Hezbollah (15 page)

Among the new militants who boarded the plane in Beirut was the group leader—likely Mughniyeh—who went by the alias Jihad. He spoke fluent English and was clearly more educated than the original hijackers. In the morning Jihad entered the cockpit with a young passenger. “We want to play a little game here,” he told the remaining crew. “We need to convince the airport to bring us fuel.” On cue, the young passenger screamed into the microphone as if he was being beaten, but his performance was lackluster. The first officer tried next, and was more convincing. As he screamed Jihad politely asked the captain to open the window and quickly squeezed off three or four rounds from his chrome-plated, pearl-handled pistol. Within minutes the fuel truck arrived, but it was driven by the same employee as in the last Algiers episode and again he wanted a credit card. The crew refused this time, but Jihad’s earlier gunshots were apparently enough to convince the driver to start pumping fuel. Unsure of where they wanted to fly next, the hijackers first chose Aden, Yemen, but the distance would be too far without a stop. After considering Iran, they settled on returning a third time to Beirut.
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Landing in Beirut, the crew faked engine failures and convinced the hijackers the plane could fly no more. For the next few hours the hijackers talked perpetually with people in the control tower. A sick passenger was released at one point, and later on several more armed militants boarded. In the middle of the night more militants arrived and woke up all the passengers. Within a half hour everyone was off the plane except the pilot, first officer, and flight engineer. Over the next sixteen days dozens of Shi’a militants would come and go while the crew remained on board. The passengers were held in locations around Beirut.
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Two crises now unfolded, one in the plane and a second in safe houses around Beirut, both in the context of the larger hostage crisis involving hostages taken before the 847 hijacking. The terrorists demanded that Amal leader Nabih Berri negotiate on their behalf, which he ultimately agreed to do. Amal had put its forces on combat alert the previous day and sealed the airport in response to the arrival of both an aircraft carrier, the USS
Nimitz
, and a guided-missile destroyer, the USS
Kidd
, off the coast of Lebanon. Unconfirmed reports claimed further that American Delta Force commandos had been sent to the Middle East. And several days later, three warships carrying 1,800 US Marines arrived off the Lebanese coast.
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Back in the United States, the hijacking crisis was covered on live television and captivated both the American public and government officials. A dedicated element within the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center worked on the issue, focusing on efforts to penetrate Hezbollah. In at least one instance, the FBI tried to help uncover the locations of the TWA flight 847 and other hostages in Beirut by tapping existing investigations of Hezbollah supporters in the United States but was thwarted by Washington bureaucracy.
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After more than two weeks of captivity, the remaining thirty-nine hostages were freed on June 29 and sent to Damascus. Israel gradually released Shi’a prisoners, though it claimed their release was in no way connected to the release of the TWA hostages. On November 14, 1985, the United States indicted Ali Atwa, Mohammad Hamadi, Hassan Izz al-Din, and Imad Mughniyeh on fifteen counts, including conspiracy to commit aircraft piracy, hostage taking, and murder.
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While the three escaped into the slums of Beirut after the hijacking, their names would reappear in relation to Hezbollah’s campaign of international terror. Izz al-Din was later linked to the 1988 hijacking of Kuwait Air flight 422 from Bangkok, and Hamadi was arrested in West Germany in 1987 after attempting to carry liquid explosives onto a plane departing from Frankfurt.
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The first recorded operation carried out by Hezbollah on European soil occurred on November 13, 1983, when bombs exploded at a train station and aboard the express train from Paris to Marseilles, attacks for which Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility. Almost a year later to the day, Swiss police arrested Lebanese national Hussein Hanih Atat at the Zurich airport when several pounds of explosives were discovered in a cloth belt around his waist and arming devices were later found in his luggage. An accomplice escaped detection, though police later discovered his luggage, which contained an additional five pounds of explosives.
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Atat was attempting to board a plane to Rome at the time of his arrest; further interrogation revealed the presence of an Islamic Jihad cell in the seaside resort town of Ladispoli, twenty-four miles north of Rome.
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Almost two weeks later, Italian police arrested the cell of seven Lebanese students, which was then planning an attack against the US embassy in Rome. A search of the members’ apartment revealed a map of the embassy, with arrows marking guard and television camera positions,
and pro-Iranian and Islamic Jihad literature. Pillars and concrete barriers constructed at the embassy in the wake of the Beirut marine barracks as protection against truck bombings and the time of the marine guards’ shift changes were also documented. A caller claiming to represent Islamic Jihad first denied participation in the cell’s activities, but a second asserted Islamic Jihad’s role, stating, “It seems the Italian government has started following the ways of American imperialism and desperately defending its devilish role.”
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The arrests in Rome occurred just four days after a meeting in Tehran between the al-Dawa al-Islamiyya and Islamic Amal parties and Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri—a key regime figure tasked with spreading the Islamic Revolution—where a decision was made to launch a wave of “armed resistance” against Saddam Hussein’s allies in the Gulf and to begin an anti-American campaign in Western Europe.
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The group wasted no time in jump-starting its European campaign. On April 12, 1985, a bomb ripped through the El Descanso restaurant in Torrejon, Spain, a favorite spot of Americans stationed at a nearby air base. The attack killed eighteen Spaniards and wounded eighty-two, including fifteen Americans. Several groups claimed responsibility, including the Basque separatist groups Basque Homeland and Liberty (ETA) and First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance (GRAPO); however, the most credible claim came from Islamic Jihad.
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Despite the attack in Spain, few were prepared for the plethora of events that would follow two months later.

Believing that his role in the TWA hijacking was unknown to Western intelligence, and convinced of the secrecy of his movements, Mughniyeh was said to have traveled to Paris in November 1985, just five months after the TWA hijacking. Lebanese security officials became aware of Mughniyeh’s travel through communication intercepts and informed US authorities. US officials implored French police to arrest the Hezbollah leader. Instead, French agents reportedly interrogated him several times over a six-day period before releasing him, apparently in return for the release of a French hostage in Lebanon.
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In July 1985 in Copenhagen, Hezbollah planted bombs at the office of the US-based Northwest Orient Airlines and at Scandinavia’s oldest synagogue. The bombs injured twenty-two people, including Americans, and damaged a Jewish home for the elderly. In a telephone call to a news agency in Beirut, an anonymous caller claimed the Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO) had carried out the attacks to avenge an Israeli attack in Lebanon. No longer would Hezbollah limit its operations to the Middle East, the caller warned; they would now “be aimed at every Zionist, American or reactionary establishment in various parts of the world.”
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Next on Hezbollah’s hit list was France. Between December 1985 and September 1986, Hezbollah operatives bombed fifteen targets in Paris. The first bombing took place December 7, 1985, when explosives were placed at both Galerie Lafayette and Galerie Printemps, injuring forty-three people.
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At the time, despite claims of responsibility by Islamic Jihad and the Palestine Liberation Front, French authorities did not consider Middle Eastern terrorists prime suspects because of the bombs’ rudimentary nature.
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Struggling continuously against the radical leftist
Action Directe network, French authorities assumed the unsophisticated bombs pointed to domestic actors. But the focus would soon shift to Lebanon.

On February 3, a bomb went off in a shopping gallery on the Champs Elysées, injuring eight people; a second bomb was later found and defused at the Eiffel Tower. A group calling itself the Committee of Solidarity with the Arab and Middle East Political Prisoners (CSPPA) claimed responsibility and demanded the release of several Lebanese terrorists held in France, including Anis Naccache, a convert to Islam who was a close friend of Ahmad Khomeini, Ayatollah Khomeini’s son, and Mohsen Rafiqdust, the IRGC commander in Lebanon. Most important, Naccache had served in Fatah’s Force 17 and was said to be a good friend of Imad Mughniyeh. After Mughniyeh’s death in 2008, Naccache spoke glowingly of the Hezbollah leader to the Associated Press, calling him the “top architect” of the 2006 war with Israel.
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The deadliest of the fifteen Paris bombings occurred September 17, 1986, in front of Tati, a clothing store. Seven were killed and more than sixty were wounded, with the CSPPA again claiming responsibility.
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The mastermind of this and the other bombings, most of which employed the same type of C4 explosive used in the 1983 bombing of the French embassy in Kuwait, was identified as a Tunisian named Fouad Ali Salah. According to the Associated Press, “French authorities said the terrorist network he led was controlled by Hezbollah.” Additionally intelligence officials concluded that “Iran ordered the attacks through Hezbollah to curb French support for Baghdad in the Iran-Iraq war.”
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Still further investigation revealed that while Salah organized the network and selected targets, Hezbollah dispatched an explosives expert from Beirut to execute the attacks on the orders of senior Hezbollah leader Abdelhadi Hamadi.
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Confirming Hezbollah’s role in the attacks, Hussein Ali Mohammed Hariri, who would hijack an Air Afrique flight in 1987 (see
chapter 9
), would later acknowledge during his interrogation that “all the organizations that you know in France under various names are all dependent on Hezbollah. The actions are decided by the board of operations of Hezbollah in collaboration with the secret services of the Party of God.”
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As Salah’s wave of terror continued throughout 1986, it was unclear if French investigators would ever identify the responsible party. Fear gripped Paris as bomb after bomb exploded and the investigation saw little progress. Only a string of lucky breaks revealed the full extent of the cell’s operations to French police. In January 1987, Mohammad Ali Hamadi of TWA flight 847 was arrested at the Frankfurt airport, where he was found carrying methyl nitrate, an extremely potent liquid explosive, and an address book with the name of a Tunisian later discovered to be Salah. Another name found in Hamadi’s address book was that of Hussein Mazbou, one of Salah’s Lebanese bomb makers.
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Hamadi was reportedly en route to France to resupply Salah’s group with the more potent methyl nitrate for use in another wave of more deadly attacks. Further, Hamadi’s group in Germany was reportedly tasked with providing Hezbollah’s European cells with both arms and drugs supplied by a network run by one of Mohammad Hamadi’s brothers in Lebanon.
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Then, in February 1987, a Tunisian approached French police in the Loire Valley and indicated that he had information regarding the bombings. He was assigned the cover name Lofti and agreed to function as a mole, feeding information to French intelligence.
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Lofti had previously studied in Qom, Iran, before traveling to France as an agent for the Iranian intelligence services and reportedly earned $30,000 a year from the Iranian government to convert fellow North Africans in France to Shi’ism.
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Lofti agreed to let French intelligence wiretap his conversations, which led them to the cell. According to a French intelligence report, the details of which were published in the French daily
Libération
, top Iranian officials were responsible for the wave of bombings. The report went further still, claiming that Ayatollah Khomeini himself ordered the bombings through a fatwa.
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For his cooperation with the French government, Lofti was paid about $178,000 and later traveled to the United States.
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On March 21, 1987, seven other suspects were arrested along with Salah, including five Tunisians and two Lebanese with French citizenship, one of whom was Salah’s wife. During the raid, French police seized two automatic pistols, ammunition, and twenty-six pints of methyl nitrate contained in bottles of arrack liquor. Six and a half kilograms of heroin were also found in the cache, allegedly to be used to finance the network. After the arrests Tunisia broke diplomatic relations with Tehran, accusing Iran of recruiting Tunisians to carry out terrorist acts, and claimed that the six Tunisians were members of Hezbollah’s IJO. Salah was charged by a special antiterrorist court in France in November 1987 and found guilty in 1992 of murder, attempted murder, and conspiracy and sentenced to life in prison.
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Salah’s trial was memorable, among other things, for his courtroom theatrics. Following one outburst, he loudly proclaimed, “My name is Death to the West” and “War, holy war!”
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Thereafter, he was ejected from the court. In another statement Salah described his motivation for the attack. “I am a fighter advocating for the Islamic cause,” he declared. “The stronghold of Islamism is Iran, and our enemies are all those countries who fight against Iran. By helping Iraq against Iran, your country, France, becomes our enemy…. Our main goal is to make France aware of what it is doing to us through violence.”
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