Part 5 of this series should really be named Part 4a as it takes a deeper dive into the aftermath of the Hezbollah/Islamic Jihad’s bombing of the US Embassy and the US Marines barracks in Beirut in 1984, events and participants previously covered. Why dwell on this? Because these incidents are central to America’s long-standing animosity towards Iran, which began in ‘79 when the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power and the Shah was overthrown. And it continues to be a salutary lesson, one that really should have informed America’s involvement in the Middle East throughout the years that followed.
— David
The bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut in April 1983 that destroyed the building, killed sixty-three people, and wiped out the CIA Middle Eastern station housed there, makes it clear what the local Muslim forces think of the US Peacekeepers’ so-called “presence mission.”
The FBI sends in a team to investigate the disaster, and the US Navy dispatches divers to search for evidence — bomb parts — blown by the explosion into the bay behind the Embassy. A unit from the Pentagon also arrives to assess the implications for continued American involvement in Lebanon.
The CIA tasks Special Agent Keith Hall to find the perpetrators, a man with a reputation as a head kicker and whose nickname is “Captain Crunch.”
Hall’s first stop is to brief the Lebanese Internal Security Forces (ISF). Working in concert with Lebanese police, the ISF and Hall round up suspects, who are then taken to an undisclosed location and “questioned.”
Five men are detained for interviews which involve, among other inducements, bashings and electric shocks.
One of these detainees is a low-level employee at the Embassy. He confesses to being the lookout man on the morning of the bombing. His job was to stand near the Embassy entrance and signal to the bomber when the Ambassador was in his office.
A second detainee admits to unloading the explosives and packing them onto the pickup, which has extra cases welded onto it so it can hold additional explosives.
Several of the suspects reveal under torture the involvement of a Syrian intelligence officer who attended the site in Baalbek, a town in the Bekaa Valley east of Beirut, where the pickup was prepared for the attack.
A couple of the suspects also recall a religious ceremony on the night before the attack, celebrating the bomber’s entry to the ranks of the “shahid,” martyrs who are especially favored by Allah in Paradise.
The most significant of these suspects is a man named Elias Nimir, who has a reputation in Beirut as a guy you don’t tangle with. That says something about Nimir, given the violence endemic in Beirut, which is possibly the most dangerous city in the world at that time.
Nimir is a Phalange* Christian, so, supposedly on the side of the United States. However, allegiances in Beruit are constantly shifting, and further digging reveals that while he was trained by the Israelis, at the time of the bombing he was working for the Syrians and the Iranians.
Under torture, Nimir confesses to being the paymaster for the bombing – the go-between for Iran, who he insists bankrolled the operation. It is also established under duress that it was Nimir who undertook the recruiting for the bombing operation and escorted the Syrian intelligence officer through Phalange militia lines in East Beirut. Nimir has a lot to tell his interrogators and could possibly have told a lot more to say. Unfortunately, after these revelations, he’s found dead in his cell
Under torture, Nimir confesses to being the paymaster for the bombing – the go-between for Iran, who he insists bankrolled the operation. It is also established under duress that it was Nimir who undertook the recruiting for the bombing operation and escorted the Syrian intelligence officer through Phalange militia lines in East Beirut. Nimir has a lot to tell his interrogators and could possibly have told a lot more to say. Unfortunately, after these revelations, he’s found dead in his cell.
Keith Hall later says he was not in Lebanon when Nimir was found dead, but the CIA fires him anyway for physically abusing the suspects.
The lessons the CIA learns in Beirut about torture are forgotten in the aftermath of the coming 9/11 attacks.
The information obtained under torture is later corroborated by polygraph testing of the surviving four suspects. None of these men ever goes to trial, and the Syrians, once they gain control of Lebanon, eventually release them all back onto the streets.
The team from the Pentagon investigating the Embassy bombing liaises with all the agencies involved and releases a combined report with a number of findings. It says plenty about what is shaping against the US in Beirut, but only with 20/20 hindsight. What happens to the US Embassy in Beirut, and then again in October with the bombing of the Marines HQ at the airport, establishes a pattern that will be seen again and again in numerous asymmetrical attacks on American citizens and facilities over the coming 40 years – US embassies bombed in Africa, the 9/11 attacks, & throughout the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Ayatollah sees the war-torn city of Beirut as the perfect ground for sowing the seeds of an Islamic revolution. The 1500 Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) the Ayatollah personally dispatches to Lebanon are sent there to achieve it. The plan is to target the enemies of Islam, specifically the West and the proxies of the West, Israel chief among them. In order to fulfill its mission, the IRGC establishes Hezbollah (which means party of god) in partnership with local Lebanese fighters.
Following the bombing of the US Embassy, the US National Security Agency — the NSA — embarks on a program of electronically monitoring the communications of a wide range of militia groups and other relevant individuals in the troubled region.
On or about September 26th, around a month prior to the attack on the Marines barracks, communications from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security and Iran’s ambassador to Syria, Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, are intercepted. The message in Farsi to Mohtashamipour reads, “Take spectacular action against the American Marines.” The message further directs the Ambassador to contact Hussein Musawi, the leader of Islamic Amal, one of the terrorist Muslim militias operating in Beirut, to carry out the attacks. Musawi’s chief lieutenant in charge of death and destruction is Imad Mughniyeh alias Al-Hajj Radwan, alias Castro (see Parts 3 & 4 of this series).
This message, decoded and translated, doesn’t arrive on the desk of Admiral James Lyons, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, until two days after the bombing. But in terms of identifying Iran’s complicity in the bombing of the Marines BLT building, Admiral Lyons will later describe this as a “24-karat gold document”
This message, decoded and translated, doesn’t arrive on the desk of Admiral James Lyons, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, until two days after the bombing. But in terms of identifying Iran’s complicity in the bombing of the Marines BLT building, Admiral Lyons will later describe this as a “24-karat gold document.”
Additional NSA intercepts allow US Investigators to trace the movement of $1 million from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security to the Iranian Embassy in Damascus, the office of Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour.
Three days after the US Marines bombing, a known Lebanese “fixer” involved in the staging of the bombing is observed receiving an amount of $50,000 from the Iranian Embassy in Damascus.
A full ten years later, in 2003, CIA contacts in Beirut will unearth a participant in the 1983 attack on the Marines. He goes by the pseudonym of Mahmoud. Mahmoud’s statements will be used as testimony in a long-running legal battle by the families and survivors of the Beirut Marines bombing in a damages lawsuit aimed at holding Iran to account.
In video testimony recorded for this long-running trial, Mahmoud states, ”The [Iranian] Ambassador, Mohtashamipour, he does not call Musawi. He contacts Dehghan**, the IRGC leader of Hezbollah in Baalbek, and tells him to make the attacks. There is a meeting. Dehghan comes. Sheik Sobhi Tufali comes, Sheik Abbas Musawi comes, and so does Sheik Hassan Nasrallah. They agree to make attacks at the same time on American Marines and also the French.”
The details of the attacks are masterminded by chief Amercian antagonist Imad Mughniyeh, who is also heading Hezbollah’s by-now infamous special operations offshoot, Islamic Jihad.
“…Bin Laden cowered and hid. Mughniyeh spent his life giving us the finger.”
Mughniyeh will soon be regarded as the world's most wanted terrorist with an impressive curriculum vitae that includes:
The 1984 murder of Malcolm S. Kerr, President of the Beirut American University where Mughniyeh is studying engineering
The planning of the 1984 attack on the annex of the US Embassy, Beirut (24 killed)
The planning of the Lebanese Hostage Crisis, ’82-’92, including the kidnap, torture and killing of William Francis Buckley, CIA station chief, and US Marine Colonel William R. Higgins
The 1985 hijacking of TWA Ft 874, torturing and killing US Navy “Seabee” Robert Stetham
The 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy, Buenos Aires (29 killed)
The 1994 bombing of the AIMA building, Buenos Aires (85 killed)
In fact, Mughniyeh will be every bit as feared by Western intelligence services and idolized by Islamists as Osama bin Laden who will replace him at the top of that most-wanted list. Of Imad Mughniyeh, one CIA case officer said, “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.”
Away from the IRGC HQ located in Baalbek, in a basement garage two large Dodge trucks are prepared to look like the yellow Mercedes truck that delivers water to the Marines’ Beirut barracks on an almost daily basis.
The beds of each truck are given a thick layer of concrete to direct the force of the explosion upwards into the buildings. The explosives arrive, and the bombs are assembled around canisters of butane gas, supervised by an Iranian bomb-making expert accompanied by Mughniyeh. The truck bombs take two days of careful preparation.
On the night before the simultaneous attacks on the American and French UN Peacekeepers, a religious ceremony is held to celebrate the coming martyrdom of the two suicide bombers. They are envied for their certain welcome to paradise and the special status as shahids they will enjoy in the company of Allah for all eternity.
One of the bombers will subsequently be identified as an Iranian national by the name of Ismail Ascari. He is possibly IRGC, but little is known about him. The identity of the bomber who will blow up the French paratroopers barracks is unknown.
Mahmoud: "The trucks are Dodge trucks… On the morning of the bombing, a lookout tells us when this water truck is coming so that we can stop it on the road. The water truck is ambushed. The [truck] bomb then takes its place and drives towards the Marines’ barracks.”
Four kilometers away, on a hill with a clear view of the airport, an Islamic man waits patiently, intently, with a camera on a tripod, his AK-47 laid on the ground beside it. An orange flash and a pall of black dust suddenly materializes over the airport, followed by a rising, ballooning grey mushroom dust cloud. The photographer readies his thumb on the shutter trigger. Several seconds pass before a heavy flat thud rolls over him along with the distant sound of shattering glass. A few seconds later, as the mushroom cloud begins to expand and lose its shape, the photographer’s thumb depresses the trigger.
As for the planners of the attacks on the Peacekeepers, Sheik Sobhi Tufaili, the first Secretary-General of Hezbollah, is eventually expelled from the organization and is today a vocal critic of Iran’s involvement in the region.
Sheik Abbas Musawi, for years the head of Hezbollah’s Special Security Apparatus, is assassinated in 1992 when Israeli Apache helicopters fire missiles at his Mercedes traveling in a motorcade. His wife, five-year-old son, and four others are also killed.
Imad Mughniyeh is assassinated in Damascus in 2008 by a bomb placed in his car that contains hundreds of cube-shaped metal shards designed to rip his body to shreds.
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the current Secretary-General of Hezbollah who replaced Musawi and was a friend and accomplice of Mughniyeh, rarely travels for fear of assassination.
*Phalange party was and is the largest Maronite Christian political party in Lebanon. The Maronite Christians are just another sect of Christianity like Presbyterians, Protestants, Lutherans, Catholics, Greek Orthodox, and so forth.
**This name — Dehghan — is garbled in Mahmoud’s recorded testimony. I would like to think that he’s saying “Mughniyeh” because Mughniyeh being present in that meeting would fit other accounts and the events that subsequently unfolded, but the identity of this Dehghan person has not been formally established.
In Part 6, titled NUCLEAR, coming next week, I take a closer look at Iran’s moves to acquire nuclear bomb technology and cement the Islamic Revolution’s continuing influence.
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And if you have some thoughts on this series, or indeed, on what’s currently happening in the Middle East, please leave a comment. Your ideas and opinions matter!
— David
PS: I’m withholding the mind maps from now on because they aren’t reproducing.
Fascinating, scary.