The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames

by Kai Bird

  Mustafa Zein knew Mughniyeh. They were fellow Shi’ites, both sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, and they shared an admiration for the late Ali Hassan Salameh. They crossed paths again after the March 16, 1984, kidnapping of the Beirut CIA chief of station William F. Buckley. When Buckley disappeared, the CIA’s Sam Wyman implored Zein to fly back to Beirut from New York to negotiate his release. Zein knew going back to Beirut entailed obvious risks. But he did it, partly because the Agency told him the rescue effort was dubbed “Operation Bob Ames.” Zein did his best. At one point, he had a face-to-face meeting with Mughniyeh in an effort to locate Buckley and other American hostages. Incredibly, he obtained photographs of the hostages posing with a contemporaneous copy of Newsweek magazine. He passed these photos to the CIA. Negotiations ensued. Those holding the hostages made it clear that their key demand was the release of twenty-two Shi’ite prisoners in Kuwait who had been convicted of terrorism. They were known as the Dawa 22.

  In the spring of 1985 Zein came back to Beirut. He thought he was close to a deal for the release of American hostages. By then, there were a half-dozen Americans in captivity. But on March 8, 1985, Zein narrowly missed being blown up with Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the spiritual guide of Hezbollah. The two men were about to get in Fadlallah’s SUV to drive a short distance when the ayatollah was detained at the last moment. But his car was nevertheless sent ahead, and just forty yards from Fadlallah’s home a parked car bomb with 440 pounds of explosives ignited. A seven-story building collapsed, killing eighty people. Mughniyeh’s brother—who was working as a bodyguard for Fadlallah—was killed along with many of his friends. But both Fadlallah and Zein escaped injury in what is known today as the B’ir al-Abed bombing. They just happened not to be in the SUV targeted by the assassins. According to Bob Woodward, the attempt on Fadlallah’s life was a plot jointly organized by the Saudis and Bill Casey. The CIA director had been told that Fadlallah had “blessed” the suicide driver of the truck bomb that had killed Bob Ames. Woodward reported that Casey had a meeting in Washington with the Saudi ambassador Bandar bin Sultan, and the two men agreed on a joint operation funded with $3 million. “They knew that the chief supporter and symbol of terrorism,” wrote Woodward, “was the fundamentalist Muslim leader Sheikh Fadlallah, the leader of the Party of God, Hizbollah, in Beirut. Fadlallah had been connected to all three bombings of American facilities in Beirut. He had to go. The two men were in agreement.” According to Woodward, Casey got President Reagan to sign a presidential directive authorizing the covert operation. Lebanese operatives recruited from the Phalangist security forces were trained and funded by the CIA. This special force was designated the Foreign Works and Analysis Unit (FWAU). It was designed to launch retaliatory strikes against the terrorists who had blown up the U.S. embassy and the marine barracks in 1983.

  But then it all went wrong. The FWAU unit targeted Ayatollah Fadlallah for assassination—but these Lebanese assassins didn’t care how many innocents were killed. Casey and Prince Bandar did not intend to kill eighty people. As painted by Woodward, the operation went awry. “When Bandar saw the news account,” Woodward wrote, “he got stomach cramps.” Woodward reports that the Saudis took steps to blame the attack on other parties. Woodward quotes Bandar as saying, “I take a shot at you. You suspect me and then I turn in my chauffeur and say he did it. You would think I am no longer a suspect.” (Prince Bandar later denied any Saudi involvement in the bombing.) Woodward, of course, has no footnotes, just incredible access to incredible sources. But Mustafa Zein also believes that Casey ordered the assassination attempt—and his source is Imad Mughniyeh, who he claims told him that he later found two men involved in the bomb attack that killed his brother, and they confessed that it had been a CIA operation. Again, as is the case with Woodward’s account, there is only an oral footnote for this story. Robert Baer and other CIA sources criticize Woodward’s story and blame the Lebanese security forces for the bombing.

  The B’ir al-Abed bombing sealed the fate of the American hostages. Mughniyeh and his Hezbollah friends hung a white sheet over the bomb site, proclaiming in black letters, “Made in America.” Zein’s negotiations ended. Buckley was alive as late as July 1985—but he died later that year, probably of dysentery or pneumonia. The other American hostages were not released for months or years to come.

  The twenty-year-old Mughniyeh certainly had a role in the Beirut embassy bombing—perhaps he came up with the idea—but many others carried it out. It was too technically complicated an operation for a twenty-year-old former Force 17 bodyguard to handle alone. Zein reports that in the spring of 1985—after Zein was nearly killed in the attempted assassination of Ayatollah Fadlallah—Mughniyeh told him that he hadn’t been involved in the embassy attack. He claimed that he’d been told that the truck bomb’s first target had been the U.S. marine barracks—but that at the last minute the suicide driver had been diverted to the embassy. He didn’t know why. Mughniyeh told Zein, “It was [Ali Reza] Asgari’s operation”—referring to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander who had recruited him in 1982.

  American investigators eventually determined that the truck that plowed into the embassy was bought in Texas, was shipped to Dubai, and then somehow ended up in Beirut. It was packed with an estimated two thousand pounds of explosives. A suicide driver was found to steer the truck into the embassy. But who assembled the bomb? Who financed the operation? Who bought the truck and explosives? These questions were not rigorously explored in a court of law for many years to come.

  Finally, in March 2000, Anne Dammarell, one of the pluckiest survivors of the Beirut embassy bombing, read in the newspapers that Terry Anderson, an American journalist kidnapped in Beirut, had won a civil suit against the Islamic Republic of Iran. A U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., had awarded Anderson more than $41 million in compensatory damages for his six years in captivity. Dammarell called Anderson’s lawyer, Stuart H. Newberger of Crowell & Moring LLP, and asked if he would represent her and other survivors and relatives of the victims of the embassy bombing. Stu Newberger agreed. In 2002, the civil suit was filed in the name of Anne Dammarell but also on behalf of Yvonne Ames, her children, and a dozen other plaintiffs. A trial was held, and in September 2003 U.S. district court judge John D. Bates ruled that the Islamic Republic of Iran was responsible for the April 18, 1983, bombing. The court determined that the bombing was carried out with technical assistance from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps stationed in the Bekaa Valley. Chemical analysis of the explosives used in the attack determined that the truck was loaded with about two thousand pounds of PETN (pentaerythritol tetranitrate), a military-grade explosive. Moreover, investigators determined that the PETN in question was not commercially available in Lebanon—but that this raw, “bulk form” of PETN was manufactured in Iran for military purposes. This was not an easily assembled bomb. The materials came from a military factory in Iran.

  Unfortunately, there is no declassified intercept intelligence available pertaining to the embassy attack. But there is such evidence for the truck bomb that struck the U.S. marine barracks (and the French barracks) on October 23, 1983, killing 299 American and French soldiers. The same PETN was used in the marine barracks as in the embassy attack. On September 26, 1983, the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted some form of an electronic message from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Tehran to the Iranian ambassador in Damascus, Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur. The message instructed Mohtashamipur to contact Hussein Musawi, the chief of the newly formed Shi’ite militia Islamic Amal, and ordered him “to take a spectacular action against the United States Marines.” This September 26 message was not discovered until two days after the October 23 attack—but it seems to be incontrovertible proof of Iran’s hand in the operation. Admiral James A. Lyons later described it as a “24-karat gold document.”

  Years later, a former Hezbollah member with the alias of “Mahmoud” gave videotaped testimony to a U.S. court in whic
h he claimed that Ambassador Mohtashamipur gave orders to a Revolutionary Guard officer named Ahmad Kan’ani to organize an attack on the marine barracks. At the time, Kan’ani was stationed in the Sheikh Abdullah Barracks in Baalbek. (He was the commanding officer of the several hundred Revolutionary Guards living in Baalbek, serving there until late January 1984.) Mahmoud testified that Kan’ani then held a meeting in Baalbek with Hussein Musawi, Sheikh Sobhi Tufaili, and Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah—all early leaders of the nascent Islamic Amal that was later to become known as Hezbollah. Mahmoud claimed, “They got the order. They met and adopted the operation against the Marines and French barracks at the same time.… The cars were built, equipped, in Biralabin in a warehouse near a gas station.”

  Mahmoud’s 2003 testimony thus directly implicates the current Hezbollah chief, Hassan Nasrallah, in the marine barracks bombing. The court heard testimony from yet another anonymous source, an unnamed U.S. intelligence officer, who vouched for Mahmoud’s reliability and truthfulness. It is difficult to evaluate this anonymous evidence from the shadows. In 2003, and even today, Washington has a foreign policy predilection to discredit Hezbollah. On the other hand, everything we know about the Islamic Amal and the early Hezbollah suggests that in 1982–83 this nascent Shi’a movement was operating under direct orders from the Islamic Republic of Iran.

  “The Beirut embassy operation was directed and guided by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and carried out by Hezbollah,” says Vincent Cannistraro, a veteran CIA officer who once served as a clandestine officer in the Middle East division of the Directorate of Operations. Now retired, Cannistraro worked on the Mughniyeh case in the 1980s while chairing an interagency committee dealing with the problem of American hostages in Lebanon. Cannistraro believes Mughniyeh was somehow involved in the embassy bombing. But he says Mughniyeh was not alone: “So, was Mughniyeh at that young age totally responsible for the embassy bombing? No … Iran provided the explosives.”

  The bottom line is that both the U.S. embassy bombing and the truck-bomb attack on the marine barracks were operations directed by Tehran and carried out by Iranian Revolutionary Guard officers stationed in Baalbek. Ahmad Kan’ani was not the only Revolutionary Guard officer stationed in Baalbek at the time. Feridoun Mehdi-Nezhad and Hussein Mosleh were also in Baalbek. And Brig. Gen. Mustafa Mohammed Najjar was also reportedly a commander of the Revolutionary Guard in Lebanon sometime during the 1980s. All of these men later were implicated in a long list of kidnappings, hijackings, and car-bomb attacks. All of these men were known to have associated with Imad Mughniyeh.

  In 2003, Ambassador Robert Dillon testified in federal district court, “I remember learning that there was a senior Iranian intelligence officer in the Bekaa who moved back and forth between the Bekaa and occasionally Damascus, and I would presume from Damascus to Tehran. I can’t remember his name. Years later, I was told [by the CIA] that he was, quote, the chief terrorist.” This strongly suggests that at some point in its investigation of the embassy bombing, the U.S. government had evidence implicating an Iranian intelligence officer. And yet, oddly enough, even thirty years later, this evidence has not been declassified.

  Mughniyeh’s name, in any case, was repeatedly linked to the embassy bombing and many other acts of terrorism. His name first surfaced in a highly public fashion when he was indicted for the June 14, 1985, hijacking of TWA Flight 847. (The hijacking was carried out by Hezbollah operatives, partly in retaliation for the March 8, 1985, B’ir al-Abed car bomb that almost killed Ayatollah Fadlallah.) In October 2001, Mughniyeh was placed on the FBI’s list of the twenty-two most wanted terrorist fugitives.

  The United States tried repeatedly to hunt down Mughniyeh. He was almost caught in Paris in 1988, but French authorities insisted that he’d “managed to slip away.” In late 1994, Mossad assassinated another of Imad’s brothers, Fuad Mughniyeh, a mere shopkeeper in South Beirut. The car bomb killed four people. Mossad had hoped that Mughniyeh would show up at the funeral for Fuad. But the long-sought-after terrorist may have sensed an ambush and never appeared.

  On April 7, 1995, the CIA learned that Mughniyeh was aboard a Middle East Airlines flight from Khartoum to Beirut. The flight was scheduled to transit Riyadh, so the Saudis were asked to detain the plane on the runway. Fearing a political backlash from their own conservative Wahhabi constituency if Mughniyeh was arrested on Saudi soil, someone ordered Riyadh’s air traffic controllers to wave off the plane. There seems to be good evidence that Mughniyeh had traveled to Khartoum for one purpose: to meet with Osama bin Laden. The Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman asserts, “Imad Mughniyeh came to Khartoum to meet him [Bin Laden], and told him about the enormous effect of suicide attacks against the Americans and French in the early 1980s in Lebanon.” Bergman cites the confession of Ali Abdelsoud Mohammad, an Egyptian-born American citizen who was later arrested for his involvement in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya—Al-Qaeda’s first terrorist attack. Mohammad claimed to have handled the security details for the Bin Laden–Mughniyeh meeting. Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, also confirms that Mughniyeh met with Bin Laden in Khartoum. Wright credits Mughniyeh with persuading Bin Laden that “suicide bombers could be devastatingly effective.” Later, Bin Laden sent his agent, Ali Mohammad, to Beirut, where he received training in explosives from Hezbollah.

  In 2003 Hezbollah’s charismatic leader, Hassan Nasrallah, dismissed American allegations that Mughniyeh was involved in terror attacks. He told Time magazine’s Nicholas Blanford that the U.S. charges were “just allegations.… Can they provide evidence to condemn Mughniyah?” Nasrallah described Mughniyeh as a “freedom fighter” and said, “He had a very important role during the occupation of South Lebanon by Israel.” Indeed, Mughniyeh had played a key role as a Hezbollah commander in the military operations that forced the Israelis to withdraw from South Lebanon in 2001. He reportedly pioneered Hezbollah’s deployment of armor-piercing roadside explosive devices that killed hundreds of Israelis in South Lebanon. He also fought in the Israeli-Lebanese war in the summer of 2006; the war was a disaster for Lebanon, but Hezbollah could nevertheless claim a victory by merely surviving the Israeli onslaught.

  On February 12, 2008, Mughniyeh, by then forty-five years of age, was in Damascus to attend a reception celebrating the twenty-ninth anniversary of the Iranian revolution. The party was hosted by Iran’s ambassador to Syria in the wealthy Kfar Soussa neighborhood of Damascus. Mughniyeh left the party around 10:15 P.M. and walked to his parked car, a Mitsubishi Pajero. When he sat in the driver’s seat the car’s headrest exploded. A witness said Mughniyeh was blown across the road and his arms and legs were severed from his body. He died instantly. One of the CIA officers who worked on the Mughniyeh case in the 1980s, Vincent Cannistraro, bluntly said, “Mughniyeh was assassinated by the Israelis, with intelligence on his whereabouts furnished by the CIA.” But another former intelligence official insists that it was an operation primarily controlled by Langley. This source, who must remain unnamed, says that Mughniyeh was killed by an explosive charge hidden in the spare tire of his SUV. He says that the Israelis provided the intelligence on Mughniyeh’s location—but that it was actually a CIA “black ops” team that carried out the assassination in Damascus.

  “The world is a better place without this man in it. He was a cold-blooded killer, a mass murderer and a terrorist responsible for countless innocent lives lost,” said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack. “One way or another he was brought to justice.” Danny Yatom, a former director of Mossad, told reporters, “He was one of the most dangerous terrorists ever.” A female Mossad officer who had a role in the operation to kill Mughniyeh later told an Israeli journalist that she respected Mughniyeh’s spy craft and professionalism: “His was a rare case where one individual had changed history.”

  Hezbollah accused Mossad of killing Mughniyeh and released a statement on its website calling him
a “great leader and a martyr.” At a memorial service in Beirut, a mourner named Zahra told the Washington Post’s Anthony Shadid, “What they don’t know is that today, by killing one Imad Mughniyeh, they will give birth to another hundred Mughniyehs. Every time they kill one of us, hundreds more will be born. They consider him a terrorist. For us, he is a hero who was fighting our enemy.” Indeed, later that spring, the New York Times reported that the Iranian government was issuing a postage stamp in Mughniyeh’s honor. And in the autumn of 2008, Hezbollah inaugurated a museum in the southern Lebanese town of Nabatieh celebrating Mughniyeh’s life and death. “At first glance,” reported the New York Times’s Robert F. Worth, “the exhibit could almost be taken for an outdoor children’s museum. The green entrance awning is a huge replica of Mr. Mugniyeh’s signature cap, and visitors then cross a ‘victory bridge’ made partly from artillery shells.” A glass-encased box displays the bloodstained clothes Mughniyeh was wearing when he was assassinated. Visitors can see his belt, shoes, and cell phone. “His prayer mat is here, his slippers, even his hairbrush,” reports Worth, “as if they were a saint’s relics.”

  So for some people Mughniyeh was a hero of the Shi’a resistance, a soldier who died in battle. This narrative exists. It is not to be dismissed. Yet this narrative obviously collides with the bare facts of who died on April 18, 1983: not only Bob Ames, not only seven of his CIA colleagues, but also forty-six Lebanese civilians. They were innocents. But so too was Bob Ames.

  Mughniyeh is dead. But the Iranian Revolutionary Guard officers implicated in the embassy attack all remain alive and free. Ahmed Kan’ani—who was the commander of the Revolutionary Guard unit in Baalbek at the time of the embassy attack—later became an Iranian ambassador to Madagascar. The former Iranian ambassador in Syria, Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur, later served as interior minister, and today he is the leader of one of Iran’s political parties.