FBI warns of revenge attacks by Hezbollah

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security sent a bulletin today to state and local law enforcement authorities advising them to watch for potential retaliatory strikes by Hezbollah, one day after the Lebanese militia group vowed to avenge the death of a top commander by attacking Israeli and Jewish targets around the world.

“While retaliation in the U.S. homeland is unlikely, Hezbollah has demonstrated a capability to respond outside the Middle East to similar events in the past,” according to the “intelligence bulletin” that was sent to about 18,000 state and local law enforcement officials late this afternoon.

FBI officials also said they were ramping up their own domestic intelligence-gathering efforts to identify and neutralize any potential Hezbollah threats in the United States in the aftermath of Tuesday’s car-bomb assassination of Imad Mugniyah in Syria.

On Wednesday, the FBI quietly sent a confidential internal bulletin to its 101 Joint Terrorism Task Forces across the country warning of the possible domestic consequences of Mugniyah’s killing. As part of that effort, FBI officials at headquarters told the bureau’s field offices and multiagency task forces to increase monitoring and surveillance of suspected Hezbollah operatives and to conduct fresh interviews with sources and informants about the U.S.-designated terrorist group, according to two FBI officials.

U.S. authorities have long described Hezbollah as the “A Team” of terrorism, with far more discipline than Al Qaeda, vast financing from the government of Iran and a global network of sleeper operatives that could be called upon to launch an attack at any time. Various federal investigations and prosecutions have uncovered dozens of Hezbollah fundraisers and other supporters in the United States, but few people are believed to be actual “bomb-throwers,” according to a senior FBI counter-terrorism official who focuses on Hezbollah.

So far, the FBI and DHS have found no specific threats to targets in the United States, according to the intelligence bulletin. But the FBI officials said that such precautionary measures were warranted because of Mugniyah’s stature within Hezbollah, and because the organization and its Iranian supporters had publicly blamed his death on Israel and “Zionist forces.”

Mugniyah, the former Hezbollah security chief and military commander, was one of world’s most wanted fugitives, accused by the United States and other nations of masterminding attacks that killed hundreds of Americans in Lebanon in the 1980s and hundreds of other victims elsewhere in the Middle East and in Argentina. Mugniyah also was in charge of international operations for Hezbollah, and in that capacity was believed to have inspired tremendous loyalty from a large number of operatives, fundraisers and supporters in Europe, the United States, Southeast Asia, West Africa and South America.

On Thursday, Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah told thousands of fist-waving mourners in a videotaped eulogy in Beirut that the killing of Mugniyah merited a violent response because it occurred outside the “natural battlefield” of Israel and Lebanon.

The FBI and DHS did not give local and state law enforcement agencies specific instructions in the bulletin, and the FBI officials said that was because each local jurisdiction should respond in ways that it thought were appropriate to step up security in and around government buildings, Jewish institutions and other potential targets.

In the past, Hezbollah has not launched any attacks in the United States, and the two FBI officials and other experts said today that they believed that was because the organization raised so much money here from supporters of its political and social services efforts in Lebanon that it did not want to risk stepped-up enforcement actions.

But the calls for retribution by Nasrallah and other prominent supporters of Hezbollah have been unusually strident, if not unprecedented, according to current and former FBI officials who have followed the organization over the years.

“My understanding has always been that Hezbollah would never strike in the United States unless they believed that we participated in an operation against them,” said Bob Pertuso, a former FBI special agent assigned to the Detroit Joint Terrorism Task Force from 2000 to 2004, specializing in Hezbollah investigations. “So if they believed we assisted in the operation against Mugniyah, I would say they would strike in the United States.”

josh.meyer@latimes.com