Who Killed Imad Mughniyeh?

Imad Mughniyeh was a man of the Middle East's shadows. He was a terrorist mastermind behind political causes. For him, though, it was as much about the fight as the cause. He shunned the light. He never gave public speeches or lectures. He is not known to have given any press interviews, not even to sympathetic or politically aligned journalists. Western reporters like me who sought the Lebanese Shi'ite group Hizballah's help to arrange a rendezvous were politely but sternly advised not to go there.

As Robert Baer, who hunted Mugniyeh for years as a CIA officer, describes Mughniyeh, ““He is the most dangerous terrorist we've ever faced. He is probably the most intelligent, most capable operative we've ever run across, including the KGB or anybody else. He enters by one door, exits by another, changes his cars daily, never makes appointments on a telephone, never is predictable. He only uses people that are related to him that he can trust. He doesn't just recruit people. He is the master terrorist, the grail that we have been after since 1983."

So, did the CIA or some other American intelligence agency finally do Mughniyeh in? Working closely with Iran and at least loosely attached to Hizballah, he was accused of everything from bombing the U.S. embassy and U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut to the kidnappings of American journalists, academics and the Beirut CIA Station Chief. More recently, some have claimed that Mughniyeh collaborated with Bin Laden. After Al Qaeda's top guns, Mughniyeh has the highest price on his head of any terrorist wanted by the FBI--$5 million. Besides Baer's efforts, many other operations have been tried. In 1996, the U.S. government caught wind that Mughniyeh might be on a Pakistani ship off the coast of Qatar. A major operation to grab him was mounted by the U.S. Navy and Marines--which would have been sweet revenge, given Mughniyeh's suspected involvement in the deaths of U.S. navy and marine personnel in Beirut. But the mission was aborted when it could not be verified that Mughniyeh was aboard. A year earlier, the U.S. sought to have Mughniyeh arrested as he arrived on a flight to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis reportedly refused to let the plane land, lest they become embroiled in the U.S.'s fight with Mughniyeh and his friends.

Hizballah immediately blamed Israel for Mughniyeh's assassination in Damascus, Syria, Tuesday night. Israel's Mossad spy agency is a reasonable suspect, given Israel's determination to bring him to justice for his alleged involvement in the 1990s bombings in Argentina of the Israeli embassy and a Jewish cultural center. Israeli intelligence has a good history of eliminating terrorist masterminds, even when they are present in unfriendly Arab capitals.

In the John Le Carre world of Middle East terrorism and politics, however, it's impossible to rule out the wildest of conspiracy theories, including that Mughniyeh's friends in Syria or Iran may have found his continued existence to be an inconvenience. Or, they may have believed it was politically useful to demonstrate that they can be relied on to control terrorism in the Middle East--as long as the U.S. doesn't try to go after the regimes in Damascus or Tehran.

Some consider Mughniyeh to have been the Bin Laden before there was a Bin Laden. He cut his teeth working for Yasser Arafat's PLO in Lebanon, but came into his own during the Iranian Revolution, signing up to bring Khomeini's brand of Shi'ite Muslim rage against America and Israel to Lebanon. Mughniyeh the Operative had more in common with two former Palestinian terrorist leaders, Wadiah Haddad and Sabri al-Banna, alias Abu Nidal. Before Bin Laden came along, those two men had orchestrated some of the worst terrorist atrocities of our times. They worked in the shadows and regularly cooperated with the intelligence services of the Middle East's outlaw regimes, like Mughniyeh would do. As it happens, Haddad fell ill from suspected poisoning while living in Baghdad; some of his friends suspected Saddam Hussein's regime, doing a favor for the Americans. Abu Nidal died in Baghdad, after "committing suicide," according to Saddam's spokesman. That was just as the U.S. was cranking up threats to invade Iraq.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo