Beirut: Hizbullah Clashes Raise Civil-War Fears | Newsweek International

Slaughterhouse Beirut
Christopher Dickey 5/13/2008 12:00:00 AM
If you want to know what Iraq will look like 25 years from now, look at Lebanon today. The similarities and differences—but mainly the similarities—raise a lot of painful memories and questions for Americans.
The Worst Terrorist You Never Heard Of
Michael Isikoff 2/13/2008 12:00:00 AM
Until his death in a car-bomb explosion in Damascus on Tuesday night, Imad Mughniyeh was a highly dangerous figure in the Mideast terror business who secretly served as a top Hizbullah military commander protected by the highest levels of the Iranian government, U.S. and allied intelligence officials said today. The officials spoke candidly about sensitive matters on condition of anonymity. Though barely known to the general public, Mughniyeh's re-emergence as a major terror plotter in recent years had caused increasing anxiety inside CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., and in the offices of other Western intelligence services.
MIDDLE EAST
Death of a Hizbullah Leader
Kevin Peraino 2/13/2008 12:00:00 AM
One afternoon during Israel's summer war with Lebanon 18 months ago, I met with a couple of senior Israeli intelligence officers at an office outside Tel Aviv. As Hizbullah's rockets rained down on the north of the country, most of the world was focused on trying to deconstruct the motives of the Islamist group's most prominent leader, Hassan Nasrallah. The Israeli officers, on the other hand, had zeroed in on a figure less well known to the public but infamous in intelligence circles: Imad Mughniyeh, Hizbullah's deputy secretary-general. Mughniyeh had been linked to some of the deadliest acts of terrorism on record, including a string of suicide attacks targeting Americans in Lebanon and the kidnapping of the CIA's Beirut station chief, William Buckley, in the 1980s. By the summer of 2006 conventional wisdom held that the aging terrorist was no longer a key player in Hizbullah's day-to-day operations. Still, the Israeli intel officers told me they were increasingly concerned about an elite and quickly growing new cadre of Hizbullah operatives, known as Unit 1800; according to a flow chart that one of the men slid across the table, the unit reported up the chain of command to Mughniyeh.
War and Peacemakers
Christopher Dickey 11/7/2007 12:00:00 AM
In a Middle East slipping from war to war, sometimes it seems only the old are truly impatient for peace. Certainly none is pushing harder than the octogenarian King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. His cause as crown prince in the 1990s and as reigning monarch since 2005 has been to settle as many disputes as he can in this region of clashing faiths, millennial rivalries and chronic conflagrations. They are all related, as he sees it, from Palestine to the price of oil, from Iraqi death squads to Iranian nukes to the risk of global recession, each cancroid problem feeding off the other.
TERROR
The Fox is Hunted Down
Kevin Peraino
Even on Imad Mugniyah's home turf, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, his associates didn't dare speak his name. When they wanted to arrange a meeting, they'd call their contacts in Hizbullah and quietly ask to see "Big Brother" or "the Fox." Mugniyah, who by the mid-1980s was being hunted by the world's most powerful intelligence agencies for his role in a string of bombings, kidnappings and hijackings, would choose a different safe house—and a different persona—for each encounter. Sometimes he would show up wearing a Western-style business suit, other times a simple pair of blue jeans, but never a uniform that would betray him as one of the guerrilla force's most prominent tacticians. "It wasn't just plastic surgery," says Mohammad Yassin, a Palestinian leader in Lebanon who met frequently with Mugniyah during the 1980s and 1990s. "It was masks, it was mustaches, it was hair." Sometimes the militant would playfully pinch his own cheek, signaling that it was really him. Such meetings continued, intermittently, for nearly 20 years. Then, one day in the late 1990s, according to Yassin, "he just disappeared completely."
ESPIONAGE
Dangerous Liaisons
Michael Isikoff
She was just what the spooks were looking for. Nada Nadim Prouty was athletically fit and aggressive, shrewd and tough-minded. She spoke fluent Arabic—an all-too-rare skill in the American intelligence community—and she had a CPA's license, the better to follow the money. Prouty, born and raised in Lebanon, knew the Middle East. First hired by the FBI in 1999, she was sent to Baghdad in 2003 to help interrogate captured insurgents. She did so well that, a few months later, the CIA stole her away and made her an undercover case officer.