The CIA and Israeli spy agency Mossad were behind an elaborate plot to kill then-Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh in a 2008 car bomb attack in Syria, the Washington Post reported on Friday.
Citing former intelligence officials, the newspaper reported that US and Israeli spy agencies worked together to target Mughniyeh on Feb. 12, 2008, as he left a restaurant in the Syrian capital, Damascus.
He was killed instantly by a bomb planted in a spare tire on the back of a parked car, which spread shrapnel in a tight radius, the Post said.
The bomb, built by the US and tested in North Carolina, was triggered remotely by Mossad agents in Tel Aviv who were in communication with US CIA operatives on the ground in Damascus, the report added.
“The way it was set up, the US could object and call it off, but it could not execute,” a former US intelligence official told the newspaper.
A senior Hezbollah commander, Mughniyeh was suspected of masterminding the abduction of several Western hostages in Lebanon in the 1980s and of the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Argentina that killed 29 people.
He was also linked to the bombing of the US marine barracks at Beirut airport in 1983, in which 241 US servicemen died, and the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in 1985, in which a US navy diver was killed.
The CIA declined to comment to the Post about the report.
According the newspaper, the authority to kill would have required a presidential finding by then-US President George W. Bush.
Several senior US officials, including the attorney general, the director of national intelligence and the national security adviser, would have had to sign off on the order, it added.
The former officials who spoke to the newspaper said that Mughniyeh was directly involved in arming and training Shiite militias in Iraq who were targeting US forces, and though it occurred in a nation where the US was not at war, his assassination could be seen as an act of self-defense.
“They were carrying out suicide bombings and IED attacks,” one former official told the Post, referring to alleged Hezbollah operations in Iraq.
They added that getting approval from the most senior echelons of the US government to carry out the attack against Mughniyeh was a “rigorous and tedious” process, and it had to be proven that Mughniyeh was a true menace.
“What we had to show was he was a continuing threat to Americans,” the official told the Post. “The decision was we had to have absolute confirmation that it was self-defense.”
According to the newspaper, US intelligence officials had been discussing possible ways to target the Hezbollah commander for years, and senior US Joint Special Operations Command agents held a secret meeting with the head of Israel’s military intelligence service in 2002.
“When we said we would be willing to explore opportunities to target him, they practically fell out of their chairs,” a former US official told the Post.
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