Hezbollah (35 page)

151.
“Arab Man Wanted for 1990 Murder of Saudi,”
Bangkok Post
, August 6, 2009.

152.
Shay, “Thailand’s Blue Diamond Heist.”

153.
“The Big Issue: The Blue Diamond Affair,”
Bangkok Post
, January 17, 2010.

154.
Shenon, “Saudi Envoy Helps Expose a Thai Crime Group.”

155.
Shay, “Thailand’s Blue Diamond Heist.”

156.
McCarthy, “Saudi Gems Theft.”

157.
“A Law unto Themselves: Reforming a Corrupt and Politicised Police Force Will Be Tough,”
Economist
, April 17, 2008.

158.
“The Big Issue.”

159.
“Interpol Can’t Help in Hunt for Abu Ali,”
Bangkok Post
, February 2, 2010.

160.
“Arab Man Wanted.”

161.
“Alleged Victims of Iranian Government ‘Hit Squads,’ 1979–1996.”

162.
“The Big Issue.”

163.
Israeli intelligence report, “Hizballah World Terrorism.”

164.
US CIA, “Iranian Support for Terrorism: Rafsanjani’s Report Card.” The text immediately preceding this quote in the CIA report is redacted, but the context makes it clear the report is referring to the murders in Thailand, not to the activities of Saudi Hezbollah in Saudi Arabia which are discussed before the redaction.

Hezbollah Comes to North America

ONE OF HEZBOLLAH’S
first American recruits was a Vietnam veteran and convert to Islam who first fought for Amal and then, as Amal lost political ground and members to Hezbollah, trained Hezbollah operatives. He reportedly served as a bodyguard for Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah (a trusted position once occupied by Imad Mughniyeh) and by 1996 would be described by then–defense secretary William Perry as “a known American terrorist.”
¹

The casualty of a broken home who fell in with street gangs in Southeast Washington, D.C., Clevin Holt dropped out of school at age fourteen and used forged papers to enlist in the US Army at age fifteen. Holt spent three months in Vietnam but never saw combat. Most of his tour as an Army Ranger was spent in South Korea, where he became a black nationalist and was involved in a race riot that left one US soldier dead. When the army discovered he had enlisted as a minor, he was given an honorable discharge and flown home. There, angry at the treatment of returning Vietnam veterans and the racism still pervading American society, Holt planned to find a good vantage point in Silver Spring, Maryland, and “start shooting white people.” Unable to enact his plan, he was about to commit suicide when, as he retells it, an angel told him he would go to hell if he killed himself. Three days later, he met Musa Abdul Raheem, an African American convert to Islam, and he soon converted to Sunni Islam and took on the name Isa Abdullah Ali.
²

Within a couple of years, however, Abdullah Ali would leave the Sunni tradition and embrace Shi’ism. Inspired by the Iranian revolution, he and his fellow convert and friend Dawud Salahuddin (David Belfield) took jobs at the Washington, D.C., embassy of the new Islamic Republic of Iran. Salahuddin would soon be recruited by the Islamic Republic to assassinate Ali Akbar Tabatabai, a former Iranian embassy press attaché who had become a vocal critic of Khomeini. Disguised as a postal carrier, Salahuddin shot Tabatabai three times with a handgun at Tabatabai’s Bethesda, Maryland, home.
³

Abdullah Ali would first come to the attention of US law enforcement following “the assassination of this criminal Tabatabai,” as Abdullah Ali later described it, as a result of to his friendship with Belfield.
⁴
FBI officials later questioned Abdullah Ali,
reporting that the “subject provided minimal information concerning the areas of FBI interests.”
⁵
They ruled him out as a suspect, likely because by the time of the murder Abdullah Ali had already left the United States to fight in Afghanistan.

Abdullah Ali was forced by illness to leave Afghanistan after just a month, returning to the United States in August 1980, a month after the Tabatabai murder. But four months later, he left for another foreign jihad, this time to fight in Lebanon with the Amal militia. He stayed in Lebanon from December 1980 to October 1981, at which point he went to Iran for eight months. He returned just days before the Israeli invasion of Lebanon on June 6, 1982. Speaking to an American reporter in 1982, Abdullah Ali declined, “for political reasons,” to specify what he did in Lebanon and Iran before the 1982 Lebanon war. Generally, he stated, “when advice is needed I give it. When it’s not, I’m a sniper.” By that time, he claimed to have killed at least nine Israelis.
⁶
Years later, he claimed he stopped counting the number of people he had killed when the number reached 173.
⁷

Over time, Abdullah Ali appears to have moved along the spectrum of Shi’a militancy in Lebanon from Amal to Hezbollah. According to former State Department intelligence officer Louis Mizell, Abdullah Ali appears to have trained Amal and Hezbollah operatives while in Lebanon, including female recruits.
⁸
By the time he left Lebanon, he had also served as bodyguard for Fadlallah.
⁹
Perhaps most interesting, however, is his role in the October 1994 kidnapping of Tod Robberson, an American journalist in Beirut.

Working for the Beirut
Daily Star
, Robberson took particular interest in the February 11, 1984, kidnappings of American professor Frank Regier and Frenchman Christian Joubert, one of whom was Robberson’s neighbor. Hezbollah kidnapped the two Westerners during the trial of the Kuwait 17 operatives charged with carrying out acts of terrorism in Kuwait. While most of the defendants were Iraqis, also on trial were Imad Mughniyeh’s brother-in-law Mustapha Badreddine and the cousin of Hussein al-Musawi.
¹⁰

About a month after the kidnappings, Robberson heard that Amal had rescued the two captives from Hezbollah. The kidnappers were caught by surprise peeling potatoes for their next meal, and the captives were found chained to a wall. Robberson smelled a story—Westerners held by one extremist Shi’a group and rescued by another—and began interviewing people in the Beirut southern suburb where Regier and Joubert had been held. What he found astounded him: The Amal raid on the Hezbollah safe house was directed by an American who instructed the Amal militiamen how to surround the house and led the operation. Robberson probed his Amal and US embassy contacts, seeking more information about this American Amal militia commander. By the time he got back to his office, the death threats had already arrived, prompting his publisher to press him to stop asking questions about the raid. “I dropped it for a while,” Robberson later recalled; “the warning was I’d get myself killed, not just in trouble. But people kept giving me small pieces of information.”
¹¹

It took the journalist some time to identify the American as Isa Abdullah Ali. According to information the US embassy provided him, the American was David Belfield (Dawud Salahuddin), the man wanted for the Bethesda assassination of Ali
Akbar Tabatabai. That assessment proved to be wrong, as Robberson found out firsthand not long after he left the
Daily Star
for Reuters’s Beirut bureau. Shortly after the Beirut embassy bombing, Reuters asked Robberson to travel to the Bekaa Valley, where a fellow Reuters journalist, the Briton Jonathan Wright, had just been kidnapped, to pass out fliers seeking his release. (Wright escaped from his captors after a couple of weeks.)
¹²
Driving back to Beirut through the Shuf Mountains and Beirut’s southern suburbs at nightfall, Robberson and his Lebanese driver came to a checkpoint unlike the many others they had encountered before. Usually Robberson would joke with the Amal militants manning the checkpoints, but this person was eerily serious. “There was no joking with this guy,” Robberson recalled. “After we were waved through, my driver, clearly nervous, says, ‘Do you know who that was? It was the American, Isa.’”
¹³

This chance meeting rekindled Robberson’s interest in Abdullah Ali. With his editor’s blessing and admonition to be careful, Robberson resumed his investigation. He talked with two Amal officials, and while neither would speak about Abdullah Ali, they both warned him to stay away from the story. Still, “the story seemed too sensational to set aside,” Robberson later wrote.
¹⁴

A month later—just days after the US embassy in Beirut was bombed a second time within eleven months—Robberson was riding his motorcycle home from work through West Beirut shortly after midnight when a car full of gunmen tried to ram into him. “Terrified, I tried every possible Steve McQueen maneuver,” he recalled, “but I couldn’t shake them. When I suddenly slammed on the brakes, hoping to evade them, they pulled up right beside me, guns drawn.” One gunman drove off on Robberson’s motorcycle, while another shoved an AK-47 in his back and forced him into the car.
¹⁵

A few minutes later, the car pulled up at an Amal checkpoint, where militiamen asked the driver why he had a frightened American in the back of his car. “We are Hezbollah,” the driver responded. The car was waved through the checkpoint. “I remember thinking that their claiming to be Hezbollah was itself almost a threat,” Robberson later reflected. A few minutes later, Robberson’s captors stopped at a field and told him to walk to a wall at one end. “I was convinced he was going to shoot me, firing-squad style.” But he didn’t. His kidnappers drove away, leaving him there. About a week later someone delivered his wallet to the Reuters office, as if to make clear the kidnapping was no random motorcycle robbery.
¹⁶

In 1989, Robberson tracked down Isa Abdullah Ali, not in Beirut but in Washington, D.C. In 1986, Abdullah Ali returned to Washington, D.C., after being targeted by a would-be assassin on a busy Beirut street. In the nation’s capital he worked as a groundskeeper at Howard University and as a security guard at a bar.
¹⁷

In a series of interviews in Robberson’s living room, Abdullah Ali first denied any knowledge of the journalist’s kidnapping, but one day toward the end of a long session, Robberson turned off his tape recorder and Abdullah stood up. “I have something to tell you,” he said. “I knew about your kidnapping all along. I told them to do it.” He dropped his head, apologized, and asked Robberson, “Are you mad at me?”
¹⁸

Abdullah Ali recalled to Robberson that Hezbollah had contacted him to say the organization had heard Robberson was asking questions about him. In a sign of Abdullah Ali’s relative importance to the group, they asked him what he wanted them to do about it.
¹⁹
It is not clear if Abdullah Ali was already serving as Fadlallah’s bodyguard at this point, though such a role might explain Hezbollah’s particular interest in his safety. He told the Hezbollah muscle to scare Robberson, which they did.

In summer 1995, Abdullah Ali left Washington, D.C., to fight in Bosnia. Years later, his Bosnian wife would recall that she and others were given training in “military stuff” by “some people from Iran.”
²⁰
In fact, Hezbollah operatives were also involved in training Bosnian fighters, according to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Appearing on an Arabic-language television news program (a copy of which was found in the home of a Hezbollah operative in North Carolina several years later), Nasrallah was asked if any Hezbollah fighters had defended Muslims in the former Yugoslavia. “A group went in the past,” Nasrallah replied, “and had a martyr among them. Their main role was training and not participation.”
²¹

In February 1996, Secretary of Defense William Perry publicly pegged Abdullah Ali (Holt) as “a known American terrorist.”
²²
Perry told CNN that Holt “has been identified with terrorist groups in the past” and was wanted for questioning in the United States. “Therefore, we take his possible presence in [Bosnia] very seriously. We have alerted troops to look out specifically for him.” The fear, a Pentagon spokesman added, was that Abdullah Ali, who “is viewed as a terrorist threat,” could infiltrate an American base in Bosnia.
²³

In fact, Abdullah Ali settled down in Bosnia, where he still lives today with his wife and children. He reportedly travels back to the United States periodically, without incident, and after turning himself in to US authorities, was immediately released for reasons unknown.
²⁴
Following the September 11, 2001, attacks, Robberson returned to Lebanon and interviewed a Hezbollah leader, who was impressed by his acquaintance with Abdullah Ali, but when told the story of Robberson’s abduction, insisted it was not Hezbollah who kidnapped him. Robberson was not convinced.
²⁵

In 1989, around when Robberson tracked down Isa Abdullah Ali in Washington, D.C., Bassam Makki was caught plotting to bomb Israeli targets in Germany. After serving time in a German jail, he was deported to Syria in 1990. Members of Makki’s family remained active Hezbollah operatives, including some who resided in New York City. By 1994, the FBI would report that New York Hezbollah cell members were taking directives from the group’s Beirut leadership, exhibiting security-conscious behaviors, and, at the instruction of Hezbollah leaders, increasing counterintelligence efforts aimed at identifying Lebanese nationals within the community who may be providing information to law enforcement.
²⁶

The FBI warned of an unstated number of actual Hezbollah members with “paramilitary training, including explosives and firearms training.” According to the
FBI, members “initiated a ‘neighborhood watch program’ in order to alert cell members of an FBI presence.” In another case, a Hezbollah cell in New York was instructed to divide into teams as a security precaution. “Teams were not to discuss Hezbollah matters outside of their team,” the FBI reported. “Secret communications could no longer be carried by courier, and letters could not contain details such as the names of members.” The FBI’s bottom line was sobering: While Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon would be “reluctant to jeopardize the relatively safe environment its members enjoy in the United States by committing a terrorist act within the U.S. borders,” in the event it decided to do so “Hezbollah has the infrastructure present to support or carry out a terrorist act.”
²⁷
As for Bassam Makki, he next resurfaced on the radar of counterterrorism officials in 1998, first in Paraguay.