The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict With Iran

by David Crist

  The Revolutionary Guard displayed considerable flexibility to train the new recruits. With many of the recruits young students, the Iranians held the classes during breaks in the school schedule, and the Revolutionary Guard tried to accommodate by holding classes in Beirut for those who did not have enough time between classes to travel all the way to the Bekaa. Sayeed Ali attended a technical school where he was studying the unlikely discipline of interior decorating. He attended one of the camps about an hour away from Baalbek during his summer break.

  Political and religious lessons broke up the martial regime. Through Arabic translators, Iranian speakers extolled Khomeini or lectured on religious subjects. Hassan Nasrallah frequently came as a guest lecturer, giving rousing talks touting the righteousness of their struggle. Sayeed Ali became friends with Nasrallah and went to his house frequently. “He was very charismatic and good at telling jokes; he was always smiling and laughing,” Sayeed Ali recalled.

  In addition to Sayeed Ali, Iran recruited another more important fallen Nabih Berri supporter, a Lebanese chemistry teacher turned revolutionary named Hussein al-Musawi. After the cantankerous meeting at Shamseddine’s home, al-Musawi had formed his own breakaway group called Islamic Amal. Young and idealistic like Sayeed Ali, al-Musawi was an ardent supporter of the Ayatollah Khomeini, publicly proclaiming, “We are the children of Iran.” After breaking with Berri, al-Musawi fled to his village in the Bekaa Valley to establish his coterie. According to retired CIA officer Robert Baer, al-Musawi spearheaded the takeover of the Sheik Abdullah Barracks, inviting the guards to use it as their base.10

  Acceptance of Iran in Lebanon received a boost when the prominent cleric Ayatollah Sheik Sayed Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah backed the Revolutionary Guard’s mission. A scholar of considerable renown and a prolific writer on Islam, he settled in Beirut’s southern suburbs, where he brought together under his control a number of humanitarian organizations that provided basic services to the Shia slums. His power increased when the Iraqi government expelled dozens of Lebanese theology students in a crackdown on Shia radicalism. Many of these flocked to Fadlallah and served as his core supporters.11

  Fadlallah welcomed the Iranian Revolution and openly endorsed Ayatollah Khomeini’s Shia activism. “It empowered the Shia and gave strength to them,” he said. After the Israeli invasion, Fadlallah was a principal motivator for the Shia resistance, and his rhetorical jabs at the U.S. government frequently carried the same vitriol as Khomeini’s.

  After Israel’s invasion, an Iranian delegation came to Fadlallah’s compound in south Beirut to meet with the ayatollah. The Iranians wanted him to lead their Lebanese operations. Many of Iran’s early supporters prayed in his mosque and had been inspired by him.12 But Sheik Fadlallah refused. His religious training stemmed from Najaf, not Qom. While he embraced Khomeini’s view of political Islam, he had no intention of being subservient to Iran. They were Arabs, not Persians, and the Lebanese struggle should be run by Lebanese, he believed.13

  Sheik Fadlallah’s intransigence in opposing Iranian leadership of the Shia resistance caused considerable tension with the Revolutionary Guard. He carried too much gravitas to purge, so the Iranians maintained an uneasy association with him. But American intelligence failed to notice these important distinctions and divides. For years cables from the embassy in Beirut continued to refer to Fadlallah as “Hezbollah’s spiritual adviser,” a characterization that both Hezbollah and Fadlallah emphatically denied.14

  The Iranian-backed resistance to Israel and the United States began spastically. Factions launched uncoordinated and feeble attacks against the Israeli army around Beirut and in south Lebanon. “We fired a lot of ammunition and many men were killed or wounded without achieving very much,” Sayeed Ali remarked about the early operations.

  But they struck their first major blow against the Israelis on November 11, 1982. At seven in the morning, seventeen-year-old Ahmed Qassir, a native of the small village of Deir Qanun al-Nahr just ten miles from the Lebanese city of Tyre, plowed his car into a seven-story building that served as a major headquarters for the Israeli army in southern Lebanon. Qassir had lost several family members during a 1978 Israeli incursion into southern Lebanon and he wanted revenge. The car bomb, packed with explosives and cylindrical gas canisters, leveled the building. It blew one Israeli soldier out of the fifth floor; miraculously, a chair and a refrigerator landed around his head and formed a protective cocoon that saved him from the tons of steel and concrete that descended on top of him.15 Seventy-five other Israeli soldiers were not so fortunate, including many of Israel’s elite internal security force, Shin Beit, as well as fourteen Arabs who were being interrogated. Israel declared a day of mourning for those killed, and the attack remains one of the worst suicide attacks the country ever suffered.16

  Israel remained oblivious to this new force their invasion had unleashed. In the chaos of Lebanon, their early attacks, as one Hezbollah founder recalled, were like “a scuffle of camels in the desert.”17 An unknown group, Armed Struggle Organization, claimed responsibility for the attack.18 Hezbollah later claimed the bombing in Tyre as its first “martyrdom” operation. To avoid retribution by Israel against the driver’s family, the group refrained from announcing the details until 1985, and then only after Israelis had pulled back from Tyre. That same year, Iranian supporters erected a memorial in the bomber’s village, and the family personally received from Ayatollah Khomeini a portrait of the imam embossed with the emblem of the Islamic Republic.19

  This also marked the first use of what would be the hallmark of Hezbollah military success: the suicide bomber. Car bombs were commonplace in Lebanon during the civil war. But the pro-Iranian Shia put a unique spin on this Lebanese tradition by putting a human behind the wheel. The unique tenets of this branch of Islam emphasized martyrdom, and Iran found no shortage of drivers willing to exchange their lives for the cause and eternal glory. While Israel and the United States condemned these as acts of terrorism, in truth the attacks were not terrorism. The founders of Hezbollah had devised the poor man’s smart bomb and aimed it at their opponents’ ill-prepared military. “If Hezbollah had GPS-guided bombs dropped from thirty thousand feet, they would not need martyrs,” said one Lebanese with ties to the organization.

  Initially, the pro-Iranian Shia militias remained a fractured movement. “Everyone wanted to be in charge,” Sayeed Ali recalled. Iran supported multiple groups, including Hussein al-Musawi’s Islamic Amal, as well as other Lebanese splinter groups. A 1984 American intelligence report provided to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger listed ten different Iranian-backed Lebanese militias. This included the Dawa Party of Lebanon, a counterpart to the Iranian-sponsored Dawa Parties in Iraq and the Persian Gulf countries. The Dawa Party was further subdivided into two semi-independent wings: a political front called the Muslim Student Union, and a military arm, the Jundallah (Soldiers of God). Even Islamic Amal had a subgroup called the Hussein Suicide Squad, whom al-Musawi recruited to execute his martyrdom operations. All told, they had fewer than one thousand fighters, but as the U.S. intelligence report acknowledged, they commanded widespread support among the Shia population.20

  The true giant in the burgeoning Shia resistance was a man of only twenty, Imad Mugniyah. Born near Tyre in July 1962, the oldest of four children, Imad was remembered by friends as a bright boy with academic potential. He attended Beirut University for one year before dropping out to fight in the Lebanese Civil War as a soldier in Yasser Arafat’s elite unit, Force 19. Young and strong with a dark beard and serious persona, he possessed the natural gift of a combat leader. He was well spoken and wholly committed to Islam’s struggle against Israel. In fact, Sayeed Ali recalled, he spoke of nothing else. “Imad Mugniyah was a masterful organizer and operator. Few of his lieutenants were as capable,” said former CIA director of operations Charles Allen.21

  The Israeli invasion inspired Mugniyah too. In July 1982, he took a taxi to Baalbek and met with an Iranian Revolutionary Gu
ard officer and ethnic Arab named Sheik Hussein.22 Mugniyah liked the pitch and threw all his considerable energy into his own organization, the Islamic Jihad Organization. Mugniyah appealed to the Iranians. His connections with Arafat and numerous Shia leaders made him the indispensable man. He opened the door for Iranian influence in Lebanon in ways no outsider could.23

  To Iran, Mugniyah became more than an ally; he served as a partner. Iran commissioned him an officer in the Revolutionary Guard and many of his Iranian comrades genuinely mourned his death when a car bomb in Damascus sent him on into the afterworld in 2008. As Hezbollah’s chief military commander for over two decades, Mugniyah took on a mythical persona. Israel and the United States seemed to attribute every guerrilla attack or act of terrorism to him, and his hand guided many even in his tender years. Few knew him; he hid his true identity even from his only son, Mustafa. The head of Hamas’s operations in Lebanon, Osama Hamdan, met him masquerading as a stone salesman.24

  Iran tried to morph these disparate supporters into a cohesive force. It formed the Council of Lebanon, a five-member committee of senior Lebanese and Iranian clerics to coordinate the religious, political, and military activities of the radical pro-Iranian Shia groups. The Revolutionary Guard centralized all military training at Baalbek. On June 27, 1983, the two main groups—al-Musawi’s Islamic Amal and Mugniyah’s Islamic Jihad Organization—were both placed under the direct control of Iranian officers. By 1984, American intelligence began reporting a new umbrella name for the pro-Iranian militias: Hezbollah, or Party of God.

  Iran’s growing role in Lebanon did not escape the attention of the United States. The head of America’s top eavesdropping agency, the National Security Agency, William Odom, made a swing through the Middle East in early April 1983, which included a stop in Beirut to talk to the CIA station chief and the marines at the airport. A gunnery sergeant assigned to small signal collection from the marines’ radio reconnaissance company gave Odom some of the communications they had intercepted between Sheik Abdullah Barracks and the Iranian consulate in Beirut. “The Iranian presence was growing,” Odom recalled of these messages. “They were actually struggling to find enough Arabic speakers to meet their requirements.”25

  Odom did not share the Reagan administration’s optimism about Lebanon. He came away from Beirut deeply disturbed. The rising attacks on the marines and the growing influence of Iran among the Shia population did not bode well for America, he thought. “The mere fact that terrorists have made attempts against the Marines is a bad sign to come,” he wrote to Army Chief of Staff Edward Meyer upon his return to Washington.26

  Just days after Odom’s visit, on April 17, 1983, a green Mercedes swerved in and out of the congested Beirut traffic, barely missing a dump truck and a mother and her two children. The driver accelerated, then quickly turned up a driveway, passing nonplussed guards, and headed straight toward the front of the seven-story American embassy. The car jumped up the front stoop and smashed into the front door of the lobby and exploded.27 The blast sheered off the entire front of the building, vaporizing eleven Lebanese bodyguards and their leader, Sergeant First Class Terry Gilden of the U.S. Army Special Forces, who happened to be milling about under the front portico waiting to take the ambassador to an appointment.28 Marines arrived from the airport to provide security for rescue workers digging through the rubble to recover the dead and wounded. The final tally stood at sixty-three dead, including seventeen Americans.29 Most alarming, the bomber had cleaned out America’s entire spy operation within Lebanon. Seven of those killed had been CIA employees, including the chief of station, his deputy, and the head of all the agency’s Middle East operations, Robert Ames, who happened to be visiting the embassy and having an ill-timed lunch meeting with the CIA’s staff when the bomb went off. Few intelligence officers knew as much about the Middle East as did Ames. Both William Casey and the White House held him in high regard. “If there ever was someone irreplaceable, it was Bob,” said one retired CIA agent who knew Ames well.

  Odom’s NSA pored over intercepted communications trying to find the culprits. A few nuggets between the Iranian foreign ministry and its embassies in Beirut and Damascus had indicated a vague goal of striking at American interests in Lebanon. While highly circumstantial, NSA analysts concluded it could only have referred to the embassy attack.30 Odom agreed. “It seemed the logical conclusion.”

  The CIA rushed a new batch of case officers to the embassy. This included one of the few Arabic-speaking women, deploying to Beirut on her first assignment with the agency. The new chief of station was a thin, glum-looking case officer with limited field experience who had spent much of his career in headquarters, William Buckley. Casey had pressured the reticent Buckley into taking the assignment. The director liked Buckley, and the bench of senior CIA officers with Middle East expertise was not that deep. The marine officers had a mixed view of him. Colonel Geraghty thought highly of him, and the two developed a good rapport, but many junior officers found the CIA officer conceited. Buckley did have one serious flaw for an intelligence officer: he could not remember people’s names. As an aide-mémoire, he kept a list of all the CIA officers who worked for him in his shirt pocket.

  In early August 1983, the marines went on full alert after intercepted radio communications and a Shia human source both confirmed an imminent attack by militias loyal to Iran.31 As the fighting intensified around Suq al-Gharb, marines repeatedly intercepted tactical discussions in Farsi. To help translate, one of the five Persian linguists in the entire marine corps arrived in Lebanon to help decipher the chatter.

  Robert McFarlane reported Iran’s involvement back to the White House on September 9. The attacks on Aoun’s 8th Brigade, he said, were not the work of Lebanese, but of a nefarious combination of Iranian and Syrian forces. The United States could not stand by while these countries sent in troops to interfere and oppose the legitimate Lebanese government. McFarlane noticed the irony in his stand. The United States too stood guilty of much the same offense: an outside country with military forces backing one faction in the civil war.

  While hardly the external invasion McFarlane perceived, the Syrian army did provide an umbrella for the polyglot of opponents of the Phalange-backed government. Druze, Shia, and Palestinians all battled General Aoun’s forces in the hills around Suq al-Gharb. The Revolutionary Guard lurked in the background, offering advice for their allies. With the United States actively aiding the Lebanese army, the visible symbol of the U.S. military, the U.S. Marines, found themselves the target of all those opposing Gemayel and the Israelis.

  In Ayatollah Khomeini’s mind, America continued to spearhead the assault against the revolution. If America aided Iraq, he saw no reason why American marines in Lebanon should be immune from retaliation. It was all intertwined, each a battle in the larger struggle between the Islamic Republic and the United States: righteousness versus wickedness. While the Druze shelled the marines, the Iranian militia turned to their poor man’s precision-guided weapon.

  On September 1, 1983, a Revolutionary Guard officer met with Hussein al-Musawi at Sheik Abdullah Barracks. Al-Musawi wanted to blow something up—“special targets,” as he phrased it. He remained undecided about just exactly what should be destroyed, but he leaned toward Christian Phalange sites in East Beirut. The Iranian dutifully reported this back to Ambassador Mohtashemi in Damascus, who in turn relayed it back to Tehran. As the fighting raged around Suq al-Gharb, and McFarlane and Stiner pressed Geraghty for air strikes, al-Musawi approached the Iranians again. This time he wanted help in obtaining an eye-popping thirty tons of TNT and plastic explosives.

  This got Mohtashemi’s attention. He asked al-Musawi to come to Damascus and explain what he intended to do with all that lethality. On September 22, an al-Musawi relative, Sayed, and the brother of the head of the Hussein Suicide Squad, Abu Haydan Musawi, drove to the Syrian capital and met with the ambassador in his office at the Iranian embassy. The Lebanese explained that while they had no
specific target in mind, they wanted to undertake a dramatic attack against their enemies—the Americans, the Phalange, or the Lebanese army.

  Mohtashemi listened intently. “Yes, you should certainly concentrate your operations as much as possible on the U.S. forces, Phalange, or the Lebanese army,” he replied. Then the Iranian ambassador offered up a suggestion: “You should undertake an extraordinary operation against the U.S. Marines.”

  Sayed liked the idea. It had not occurred to him, but a blow against the marines would undermine the entire American and Israeli designs in Lebanon. Mohtashemi instructed him to make sure that he coordinated his actions with Hezbollah, which meant Imad Mugniyah.

  “Perhaps when this great mission is over, we could come to Iran,” Sayed asked excitedly. “Maybe we could even meet with Ayatollah Khomeini?”32

  “You would be most welcome,” Mohtashemi said, rising to shake Sayed’s hand as he bid him good luck. “But the Iranian government cannot officially invite you. It is best we keep our distance publicly.”

  Two days later, Ambassador Mohtashemi called Tehran and reported his meeting to the Iranian foreign minister. Al-Musawi’s proposal was debated by the senior official and Ayatollah Khomeini likely gave final approval for the attack.

  The word came back to Mohtashemi approving “a spectacular action against the U.S. Marines.”

  On October 18, Abu Haydan Musawi and twenty members of the Hussein Suicide Squad arrived in Beirut from Baalbek. Iran failed to provide enough explosives, so Abu Haydan Musawi met with a Palestinian contact about obtaining four thousand more pounds of explosives. The day following, three trucks showed up in front of the Islamic Amal office in Beirut loaded with his requisition. This amount of explosives far exceeded what could be packed inside a Lebanese car bomb, and the Musawi clan seemed ready to make good on its promise of a spectacular show.