The Fox is Hunted Down

By 1985, a U.S. warrant had been issued for Mugniyah's arrest, and the CIA laid plans to snatch him in Beirut. In 1987, the then CIA operative Bob Baer was approached by a man in Beirut wearing jeans and cowboy boots who offered to assassinate Mugniyah for $2,000. Baer demurred, demanding that the guerrilla be taken alive, according to his memoir, "See No Evil." Still, Baer recalls stuffing ten $100 bills in the informant's pocket, and instructing the man to begin gathering intelligence on Mugniyah—quizzing his neighbors, cataloging his cars and photographing his house. Eventually Baer's informant repeated a version of his offer: he would kill Mugniyah with a "muffler charge," packing two cars with more than 2,000 pounds of Semtex and detonating them next to a school Mugniyah was scheduled to visit. This time the price was $12,000. Baer, knowing an assassination was well beyond U.S. law, declined.

By the 1990s the conflict in Lebanon had cooled, and Mugniyah had dropped out of sight. Some U.S. intelligence officials believe he may have traveled on at least one occasion to Sudan to meet with Osama bin Laden, who was then living on a sprawling farm along the banks of the Blue Nile. In the 1990s, Ali Mohammad, a former bin Laden security chief who also served as a U.S. government informant, alleged in sworn court testimony that he arranged security for a meeting in Sudan between Mugniyah and bin Laden. Jack Cloonan, the former FBI counterterrorism official who debriefed Mohammad, says the informant told him that bin Laden personally instructed Mohammad to reach out to Mugniyah, then hiding out in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley.

After the meeting, Mohammad said, Hizbullah provided explosives training and delivered Iranian-supplied Zodiac boats and bombs disguised like rocks to bin Laden's men. "Everybody has always said that these two [groups] would never get together," says Cloonan. "But if you agree that we're Satan, then you put all your differences aside." U.S. intelligence agencies continued to receive reports (much of it from supersensitive electronic intercepts) of contacts among Hizbullah, Iran and Qaeda operatives. The 9/11 Commission Report says that when four of the hijackers flew from Saudi Arabia to Lebanon—and then on to Iran—in November 2000, their flights were watched by "senior figures" in Hizbullah. One of those figures was Mugniyah, according to a former commission staffer who asked not to be identified talking about non-public matters. (The report found no evidence Mugniyah had advance knowledge of the 9/11 plot, but concluded that Iranian officials allowed the hijackers to enter and leave Afghanistan with "clean" passports.)

Still, other current and former intelligence officials remain deeply skeptical of any significant operational link between bin Laden's Sunni jihadists and Hizbullah's predominantly Shiite fighters. "When Osama bin Laden was in Sudan, Khartoum was filled with every desperado in the Middle East," says Bruce Riedel, a recently retired CIA official. "I think it's possible [that they met]. But I think the evidence is overwhelmingly clear that there's no real cooperation." Strategically, Hizbullah and Al Qaeda have had little in common. Hizbullah's goals have tended to be more pragmatic and nationalistic than bin Laden's, and far less nihilist.

More than once during the 1990s, American operatives believed they were on the verge of catching Mugniyah. In 1995, U.S. officials got a tip that the fugitive was aboard an airliner scheduled to stop in Saudi Arabia. But to avoid a messy diplomatic incident, the Saudi government refused to let the plane land. Riedel, who was working for the government at the time, says it's still unclear whether Mugniyah was on the plane. In any case, he adds, "we learned of the information late, hours, maybe a day beforehand. We just didn't have enough warning." The trail went cold again.

It wasn't until early 2006 that Mugniyah's name began to show up prominently again in intelligence reporting. In January, U.S. intelligence services received what they now say were credible reports that Mugniyah had traveled with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Damascus for a high-profile meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal and other regional leaders. Then in June of that year Hizbullah men kidnapped two Israeli soldiers along Lebanon's southern border, touching off a 34-day war widely viewed as a victory for the Islamists. Two senior Israeli intelligence officers, who didn't want to be identified discussing classified information, told NEWSWEEK in August 2006 that they were worried about an elite cadre of Hizbullah men known as Unit 1800 that reported to Mugniyah.