It was 1983, and Mossad agent Eliezer Tsafrir stood on the rooftop of a Beirut building observing Imad Mughniyeh's handiwork: two rising mushrooms of smoke and wailing ambulances racing to collapsed buildings where nearly 300 US and French troops had just been killed.
Tsafrir, then Beirut station chief for the Israeli spy agency, was in a unique position to observe the rise of the Lebanese terror mastermind. In an interview, Tsafrir offered an insider's take on Mughniyeh's mysterious assassination last week.
Mughniyeh's organization, Hezbollah, and its Iranian backers quickly blamed Israel for the explosion that ripped through his Pajero SUV in the Syrian capital. Israel issued an official denial, though some military officials' subsequent denials were less emphatic.
Now 74, a grandfather in sneakers and a sweat shirt, Tsafrir retired in 1992 after an intelligence career that included stints heading Mossad operations in Kurdistan and Tehran. His memoirs have been published in Hebrew, Kurdish and Farsi. At his small apartment in a leafy Tel Aviv suburb, decorated with photos and other mementos from his years of service, Tsafrir looked back on Mughniyeh and his violent demise.
The string of attacks attributed to Mughniyeh in the past quarter century includes blowing up US and French buildings in Lebanon, airplane hijackings, attacks on Israel's embassy and a Jewish community center in Argentina and other attacks in Europe and the Arab world. He had been in hiding for years and reportedly had undergone plastic surgery.
The Mossad's agents in Beirut became aware of the young Mughniyeh in the early 1980s, after Israel invaded Lebanon to evict Palestinian militants who had taken over swaths of the country, Tsafrir said. The Mossad was active alongside the military, and Tsafrir was in close contact with Lebanese Christian leaders allied with Israel.
Mughniyeh, a Shiite Muslim from south Lebanon, had first agreed to fight with Yasser Arafat's Palestinian forces and then became one of the founders of a small pro-Iranian faction of Shiites.
"We started hearing his name at that time," he said.
That group would eventually morph into the formidable Hezbollah organization, and Mughniyeh would become the group's operations officer and one of the world's most wanted terrorists.
For Tsafrir, Mughniyeh's attacks had a personal aspect: His brother, an Israeli military officer, barely survived a 1983 car bomb attack on the Israeli army's headquarters in the Lebanese city of Tyre, and his son, commander of a tank company, was only steps away from another Mughniyeh-planned car bomb targeting an Israeli convoy in south Lebanon four years later.
The Israeli agents in Lebanon were shocked by Mughniyeh's tactics, Tsafrir said. Suicide bombing, unknown at the time, would later be picked up by Palestinian militants in the 1990s, then elsewhere in the Islamic world before reaching a horrifying climax with al-Qaeda's Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the US.
"We asked ourselves, `How can this be?' We concluded that the Shiites, as an extreme sect, were more likely to do things of this kind," he said. We asked ourselves if it was possible the Palestinians would follow their lead, but thought there was no chance because the Palestinians were Sunnis and more moderate. We were wrong."
In 1986, Ron Arad, an Israeli air force navigator, was shot down over Lebanon and taken captive by Shiite militants. Arad changed hands several times before disappearing without a trace, and "at each stage the name Mughniyeh popped up again," Tsafrir said. Arad's whereabouts remain a mystery today.
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