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| YOAV LEMMER/AFP/Getty Images |
There'll be a summit conference in the
sky," smiled an Israeli intelligence official Wednesday morning when he
learned of the assassination of Hassan Lakkis, the Hezbollah commander in
charge of weapons development and advanced technological warfare, in a Beirut
suburb around midnight on Tuesday, Dec. 3. The killing of Lakkis is yet another
in the latest in a long series of assassinations of leading figures in what
Israeli intelligence calls the "Radical Front," which comprises two
countries -- Syria and Iran -- and three organizations: Hezbollah, the
Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hamas.
"We're talking about a number of organizations and people
involved in nuclear and terrorist activity. [They] do it not only for their
countries in various missions, but have created an international network -- the
most dangerous and most efficient that I have met," the official added.
The coalition's goals: "the construction of a nuclear bomb and of various
missilery capabilities -- from very short to very long ranges -- and the implementation
of suicide terror at the highest level." The Israeli goals: take these men
out, one by one.
This isn't the first time Israel has faced very powerful
enemies, of course. But Israeli intelligence officials think this may be the
most diverse, most intricately woven set of foes the country has encountered.
These foes range from those at the leadership level down to field operatives,
according to Mossad and Military Intelligence Directorate (Aman) high-ranking
officials. And it all involves deep, intimate cooperation that even spans the
religious rifts between Sunnis and Shiites, driven by a single motive force:
hostility toward the state of Israel.
Back in 2004, the Mossad began identifying various key figures
within this Radical Front -- those with advanced operational, organizational,
and technological capabilities. While other, better-known personalities in
these extremist groups and their state backers dealt with strategy, these were
the people who handled the details and the translation of strategy into actual
practice.
The Israeli intelligence source, who dealt with the Radical
Front, likens the anti-Israel coalition to SPECTRE, the fictional enemies of
James Bond. With one difference: "SPECTRE usually did it for money."
Israeli intelligence drew up a list of these men, each one the possessor of
highly lethal skills that could be threatening to Israel, even if there had not
been a coordinated network embracing of all of them. The list was headed by two
men: Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah's supreme military commander, and Gen. Muhammad
Suleiman, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's head of secret special projects,
including the building of a nuclear reactor, and the person in charge of
Syria's ties with Iran and Hezbollah. As Meir
Dagan, the former Mossad chief, told me: "Gen. Muhammad Suleiman was in
charge of Assad's shady businesses, including the connection with
Hezbollah and Iran and all sensitive projects. He was a figure Assad
was leaning upon. And these days, he misses him."
After them came Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, head of missile
development for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the export of
missiles to Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Islamic Jihad; Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the
Hamas official in charge of tactical ties with Iran; and Hassan Lakkis (also
spelled in FBI documents as Haj Hassan Hilu Laqis), who was identified by Aman
in the early 1990s as Hezbollah's weapons development expert. In an article
about Lakkis's death, Lebanon's Daily Star called him a "key figure in Hezbollah['s] drone program." The Israeli
intelligence source continued the analogy with the Bond movies and called him
"Hezbollah's Q."
According to his Aman file, Lakkis was active in the radical
Shiite movement since age 19, enlisting shortly after it was established. He
had a certain amount of technical education at a Lebanese university, but most
of his skills were acquired from his experience in developing and manufacturing
weaponry. Almost from the outset he was the top procurement officer and
coordinator with Iran on these matters. Thanks to his efforts, Hezbollah became
the most powerful terrorist organization ever -- even more powerful than al
Qaeda in many ways -- with "firepower that 90 percent of the countries in
the world do not have," according to Dagan.
As early as the mid-1990s, there were Aman officers who marked
Lakkis as a potential target, believing that he should be eliminated. But
Hezbollah was not a preferred target at the time and was considered more of a
nuisance than a strategic threat. By the time that this changed in the 2000s,
he was already taking extreme precautions to protect himself.
As I detail in my book, The Secret War
With Iran, Lakkis was also wanted in Canada and the United States for
running Hezbollah cells in those countries in the early 1990s. He had
dispatched "elements with criminal tendencies there, and they were
therefore happy to send them to North America so that they would not carry on
such activities close to the organizations members" in Lebanon, according
to a classified Aman paper. These Lebanese criminals settled in Vancouver,
North Carolina, and Michigan, where they worked in the wholesale counterfeiting
of visas, driver's licenses, and credit cards, raking in huge profits. Lakkis
permitted them to skim off a fat commission, as long as most of the cash was
used for the procurement of sophisticated equipment that Hezbollah was finding
it difficult to acquire elsewhere, such as GPS and night-vision equipment and
various kinds of flak jackets.
In the wake of information conveyed by Israeli intelligence, the
FBI and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service mounted a number of
operations against these cells, and their members either fled or were arrested
and sentenced to long jail terms for offenses including illicit acquisition of
weapons and conspiring to attack Jewish targets. Lakkis himself learned about
the raids in time and canceled a planned visit to the United States. In the
last telephone calls recorded by the FBI before the crackdown, Lakkis was heard
rebuking the cell members for not doing enough for Hezbollah and enjoying the
good life in America while the organization's members in Lebanon were being
hammered by Israel.
With Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, Hezbollah's
military buildup and preparations for a general campaign against Israel became
central in the organization's doctrine. Lakkis functioned in tandem with and
under the command of Hezbollah's military commander, Mughniyeh. The two were
aware of Israel's sensitivity to casualties in its military and of the lack of
preparedness on the Israeli home front for sustained bombardment.
They built a complex array of fortifications in south Lebanon
with a double goal: surviving for as long as possible under attack from Israeli
land forces, which they were sure would happen sooner or later, and
preservation of their own ability to fire as many missiles as possible at
Israeli communities.
The formula was a success. In the summer of 2006, Israel lost
its war with Hezbollah, thanks, in part, to fortifications equipped with
advanced gear like communications, command-and-control systems, and
night-vision optics -- all of which Lakkis played an important role in
acquiring. In effect, it was Israel, the strongest military force in the Middle East, that was
badly defeated, failing to achieve any of the goals it had set itself.
On July 20, 2006, the Israelis tried to take Lakkis out with a
rocket fired from an F-16 fighter at his apartment in Beirut, but he wasn't
home and his son was killed.
The 2006 war (known as the "Second Lebanon War" in
Israel, to distinguish it from the war Israel waged against the PLO in Lebanon
in 1982) was the high point of the Radical Front and the coordination between
the coalition's top members. Since then, the wheel has turned a full cycle.
Mughniyeh was killed by a bomb in his car in Damascus in February 2008;
Suleiman was shot dead by a sniper on a beach in Syria in August of the same
year; Mabhouh was strangled and poisoned in a Dubai hotel room in January 2010;
Moghaddam was blown sky high along with 16 of his personnel in an explosion at
a missile depot near Tehran on Nov. 12, 2011. And on Tuesday night, two
unidentified masked men cut Lakkis down in the parking garage of his apartment
building in a suburb of Beirut.
Hezbollah was quick to point the finger at Israel; Israel was
quick to deny the attack. If indeed the assassins belong to some elite
intelligence organization, by now they are most likely to be out of Lebanon,
away from Hezbollah's grasp. But this tactical success -- if you can call it
that -- is not necessarily a strategic one in the Middle Eastern political
arena.
To play assassin is to challenge history outright. Some hit jobs
proved effective in changing reality, but not all changed it in the manner the
perpetrators had hoped for. Take the 1992 assassination of Hezbollah
Secretary-General Abbas al-Musawi. Retaliation attacks on Israeli and Jewish
targets after his death cost dozens of lives, and the more radical and more
effective Hassan Nasrallah took over as the organization's leader.
For these reasons, assassinations should be considered a last
resort. The Radical Front is undergoing changes. Iran had to come to a
difficult compromise with the West after many years of sanctions brought its
economy to its knees. Hezbollah has taken both tactical and political blows
since it openly sided with Assad in the Syrian civil war and sent its troops to
fight alongside his.
"Now they're all together," said the Israeli
intelligence official. Then he recited words from the Jewish religious blessing
that's meand to be said on hearing that someone has died: "Blessed be the
Judge of the Truth."
But sometimes it's better to let the Judge -- and History --
take its own course.
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