First, I try asking Bilal Saab, another D.C. think-tanker and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. Saab’s analysis on Lebanon is respected in Washington, and I’ve quoted him for a story before, so he’s a good place for me to start. His opinion is mostly in line with what I’ve always been taught, although he does acknowledge that Hezbollah’s current identity is very different from what he believes was its previous incarnation as a terrorist group.
“I think there was strategic benefit during the early phases of Hezbollah to keep it as confusing as possible and not to have it all under one organizational structure,” says Saab. “That’s pre-1985; 1985 was when they publicly came out with that statement saying, ‘This is who we are, deal with it.’ There was value in keeping it very decentralized because you can maintain plausible deniability and everybody will be confused about what’s going on.”
Plausible deniability. I keep hearing that glib phrase, and I guess that would explain why people like Mughniyeh ended up rising so high in Hezbollah’s ranks. But if everyone still thinks Hezbollah was responsible for the IJO’s actions, well, their denials don’t seem very plausible, do they?
Moreover, if the IJO was originally getting its orders from Hashemi, who was running the IJO’s operations following his execution in 1987? Could leadership have passed to his point man, Ali-Reza Asgari? At some point, though, Hezbollah leaders would have had to step in and take the helm, because it eventually became clear that the IJO was damaging their interests as well as those of their patrons in Iran—at a time when Hezbollah wanted to establish itself as a legitimate political entity in Lebanon.
So let’s say Hezbollah leaders realized the IJO was not helping their cause. Is it possible that Hezbollah eventually took control of the IJO, dismantled the terrorist group, and absorbed some of its more valuable members? Like Mughniyeh, for instance, who was certainly a strategic mastermind despite the probability that he was also a psychopath. If that’s the case, then Hezbollah’s role in my father’s kidnapping was far more nuanced than anyone understands. Assuming the Hezbollah takeover of the IJO occurred sometime in the late eighties, when it became a truly cohesive, structured organization, then Hezbollah certainly held on to Dad for a while after that would have taken place. Perhaps the group and its Iranian sponsors were trying to leverage their newly acquired hostages into some type of political gain for themselves—making Hezbollah’s claims of innocence ring false.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, I have to find out if anyone in D.C. actually believes that there was a difference between Hezbollah and the IJO. Barbara Bodine is one of the first to entertain that hypothesis, and as the former U.S. State Department’s acting coordinator for counterterrorism, she’s a pretty reliable source.
“You’re quite right to make the distinction between the mainline Hezbollah as a resistance operation taking place in response to an actual occupation, versus the guys who [kidnapped] your father and his fellow hostages,” Bodine tells me.
I’m a little surprised at her candor. Everyone involved with this work in Washington is extremely careful about how far they’ll go down roads like this one. It’s not an easy thing, stepping outside of the indelible black circle that’s been drawn around a historical event by your own government. Perhaps that’s why we have so much difficulty learning from history: half the time, we’re not even allowed to fully explore its possibilities. There’s a subtle, unspoken tendency in D.C. to marginalize every scholar, historian, journalist, or politician who dares to question what we’ve been told about our role in world events. All too many “experts” sit waiting in the wings to ridicule and snipe at those who don’t toe the line.
This subtext lingers in the background of every conversation I have in D.C. about the unexplored theories I’ve come across during my reporting, and my talk with Randa Slim of the Middle East Institute is no exception. But she does seem to seriously consider my questions, and concedes that the conventional understanding of Hezbollah’s role in the terror attacks is probably oversimplified given the complexity of the environment at the time.
“The whole thing was so murky,” Slim murmurs. “One day this faction was in; another day this faction was out. It was very hard to say, ‘This is Hezbollah, this is not Hezbollah.’ It was a situation that was so dynamic, so in flux. People in, people out. Groups in, groups out. You have to take that into consideration. There was not the kind of central command over Hezbollah that Nasrallah has now.”
“It was more fractured,” I offer.
“Yeah, it was,” Slim responds. “Also, in Iran, you had this play that was going on between different centers of power. It was the Youthful Revolution at the time. Khomeini did not consolidate that revolution for some time. It took the regime a while to really take control of it and for it to become what it is today. During that time, you had many Iranian groups also trying to play out the domestic politics of Iran through Lebanon, getting the revolutionary fervor going.”
Which is exactly my way of thinking. Lebanon has always been used as a stage for other countries to act out their bitter little proxy wars against each other. Is it so unimaginable that opposing factions in Iran after the revolution would use proxy actors as tools during their period of political infighting? In a postrevolutionary environment, it’s generally a free-for-all to see which group can consolidate the most power and influence the fastest. People bet on different horses. Hezbollah may have been one horse, the IJO another. It’s an interesting scenario, and others seem to find it plausible as well.
When asked during a Skype conversation, my dad’s fellow hostage Terry Waite agrees that it makes sense to separate the Islamic Jihad from Hezbollah when discussing the IJO’s acts of terrorism—at least to some extent.
“I think it’s very plausible that each unit, like Hezbollah on the one hand, and this splinter group [the IJO] on the other, had their own modus operandi, and therefore they didn’t necessarily overinterfere with each other,” Waite tells me via Skype. “It could well be that what Hezbollah says is true, and they didn’t have direct responsibility for the abductions, but didn’t do a whole lot to prevent them.”
Ex–diplomatic spook and private intelligence analyst Fred Burton has some insights into the American intelligence community at the time that seem to line up with what I’ve been considering. During our phone call, I ask him whether it’s possible to distinguish between Hezbollah and the IJO.
“Why do you think all the hostages were finally released?” I ask Burton. “What Hezbollah guys have told me is that the IJO turned out not to be helpful to their cause at all. It tarnished their image, especially when they wanted to become more legitimate. It also tarnished the image of their Iranian sponsors at a time when there was at least an effort on the part of Iran and Syria to achieve some sort of dialogue with the West. Now this is all speculation, of course, but could it be that Hezbollah decided to change their image and approach, which is when they dismantled the IJO and absorbed people like Mughniyeh? This would have been around the same time they started releasing most of the hostages. Do you think that’s a fair assessment?”
“I think so,” says Burton. “I can tell you that at that time period, we really didn’t know. To be candid, you probably have much more clarity into that than we ever did in the fog of the terror wars at that period of time, when we didn’t know who the IJO was. We were trying to identify personalities and arguing back and forth: Is this Hezbollah? Is this Iran? Is this Iranian controlled? Who are these guys? I think your point is very well taken, and that’s as good an explanation as any.
“We in the intelligence services [often] pigeonhole certain groups and people,” Burton continues. “It’s simple to have a menu item of these groups and place people in there without thinking much into the motivation. You look at the individual and say, Hassan Izz-al-Din [one of the IJO members] is associating with Hezbollah, therefore these things must all have been carried out by Hezbollah . . . I think that goes back to the lack of [insight] into t
he failure of human intelligence.”
It’s far from an ironclad confirmation, but Burton’s observations do lend some credibility to the theory that Hezbollah and the IJO may have been operating separately. Then another source—a journalist whom I approach—tells me a story that sounds pretty firmly situated within Crazytown. He’s asked me to refrain from revealing his name; let’s just say his reporting on these subjects is respected, although his work is not without controversy. He says that during a 2006 trip to Lebanon, he interviewed a top Hezbollah member who said the group hadn’t kidnapped anybody. Like me, he became curious and started poking around to see if there was any truth to this claim.
“I was talking to people who might know about this stuff,” he says. “Then one day I was sitting in my hotel in August 2006 and a guy came up to me. A nasty guy. He sat down and he said, ‘You’re inquiring about the kidnappings.’ I said, ‘Who are you?’ He replied, ‘Are you inquiring about the kidnappings or not?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Well, stop inquiring.’ I told him, ‘I don’t know who you are; I don’t feel threatened. I’m sitting in my hotel, so why don’t you stop threatening me and have a cup of coffee.’ He said, ‘You know who did the kidnappings. We don’t want the light shined there.’ Then he left.”
This reporter tells me he has excellent U.S. intelligence contacts, and having read his work, I believe that to be true. He reached out to some of them and managed to set up a debriefing session with four CIA representatives.
“I told them the story about how I began to have doubts that Hezbollah were the kidnappers, at least the original ones,” he recounts. “These are smart people, and they didn’t say a word. They just sat there and listened to me and then a young guy in glasses says, ‘Well, thanks for coming in; we’ll get back to you.’ I said, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ He says, ‘We’re going to do some homework and some checking, go back and talk to people.’
“A month later, I get called back in,” the journalist continues. “There were the same four people and the guy who was the talker looked at me and said, ‘Well, we want to thank you for coming in and giving us that briefing two months ago. I want you to know that we’ve done a very thorough investigation because this is a very interesting case and it has implications for our foreign policy. So, I’m going to tell you that what your Hezbollah source said may in fact have some truth to it . . . there is reason to believe that what you were told is correct.’”
“Wow,” I say to the journalist. I imagine myself in that room, with those four spooks telling me that with a straight face. I would have lost my shit.
“I said, ‘You’re fucking kidding me.’” The reporter laughs. “He kind of smiled and said no. They sat there and looked at me. I said, ‘Who the hell is the Islamic Jihad?’ One of them just replied, ‘You said you had one question. We answered it.’”
What a story. This reporter could be bullshitting me, of course, but I don’t see what purpose that would possibly serve and he’s a legitimate journalist who’s been published by many reputable outlets. Plus, Bodine and Burton have already intimated that there might be some truth to this theory, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility that other government sources would have told this guy the same thing.
I remember something Timur Goksel, the former UNIFIL spokesman, said to me in regard to the respective ways in which Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad used suicide bombings.
“Hezbollah sponsored suicide bombings,” Goksel reminded me as we ate our manakeesh. “But they were not haphazard. They were very well planned and the martyrs were handpicked by a committee.”
“These were suicide bombings in the south against Israeli convoys?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s different from going and blowing up an embassy, though, right?”
“They are different,” Goksel agreed. “Hezbollah used a military tactic, but very well regulated. I know there was a long list of people who wanted to do it, but this committee, mostly clergy, they said, ‘If he is newly married, he has children, he is out. He cannot do it. He has a family to take care of.’ They had rules like this. It’s very interesting. In the south, what I’ve also been told is that the men they chose were medically not very well.”
“Sick,” I muse. “It makes sense.”
“As I said, you are right,” Goksel told me. “It’s different from the ones in Beirut.”
Tactical differences in the way Hezbollah and the IJO carried out suicide bombings would seem to line up with the idea that the groups were operating with different agendas. But not every ex–U.S. official is on board with this line of reporting. Ryan Crocker, former U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, for one, says he doesn’t think it’s wise to seriously distinguish between Hezbollah and the IJO.
“I’ve always had the feeling that while there might have been different nodes out there, they coalesced fairly rapidly into a single entity,” he tells me. “I think it was the Iranians who were pushing that. You remember, of course, this is just a few years after the Islamic revolution. They were trying to figure out how to project power outside of Iran . . . Imad Mughniyeh showed up if not right at the beginning, pretty early on. His linkages to the Revolutionary Guard were there from the beginning, obviously on the military side of Hezbollah. Tufayli was a politician, Mughniyeh was a killer . . . and none of them really carried membership cards.”
Fair point. But Sobhi Tufayli was secretary-general of Hezbollah while Mughniyeh headed the IJO. That doesn’t necessarily contradict the theory I’m following up on. I would still like to know when it was concluded that Hezbollah was responsible for the IJO’s terrorism. Tufayli was eventually kicked out of Hezbollah, for reasons that are still somewhat unclear. He’s supposed to be living in exile in Brital, a town in the Beqaa Valley. I add his name to the list of people I should try to track down on my next trip to Lebanon.
In October 2014, another ex-spook I approach, whom I’ll keep anonymous, agrees to be interviewed by me in New York. Since he didn’t join the CIA until the late nineties, he wasn’t active in the agency at the time of my father’s captivity, so I almost don’t bother reaching out to him. But I decide it can’t hurt to learn more about the way the agency operates in the Middle East, and we meet for lunch in Hell’s Kitchen.
Soon after we sit down, he launches into a long bout of mansplaining when the topic of female CIA agents casually comes up in conversation.
“Let me say this,” he booms, articulating his words as though I were a mentally challenged four-year-old. “Over the course of my career I had a number of women who worked for me as case officers. The good ones all came in older. None of them in their twenties were worth anything. They were useless in their twenties. They were young; they were pretty. Every guy they went out with wanted to sleep with them and they couldn’t get anywhere. The better looking they were, the more difficult it was . . . the girls were a big problem. I didn’t want to see them, didn’t want them within twenty miles of me. Useless, totally.”
Being a woman in my twenties, I take serious issue with this assessment. But I nod, smile demurely, and listen as he presents his “analysis” of my father’s captivity. I happen to love mansplainers. They underestimate women so much it’s embarrassingly easy to play into their fantasy of a quiet, innocent young girl captivated by their genius and get them to say really stupid things, which I can then write about.
“Let me just walk you into this slowly,” he begins. “Have you heard of Imad Mughniyeh?”
I’ve been reporting on this for almost two years, and the man kidnapped my father, I think. But no, tell me about Imad Mughniyeh, because my tiny little female brain can’t have possibly grasped that kind of complex information.
I nod, wide-eyed.
“Well, there were times that Mughniyeh wouldn’t listen to the Iranians at all. He did whatever he wanted and they would complain about him too . . . remember something, the Iranians had different political objectives than Hezbollah. Hezbollah was all about t
aking out the Israelis and trying to create an Islamic state in Lebanon.”
“But then how did you know from the beginning that the IJO was part of Hezbollah?” I ask. “It’s all so confusing to me.”
“We knew it was Hezbollah holding the hostages,” he says flatly. “Very early on. Amal was talking to us. Amal said, ‘It’s not us, it’s them.’”
That’s like saying an IRA member would be credible if they blamed a Protestant militant for a crime at the peak of the Irish troubles. “But there was a lot of fighting between Amal and Hezbollah then,” I point out.
“Well, yes,” he responds without missing a beat. “They were at war.”
Okay. Logic doesn’t seem to derail this man, but what about emotion? I’m curious to know how much effort he’s put into truly understanding the minds of the people he was meant to be protecting us from.
“Would you have any empathy or understanding at all for what it’s like being Shia and having someone invade your land?” I ask. “Do you think there’s any truth to the idea that to really understand your enemy—”
“I understand my enemy quite well,” he interrupts. I speak over him.
“—you have to sort of put yourself in their shoes?”
“No, not at all,” he huffs. “Look, would you like me to recite the history of Islam? I know quite a bit about Islam. I took Arabic for years . . . I’ve spent a lifetime doing this and the problem is that these people are so gleeful in their delivery of pain that I’ve lost any sympathy for them . . . Americans are not out there gleefully killing Muslims.”
“So, but . . . please don’t be offended by this.” I hesitate, so overwhelmed by his superior intelligence that I hardly know what to say. “I’m playing devil’s advocate here, but do you . . . don’t you think that . . . are we in any way responsible for backlash against us in terms of our policies?”
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