Mughniyeh Assassination: Another Setback for Iran's Intelligence Agency

The assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, Iran’s top man in Syria and Lebanon, should set off alarm bells in Tehran. His assassination, according to Iranian media sources, took place in the Kafarsoose neighborhood of Damascus, close to an Iranian school and the headquarters of the Syrian Mukhabarat (intelligence agency). At first glance, the elimination of such a highly valuable Iranian asset, under the very noses of the Syrians, could be taken as a sign that Western intelligence agencies have managed to infiltrate the once seemingly impenetrable walls of Iran’s intelligence operations abroad.

To say that Mughniyeh was a sought-after man would be an understatement. He had been on U.S. and Israeli wanted lists since the early 80s for having participated in operations such as the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847, during which U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem was killed, as well as the 1994 AMIA bombing in Argentina, which killed 85 people.

Furthermore, he had managed to plan the successful expansion of Hezbollah’s military capability and operations in Lebanon, as well as its supply routes and relationship with Syria. He was seen as someone loyal and capable with whom the Iranians could work. To top it all, unlike some Shiites in Lebanon, Mughniyeh was a firm believer in the velayat-e faqih (absolute rule of the supreme jurisprudence) model of Iranian Islamic leadership. According to this model, the supreme leader (the faqih) is viewed as the representative of God to all Shiites on earth.

To protect him, the Iranian government spared little expense. He was provided numerous safe houses and identities. To make it doubly difficult to find him, he was given numerous plastic surgeries. According to foreign sources, on at least two occasions in the 1980s, Western intelligence services came close to assassinating him. One was when a bomb was placed near the garage of his brother in Beirut. The bombers killed his brother instead of him. The second time was at his brother’s funeral. Suspecting a trap was laid for him, Mughniyeh refused to turn up.

Since then Mughniyeh seemed to have vanished. His finger prints could be seen on many, many operations. However, he remained as elusive as ever, until today.

The successful findings, tracking, and assassination of Mughniyeh come on the heels of a number of other major Western intelligence coups against Iran over the last several years.

First was the elimination of Iran’s long-range Zilzal missiles by the Israeli air force, in the space of 30 minutes, during the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war. These missiles, which were imported from Iran via Damascus, had been guarded carefully under the supervision of Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah intelligence operatives. The very fact that Israel was able to locate and eliminate them early on in the war showed that Iran and Hezbollah’s counter-intelligence operations were seriously compromised.

Then came the defection of General Ali Reza Asgari in March 2007. He was Iran’s former deputy defense minister and a senior contact man between Iran and Hezbollah. He was a highly valued Iranian asset. Despite that, Western intelligence agencies managed to recruit him and helped him defect while he was on a trip to Syria, without the Iranians being able to do much.

Last but not least, the recent 2007 NIE report by the U.S. intelligence agencies could be taken as another sign that the West is making successful inroads in its efforts to penetrate Iran’s intelligence community. The 2007 NIE report, which stated that Iran had stopped its weaponization program in 2003, was in complete contrast to the 2005 report which said that Iran was continuing with its weaponization program.

If the new NIE report is correct, while President Ahmadinejad was celebrating its results, he should have considered the strong possibility that to reach such a new conclusion, the West, especially the Americans, had probably managed to get their hands on new, highly valuable intelligence sources inside Iran.

The assassination of Mughniyeh is likely to lead to a major restructuring of Iran’s intelligence operations abroad, and even at home. Mughniyeh was a man who traveled frequently between Tehran and Damascus. Therefore it is very possible that his assassins were tracking his movements inside Iran as well. The worst case scenario for Tehran would be if he was compromised by someone inside Iran, a scenario which Iran’s intelligence agency, known by its Farsi acronym as VAVAK, would quite likely be looking into.

Fearing infiltrations elsewhere, it is also possible that Iran’s nuclear program, especially its nuclear scientists, may be forced to go even deeper underground due to the apparent progress in Western efforts to find valuable Iranian targets.

Although Iran has managed to win numerous battles in the intelligence war against the West in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, the recent setbacks are likely to make Iran’s intelligence chiefs more careful, and quite possibly, more violent in their next operations against the West.

Meir Javedanfar is the co-author of the upcoming book The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran – Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran. He runs Middle East Economic and Political Analysis (Meepas)

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So who do you think is responsible for Mugniyeh’s killing? What is their motive?

Timmerman: The list of Mugniyeh’s enemies is long. Hezbollah, of course, has accused the Israelis. It won’t be long before they accuse us, too. One of my sources who grew up with Mugniyeh and remains close to his family in Lebanon, told me yesterday morning that Hezbollah surveillance teams picked up the arrival at Beirut airport of an 8-man U.S. paramilitary team just two days before Mugniyeh was killed.

I saw a report just yesterday suggesting that the Rev. Guards lured Mugniyeh into a trap into Damascus, to make sure that he never revealed the extent of his involvement with al Qaeda in the 9//11 plot. This was a secret the Iranians would have liked to ensure that Mugniyeh carried to his grave.

I’ve got news for them, though: the word is out. Just take a look at pages 240-241 of the 9/11 commission report, which describes in elusive terms the travel of eight to ten of the “muscle” hijackers in and out of Iran in the company of a “senior Hezbollah operative.” That operative was none other than Imad Mugniyeh.

FP: In other words, you are saying that Mugniyeh was involved with the 9/11 terror attack and so was Iran - and the Iranians might have very well killed him so that the full extent of their own involvement would not become known.

Timmerman: There is absolutely no doubt that Mugniyeh and his masters in Iran were directly and materially involved in the 9/11 plot.

First, there is the evidence discovered very late in the day by the 9/11 Commission, which I describe in detail in Countdown to Crisis. What is astonishing is that this information has not been widely publicized. I spoke again just yesterday with one of the top investigators involved in reviewing the highly-classified U.S. intelligence reports on Mugniyeh’s involvement in convoying 9/11 hijackers in and out of Iran prior to 9/11. He was astonished when I told him that few people were yet aware of this. “That’s like saying you didn’t know that Jesse James was a crook,” he said.

The Iranians were TERRIFIED on the day of 9/11 and for the next month that the United States would “connect the dots” and discover their involvement to the 9/11 plot, as I reported in Countdown to Crisis.

Senior Iranian government officials were making desperate phone calls to relatives in the United States, asking them to rent apartments for family members so they could get out of Tehran before what they assumed would be a massive retaliatory U.S. military strike.

Of course, as we know now, that U.S. retaliatory strike never occurred – because the CIA and other U.S. government agencies succeeded in burying the information they had collected (or the case of our technical agencies, that they had siphoned up).

I believe when Americans realize the full extent of the Iranian government involvement in the 9/11 plot, they will demand action from their president – no matter what party affiliation that president may have.
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