Hezbollah (84 page)

Given Hezbollah’s role in the new three-tiered arrangement, Nasrallah was clearly uncomfortable with the notion that people might mistake Hezbollah attacks against Israeli tourists as the best the group could muster to avenge Mughniyeh’s death. A few days after media reports exposed the Cyprus plot, Nasrallah gave an interview to a Kuwaiti newspaper underscoring Hezbollah’s continued commitment to carry out an operation of equal standing to avenge the death of the IJO commander. The point was not retaliation for retaliation’s sake, he stressed: “Had we wanted to, we could have retaliated by killing Israeli tourists in this or that country.”
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But that was not Hezbollah’s calculus. Attacks on Israeli tourists were something different—the IJO’s part in Iran’s shadow war—a threat stream of its own, distinct from Operation Radwan.

In May 2011, Iranian agents shot and killed a Saudi diplomat in Karachi, Pakistan, foreshadowing a plot already under way targeting the Saudi ambassador to Washington, DC.
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Ten days afterward, Qods Force and Hezbollah operatives carried out a far more complex operation targeting an Israeli diplomat in Turkey. Around 9:00
AM
on May 26, 2011, a bomb exploded at a bus stop near one of Istanbul’s upscale shopping centers, wounding eight people.
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Placed underneath a bridge and secured to an electric bike, the bomb was structured to inflict maximum damage.
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Turkish authorities originally assumed the attack was the work of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), intended to impact upcoming Turkish parliamentary elections.
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Within weeks, however, investigators determined the attack was a botched Hezbollah–Qods Force assassination attempt targeting the Turkish-born Israeli consul-general to Istanbul, Moshe Kimhi. According to
Corriere della Sera
, the Italian paper that broke the story, Qods Force operatives cased the area, recording Kimhi’s routine, before Hezbollah operatives were called in to place the explosive along a route the diplomat was known to take. Intended as retribution for the assassination of Mohammadi, the Iranian physicist, the bombing injured random Turkish civilians instead.
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Within weeks the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon in The Hague would indict the four Hezbollah operatives, including Mustapha Badreddine, for the February 2005 murder of the former Lebanese prime minister. Closer to home, Hezbollah operatives carried out two attacks that wounded French peacekeepers—six civilians and three soldiers—assigned to the UN Interim Force in Lebanon’s (UNIFIL) mission in southern Lebanon, according to the State Department.
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But the plot targeting the Saudi ambassador to Washington, then under way, was the most brazen of all.

On October 11, 2011, US attorney general Eric Holder announced that charges were filed in New York against a dual US-Iranian citizen and a Qods Force commander for their alleged roles in a plot to murder the Saudi ambassador, Adel al-Jubeir. The plot developed quickly over just a few months, starting in spring 2011 and culminating with the arrest of Manssor Arbabsiar, the Iranian-American man, in September. According to the Justice Department, Arbabsiar told a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) confidential source posing as an associate of a Mexican
drug cartel that “his associates in Iran had discussed a number of violent missions for [the source] and his associates to perform, including the murder of the Ambassador.”
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An opportunistic plot that fell into the lap of Qods Force planners just as they decided to unleash Unit 400 to attack the West, the scheme arose from an encounter between the dejected Iranian-American and a cousin working for the Qods Force, while the former visited family in Iran. Arbabsiar sent about $100,000 in wire transfers as a down payment for the assassination, which was deposited in an FBI undercover account he thought belonged to the assassin. At a meeting in Mexico in July, the DEA source raised the possibility that innocent bystanders might be killed in a lunchtime attack at a downtown restaurant. But Arbabsiar was clear on the instructions from his Qods Force handlers: “They want that guy [the ambassador] done [killed], if the hundred go with him f**k ’em.” Later, after Arbabsiar was arrested and reportedly confessed to his role in the plot, he called Gholam Shakuri, the Qods Force commander (and his cousin), at the direction of law enforcement. With agents listening, Shakuri again confirmed that the plot should go forward and as soon as possible. “Just do it quickly. It’s late,” he said.
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In October 2012, Arbabsiar pleaded guilty to charges related to murder-for-hire and conspiring to commit an act of international terrorism.
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Interestingly, the plot seems to have been launched shortly after a Saudi-led military intervention in Bahrain against Shiite protesters, which Iran objected to loudly but could not affect. According to a Saudi official, Shakuri was “an important Quds Force case officer who had helped organize militant Shiite protesters in Bahrain.” Also according to this account, “Shakuri was among the Iranians who met Hasan Mushaima, a radical Bahraini Shiite cleric, during a stopover in Beirut last February, when Mushaima was on his way back home to lead protests in Bahrain.”
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Likely interpreted by Iran as the latest Western-backed salvo in a coordinated plot to hem in Iran, the Saudi intervention in Bahrain may have contributed to the calculus by which Iranian decision makers approved such an odd attack, involving the bombing of a popular Washington, DC, restaurant known to be frequented by US senators.

Signaling that US authorities had traced the plot to senior Iranian decision makers, the Treasury Department designated IRGC Qods Force commander Qassem Soleimani as a global terrorist for his role overseeing the officers involved in the plot.
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British officials agreed, designating Soleimani and others involved in the plot themselves as well.
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This plot against the Saudi diplomat, director-general of the UK Security Service (MI5) Jonathan Evans explained in June 2012, was likely tied to senior Iranian leadership. The plot was the work of the IRGC, he noted, adding, “And of course the IRGC leads straight back to the Iranian leadership.”
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In the assessment by Director of National Intelligence Gen. James Clapper, the Arbabsiar plot “shows that some Iranian officials—probably including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—have changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime.”
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Iran correctly perceived it was the target of a string of actions against its nuclear program and, by extension, the regime. In September 2010, Iranian computer networks linked to uranium enrichment at Natanz were infected with the Stuxnet virus, destroying some 1,000 centrifuges, reportedly part of an American-Israeli effort code-named Olympic Games.
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The next month an explosion at an IRGC missile base leveled most buildings and killed seventeen people, including Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, a founder of Iran’s ballistic missile program.
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The Arbabsiar plot underscored Qods Force leaders’ willingness to work with criminal elements to further operational planning, perhaps as a means of countering enhanced law enforcement and intelligence efforts. It was a trend officials would note several more times, perhaps most tellingly in Baku. In October 2011, signals intelligence intercepted emails suggesting Azeri criminal elements with known ties to Iranian intelligence and militant groups were planning to transfer weapons and explosives into Azerbaijan from Iran. Over the next few weeks, weapons and operatives—including at least ten Iranian recruits—were smuggled into Azerbaijan, where they met up with other Azeri criminal recruits. The Azeris were strictly in it for the money, which they were paid up-front, and used their knowledge of the area to conduct surveillance of a Jewish school, an American-owned fast food restaurant, the office of an oil company, the US embassy, and specific American diplomats. “They were going after individuals,” a State Department official familiar with the investigation confirmed. “They had names [of employees]. And they were interested in family members, too.”
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Over several months, the operatives planned what one investigator described as a “jumble of overlapping plots,” including assassinating US diplomats and a local rabbi or striking other Jewish targets. One subplot involved snipers using rifles with silencers; in another, a car bomb would target US embassy employees or their families. One plot was planned for December 2011, another for February 2012. Together, these were intended to avenge the assassinations of Iranian scientists, the captured leader of the network would later tell investigators. Some two dozen accomplices were arrested in a series of raids in early 2012, most of whom were local criminal recruits. But US officials concluded the plots were overseen by the Qods Force, with possible support from Hezbollah, as part of a coordinated, thirteen-month campaign targeting foreign diplomats in at least seven countries.
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According to a US law enforcement official, Hezbollah paid criminal gang members $150,000 each to target the Jewish school in Baku.
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Meanwhile, Hezbollah operatives were busy planning operations to fulfill their end of the three-tiered plan: targeting Israeli tourists abroad. Around the same time that authorities foiled the January 2012 plot targeting Israeli vacationers in Bulgaria, another Hezbollah plot was disrupted in Greece.
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But it was halfway across the world, in Bangkok, where Israeli and local authorities broke up a far more ambitious Hezbollah bid to target Israeli tourists.

On January 12, 2012, acting on a tip from Israeli intelligence, Thai police arrested Hussein Atris—a Lebanese national who also carried a Swedish passport—at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport as he attempted to flee the country. Originally from
southern Lebanon, Atris moved to Sweden, where he married a Swede and ran a hair salon in Gothenburg before returning to Lebanon some ten years before his arrest in Thailand. His family was well known within Hezbollah circles: According to press reports, a relative—Muhammad Atris—was involved in the 1992 Mykonos assassinations (see
chapter 3
). Another suspect, whose police composite portrait strongly resembled Naim Haris, a Hezbollah recruiting agent whose photo Israeli officials publicized a year earlier, escaped. Within days police would issue an arrest warrant for Atris’s roommate, a Lebanese man who went by the name James Sammy Paolo.
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Israel first informed the Thai authorities on December 22 that three Hezbollah operatives were preparing to attack popular Bangkok tourist sites where they expected to find Israelis, and passed on more details of the plot as they became available. Long a popular destination for Israeli vacationers, and a country with a history of Hezbollah activity, Thailand likely featured on Israeli officials’ list of possible venues for Hezbollah attacks on Israeli tourists. The investigation led authorities to Mr. Atris, identified by Thai officials as a Hezbollah member.
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Questioned over the weekend of January 13, 2012, Atris led police to a three-story building on the outskirts of Bangkok where he and his housemate had stockpiled some 8,800 pounds of chemicals used to make explosives. The materials were already distilled into crystal form, a key step in building bombs.
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Information on international shipping found at the scene indicated at least some of the explosives—which were stored in bags marked as cat litter—were intended to be shipped abroad. Intelligence officials surmised that Hezbollah had been using Thailand as an explosives hub—Atris rented the space a year earlier—and decided to use its on-hand operatives and material to target Israeli tourists. The conclusion should not have surprised: US officials already determined that Hezbollah was known to use Bangkok as a logistics and transportation hub, describing the city as “a center for a [Hezbollah] cocaine and money-laundering network.”
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Seeking to contain the damage to their tourist industry, Thai officials maintained that the shipping information indicated Thailand was merely a transit site, not a target itself. But Israeli officials insisted Thailand was the target of a “high—concrete threat.” The US embassy in Bangkok posted an alert of its own informing citizens of terrorist threats targeting Bangkok tourist areas. According to an embassy spokesman, the warning was based on “specific, credible, not-counterable threats.”
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The American ambassador to Baku may have breathed a sigh of relief when the Qods Force plot targeting him and his staff was disrupted in February 2012, but that was only a small portion of what the Qods Force had planned. Five attacks targeting Western diplomats were scheduled to be carried out as close to the February 12 anniversary of Mughniyeh’s assassination as possible. The plot in Baku was foiled; another in Turkey was delayed; others would play out in India, Georgia, and Thailand.

On February 13, twin bombings targeted personnel from the Israeli embassies in New Delhi, India, and Tbilisi, Georgia. In both cases Qods Force operatives
encountered more sophisticated security arrangements than anticipated and so they settled for modest strikes. In India, an assailant on a motorcycle attached a magnetized “sticky bomb” to a car taking the Israeli defense attaché’s wife to pick up her children at school. She was injured, along with her driver and two others. About three hours later in Georgia, a similar sticky bomb attack targeted a local citizen employed by the embassy but was discovered and defused before doing any harm.
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Just a month earlier, the deputy director of Iran’s uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, was killed in a nearly identical attack, also using a sticky bomb. Roshan was the fifth Iranian scientist to be assassinated, and the use of sticky bombs to target Israeli diplomats was a not-so-subtle message of retaliation from Iran.
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