The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (23 page)

As more Revolutionary Guardsmen arrived, they began making their way into the Shia slums of southern Beirut. They served as both social welfare agents and military advisers. They funded schools and organized basic services such as trash collection and sewage systems. The Iranians attended local mosques and after Friday prayers gave speeches extolling Ayatollah Khomeini and the natural ties between the Shia of Iran and Lebanon. The Iranian agents repeatedly linked the Israeli transgressions with Israel’s chief benefactor, the United States, arguing that the two worked in consort against both Muslims and the Iranian Revolution.

Many of the future leaders of the Iranian military earned their spurs as part of the initial vanguard of guardsmen in Lebanon. This included the future Iranian defense minister, Ahmad Vahidi, who served as a military adviser and later formed an intelligence unit that eventually morphed into the Revolutionary Guard’s elite clandestine paramilitary special forces unit, the Quds Force.

Iran established a formal chain of command for its operatives in Lebanon. Orders were relayed from the Iranian foreign minister in Tehran to the embassy in Syria, where Ambassador Mohtashemi would relay it by radio or courier to the Revolutionary Guards in the Bekaa. Iranian cargo jets regularly landed at the Damascus airport, off-loading pallets of arms and munitions that were trucked to Lebanon.

Iran’s embassy in Lebanon served as another link in the guards’ operations. One of the chargés d’affaires, Kamal Majid, had been one of the student instigators who took over the U.S. embassy in 1979. A lifelong Revolutionary Guard officer, he later served as the Iranian ambassador to Sudan, where he oversaw a similar paramilitary effort designed to expand Iran’s influence along the Red Sea.
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The military attaché, Colonel Ahmad Motevaselian, gave tactical direction to the early guard operations in Beirut. The Tehran native operated under diplomatic cover and served as a key conduit between the Shia community in West Beirut and the Revolutionary Guard at Baalbek. A popular, charismatic commander, he played an important role in cultivating disenchanted Lebanese Amal fighters.

The Israeli invasion divided the main Shia Amal militia, headed by
Nabih Berri. Members disagreed sharply over how much they should oppose or cooperate with the Israelis as well as over the role of Iran in the Shia organization. Berri rejected the Iranian overtures. He continued to see his movement as Lebanese and would not countenance taking directives from Tehran. But many of the young fighters embraced a more politically active Islam. Even if Israel had not invaded, these young devotees of Khomeini would likely have broken away from Berri, but Israel’s actions galvanized those calling for jihad and advocating the establishment of an Islamic state in Lebanon.
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The Revolutionary Guard helped sow this discontent by criticizing Amal’s military prowess and offering both training and equipment to improve Shia fighting abilities.
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These emerging cracks finally split Amal apart during a tense meeting one evening at Shamseddine’s house south of the airport. Nabih Berri had participated in an American-led effort to end the Israeli siege of West Beirut. He justified this decision as an effort to spare further injury to the Shia population that found itself caught in the crossfire between the Israelis and the PLO. When Berri arrived at Shamseddine’s home, a heated argument ensued over the future of the Amal movement. Young hotheads accused Berri of compromising the Shia cause by striking a bargain with the American and Israeli foe. At the end of the night, many young fighters walked away from Berri’s leadership. This included Sayeed Ali, who had been guarding Shamseddine’s house.

Disenchanted, Sayeed Ali moved back into his parents’ house in south Beirut and idled away in search of excitement. A friend of his, Mohammed Khodor, whose brother drove for a rising young cleric named Hassan Nasrallah, invited him over to his house along with about thirty other neighborhood friends. The Iranians had assigned Khodor to recruit and build a cell in his neighborhood. He told them about the Iranian plans and how they were going to spearhead the resistance against the Israeli occupiers. He explained Imam Khomeini’s teachings and stressed both the importance of Islam in one’s life and resistance to the beguiling Great Satan. While some rejected his pitch, the majority liked what they heard. This included Sayeed Ali. “It sounded interesting, and I was young and dumb,” he said later.

By 1984, American intelligence estimated that eight hundred Iranian guardsmen operated in Lebanon. Despite the numbers, Iran remained cautious about having the Revolutionary Guard engage in actually fighting, leaving that chore to their Lebanese allies. Instead, they brought Shia fighters
to their camps in the Bekaa Valley, where the Revolutionary Guard ran an organized boot camp at which they supervised the training curriculum. While Sheik Abdullah Barracks served as Iran’s headquarters, they established three other military training camps. There Lebanese were taught the basic skills of marksmanship and explosives. In subsequent courses, the soldiers received more sophisticated training on how to destroy enemy tanks.

The Revolutionary Guard displayed considerable flexibility to train the new recruits. With many of the recruits young students, the Iranians held the classes during breaks in the school schedule, and the Revolutionary Guard tried to accommodate by holding classes in Beirut for those who did not have enough time between classes to travel all the way to the Bekaa. Sayeed Ali attended a technical school where he was studying the unlikely discipline of interior decorating. He attended one of the camps about an hour away from Baalbek during his summer break.

Political and religious lessons broke up the martial regime. Through Arabic translators, Iranian speakers extolled Khomeini or lectured on religious subjects. Hassan Nasrallah frequently came as a guest lecturer, giving rousing talks touting the righteousness of their struggle. Sayeed Ali became friends with Nasrallah and went to his house frequently. “He was very charismatic and good at telling jokes; he was always smiling and laughing,” Sayeed Ali recalled.

In addition to Sayeed Ali, Iran recruited another more important fallen Nabih Berri supporter, a Lebanese chemistry teacher turned revolutionary named Hussein al-Musawi. After the cantankerous meeting at Shamseddine’s home, al-Musawi had formed his own breakaway group called Islamic Amal. Young and idealistic like Sayeed Ali, al-Musawi was an ardent supporter of the Ayatollah Khomeini, publicly proclaiming, “We are the children of Iran.” After breaking with Berri, al-Musawi fled to his village in the Bekaa Valley to establish his coterie. According to retired CIA officer Robert Baer, al-Musawi spearheaded the takeover of the Sheik Abdullah Barracks, inviting the guards to use it as their base.
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Acceptance of Iran in Lebanon received a boost when the prominent cleric Ayatollah Sheik Sayed Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah backed the Revolutionary Guard’s mission. A scholar of considerable renown and a prolific writer on Islam, he settled in Beirut’s southern suburbs, where he brought together under his control a number of humanitarian organizations that provided basic services to the Shia slums. His power increased when the Iraqi
government expelled dozens of Lebanese theology students in a crackdown on Shia radicalism. Many of these flocked to Fadlallah and served as his core supporters.
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Fadlallah welcomed the Iranian Revolution and openly endorsed Ayatollah Khomeini’s Shia activism. “It empowered the Shia and gave strength to them,” he said. After the Israeli invasion, Fadlallah was a principal motivator for the Shia resistance, and his rhetorical jabs at the U.S. government frequently carried the same vitriol as Khomeini’s.

After Israel’s invasion, an Iranian delegation came to Fadlallah’s compound in south Beirut to meet with the ayatollah. The Iranians wanted him to lead their Lebanese operations. Many of Iran’s early supporters prayed in his mosque and had been inspired by him.
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But Sheik Fadlallah refused. His religious training stemmed from Najaf, not Qom. While he embraced Khomeini’s view of political Islam, he had no intention of being subservient to Iran. They were Arabs, not Persians, and the Lebanese struggle should be run by Lebanese, he believed.
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Sheik Fadlallah’s intransigence in opposing Iranian leadership of the Shia resistance caused considerable tension with the Revolutionary Guard. He carried too much gravitas to purge, so the Iranians maintained an uneasy association with him. But American intelligence failed to notice these important distinctions and divides. For years cables from the embassy in Beirut continued to refer to Fadlallah as “Hezbollah’s spiritual adviser,” a characterization that both Hezbollah and Fadlallah emphatically denied.
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The Iranian-backed resistance to Israel and the United States began spastically. Factions launched uncoordinated and feeble attacks against the Israeli army around Beirut and in south Lebanon. “We fired a lot of ammunition and many men were killed or wounded without achieving very much,” Sayeed Ali remarked about the early operations.

But they struck their first major blow against the Israelis on November 11, 1982. At seven in the morning, seventeen-year-old Ahmed Qassir, a native of the small village of Deir Qanun al-Nahr just ten miles from the Lebanese city of Tyre, plowed his car into a seven-story building that served as a major headquarters for the Israeli army in southern Lebanon. Qassir had lost several family members during a 1978 Israeli incursion into southern Lebanon and he wanted revenge. The car bomb, packed with explosives and cylindrical gas canisters, leveled the building. It blew one Israeli soldier out of the fifth floor; miraculously, a chair and a refrigerator landed around his head and formed a
protective cocoon that saved him from the tons of steel and concrete that descended on top of him.
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Seventy-five other Israeli soldiers were not so fortunate, including many of Israel’s elite internal security force, Shin Beit, as well as fourteen Arabs who were being interrogated. Israel declared a day of mourning for those killed, and the attack remains one of the worst suicide attacks the country ever suffered.
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Israel remained oblivious to this new force their invasion had unleashed. In the chaos of Lebanon, their early attacks, as one Hezbollah founder recalled, were like “a scuffle of camels in the desert.”
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An unknown group, Armed Struggle Organization, claimed responsibility for the attack.
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Hezbollah later claimed the bombing in Tyre as its first “martyrdom” operation. To avoid retribution by Israel against the driver’s family, the group refrained from announcing the details until 1985, and then only after Israelis had pulled back from Tyre. That same year, Iranian supporters erected a memorial in the bomber’s village, and the family personally received from Ayatollah Khomeini a portrait of the imam embossed with the emblem of the Islamic Republic.
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This also marked the first use of what would be the hallmark of Hezbollah military success: the suicide bomber. Car bombs were commonplace in Lebanon during the civil war. But the pro-Iranian Shia put a unique spin on this Lebanese tradition by putting a human behind the wheel. The unique tenets of this branch of Islam emphasized martyrdom, and Iran found no shortage of drivers willing to exchange their lives for the cause and eternal glory. While Israel and the United States condemned these as acts of terrorism, in truth the attacks were not terrorism. The founders of Hezbollah had devised the poor man’s smart bomb and aimed it at their opponents’ ill-prepared military. “If Hezbollah had GPS-guided bombs dropped from thirty thousand feet, they would not need martyrs,” said one Lebanese with ties to the organization.

Initially, the pro-Iranian Shia militias remained a fractured movement. “Everyone wanted to be in charge,” Sayeed Ali recalled. Iran supported multiple groups, including Hussein al-Musawi’s Islamic Amal, as well as other Lebanese splinter groups. A 1984 American intelligence report provided to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger listed ten different Iranian-backed Lebanese militias. This included the Dawa Party of Lebanon, a counterpart to the Iranian-sponsored Dawa Parties in Iraq and the Persian Gulf countries. The Dawa Party was further subdivided into two semi-independent wings: a
political front called the Muslim Student Union, and a military arm, the Jundallah (Soldiers of God). Even Islamic Amal had a subgroup called the Hussein Suicide Squad, whom al-Musawi recruited to execute his martyrdom operations. All told, they had fewer than one thousand fighters, but as the U.S. intelligence report acknowledged, they commanded widespread support among the Shia population.
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The true giant in the burgeoning Shia resistance was a man of only twenty, Imad Mugniyah. Born near Tyre in July 1962, the oldest of four children, Imad was remembered by friends as a bright boy with academic potential. He attended Beirut University for one year before dropping out to fight in the Lebanese Civil War as a soldier in Yasser Arafat’s elite unit, Force 19. Young and strong with a dark beard and serious persona, he possessed the natural gift of a combat leader. He was well spoken and wholly committed to Islam’s struggle against Israel. In fact, Sayeed Ali recalled, he spoke of nothing else. “Imad Mugniyah was a masterful organizer and operator. Few of his lieutenants were as capable,” said former CIA director of operations Charles Allen.
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The Israeli invasion inspired Mugniyah too. In July 1982, he took a taxi to Baalbek and met with an Iranian Revolutionary Guard officer and ethnic Arab named Sheik Hussein.
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Mugniyah liked the pitch and threw all his considerable energy into his own organization, the Islamic Jihad Organization. Mugniyah appealed to the Iranians. His connections with Arafat and numerous Shia leaders made him the indispensable man. He opened the door for Iranian influence in Lebanon in ways no outsider could.
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