‘Other Terrorist’ Still Commands Attention

He is perhaps the world’s most elusive terrorist, an enigmatic figure who plotted bloody attacks a full decade before Osama bin Laden’s allies carried out their first assault, a man who orchestrated the Mideast’s first suicide bombings and a seven-year epidemic of hostage seizures.

Imad Mughniyah is the Other Terrorist. The “security chief” of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Mughniyah is also the face of the broader U.S. war on terrorism--and the new symbol of the difficulties Washington faces in pursuing that campaign outside Afghanistan.

“Mughniyah is not just a mastermind, he’s the master terrorist,” said a U.S. counter-terrorism official. “He introduced many of the tactics that others use to this day. The United States has been trying to nab him since the early 1980s, but he’s evaded capture every time we got close. We’re not even sure what he looks like anymore.”

Mughniyah (pronounced Moog-NEE-yah) won a place on the FBI’s new most-wanted terrorists list for the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 as it flew from Athens to Rome. In a particularly bizarre act of air piracy, the plane shuttled 8,300 miles across the Mediterranean Sea, over three days, between Beirut and Algiers in North Africa.

During one stop in Beirut, the hijackers took U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem to the door of the plane, forced him to kneel, then shot him in the head and dumped his body onto the tarmac. Ultimately, passengers and crew became hostages on the ground in Beirut for two weeks before they were released and the hijackers escaped.

Authorities say Mughniyah was involved in several even more violent incidents.

He allegedly plotted the 1983 attack on U.S. Marine peacekeepers in Lebanon. A suicide driver drove a yellow Mercedes truck laden with the equivalent of 12,000 pounds of explosives into the Marine battalion headquarters, a four-story concrete compound on the perimeter of Beirut’s international airport.

The 241 military personnel killed in the attack represented the largest death toll for the U.S. military in a single incident since Vietnam. The troops were eventually withdrawn, as Washington abandoned its Lebanon peace initiative.

U.S. officials also charge that Mughniyah ordered the capture of dozens of Western hostages, including many Americans, from 1984 to 1991 in Lebanon. Attempts to negotiate a secret deal with Iran to free hostages resulted in the embarrassing Iran-Contra debacle, the secret arms-for-hostages swap that sparked congressional investigations and the resignation of several top officials in the Reagan administration.

Mughniyah was also linked to the 1983 and 1984 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Beirut in which 77 died and hundreds were injured.

Until the 1998 bombings by Bin Laden’s network of two U.S. embassies in Africa, Mughniyah was the world’s most-wanted terrorist. He’s been charged under a sealed indictment in U.S. District Court since 1985, three years before Bin Laden even formed his Al Qaeda terrorist group.

Mughniyah and Bin Laden are alike in many ways. They share a common rage at the West, particularly the United States, for perceived oppression of Muslim lands and peoples. They both want to purge the Mideast of U.S. troops and political influence.

And both have had state support: Bin Laden is dependent on Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers, while Mughniyah has received aid and encouragement from Iran, where he still travels frequently under the aegis of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and the regime’s hard-liners, according to U.S. counter-terrorism officials.

But the Islamic world’s two foremost extremists are also strikingly different--and a reflection of the wide diversity within the world of terror.

A rich Saudi exile, Bin Laden funds a coterie of Islamic militants who have formed a worldwide network. The network’s attacks are believed carried out without his direct participation. Mughniyah, who grew up in the poor Shi’ite suburbs of Beirut, carried out many of the acts himself, including the TWA hijacking. He has operated almost exclusively in Lebanon and against neighboring Israel.

Shared Hostility, but Different Goals

Mughniyah has also lived in the shadows of terrorism, not issuing manifestoes, making threats or commenting to the media about his enemies or his agents, as Bin Laden has. Some reports claim he’s had plastic surgery at least twice to conceal his identity, although U.S. officials are skeptical. He flits between Lebanon and Iran to keep the manhunt off-guard.

The two extremists’ goals and world views also vary, in part because they belong to different sects of Islam. Bin Laden is a Sunni Muslim, the mainstream sect, although he is a follower of the 18th century cleric Mohammed Wahhab, who preached that the faith should return to the purity of its 7th century roots. Mughniyah is a Shi’ite Muslim, which accounts for about 15% of the world’s 1 billion Muslims.

“There’s often an assumption that all these guys fit on the same team, but in fact these two particularly are poles apart even if they share the same hostility to the United States,” said Augustus Richard Norton, a former U.N. officer in Lebanon who is now a Boston University political scientist. “Bin Laden seeks a state that is puritanical in social mores and is hostile to any notion of rights for women. He has an exclusivist conception of Islam that has little room for other people, including Christians and Jews.

“Mughniyah, on the other hand, allows for a more enlightened role for women in society and a less restrictive meaning of Islam and its adaptability to modernity. Shi’ism as interpreted in Lebanon and Iran is much more in tune with coexistence with [other] people.”

Mughniyah’s Iranian mentors also view the neighboring Taliban as a major threat.

Some reports claim the two men have worked together--and that Hezbollah may even had had a role in the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. But U.S. counter-terrorism officials are skeptical of this latter claim.

Mughniyah’s agents met with Al Qaeda agents when Bin Laden was in exile in Sudan in the mid-1990s, according to Magnus Ranstorp, a Hezbollah specialist at St. Andrews University in Scotland.

“It’s absolutely certain that they met. What it led to [is] uncertain,” he said.

Sudan, which is ruled by a strict Islamic government, was at the time one of five havens for Islamic radicals. The others were Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In contrast to Bin Laden, Mughniyah has been less active recently, U.S. officials say.

Over the last decade, since the end of Lebanon’s civil war in 1990, Mughniyah’s primary target was Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon. In 1992, Mughniyah was indicted in Argentina for a role in the bombing of the Israeli embassy, which killed 115.

Israel withdrew from Lebanon last year and terrorism there has almost disappeared. Hezbollah since 1992 has also emerged from the underground and focused on legitimate politics, including winning seats in Lebanon’s parliament.

“Hezbollah has had things going its way politically,” said a U.S. counter-terrorism official. “It’s now an accepted part of the political establishment, so why mess that up? But [Mughniyah’s] apparatus is still there--and still available. He can still use it again, should he feel the need.”