Hezbollah (10 page)

The kidnappings drew attention to the Shi’a cause but also convinced many foreigners to leave or avoid Lebanon, fulfilling one of Hezbollah’s primary objectives of “expel[ling] the Americans[,] the French and their allies definitely from Lebanon, putting an end to any colonialist entity on our land.”
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In the process the West began to view Hezbollah “as a crazy and fanatic religious group, bent on martyrdom through suicide-operations, and engaged in the random abduction of foreigners, under the assumed strict control and direction of Iran’s clerical establishment.”
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Throughout the 1980s, Hezbollah’s actions were influenced, if not directed, by the Iranian regime. In fact the organization’s founding letter states, “We obey the orders of one leader, wise and just, that of our tutor and
faqih
(jurist) who fulfills all the necessary conditions: Ruhollah Musawi Khomeini. God save him!”
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Over time Hezbollah became somewhat more independent from its state sponsor, but at the time the group was run as a virtual extension of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. David Jacobsen, the head of the American University of Beirut Medical Center, kidnapped in 1985, would later recall that after he had reached out to Fadlallah in a “private initiative,” Fadlallah had explained that “only the Iranian chargé d’affaires could release those held.” Fadlallah described the Hezbollah captors as “nothing more than the Iranian ‘hunting dogs.’”
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In June 1986, the US government got its first direct acknowledgment from an Iranian official that Tehran held sway, if not complete control, over the kidnappers. An American envoy asked Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, then–speaker of the Iranian parliament (Majlis), “what sign of sincerity Iran required from the United States” for Tehran to use its influence over Hezbollah to win the release of US hostages. After launching into a tirade against US policy, Rafsanjani implied that Iran would consider future discussions with the United States if Washington adopted “a new attitude.” In a memo summarizing international efforts to secure the release of US
hostages in Lebanon, the CIA director’s “Hostage Location Task Force” concluded that the meeting was “noteworthy in that Rafsanjani acknowledged that Tehran had influence with the captors.”
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And yet that influence was limited, as the chief of the CIA’s Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis noted in a memo penned two years later. “We continue to believe that Iran is unable unilaterally to order the release of Western hostages and must bargain with Hezbollah on the terms of any release.” The key, the memo concluded, would be sweetening the deal for the key hostage holder, Imad Mughniyeh. “Mughniyeh,” the CIA assessed, “may be willing to release one or a few U.S. hostages in exchange for ransom money or Iranian promises of assistance in future operations against Kuwait.”
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The CIA understood the central role Mughniyeh still played in the hostage drama and the limitations of Iran’s influence over him when it came to his prized bargaining chips. “The last two hostages who have been freed were held by Imad Mughniyeh’s Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO),” the CIA noted in March 1991. “Mughniyeh most likely would resent Iranian efforts to secure the release of another IJO hostage at this time, viewing any such request as an Iranian effort to draw down his pool of hostages first.”
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The adoption of kidnapping reflected the judgment that taking Western hostages provided Hezbollah—and, by extension, Iran—significant leverage over Western governments. Often, Hezbollah kidnapped Westerners in order to pressure the hostages’ governments to secure the release of incarcerated Shi’a. In other cases hostages were taken as a means to pressure Western governments against funding or arming Iraq in its war against Iran. They later became pawns in the arms-for-hostages Iran-Contra affair. When kidnappings failed to sufficiently pressure foreign governments or secure a desired response, Hezbollah would threaten hostages’ lives to increase pressure on their governments to negotiate for their release.
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Nonetheless, only five Westerners died or were executed while held hostage by Hezbollah between 1982 and 1992.
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According to former hostage David Jacobsen, when fellow captive William Buckley—the CIA station chief in Beirut—died in captivity, reportedly from drowning in his own lung fluids as a result of torture, it “really shook up our kidnappers.”
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Late 1983 saw a lull in kidnappings over several months, until early 1984, possibly because Hezbollah was distracted by its efforts to expand beyond the Bekaa Valley to southern Lebanon and Beirut. And what operational resources the young movement had available were being used to carry out the more spectacular Beirut bombings. Many more kidnappings would follow, but not before Hezbollah and other pro-Iran Shi’a militants carried out a string of attacks on Western targets in Kuwait at Iran’s behest. Those events would shape the Western hostage crisis in Lebanon for years to come.

On December 12, 1983, terrorists carried out a series of seven coordinated bombings in Kuwait, all within two hours, at the American and French embassies, the Kuwaiti airport, near the Raytheon Corporation’s grounds, at a Kuwait National
Petroleum Company oil rig, and at a government-owned power station. The seventh explosive, outside a post office, was defused.
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Six people were killed and some eighty-seven wounded in the attacks.
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The string of bombings was executed at Iran’s behest by Lebanese and Iraqi Shi’a militants.
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In a 1986 report the CIA assessed that while Iran’s support for terrorism was meant to further its national interest, including dissuading Kuwait from supporting Iraq militarily in the Iran-Iraq War, this support also stemmed from the clerical regime’s perception “that it has a religious duty to export its Islamic revolution and to wage, by whatever means, a constant struggle against the perceived oppressor states.”
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The Kuwait bombings were the first in a long chain of such attacks.

In these attacks, senior Hezbollah operatives, joined by their Iraqi compatriots, acted in the explicit service of Iran rather than in the group’s immediate interests. But in the aftermath of the bombings, Hezbollah would carry out many more attacks, at home and abroad, seeking the release of members jailed in Kuwait. Though he later denied the group played any role in the kidnappings of Westerners in Lebanon, Hezbollah deputy chief Naim Qassem once acknowledged that the Kuwait episode “was the starting point for the idea of hostages, to impose pressure for the release of prisoners in Israel and elsewhere.”
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The bombings took Kuwaiti officials by surprise, but the damage could have been much worse had the bombs been properly wired. As it happened, faulty engineering prevented three quarters of the explosives planted at the American embassy compound from detonating, saving many lives.
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Shoddy planning also reduced the destructiveness of the attacks: a truck carrying 200 gas cylinders primed to explode at the National Petroleum Company site went off 150 yards from a refinery and just a few yards shy of a pile of flammable chemicals. More adept operational planning might also have resulted in the destruction of Kuwait’s primary water-desalination plant, located within the premises, leaving the desert nation nearly devoid of fresh water.
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Credit for the bombings went to the Iraqi-based Dawa group, as well as the IJO, which claimed responsibility in a call to a French news agency in Beirut. By then, Islamic Jihad was already recognized as a cover name Hezbollah used in such calls.
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Dawa, a group of Iraqi Shi’a established in 1968, was one element in an amorphous, Iran-sponsored Shi’a network particularly active in and around Lebanon in the mid-1980s. Still composed primarily of Iraqis, Dawa carried out most of its activity, and was headquartered, in Iran.
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Signaling the intimate links between Dawa and Hezbollah, Sheikh Subhi al-Tufayli, one of Hezbollah’s founders, acknowledged that “Hezbollah is in essence the Dawa party.”
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Fadlallah, meanwhile, headed the Lebanese branch of the Dawa Party.

Six days after the attacks the Kuwaiti government accused twelve Shi’a—nine Iraqis and three Lebanese—of playing a role in the plot. Abdul Aziz Hussein, then Kuwait’s minister of state for cabinet affairs, identified all twelve as Dawa members, including the operative who drove the explosives-laden truck into the US embassy compound, Raad Mouchbil.
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The discovery of one of Mouchbil’s thumbs—the sole piece of his body still intact following the explosion—provided just enough
evidence for Kuwaiti authorities to apprehend, and eventually try, some of his accomplices.
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While the bombings appear to have been orchestrated by Dawa, the group had called on the expertise of the three arrested Lebanese operatives. One, Hussein al-Sayed Yousef al-Musawi, was the first cousin of Husayn al-Musawi, leader of Islamic Amal (which merged with Hezbollah).
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Another was Mustapha Badreddine, Imad Mughniyeh’s brother-in-law and cousin, who was in Kuwait under the Christian-sounding cover name Fuad Saab. The last was Azam Khalil Ibrahim.
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In total twenty-five suspects were charged (four in absentia).
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Ultimately they were charged with “belonging to a group bent on demolishing the basic values of society through criminal means,” charges diluted significantly from the initial accusations of membership in the banned Dawa organization or practicing terrorism.
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Despite multiple references to “another state,” the charges made no explicit mention of Iran.
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For its part, Iran denied any involvement in the plots, insisting that “attribution of these attacks to Iran is part and parcel of a comprehensive plot by the United States of America and its agents against the Islamic revolution.”
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After a six-week trial the court handed down six death sentences (three in absentia), seven life sentences, and seven sentences of five to ten years in jail. Excepting the five found not guilty and the three convicted in absentia, seventeen convicted terrorists were jailed in Kuwait—thus the moniker “the Kuwait 17,” or the “Dawa 17.”
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Mughniyeh and the IJO would spend the next few years carrying out kidnappings, hijackings, and other attacks aimed at securing the release of the Kuwait 17, Badreddine in particular. When a Kuwaiti court sentenced Badreddine to death in March 1984, Hezbollah threatened to kill some of its hostages if the sentence was carried out (it was not).
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Discussing prospects for the release of US hostages, a CIA memo noted that “Mughniyeh has always linked the fate of his American hostages to release of 17 Shia terrorists in Kuwait, and we have no indication he has altered this demand.”
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By the spring of 1985, US intelligence described West Beirut’s transformation from a commercial and cultural hub of the Arab world—the Paris of the Middle East—into “a lawless militarized zone contested by confessional and ideological factions.” The CIA titled an analytical report on the subject
Wild, Wild West Beirut
, noting that “turf battles, terrorism, rampant street crime, and the lack of central authority have made the city extremely dangerous for both local residents and foreigners.”
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Hezbollah’s successful expansion from the Bekaa Valley into Beirut, at Amal’s expense, enabled the group to carry out kidnappings and other plots in the city with greater ease. Hezbollah gunmen had become so comfortable in the city that they were notorious for harassing women wearing Western-style clothing and raiding restaurants that served alcohol. Noting the lack of security, poor economic conditions, prospects of unemployment, and social alienation facing many young Lebanese
men, especially in the Shi’a communities, intelligence analysts correctly assessed that “the strength of the Hezbollah fundamentalists in West Beirut is likely to grow.”
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Against this backdrop, the Western hostage crisis stretched on until 1992, with Westerners and, on occasion, other foreigners being abducted in stages that, in retrospect, can be loosely tied to specific Hezbollah causes. Magnus Ranstorp breaks down the Western hostage crisis into nine stages, starting with Hezbollah’s expansion from the Bekaa Valley into Beirut and southern Lebanon and its terrorist operations aimed at ridding the country of foreign forces and ending with the release of the last American hostages, a closer relationship with Iran based on converging interests, and the election of Hassan Nasrallah as secretary-general. Each of these periods focused on some particular goal, though certain themes—like securing the freedom of Shi’a militants jailed abroad or kicking Israeli and Western forces out of Lebanon—remained constant. For example, the abduction of CIA Beirut station chief William Buckley in March 1984, as well as several other kidnappings in the second half of 1984, was a direct response to the arrest and sentencing of the Kuwait 17 bombers.
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To be sure, some kidnappings were carried out by Hezbollah factions or clans—each with its own alias—in an opportunistic fashion to secure, for example, the release of a jailed relative. Others involved poorly trained muscle to grab people off the streets; several people were kidnapped because they were mistaken for American or French citizens. Captors assigned to guard the Western prisoners were often “unsophisticated but fanatic Muslims,” as one captive put it.
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In contrast, the abduction of William Buckley indicated careful target selection and operational surveillance, likely supported by Iranian intelligence. According to one account, some of the intelligence Hezbollah used to identify Buckley as the local CIA chief was provided by Iran based on materials seized during the US embassy takeover in Iran in 1979.
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