WaPo Reports CIA & Mossad took out Hezbo Terrorist Mastermind Mughniyah in 2008
Hezbollah Supporters with picture of late Terrorist Mastermind Imad Mughniyah 2-16-09
Source: Hussein Malla-AP
The Washington Post (WaPo) account of the alleged CIA Mossad take out of Hezbollah terrorist mastermind Imad Mughniyah leaves out most of his appalling record. That incliudes the 1983 Beirut Embassy, US Marine and French Paratrooper Barracks truck bombings that killed and injured hundreds. There was the 1985 killing of US Navy diver Robert Stethem on board hijacked TWA flight 847 diverted from Athens to Beirut, There were the 1992 Israeli embassy and 1994 AMIA Jewish bombing in Buenos Aires that killed and injured hundreds. Some also suspect that Mughniyah may have been behind the suicide bombing aboard a Panamanian commuter air flight the day after the AMIA Buenos Aires blast on August 19, 1994 that took the lives of all 21 passengers and crew including 12 Jewish businessmen. Prior to 9/11 Mughniyah was at the top of the FBI’s Most wanted Terrorist list. There was Mughniyah’s role as the trainer and facilitator of travel for the 9/11 perpetrators in Iran as revealed in the New York Federal court 9/11-Iran links case in 2011. Perhaps this WaPo article was prompted by the January 18, 2015 IDF helicopter attack in Quenitra, Syria on Israel’s Golan frontier that took out senior Hezbolleh commanders, including Mughniyeh’s son, Imad, and Iranian IRGC Gen. Allahdadi and other Iranian Al Quds commanders.
CIA and Mossad killed senior Hezbollah figure in car bombing
On Feb. 12, 2008, Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah’s international operations chief, walked on a quiet nighttime street in Damascus after dinner at a nearby restaurant. Not far away, a team of CIA spotters in the Syrian capital was tracking his movements.
As Mughniyah approached a parked SUV, a bomb planted in a spare tire on the back of the vehicle exploded, sending a burst of shrapnel across a tight radius. He was killed instantly.
The device was triggered remotely from Tel Aviv by agents with Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service, who were in communication with the operatives on the ground in Damascus. “The way it was set up, the U.S. could object and call it off, but it could not execute,” said a former U.S. intelligence official.
The extraordinarily close cooperation between the U.S. and Israeli intelligence services suggested the importance of the target — a man who over the years had been implicated in some of Hezbollah’s most spectacular terrorist attacks, including those against the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and the Israeli Embassy in Argentina.
The United States has never acknowledged participation in the killing of Mughniyah, which Hezbollah blamed on Israel. Until now, there has been little detail about the joint operation by the CIA and Mossad to kill him, how the car bombing was planned or the exact U.S. role. With the exception of the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden, the mission marked one of the most high-risk covert actions by the United States in recent years.
U.S. involvement in the killing, which was confirmed by five former U.S. intelligence officials, also pushed American legal boundaries.