Israel's Kill List
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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.
YOAV LEMMER/AFP/Getty Images
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