CIA and Mossad behind plot that killed Hizbollah commander

The bomb was built and tested in the United States but triggered remotely by Mossad agents in Tel Aviv who were in communication with CIA operatives in Damascus.

Hizbollah fighters carry the coffin of slain commander, Imad Mughniyeh, during his funeral in the southern suburbs of Beirut on February 14, 2008. Mazen Akl/AFP Photo

WASHINGTON // The CIA and Israel's spy agency Mossad were behind an elaborate plot to kill Hizbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh in a 2008 car bomb attack in Syria, the Washington Post has reported.

Citing former intelligence officials, the newspaper reported on Friday that US and Israeli spy agencies worked together to target Mughniyeh on February 12, 2008 as he left a restaurant in 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 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 CIA operatives on the ground in Damascus.

“The way it was set up, the US could object and call it off, but it could not execute,” a former US intelligence official said.

A senior Hizbollah 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 US 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 US navy diver was killed.

According the newspaper, the authority to kill required a presidential finding by George W Bush.

The former officials that spoke to the newspaper said Mughniyeh was directly involved in arming and training Shiite militias in Iraq that were targeting US forces, and though it occurred in a country where the US was not at war, his assassination could be seen as an act of self-defence.

“They were carrying out suicide bombings and IED attacks,” one former official said, referring to alleged Hizbollah operations in Iraq.

They added that getting approval from the most senior echelons of the US 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 said.

“The decision was we had to have absolute confirmation that it was self-defence.”

The newspaper said that during the Iraq war, the Bush administration had approved a list of operations aimed at Hizbollah, 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 US official who served in Baghdad said.

US intelligence officials had been discussing possible ways to target the notorious Hizbollah commander for years, and senior US 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 US official told the Post.

* Agence France-Presse