hijackings, kidnappings and murders over a quarter of century, were brought to popular attention.
As a Shiite extremist in the service of Khomeinist Iran, the master terrorist singled out America and Israel as the targets of his most savage works, but 42 governments all told hold confidential dossiers on his crimes against their nationals.
During his 46 years, Imad Mughniyeh evolved from a lowly recruit in Yasser Arafat's Force 17 to master of Hizballah's world-wide intelligence-cum-terror network, a powerful and dangerous Iranian tool with a clandestine presence as far afield as the United States backyard, Latin America.
As such, he ran more terror fronts against America than Osama bin Laden. Before 9/11, Mughniyeh topped the Washington's most wanted terrorist list.
Throughout his career, he kept Israel within his sights. He died in the midst of preparing the Lebanese Shiite militia for its next war against Israel. After the 2006 conflict, Tehran made him Hizballah's military chief in place of Hassan Nasrallah, whose performance was found wanting.
An adept at his destructive trade, Imad Mughniyeh found open doors in the highest reaches of the nether world he inhabited, including Iran's supreme ruler Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahri and every Palestinian terrorist chief.
Close friend of Moqtada Sadr
Their absolute trust and high regard only reached the public domain in the eulogies they delivered after he was dead. None, however, touched on Mughniyeh's most ambitious covert venture: Laying the first logistical and organizational foundations for the Iraqi insurgency which later erupted against the US Army.
His early mission therefore embodied the early date of Iran's steps to counter the US invasion and turn the Iraq War against the invaders.
A small keyhole opened up when Iraq's Shiite radical leader Moqtada al-Sadr on Thursday condemned the assassination of Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus and declared three days of mourning in all Sadrist offices.
Sources reveals that the two Shiite radicals were friends. The Lebanese terrorist helped the Iraqi Shiite organize his Mehdi Army militia and make it an effective fighting machine supported by the infrastructure he created. Their ties continued for years. In 2006, US officials discovered 1,000 to 2,000 fighters from the Mehdi Army and other Shiite militias had been trained by Hezbollah in Lebanon, one of the projects arranged by Mughniyeh.
Iran has facilitated the link between Hezbollah and the Shiite militias in Iraq, the official said.
Mughniyeh's counter-terror experts traced the first visit to Iraq by the shadowy servant of Tehran to April 2003. He spent six months crafting the infrastructure of command centers, hideouts, supplies, arms and equipment which were to support the Shiite, Sunni and al Qaeda anti-US campaigns at three levels.
The Baghdad-Ramadi-Falluja-Anbar framework: The al Qaeda and Iraqi Sunni groups of this network did their brutal worst from 2004 to 2006 and came close to bringing the US army to defeat in those dark days of the Iraq War.
The logistics framework: A well-oiled machine used by elements of al Qaeda and the Syrian government to smuggle fighters, arms, equipment and money from Lebanon's Hizballah via Syria with Iranian funding, to nurture the Iraq insurgency.
Hizballah still runs Iraq's insurgency's support system via Syria
This support system was, and still is, run by Hizballah and, according to Middle East sources, made the ruling elite of Damascus rich.
The Assad clique rakes off a commission on every shipment and service Syria supplies this network - which goes far to explain why President Bashar Assad was consistently unmoved by Washington's appeals and threats to seal his border with Iraq.
The Iranian espionage-subversion network: Established in southern Iraq, this network has spread across the country with cells in every Shiite town and village, Tehran's tentacles reaching out to dominate the Iraq state and bring it into Iran's sphere of influence for the long term.
Imad Mughniyeh brought his finest handiwork to bear on the Iraq enterprise as a joint project of Iran, al Qaeda and Hizballah, making it the high point of his career.
The question is: Why did US intelligence and its military fail to go after him in Iraq and nip his depredations in the bud? The answer, quite simply, is that in 2003, the early days of the Iraq war, America's civilian and military war leaders were certain that victory was in the bag and had no ears for alerts about his activities even when they came from Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Least of all, they heeded our sources, the only one's at the time to report that the Lebanese terrorist had arrived in Iraq to set up the machinery for hostile elements in Iraq and the Middle East to fight the American army in Iraq with the fire of terror.
The Iraqi episode is one of the hidden chapters of the epic war on Islamist terror and probably not the only one.
Death in Damascus II
Mughniyeh's Passing Stalls Iran's Expansionist Drive
Imad Fayez Mughniyeh, the Lebanese-Iranian ace terrorist killed by a bomb in Damascus, Tuesday, Feb. 13, was the keystone of Tehran's drive for a military presence on the Mediterranean and an intelligence presence across the world.
His death surgically severed that outreach.
Before then, Iran relished the steady upward curve towards its goals. Tehran saw its goals drawing ever nearer with the inconclusive 2006 Hizballah-Israel War, Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip in June 2007 and its push into northern Sinai in February 2008.
Now, Iran has lost the architect of many of its successes as well as a loyal servant albeit one who by refusing to share his secrets has left his masters and successors with an almost empty cupboard.
Deeply stricken, the Islamic government quickly posted a high-profile military delegation to Damascus to get to the bottom of the disaster which deprived them of a prime asset.
The delegation, which arrived Wednesday night on the same plane which continued to Beirut to carry foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki to the Mughniyeh funeral, is headed by Gen. Ghassem Soleimani, commander of the al Qods Brigades, the Revolutionary Guards foreign terror arm. Its other members are Adm. Mohammad Fadavi, Dep. Commander of the IRGC Navy, who set up the near-clash between Iranian speedboats and US warships in the Strait of Hormuz in January; and Gen. Morteza Rezai, former chief of the IRGC intelligence branch.
Alive, Mughinyeh was more than a trusted military chief; his instincts as a terrorist were useful registers of soft American and Israel targets in the region; his strategic strengths were applied for precisely aimed attacks.
His value to his Iranian masters was such, Middle East sources say, that had there been no Imad Mughniyeh, Revolutionary Iran might never have gone so far as to build the Lebanese Hizballah militia into a military force for challenging the Americans and Israelis.
A rare accident of history brought the future master terrorist in early 1982 to the first training camp Iranian agents set up for Hizballah in the Lebanese Beqaa. Aged 20, he was armed with the combat experience gained in the Palestinian Force 17 which acted as Yasser Arafat?s personal guard.
Arafat himself was expelled from Lebanon that year leaving the ambitious young Shiite unemployed.
He crafted the arcane, never-penetrated Hizballah intelligence network
Within months, he launched the first suicide bombing attacks, wreaking unbelievable carnage to US, Israeli, French and other Western targets in Beirut.
Over the next 26 years, Mughniyeh came to dictate the tempo of Iranian and Hizballah terrorist and military operations in the eastern Mediterranean countries of the Middle East.
Tehran soon discovered his exceptional talents - not only as a terror tactician but as a secret agent and designer of clandestine organizations.
In this capacity, Mughniyeh created a world-wide undercover network, grafting it on the affluent Lebanese Shiite expatriate communities scattered across Africa, Asia, and North and South America. He also enlisted willing hands among anti-American and pro-Nazi groups doing business with the expatriates in Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina.
These rings were and still are employed mainly as spies for Tehran, in weapons and drug trafficking and most of all in raising money to fund Hizballah?s operations.
Cells of this universal ring were responsible for the 1992 bombing attacks on the Israeli embassy and Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires, in which more than a hundred people died. They stand ready now to execute further orders to avenge their master?s death by hitting more Israeli and Jewish targets.
The clandestine Shiite network crafted by the Lebanese secret agent for Tehran parallels al Qaeda's jihadist worldwide spread.
No American, Israel or other Western agency has ever succeeded in penetrating Mughniyeh's clandestine operation. The only Western cloak-and-dagger service with indirect ties and then too through Iran was the German BND intelligence agency. Those ties were not operational, only a conduit for relaying communications between the Iranian network and Western intelligence organizations.
An obsession with secrecy
So obsessed was the dead terrorist with secrecy, that he designed and made his own disguises; even his closest helpers never knew in what character he would turn up at any given moment. He personally arranged for the facial surgery procedures that change his appearance. Middle East intelligence circles insist that he masked his reinvented images by murdering the surgeons who performed the operations and torching their clinics to destroy his medical records.
In 1996, US intelligence received a tip that its most wanted terrorist had been spotted during a stopover at Jeddah international airfield and identified, although he was bald, beardless and stout.
By the time the news was flashed between Washington, the US embassy in Riyadh and the Saudi royal court, Mughniyeh had shown a clean pair of heels. His plane took off hurriedly without first checking with the control tower.
The only clue he left behind was the sense that he had contracted an ailment which caused him to swell up.
So well did he succeed in hiding his true appearance that only two batches of photos ever reached Western intelligence hands; one dates from 1985 when he was 25; the second was shot from a distance by Israeli military intelligence AMAN with telescopic lens in 1998, when he was sighted on a rare tour of the Lebanese-Israeli border.
Mughniyeh handled the security and Intelligence aspects of his networks with the same care as his personal safety. He kept all the data on the composition of his networks, how to contact them, his personal exchanges, his knowledge of their resources, scale and capabilities as close to his chest as his private secrets.
He did not even share the information with his deputies, the most senior of whom are Talal Hamayeh, a kinsman from Taraya village in the Lebanese Beqaa Valley, and Ibrahim Aqal, who served as Hizballah commander in south Lebanon in 2000.
According to intelligence sources, one of these two will most likely be appointed to succeed their dead boss as military and intelligence chief of Hizballah.
However, he will have to start working almost from scratch. The super-secretive Mughniyeh took most of the mysteries of his networks to the grave, leaving very few records for them to recover.
Tehran has discovered that his death has not only deprived the Islamic Republic of an exceptional asset, but also severed vital access to the Iranian foreign intelligence and terrorist networks which he established.
Death in Damascus III
Syria's Regime and Intelligence Are Wide Open
Conscious of the damage caused by the discovery that one of the world's most notorious terrorists was at home in Damascus, official Syrian sources tried planting a story that Imad Mughniyeh was using a false passport in the name of Redwan when he was murdered Tuesday, Feb. 12, in the posh Kafar Soussa neighborhood of the capital.
The story, run in the London-based story in the London-based Arabic media Thursday, Feb. 14, claimed that, not only were the Syrian authorities ignorant of his presence, but they found it hard to identify him.
This tale was designed for the dual purpose of shrugging off knowledge of his presence while insinuating that had Syrian security known he was there, he would have been looked after and alive to this day.
Except that the Iranians spoiled Syria's game.
According to Tehran's version, Mughniyeh arrived in Damascus from the Iranian capital on Jan. 19, 25 days before his death. During that time, he was busy holding meetings with the Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshaal on their joint operation for setting up the Hamas rampage against Egypt and Israel in the Gaza Strip. No one would believe that Syrian security and intelligence authorities, noted for keeping a close eye on every moving object in Damascus, missed the movements of the Lebanese master terrorist and were unaware of the pair?s schemes.
Whatever the Syrian officials may claim in their defense, the fact that the Tehran's terror tactician was assassinated under their nose has exposed a glaring breach in their intelligence and security services. The breach in this bulwark of the regime endangers Bashar Assad?s hold on power. It is also a blot on his relations with Tehran.
He therefore quickly followed Iran in appointing a military panel to investigate how the assassination was engineered, headed by acting interior minister Gen. Bassam Abdul Majid. It will have to come up with some fast answers for the Iranian delegation, which arrived in Damascus Wednesday for an exhaustive probe into the loss of one of the Islamic Republic's most valuable strategic assets.
Death trap in the most heavily-secured part of Damascus
The Lebanese terror ace believed he was safe staying in the Kafar Soussa neighborhood because it is so well guarded. On the opposite side of the street, 300 meters away, the editorial office of the government-controlled Al Thawra newspaper is located in a protected building on whose roof sharpshooters are perched.
The Rifai Mosque is located further down the street, attached to the Iranian school which is attended by the children of Iranian diplomats and military men serving in the Syrian capital. Both buildings are under heavy guard.
Mughniyeh's own residence had security officers posted around it night and day. His car, a Mitsubishi Pajero, in which the assassin?s bomb was planted, was kept in a garage attached to the house and inspected now and again by the guards.
All the same, someone entered the car and planted the explosive device. It was detonated by remote control after Mughniyeh drove off and had reached a point between the Al Thawra offices and the Rifai mosque. The assassins, or one of them, must have stayed on the street to activate the detonator when he could see the target sitting in the driving seat.
The shape of the plot shows that a hostile group of people was able to move about freely in one of the high-end neighborhoods of Damascus among the palatial homes of Syria's top political, military and business leaders.
Syrian intelligence displayed a similar failing six months ago, when Israeli raiders accessed secret military-nuclear sites undetected and made off undisturbed with a haul of nuclear apparatus, which was transferred to Israel and later the United States.
A few days before Mughniyeh was killed, DEBKAfile exposed another episode which showed up the mess in Syria's intelligence services.
On Feb. 9, Syrian Defense minister Gen. Hassan Turkemani told army officers to beware because, The Mossad has been able to penetrate the officer elite with gifts of satellite tetephones linked to Israeli spy satellites.
Approaching Hariri tribunal strips Assad regime of loyalists
On Feb. 1 Sources dislcosed that Gen. Labid Salame, head of Syria?s eavesdropping agency, Unit 225, had been detained on suspicion of monitoring and collecting material on the top secret exchanges between the head of Syrian military intelligence Gen. Assaf Shawqat and high-ranking Iranian intelligence and army officers and passing it on to anti-Iranian elements buried in the Syrian army.
The slaying of the high-powered Hizballah commander in the heart of the Syrian capital confirms that key sections of its security apparatus are seriously dysfunctional.
Part of their trouble, our intelligence sources report, is the panic that has seized the powers-that-be in Damascus over the approaching opening of the international tribunal for trying the plotters of the assassination of former Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri three years ago in Beirut.
Thursday, thousands turned out in the Lebanese capital to remember Hariri in a show of strength by anti-Syrian Lebanese government factions. Unbridled hate rhetoric for Syria and Hizballah was heard from every speaker at the event. None condemned the killing of Mughniyeh.
This week, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon issued this statement:
"The selection of the judges, the appointment of the prosecutor, the finalization of a headquarters agreement with the government of the Netherlands for the tribunal to be based in that country are decisive landmarks in the process of making the Special Tribunal a reality"
Intelligence sources point out that no Syrian intelligence officer feels he is safe from being thrown to the wolves of the tribunal to take the heat off the Assad clan, who are the chief suspects in the Hariri assassination conspiracy. Furthermore, every Syrian intelligence officer has noted that the Assads have proved powerless to arrest the wheels of justice. Therefore, the members of Syria?s undercover agencies are primarily preoccupied with saving their own skins rather than protecting their shaky rulers and their allies.
There could be no more opportune time for a foreign intelligence agency to get away with a hit in the Syrian capital.
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