Lebanese madman leaves trail of terror: the "axis of evil" that President Bush recently spoke of might actually consist of Iran, al Qaeda and Hezbollah. Of the Hezbollah terrorists wanted by the U.S., the "Lebanese Carlos" makes bin Laden look like a "schoolboy." Responsible for the deaths of at least 260 Americans, he has a $25 million reward on his head

VFW Magazine, April, 2002 by Kenneth R. Timmerman

He has blown up U.S. embassies and car-bombed a U.S. military barracks. He has hijacked U.S. commercial airliners and murdered Americans. He has kidnapped and tortured a top CIA officer and vowed through terror to drive the United States from his country. Do you know who he is?

If you guessed Osama bin Laden, you're wrong. The correct answer is Imad Fayez Mugniyeh (pronounced MOOG-NEE-YEH), a Lebanese Shiite long considered one of the world's most ruthless and elusive killers. The CIA has been tracking him since 1984 when he masterminded the kidnapping in Beirut of CIA station chief William Buckley, apparently on orders from Iran.

Now evidence is beginning to mount that Mugniyeh has deep ties to bin Laden and his al Qaeda network and may have been directly involved in planning the Sept. 11 attacks.

`DEMONIC MILITANT'

"We know Mugniyeh has a relationship to bin Laden. We know that," one U.S. official told Insight magazine. "Did he have a role in planning the outrages of Sept. 11? We can't rule it out. Hezbollah is part of bin Laden's International Islamic Front for Jihad on the Jews and Crusaders, and Mugniyeh is the head of Hezbollah's special-operations branch."

Twice the U.S. spotted Mugniyeh on international flights and sought to have him arrested. In 1986, he was leaving Charles de Gaulle Airport after several days of secret negotiations with the French government. Although the CIA provided a copy of the passport he was using, the French declined to stop him. Nine years later, he was flying back to Beirut from Khartoum after a meeting with bin Laden in the Sudan. The U.S. arranged for his Middle East Airways plane to make an unscheduled stopover in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, but the Saudi authorities refused to force him to leave the plane. Neither the French nor the Saudis wanted him on their hands.

"Imad Mugniyeh is one of the most demonic of the militant Islamic leaders," says Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia. "He appears to serve as a bridge between the 1980s, when the violence was primarily Shiite, and today, when it is primarily Sunni."

Mugniyeh and his Iranian backers are Shiite Muslims; bin Laden and his followers are Sunnis. Most terrorism analysts and Islamic scholars insist that the two Muslim sects are on less-friendly terms than Catholics and Protestants in Belfast. But when it comes to terrorism, they are dead wrong.

HEZBOLLAH ROOTS

The eldest of four children, Mugniyeh was born in the village of Tir Dibba in the mountains above the Lebanese coastal city of Tyre on July 12, 1962. His father, Sheik Muhammad Jawad Mugniyeh, was praised as "one of Shia Lebanon's best jurists" by American Islamic scholar Fouad Ajami.

As a high-school dropout, Mugniyeh was recruited by Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction and later joined the elite Force 17, Arafat's personal security service. Once the Palestinians were kicked out of Lebanon in 1983, Mugniyeh and his two brothers, Fuad and Jihad, joined a new organization set up by Iran called Hezbollah (Party of God). Its goal was to drive the Western powers out of Lebanon.

Imad Mugniyeh became Hezbollah's star recruit, reporting directly to Ali Akbar Mohtashemi-Pour, Iran's ambassador to Syria. His terrorist pedigree began with a bang when he organized the April 18, 1983, bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut that killed 63 people, including Robert Ames, the CIA's top Middle East operations officer, and many of his best agents.

On Oct. 23, 1983, Mugniyeh was back at work. This time, with Iranian and Syrian help, he plotted the twin suicide truck-bomb attacks in Beirut that took the lives of 242 U.S. Marines and 58 French troops.

For many years Mugniyeh's personal involvement in those early bombings remained obscure. It wasn't until he kidnapped the new CIA station chief to Beirut, William Buckley, in April 1984, that the U.S. intelligence community began to get a fix on him.

David Jacobsen was one of a dozen Americans and Frenchmen kidnapped in Beirut in the 1980s by Mugniyeh and his pro-Iranian militiamen. At one point he shared a cell with Buckley at an undisclosed location and remembers his ordeal well. "I was chained to the floor; I was blindfolded. The person at my feet, I later learned, was Terry Anderson, and the person at the head was Bill Buckley."

Mugniyeh's guards tried to keep them from speaking to one another. "One of the chilling moments for me and for Terry Anderson was to hear Bill Buckley cough," says Jacobsen. "He was very, very sick. He was delirious. I heard him say, `I don't know what happened to my body; it was so strong 30 days ago.'"

The CIA now believes that Buckley was tortured to death by Mugniyeh personally, who extracted whatever secrets he could and then murdered him. Buckley was honored by CIA director William H. Webster at a posthumous ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery on May 13, 1988, and a star in his honor was carved into the wall of CIA headquarters--the 51st.

Mugniyeh burst onto the international scene with the brash June 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 from Greece to Beirut, where he held 39 Americans hostage for 17 days. Wearing a ski mask, Mugniyeh prowled the aisles of the aircraft looking for U.S. military personnel and discovered U.S. Naw diver Robert Stethem. He tortured and shot Stethem, then dumped his body out on the runway in full view of international TV cameras. Later, the FBI was able to identify, Mugniyeh's fingerprints in the rear lavatory of the aircraft and indicted him for Stethem's murder.