Opinion & Commentary:
Timeline of terror: From 'Che' to Mugniyeh to 9/11
By Seth Mandel
Feb. 29, 2008

To follow the trail of blood from Che Guevara to the ayatollahs of Iran is to begin with the father of modern terrorism and arrive at the foster parents of global Islamist murder. To follow that trail is to know that the education of today's jihadist terror warriors against the West went through -- until Feb. 12 -- one man: Imad Fayez Mugniyeh.

Mugniyeh was assassinated by car bomb in Damascus, Syria, breaking one of the strongest links in a decades-old chain of homicidal terrorism.

Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Fidel Castro's executioner in post-revolution Cuba, held conferences to teach budding terrorists how to kill Americans, Jews, homosexuals, African-Americans, musicians, writers, people with long hair, librarians, as well as anyone who dared try to educate the New York Times that Che was, in reality, a cowardly communist murderer who sold the blood of those he executed and intended to destroy the U.S. with nuclear weapons.

As noted by Che biographer Humberto Fontova, one of the attendees of Che's how-to classes was a young Yasser Arafat. Arafat put what he learned from Che into his Force 17, the criminal gang whose mission was to protect Arafat and assassinate Israelis.

Arafat's most promising and psychopathic apprentice in Force 17 was Mugniyeh.

Mugniyeh soon became chief of terrorist operations for Iran's Hezbollah, with immediate results. Former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has said: "Hezbollah may be the 'A-Team of Terrorists,' and maybe al-Qaeda is actually the 'B' team."

Osama bin Laden, the world's most household name in terrorism, would agree. Senior al-Qaeda operatives, in the fall of 1993, went to Lebanon to learn how to make explosives from the master, Mugniyeh. From there, as documented by bin Laden confidants, American and Israeli intelligence officials, the 9/11 Commissioners, and terrorism experts like Rohan Gunaratna and the Claremont Institute's Thomas Joscelyn, Mugniyeh took bin Laden under his wing and gave the al-Qaeda leader the training and expertise to carry out the lion's share of anti-West terrorism since then, including, of course, the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Mugniyeh 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, and the Oct. 23, 1983 twin suicide truck-bomb attacks on the Marine barracks in Beirut that took the lives of 242 U.S. Marines and 58 French troops.

In April 1984, Mugniyeh kidnapped, tortured and murdered William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut. Mugniyeh orchestrated the June 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 from Athens to Beirut, where he held 39 Americans hostage for 17 days. U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem was on that flight, and Mugniyeh tortured and shot Stethem, then dumped his body out on the runway in front of the TV cameras rolling tape.

And Mugniyeh organized the March 17, 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which killed 29 people and wounded almost 250 more.

That is the resume  that Mugniyeh is credited with; it is that rap sheet that was broadcast around the clock after his assassination.

But there is more. He likely played a commanding role in every single Hezbollah attack on Israel, including the kidnapping/murder of Israeli soldiers that touched off the Second Lebanon War.

Retired CIA agent Bob Baer knew more about Mugniyeh than anyone except the Israelis. And, according to Joscelyn, Baer discovered shortly after al-Qaeda's 1995 attack on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, that Mugniyeh's deputy provided a stolen passport to one of the planners of the bombing.

But one week prior, on Nov. 13, 1995, al-Qaeda bombed a Saudi National Guard training facility in Riyadh, killing five Americans who were training Saudi National Guardsmen. Joscelyn, in his publication Iran's Proxy War Against America published in September 2007, refers to statements and testimony of Gunaratna and Ali Mohamed -- an agent of Ayman al-Zawahiri's who infiltrated the U.S. Green Berets -- who noted that al-Qaeda "self-consciously" modeled itself after Mugniyeh's Hezbollah.

In 1996, Palestinian representatives, Mugniyeh, a representative of bin Laden, and a representative of al-Zawahiri all attended a terrorism conference hosted by Iran. Two days after that conference ended, Mugniyeh's men detonated a truck bomb inside the housing complex of the Khobar Towers, killing 19 American servicemen and wounding hundreds others. In 2001, the indictment of the Khobar conspirators (www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel01/khobar.pdf) outlined numerous connections between the actual attackers, the Saudi branch of Mugniyeh's Hezbollah, and the Iranian government.

Immediately following 9/11, Jane's Foreign Report began trying to put the pieces together with the help of their intelligence service insiders. Was Mugniyeh just crazy enough to be involved in the worst terrorist attack in our nation's history? The evidence, as Jane's found out, points in that direction.

"Bin Laden is a schoolboy in comparison with Mugniyeh," Jane's Israeli intelligence source -- someone who knows Mugniyeh -- says. "The guy is a genius, someone who refined the art of terrorism to its utmost level. We studied him and reached the conclusion that he is a clinical psychopath motivated by uncontrollable psychological reasons, which we have given up trying to understand. The killing of his two brothers by the Americans only inflamed his strong motivation."

In the intelligence and counterterrorism world, there are always two things to look for when trying to decipher an assassination, a terrorist plot, or a rescue attempt: Motive and capability.

Mugniyeh had the motive, since his brothers were assassinated in retaliatory attacks (one of which was thought to have been intended for Mugniyeh himself) by the U.S. and Israel.

And if anybody had the capability, it was Mugniyeh. Every major Iranian, Hezbollah, or al-Qaeda attack (and indeed many others) since the early 1980s had his fingerprints on them.

In Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11, Matthias Kuntzel tells us that the idea of striking Manhattan skyscrapers with kamikaze maneuvers was the brainchild of Adolf Hitler. Hitler had designed the Daimler-Benz Amerikabomber in 1944; it was a mother plane that carried four smaller bombers with no landing gear and filled with explosives. When the plane approached the East Coast, it would release the bombers and return to Germany, and the bombers would fly directly into N.Y. skyscrapers.

"Sixty years later, it so happens, the assault on the World Trade Center was coordinated from Germany," Kuntzel wrote in an essay ahead of the book's November 2007 publication. "Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian who piloted the plane that struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center; Marwan al-Shehhi, from the United Arab Emirates, who steered the plane into the South Tower; Ziad Jarrah, from Lebanon, who crashed United Airlines Flight 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania; and their friends Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni, and the Moroccan student Mounir al-Motassedeq had formed an al-Qaeda cell in Hamburg, where they held regular 'Koran circle' meetings with sympathizers."

Six weeks prior to 9/11, one of Jane's sources warned their allies that an "unprecedented massive terror attack" was coming. Guess where Mugniyeh was during that time? According to those sources, he was "[meeting] with some of his dormant agents on secret trips to Germany."

Jane's noted that Mugniyeh had even tried it before -- the only one of those who were suspected to be involved with 9/11 to have done so -- when he orchestrated a plan in 1997 that would have blown up an Israeli El-Al airliner above Tel Aviv. The bomber's explosive device accidentally went off in his hotel room just hours before he was to board the flight. He survived the explosion, however, and told the Israeli authorities that the bomb was intended as a "special gift" from Mugniyeh.

Foreign Report had, in the months leading up to 9/11, brought to light Iraq's burgeoning involvement in the arena of sponsoring terror. Jane's sources concurred, and even went a step further a week after the attacks.

"We believe that the operational brains behind the New York attack were Mugniyeh and Zawahiri," they said, "who were probably financed and got some logistical support from the Iraqi Intelligence Service (SSO)."

At that time, the head of the SSO was believed to be Qusai Hussein, Saddam Hussein's son.

Three things seem clear. The first is that without Mugniyeh and Saddam Hussein, 9/11 would have been nearly impossible for al-Qaeda to even attempt. Mugniyeh's involvement is clearer than Hussein's, though the evidence implicates the Hussein regime as well.

The second is that Iran, through its terrorist group Hezbollah headed by Mugniyeh, declared war on the United States long ago. They drove former President Ronald Reagan from the Middle East, and they bullied former President Bill Clinton, while killing hundreds of Americans. Not only have there been no direct reprisals against Iran, but now that the CIA's Baer is retired, Israel remains America's best defense. Oh, and Iran is rapidly closing in on nuclear capability.

The third point builds on that last statement. With Castro's recent retirement, it's a good time to look back on a strain of anti-American and anti-Israeli terror that was created when Castro seized power there and appointed Che to be his terror master.

Che wanted badly to use Soviet nuclear missiles against New York and Washington. Forty years later, his terror trainees, the Islamic supremacists, are looking to do the same. In that time span, appeasement has never worked, and negotiations with Iran have never worked.

The U.S. government should open a formal investigation into Iran's involvement in 9/11, get control over the self-politicizing CIA, and remember that we are at war whether we like it or not -- a new kind of war in which we have struggled, in part because we haven't done enough to rein in the CIA and because we haven't pointed enough fingers at the evil men of our time.

Six years before Mugniyeh's assassination, Jane's asked an experienced Israeli commando officer how the West could counter Mugniyeh's brand of terror warfare.

"To fight these bastards you don't need a military attack," the Israeli officer responded. "You only need to adopt Israel's assassination policy."

Seth Mandel is the managing editor of The Jewish State.