The CIA and Israel's spy agency Mossad were behind an elaborate plot to kill Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh in a 2008 car bomb attack in Syria, the Washington Post reported.
Citing former
intelligence officials, the newspaper reported that U.S. and Israeli spy
agencies worked together to target Mughniyeh on February 12, 2008 as he left a
restaurant in the Syrian capital Damascus.
He was killed
instantly by a car bomb planted in a spare tire on the back of a parked car,
which exploded shrapnel in a tight radius, the Post said.
The bomb, built
by the United States and tested in the state of North Carolina, was triggered
remotely by Mossad agents in Tel Aviv who were in communication with Central
Intelligence Agency 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," a former U.S. intelligence official told the newspaper.
A senior
Hezbollah commander, Mughniyeh was suspected of masterminding the abduction of
Western hostages in Lebanon in the 1980s and of the 1992 bombing of the Israeli
embassy in Argentina that killed 29 people.
He was also
linked to the bombing of the U.S. marine barracks at Beirut airport in 1983, in
which 241 American servicemen died, and the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in
1985, in which a U.S. navy diver was killed.
The CIA declined
to comment to the Post about the report.
According the
newspaper, the authority to kill required a presidential finding by George W
Bush. Several senior officials, including the attorney general, the director of
national intelligence and the national security advisor, would have had to sign
off on the order, it added.
'Find,
fix and finish'
The former
officials that spoke to the newspaper said Mughniyeh was directly involved in
arming and training Shia militias in Iraq that were targeting U.S. forces, and
though it occurred in a country where the United States was not at war, his assassination
could be seen as an act of self-defense.
"They were
carrying out suicide bombings and IED attacks," one former official told
the Post, referring to alleged Hezbollah operations in Iraq.
They added that
getting approval from the most senior echelons of the U.S. government to carry
out the attack against Mughniyeh was a "rigorous and tedious"
process, and it had to be proven that he was a true menace.
"What we had
to show was he was a continuing threat to Americans," the official told the
Post.
"The
decision was we had to have absolute confirmation that it was
self-defense."
The newspaper
said that during the Iraq war, the Bush administration had approved a list of
operations aimed at Hezbollah, and according to one official, this included
approval to target Mughniyeh.
"There was
an open license to find, fix and finish Mughniyeh and anybody affiliated with
him," a former U.S. official who served in Baghdad told the Post.
According to the
newspaper, American intelligence officials had been discussing possible ways to
target the Hezbollah commander for years, and senior U.S. Joint Special
Operations Command agents held a secret meeting with the head of Israel's
military intelligence service in 2002.
"When we
said we would be willing to explore opportunities to target him, they
practically fell out of their chairs," a former U.S. official told the
Post.
Though it is not
clear when the agencies realized Mughniyeh was living in Damascus, a former
official told the newspaper that Israel had approached the CIA about a joint
operation to kill him in Syria's capital.
The agencies
collected "pattern of life" information about him and used facial
recognition technology to establish his identity after he walked out of a
restaurant the night he was killed.
AFP