The Hunt for Imad Mughniyeh

An interesting long read in the current issue of Foreign Policy by Mark Perry, investigating the hunt for Hezbollah master terrorist Imad Mughniyeh. For those unfamiliar with Mughniyeh's C.V., he is believed to have been responsible for:

• The October 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine and French barracks in Beirute (241 Americans, 58 French KIA);
• The 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 (which included the murder of U.S. Navy sailor Robert Stethem);
• Dozens of kidnapping and murders of Western hostages in Lebanon in the 1980s (including the torture and murder of William Buckley, the CIA's Beirut station chief, and Marine COL Rick Higgins, who was part of a UN peacekeeping mission);
• The March 1992 attack on Israel's embassy and the 1994 synagogue bombing in Buenos Aires.

Veteran CIA officer Milton Bearden summarized Mughniyeh's career, saying: "Both bin Laden and Mughniyeh were pathological killers. But there was always a nagging amateurishness about bin Laden -- his wildly hyped background, his bogus claims . . . Bin Laden cowered and hid. Mughniyeh spent his life giving us the finger."

Mughniyeh was killed on February 12, 2008, by a car bomb in Damascus, Syria. To this date, nobody knows for sure who killed him. Suffice it to say the man had a lot of enemies, although Perry implies it was likely the Mossad with Syrian assistance as precursor to Israeli-Syrian peace talks. (In February, Canada's National Post published an account by Erol Araf that explicitly credits the Mossad, which he claims was able to locate Mughniyeh through a combination of old East German Stasi files, hacking into a Syrian official's computer, and local agents in Lebanon. This account is certainly plausible, but given that Araf credits Mughniyeh with involvement in the clearly established al-Qa'ida attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, it should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt).

The iconic image of a then-23-year old Mughniyeh during the standoff during the 1985 TWA Flight 847 hijacking. 

An undated picture of an older Mughniyeh.

Although Perry leaves definitive attribution for his killing unclear, his account demonstrates the critical importance of third-country assistance in strategic manhunts. During the 30-year manhunt, despite a $5 million American bounty on his head, Mugniyeh was able to move freely between Tehran, Damascus, and Beirut, each of which offered a sympathetic local population and government willing to shelter him. His closest scrape with American pursuers came in late 1995 when he boarded a flight to Saudi Arabia, but the Saudis refuse an American request to apprehend him, instead denying the plane authorization to land. Again, if Perry's account is accurate, then the lack of bilateral assistance prevented his apprehension for three decades, and if the Syrian complicity-angle is true (which Hezbollah appears to believe), this reversal explains his ultimate demise as well.

But as they say, read the whole thing for yourself.