Hezbollah (16 page)

Mohammad Mouhajer, one of the Lebanese men arrested in connection with the bombings, was the nephew of Hezbollah leader Sheikh Ibrahim al-Amin.
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As a cover for his activities Mouhajer operated an Islamic bookstore in Paris. He, along with Salah, also frequented an Islamic cultural center named Ahl al-Beit, which was operated by Sheikh Fadlallah’s brother Mohammad Bakir. According to Hezbollah expert Magnus Ranstorp, Mouhajer “occupied a senior position as coordinator of the French pro-Iranian network and Hizb’allah in Lebanon.” Mouhajer’s release in 1988 coincided with the release of several French hostages, leading some to conclude that French law enforcement had averted normal legal proceedings against him in order to minimize the risk of further terrorism in France and obtain the release of French nationals held by Hezbollah.
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Salah’s cell in France received its marching orders from both Hezbollah Special Security Apparatus chief Abdelhadi Hamadi and Wahid Gordji, a translator and unofficial second-in-command at the Iranian embassy in Paris. Gordji, who had
been responsible for obtaining Salah’s scholarship to study at Qom, served as Tehran’s primary contact with the Paris cell.
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In June 1987, Paris accused Iran of “instigating the 1986 bombing campaign and of giving support to a cell of North African terrorists,” and the French investigative team demanded that Gordji submit to questioning related to the bombings.
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His refusal to answer the summons and subsequent confinement to the Iranian embassy in Paris triggered a diplomatic row. After French police cordoned off the Iranian embassy to prevent Gordji from leaving the country, Tehran responded by blockading the French embassy in the Iranian capital. On July 18, France officially severed ties with Iran, leading to a warning from a French lawyer for the Iranian government that unruly crowds could storm France’s embassy and seize staff. Hezbollah’s IJO also issued a communiqué threatening to immediately execute two French hostages, Marcel Fontaine and Marcel Carton, though the two were eventually released in 1988. The dispute ended with the release of Gordji, who returned to Iran, in exchange for the release of the French consul Paul Torri.
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The 1986 bombing campaign resulted from a convergence of interests between Hezbollah and Iran. Hezbollah sought the release of its imprisoned members, while Iran desired to make France pay for its support of Iraq and other anti-Iranian policies.
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Despite Salah’s arrest and the destruction of his network, the terror campaign of 1986 accomplished many of its goals. In July of 1986, Masoud Radjavi, leader of the Iranian opposition movement Mujahedin-e Khalq (People’s Mujahedin of Iran, or MEK) also known as the National Council of Iranian Resistance, was expelled from Paris along with his organization and forced to transfer its headquarters to Iraq. In 1988, France also agreed to repay $300 million of the $1 billion loan from Iran to the French nuclear consortium Eurodiff, a deal dating from before the Islamic Revolution aimed at financing the construction of a nuclear plant.
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In return for these goodwill gestures, overt attacks against French targets and the kidnapping of French nationals in Lebanon ceased. However, Europe overall remained an arena for Hezbollah’s attacks against Israeli, Jewish, and American targets.

It would not be long before Mohammad Hamadi followed up on the hijacking of TWA flight 847 with further European attacks. The Hamadi clan had long been part of the core of Hezbollah—there at its founding and central to its IJO. A July 1987 CIA report tied “Hizballah’s success in the Bekaa” to Shi’a clans in the valley, in particular “the Musawi, Tufayli, and Hamadi clans.”
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The agency had no mere parochial interest in the Hamadi clan—the family’s members were popping up in a series of international Hezbollah plots.

Around the time of Mohammad Hamadi’s 1987 arrest at the Frankfurt airport, another Hezbollah operative was arrested in Italy, indicating the group was “apparently preparing the logistic grounds for future terrorist attacks,” according to the CIA.
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Meanwhile, Abbas Hamadi, who returned to Lebanon after being briefly detained along with his brother, helped kidnap two West German businessmen in
an attempt to pressure the West German government to release his younger brother, Mohammad. The eldest Hamadi brother, Abdel, was chief of security for Hezbollah in the Beirut suburbs and the de facto leader of an operational network that went by the name “Freedom Fighters” and which claimed responsibility for three kidnappings in West Beirut following Mohammad Hamadi’s arrest in Germany.
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When these actions failed to secure Mohammad’s release, Abbas took the fight to Germany, but—just twelve days after his initial release—he was arrested at the Frankfurt airport again.
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Mohammad might have been the youngest Hamadi brother, but his star burned brightest given his role in the TWA flight 847 hijacking. So when Mohammad was caught in Frankfurt, the retribution was high: not just the kidnapping of two Germans in Lebanon but also that of two Swedish journalists (thought to be West Germans) on February 11, 1987, in Beirut. Once the kidnappers realized they had grabbed Swedes, not Germans, the captives were promptly released. These kidnappings closely followed the January 27 capture of another West German hostage, also taken in an effort to secure the Hamadis’ release. Two years later, Hezbollah operatives kidnapped two German charity workers in southern Lebanon, the day before Mohammad Hamadi was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in Germany in May 1989.
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The Hezbollah hijacking of a flight in 1987, led by Hussein Ali Mohammad Hariri, was also aimed at securing the release of detained Hezbollah operatives, chief among them the Hamadi brothers (see
chapter 9
).

Hezbollah saw Europe in general and Germany in particular as a permissive operating environment, however, and had bigger plans than just kidnapping Germans in Lebanon. According to a US Senate report, Hezbollah leveraged the acumen and connections of sympathetic Lebanese businessmen in Europe to build a “web of import-export companies in Western Europe as part of its dormant network.” The purpose of this network: “to insert large quantities of explosive and related equipment into target countries.”
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The Hamadi brothers’ operational plans had been thwarted with Mohammad’s arrest and conviction, but other Hezbollah operatives were ready to pick up where the Hamadis had left off.

In 1989, Hezbollah operative Bassam Gharib Makki was apprehended in Germany, where he was planning to carry out a bombing attack. Makki was found in possession of preoperational intelligence about Israeli, Jewish, American, and other targets in Germany, and Arabic bomb-making instructions were discovered in his apartment in Darmstadt, in the southwest part of the country.
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Born on July 25, 1967, in Bint Jbeil, in southern Lebanon, Bassam Makki first arrived in Germany on December 2, 1985, and filed an asylum claim. However, after learning he could not attend university under asylum status, he flew back to Lebanon and later returned under the auspices of a church group. In April 1988, Makki received his residency permit and began studying physics at the Institute of Technology in Darmstadt, on a full scholarship from the Hariri Foundation.
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However,
Makki’s interest in higher education was merely a cover for his real mission in Germany, which was to case American, Israeli, and Jewish targets.
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On September 23, 1988, German authorities intercepted a package sent by Makki to his contact in Lebanon containing an atlas of the Rhine-Main area and thirteen color photographs of Israeli targets. It also contained an odd letter referring to various BMW cars that he claimed to have located, with a particular focus on the BMW 320 and 520 models. The Germans intercepted another package en route to Lebanon on May 31, 1989, which contained a list of twenty Mercedes cars and a statement from Makki that buying larger models such as the 450 and 480 would be difficult. If there were some “marks or checks,” he added, he would be willing to buy the cars.
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Investigators would make sense of the letters only later, when they found Makki’s codebooks and realized the references to cars were code for his operational planning.

When Bassam Makki was apprehended by German authorities on June 22, 1989, he was found in possession of a letter identifying all his targets.
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A search of his apartment revealed codebooks hidden in a suitcase and behind a picture frame as well as instructions on the use of explosives. The codebooks were simple but effective. For example, the sentence “I have found a car in good condition” indicated he had discovered a good bombing target. “BMW” referred to Israeli and Jewish targets, and “Mercedes” indicated an American target. The combination 320 and 520 BMW referred to the Israeli religious community at Reichensbachstrasse 27, while the numbers indicated that both injuries to persons and property damage could be achieved. For this reason, it was considered the best target. The references to the Mercedes 450 and 480 implied difficulty scouting out special buildings or people. And “marks or checks” referred to the weapons or explosives needed to make feasible an attack on the targets.
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During his trial Bassam claimed that he had been coerced into conducting reconnaissance by a man named Jozef, an Arab who appeared in his apartment in September 1988 and threatened his family unless Bassam complied with his demands. “Jozef,” also the name signed to the letters seized en route to Lebanon, was determined by the German court to be a fabrication.
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“For an undetermined time,” the court concluded, “he has had connections with similarly-minded persons or organizations in Beirut, Lebanon, who engage in or have an interest in preparing and executing bomb attacks against Israeli, Jewish, or American installations” in Germany.
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Makki was sentenced to two years in prison on December 22, 1989, and deported to Syria on July 22, 1990.
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This was hardly the end of his involvement with Hezbollah, however; Makki turned up again in South America several years later under incriminating circumstances (see
chapter 11
).

Immediately following the founding of the Islamic Republic, the Iranian leadership embarked on an assassination campaign targeting individuals deemed to be working against the regime’s interests. Between 1979 and 1994, the CIA reported, Iran
“murdered Iranian defectors and dissidents in West Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Turkey.”
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Overall, more than sixty individuals were targeted in assassination attempts.
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In many cases Hezbollah members functioned as the logistics experts or gunmen in these plots.

The first successful assassination of an Iranian dissident in Western Europe occurred in 1984. On February 7, Gen. Gholam Ali Oveissi and his brother were fatally shot on a Paris street by what French police described as “professional assassins.” Police claimed there were “two or three men involved and that one or two of them had fired a 9-millimeter pistol at the victims who were walking on Rue de Passy.”
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Oveissi, the former military governor of Tehran under the shah who was known as the Butcher of Tehran, distinguished himself by responding to protests with tanks. Just before his death, Oveissi claimed that he had assembled a small counterrevolutionary army to retake Iran. Hezbollah’s IJO and another group, the Revolutionary Organization for Liberation and Reform, claimed responsibility for the killings. The day after the attack, the Iranian government described the event as a “revolutionary execution.”
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Oveissi’s assassination ushered in a period of great danger for Iranian dissidents in Europe. On July 19, 1987, for example, Amir Parvis, a former Iranian cabinet member and the British chairman of the National Movement of the Iranian Resistance, suffered a broken leg, cuts, and burns when a car bomb exploded as he drove past the Royal Kensington Hotel in London. Several months later, on October 3, Ali Tavakoli and his son Nader, both Iranian monarchist exiles, were found shot in the head in their London apartment.
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Both attacks were claimed by a previously unknown group, the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, which according to a March 3, 1989, report by the
Times
of London, “is believe[d] to be closely linked to the Hezbollah extremists in south Beirut, but all its London-based members are Iranian.”
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A year later, on July 13, 1989, Dr. Abdolrahman Ghassemlou, secretary-general of the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI); Abdollah Ghaeri-Azar, the PDKI’s European representative; and Fazil Rassoul, an Iraqi Kurd serving as a mediator were assassinated in a Vienna apartment while meeting with a delegation from the Iranian government. Although forced underground after the 1979 revolution, Ghassemlou and the PDKI were informed after the Iran-Iraq War that the Iranian government was open to conducting talks. On December 30 and 31, 1988, Ghassemlou met with an Iranian delegation headed by Mohammad Jafari Sahraroudi, the head of the Kurdish Affairs Section of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence. The two met regularly until July 13, when a meeting was held that included Sahraroudi; governor of the Iranian province of Kurdistan Mostafa Ajoudi; an undercover Iranian agent, Amir Mansour Bozorgian; and the victims. At one point during the meeting, Rassoul and Ghassemlou proposed a break and suggested that the negotiations resume the next day. Soon after, gunshots were heard. In the shooting the three Kurds were killed and Sahraroudi was injured. Investigators found a blue baseball cap in Ghassemlou’s lap, the same call sign that was left at the scene of the murder of an Iranian pilot, Ahmad Moradi Talebi, in 1987 and the 1990 murder
of resistance leader Kazem Radjavi.
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Bozorgian was taken into custody; however, he was later released and fled the country, along with several other suspects.
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