Authors: Matthew Levitt
More plots followed, the first of which was exposed by the September 2008 arrest of key members of a Hezbollah network in Egypt that was funneling weapons to Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza and reportedly was planning a string of attacks in Egypt. Another was foiled in January 2009, this time in an unnamed European country.
23
In September–October 2009 Turkish authorities disrupted a plot in which Hezbollah and Iranian agents posing as tourists intended to attack Israeli, American, and possibly local Jewish targets. By one account a cell led by Abbas Hossein Zakr was looking to strike Israeli tourists, Israeli ships or airplanes, or synagogues in Turkey.
24
Turkish police arrested Hezbollah operatives traveling on Kuwaiti and Canadian passports who reportedly smuggled a car bomb into the country from Syria.
25
The thwarted plot, combined with an assessment that Hezbollah sought to kill an Israeli diplomat to avenge Mughniyeh’s death, led Israeli officials to heighten security for Israeli officials traveling overseas.
26
Sources close to Hezbollah, embarrassed by its failure to retaliate for Mughniyeh’s assassination, as Nasrallah had promised two years earlier, couched the group’s failed attacks in terms of divine will. “The divine factor is necessary in all actions,” they explained, adding that “the attempts … were unsuccessful because the time had not yet come for an opportunity reflecting the divine wish.”
27
Hezbollah also posted a poem on its website implying that while no attacks had succeeded, part of the group’s revenge was keeping the threat of an impending attack hanging over Israel’s head. Titled “Mughniyeh Haunts ‘Israel,’ Every Day, Every Year,” the poem reads, in part,
With every rising sun he asks revenge / With every passing month he asks revenge / And with every passing year, they ask themselves when, where, and how they will taste his revenge / This year, like last year, like the year before, his killers warn their supporters: Beware Mughniyeh! / Wherever you are, beware Mughniyeh.
28
The absence of an attack, then, was not a sign of failure but part of a master plan. Later that year Hezbollah produced a hit list of prominent Israeli officials it held responsible for Mughniyeh’s death. Mimicking the US military’s deck of cards featuring wanted Iraqi insurgents, Hezbollah’s own deck featured the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) chief of staff, the prime minister, and others.
29
Meanwhile, despite its operational failures abroad, Hezbollah had much to celebrate at home in Lebanon. In July 2008 Hezbollah secured a blocking third in the new Lebanese cabinet as part of the Doha (Qatar) agreement reached by opposing Lebanese factions that May to end the country’s protracted political crisis. The one-third-plus-one representation of Hezbollah and its allies within the thirty-member cabinet effectively undercut any legislative means to disarm the group’s military
wing as required under UN Security Council Resolution 1701.
30
At the time, then–UN secretary-general Kofi Annan stated, “Dismantling Hezbollah is not the direct mandate of the UN.” Commenting on the continued flow of weapons from Iran to Hezbollah through Syria, Annan made it clear that the UN force would not stop the transactions. “The understanding,” he added, “was that it would be the Lebanese who would disarm [Hezbollah].”
31
Israeli intelligence officials reported that Hezbollah had tripled its supply of rockets since the summer 2006 war. More disturbing, the quality of the rockets had improved along with the higher numbers. Hezbollah now had “serious weapons,” a French diplomat reported, “not just Katyushas.”
32
According to an Israeli security official, Hezbollah could now fire rockets on Tel Aviv from north of Lebanon’s Litani River and hit as far south as Dimona from southern Lebanon.
33
Hezbollah also appeared to have overcome the political setbacks incurred by the massive damage caused to Lebanon’s infrastructure in the July 2006 war. Despite underwriting the reconstruction of homes and more in southern Lebanon with financing provided by Iran, Hezbollah suffered significant domestic criticism for igniting the war by kidnapping Israeli soldiers and firing thousands of missiles into northern Israel. Local criticism arose again in May 2008, after Hezbollah militants briefly seized control of part of West Beirut, turning onto fellow Lebanese citizens the weapons the party claimed were maintained strictly to resist Israel. The fighting broke out after the Lebanese government announced intentions to curb Hezbollah’s intelligence activities at Beirut International Airport and shut down its private “military telecommunications network.”
34
But by July 2008 Hezbollah had every reason to expect that its reconstruction support and military successes would translate into political gain. In particular Hezbollah negotiated a prisoner exchange that secured the release of five Lebanese militants held in Israeli jails as well as the remains of several other Hezbollah and Palestinian fighters. This, the party felt confident, would catapult the group and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, back into the limelight as the spearhead of resistance against Israel. Among the slogans plastered along coastal roads from the Israeli border to Sidon was Nasrallah’s refrain: “Thanks to the weapons of the resistance, we will free our prisoners.”
35
Hezbollah posters referred to the exchange as the “Radwan Operation”—framing the prisoner release itself as part of the group’s revenge for Mughniyeh’s assassination.
36
The Israel-Lebanon frontier, however, remained eerily quiet. Even when Israeli forces fought a pitched battle with Hamas in Gaza over three weeks in 2008–9, not a single Hezbollah rocket or fighter brought the fight to Israel’s northern border. While Hezbollah declared victory in the July 2006 war, the devastating Israeli military response appears to have deterred Hezbollah from entering the fray two years later.
As the Hezbollah-led March 8 coalition campaigned ahead of Lebanon’s June 2009 elections, the group was forced to contend with the unexpected exposure of its covert terrorist activities within Lebanon and internationally. At home, Hezbollah
stood accused by a UN tribunal of playing a role in the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. Abroad, a series of law enforcement actions targeted Hezbollah support networks operating across the globe. Together these activities posed what Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah described as “the largest and most important and serious challenge” facing the party.
37
Mughniyeh’s funeral—where Nasrallah threatened open war—occurred on the third anniversary of Hariri’s assassination. These two events became even more intimately intertwined several months later, in May 2009, when the German weekly
Der Spiegel
revealed that the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) investigating Hariri’s assassination had implicated Hezbollah operatives in the murder. Citing Lebanese security sources, the report referred to cell phones linked to the plot and found that “all of the numbers involved apparently belonged to the ‘operational arm’ of Hezbollah.” The report described a principal suspect, Abdulmajid Ghamlush, as “a Hezbollah member who had completed a training course in Iran.” The investigation of Ghamlush, who reportedly purchased the mobile phones, led officials to Hajj Salim, the alleged mastermind of the assassination plot and commander of a special operational unit reporting directly to Nasrallah.
38
It would be another two years before the STL issued formal indictments to Lebanon’s state prosecutor calling for the arrest of four Hezbollah members. While two of the suspects—Hasan Aneisi and Asad Sabra—appear to have been low-level musclemen, the others—Salim Ayyash and Mustapha Badreddine—were senior members of the IJO, Hezbollah’s famed terrorist wing, with international connections. Ayyash was described as a US passport holder who headed the cell that carried out the assassination. Meanwhile, Badreddine, Mughniyeh’s brother-in-law, was a longtime partner in Mughniyeh’s terrorist plots dating back to the Beirut bombings in the early 1980s and succeeded Mughniyeh as head of Hezbollah’s external operations.
39
Nasrallah took to the airwaves condemning the tribunal as an American project based on fabricated communications data from Israeli spies embedded in Lebanon’s telecommunications industry. Israel was behind the assassination, he claimed, as he exhorted the Lebanese people not to cooperate with its investigators.
40
But even before the formal indictments were issued, Hezbollah reportedly conducted quiet surveillance of the tribunal’s headquarters in The Hague. The Netherlands considers Hezbollah a terrorist group, and Dutch intelligence was already conducting bimonthly assessments of potential threats to the tribunal. While they found no plots in the works, they did note periodic surveillance of tribunal headquarters. In particular before the tribunal occupied its newly refurbished building, a Lebanese camera crew was caught taking suspicious pictures and video of the unfinished facility.
41
Back in Lebanon Hezbollah followed tribunal investigators on the ground and intimidated them overtly. The group reportedly collected information on tribunal officials entering and leaving the country through airport surveillance, creating an environment in which investigators did not feel safe.
42
The January 25, 2008, assassination of Lebanese Internal Security Forces captain Wissam Eid, who was detailed
to the Hariri investigation, underscored those fears. According to a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation report, the investigation of Eid’s murder—which also fell under the tribunal’s jurisdiction—implicated two additional Hezbollah officials, Hussein Khalil and Wafiq Safa.
43
Meanwhile, in April 2009 Egyptian authorities announced the November 2008 arrest of a cell of Hezbollah operatives and several dozen local recruits accused of funneling arms to Hamas and targeting Israeli tourists and shipping through the Suez Canal. As long as the arms smuggling network only ran weapons into Gaza, Cairo looked the other way. But local authorities took offense when Hezbollah leaders tasked its Egypt cell with also collecting intelligence for a possible attack on Israeli interests on Egyptian soil. According to Egyptian prosecutors the operatives were instructed to collect intelligence from villages along the Egypt-Gaza border, at tourist sites, and at the Suez Canal. Nasrallah himself confirmed that one of the men arrested was Sami Shihab, a Hezbollah member who was on “a logistical job to help Palestinians get [military] equipment.”
44
The cell reportedly established commercial businesses as fronts for its operational activities, purchased apartments in el-Arish and on the Egyptian side of Rafah for use as safe houses, and contacted criminal elements in Egypt to procure forged Egyptian passports so that members could leave Egypt as needed and purchase or rent apartments. Some of the cell members reportedly worked for the Egyptian bureau of al-Manar, Hezbollah’s satellite television station, as cover for their activities in Egypt.
45
Following the exposure of the Hezbollah cell operating in Egypt, UN special envoy Terje Roed-Larsen noted “a growing concern that Hezbollah has engaged in clandestine and illegal militant activities beyond Lebanese territory.”
46
The Baku plot was made public that May, prompting senior State Department officials to comment that the foiled plot “illustrate[d] the group’s continued disregard for the rule of law, both inside Lebanon and outside its borders.”
47
Hezbollah’s Operation Radwan continued apace as the group mobilized operatives to carry out attacks to avenge Mughniyeh’s assassination. In April 2009 Israeli officials issued warnings to Israeli businesspeople traveling to Europe in response to what was described as “pinpoint” intelligence of a specific threat.
48
In August 2008 Israel had issued similar warnings of a pending Hezbollah attack targeting Israelis in Africa.
49
A few weeks later senior Israeli officials confirmed that five attempts by Hezbollah operatives to kidnap Israeli citizens abroad had been thwarted.
50
In May 2009 the US Treasury Department issued a press release adding two Africa-based Hezbollah supporters to its list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists (see
chapter 9
).
51
Halfway across the world, pressure on Hezbollah continued to build as Argentine prosecutors issued an international arrest warrant for Samuel Salman al-Reda, who was charged with involvement in the 1994 bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) Jewish community center (see
chapter 4
).
52
Within days Nasrallah gave his final major address before the Lebanese elections. In the speech Nasrallah bemoaned what he described as an Israeli effort to “return to the strategy of introducing Hezbollah as a terrorist organization that attacks countries and
peoples and threatens world security.” Even worse, Nasrallah said, was “the attempt to accuse Hizballah of assassinating [the] martyr Rafiq Hariri in order to foment a sectarian sedition in Lebanon.”
53
While the Hezbollah coalition would underperform in the July 2009 election, by early 2011 it led a coalition government and held the reins of power in Beirut. In the interim Hezbollah attacks continued. According to leaked diplomatic cables cited by Israel’s
Ha’aretz
newspaper, IDF chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi informed the United Nations envoy to Lebanon of intelligence indicating that Hezbollah was behind the January 2010 bombing of an Israeli diplomatic convoy in Jordan.
54
By then, six different Hezbollah plots, each intended to exact revenge for Mughniyeh’s assassination, had reportedly been foiled.
55
While the Israeli diplomats were unhurt, Hezbollah continued to threaten revenge, with Hezbollah second-in-command Naim Qassem stating in February 2010 that the “commitment exists” but that “the (attack) period and specifications [will] come in due time.”
56