New Fears: The Return Of A Superterrorist

Before Osama bin Laden, there was Imad Mughniyeh. The Lebanese terrorist from Hizbullah was considered the most dangerous in the world. Now the White House worries that he's back, after years of lying low. Four serving U.S. intel and counterterrorism officials, anonymous when discussing sensitive material, said Mughniyeh is prominent in recent reporting from the field about Hizbullah activity. Bruce Riedel, a veteran Mideast expert recently retired from the CIA, told NEWSWEEK there is "no question he is heavily involved in [formulating] terrorist contingency plans in case of a U.S.-Iran confrontation."

Mughniyeh has the résumé to be a potent threat. He was the alleged organizer of a series of devastating bombings and kidnappings against U.S. targets in Lebanon during the 1980s, including two bombings of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. But Hizbullah later made a strategic decision to abandon attacks on American targets. Even now, U.S. intel officials stress that they don't believe Hizbullah will actually hit U.S. interests unless Washington strikes first--against either the movement or its key patron, Tehran.

So what is Mughniyeh up to? Two of the U.S. officials interviewed by NEWSWEEK said field reports indicate that he travels between Beirut, Damascus and Tehran. One official said that some reports also suggest he has visited Baghdad. (Hizbullah has allegedly been involved in training the Mahdi Army militia of Moqtada al-Sadr.) According to Riedel, Mughniyeh is Hizbullah's chief of "external operations," and keeps in touch with cells around the world. FBI and other counterterror officials have said they believe Hizbullah has recruitment and fund-raising cells in the United States. "He is the brain behind all Hizbullah's military activity," says Lt. Col. Guy Hazoot, operations officer of the Galilee Brigade on Israel's northern border.

But the renewed focus on one man as a kind of Lebanese superterrorist may be folly. That's the view, anyway, of an Iranian official with close ties to Hizbullah. "Americans' interest in Mughniyeh shows their desperation for any insight into Hizbullah operations," says the official, who refused to be ID'd speaking on a sensitive subject. The official seemed amused to be asked about Mughniyeh. "To my knowledge, he hasn't been involved in any operation for the past decade. There's a new cadre of operatives in Hizbullah that Americans don't know anything about. And I'm not going to tell you about them, either."