“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 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.
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