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The Sunday Times
Plot for revenge attacks on West
Sarah Baxter, Washington and Uzi Mahnaimi, Tel Aviv
 IRAN’S
president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
attended a meeting in Syria earlier this year with one of the world’s most
wanted terrorists, according to intelligence experts and a former national
security official in Washington.
US officials and Israel
intelligence sources believe Imad Mugniyeh, the Lebanese commander of Hezbollah’s overseas
operations, has taken charge of plotting Iran’s retaliation against
western targets should President George W Bush order a strike on Iranian
nuclear sites.
Mugniyeh is on the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorists”
list for his role in a series of high-profile attacks against the West,
including the 1985 hijacking of a TWA jet and murder of one of its
passengers, a US
navy diver.
Now in his mid-forties, Mugniyeh is reported to
have travelled with Ahmadinejad
in January this year from Tehran to Damascus, where the
Iranian president met leaders of Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas.
The meeting has been dubbed a “terror summit” because of the presence of so
many groups behind attacks on Israel,
which Ahmadinejad has threatened to wipe from the
map.
Jane’s Intelligence Review cited “reports in recent weeks” of Mugniyeh’s presence alongside the president.
Michael Ledeen, a Middle East expert and former
Pentagon and National Security Council official who wrote that Mugniyeh had “probably” been there, said last week senior
American officials had confirmed it.
“It’s hard to identify Mugniyeh because he is said
to have changed his face and his fingerprints,” Ledeen
said. “But senior government officials have told me I was right. He was
there.”
Shortly after the Damascus
summit Henry Crumpton, head of counter-terrorism at the state department,
singled out the elusive Mugniyeh as a threat. The Iranians, Crumpton said,
“have complete command and control of Hezbollah. Imad Mugniyeh works for Tehran. And you can’t
talk about Hezbollah and not think about Iran. They really are part and
parcel of the same problem.”
Mugniyeh lives in Iran
and has evaded capture for more than 20 years, despite a $5m American bounty on
his head. Western intelligence reports claim he has many connections to
terrorist cells in Europe, Africa, Latin America and the US and he is
said to have met Osama Bin Laden.
“When and if the Iranians decide to hit the West in its soft belly, Imad will
be the one to act,” a western intelligence source said last week.
An Israeli defence source claimed Mugniyeh was in regular touch with the new
Iranian intelligence minister, Gholamhossein Mohseni Ezhei. The minister is a
long-time confidant of Ahmadinejad and was appointed by him.
“We know that Mohseni Ezhei holds routine meetings with Mugniyeh, who is
today Iran’s
head of overseas operations,” said the Israeli defence source. “Since we know
from previous Iranian terror attacks that it takes about a year to plan a
substantial one, we should not be surprised if operations against western
targets are already in high gear and Mugniyeh is certainly playing a major
role.”
The young Mugniyeh first attracted the attention of the West when he was
involved in the kidnapping, torture and mutilation of William Buckley, the
CIA station chief in Beirut,
in 1984. He kept his victim at the Sheikh Abdullah camp in the Lebanese Bekaa
valley and was allegedly the last person Buckley saw before he died.
“Imad had good reason to retaliate,” said a well-informed source. “A car bomb
killed his brother Jihad, who had taken Imad’s old job as bodyguard to
Hezbollah’s spiritual leader.” Mugniyeh blamed the CIA, and Buckley was
chosen to pay the price.
The kidnapping led to the Iran-contra affair, one of the most embarrassing episodes of the Reagan presidency, in
which arms were swapped for hostages. But by the time the Americans were
negotiating with the Iranians, Buckley was already dead.
Mugniyeh has also been linked to the demolition of the American embassy and
marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 and is wanted in Argentina for his role in recruiting the
bombers of the Israeli embassy and Jewish centre in Buenos Aires in the early 1990s.
Mugniyeh left Lebanon for Iran in 1994
with his wife and son after an assassination attempt. He is since believed to
have played an active role in fomenting trouble in Iraq. Ledeen described him last
week as the “spinal column of the terror war against America in Iraq from the beginning”.
According to Robert Baer, a former CIA agent who pursued Mugniyeh in the
1980s, “he is the most dangerous terrorist we have ever faced. Mugniyeh is
probably the most intelligent, most capable operative we have ever run
across, including the KGB or anybody else.
“He enters by one door, exits by another, changes his cars daily, never makes
appointments by telephone — he is never predictable. He is the master
terrorist, the grail we have been after since 1983”.
• Elite Iranian army officers who arrived in south Lebanon
this month have taken command of thousands of rockets aimed at cities across Israel. They
are believed to have been given control of the missiles by Hezbollah to deter
possible Israeli attacks against Iran’s nuclear facilities.
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