Israeli intelligence and the Lebanese Shiite Islamist militia Hezbollah have been waging a brutal and vicious war in the shadows for more than 40 years.
One of Israel’s first defeats came in November 1982, five months after Tel Aviv’s forces invaded Lebanon in an attempt to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the country where it was then based.
By forcing the armed PLO fighters out of Beirut, Israel appeared to have scored a major victory. That was when a shocking explosion demolished the Tyre offices of the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic spy service. As a result of the blast in the Lebanese coastal city, 91 people died.
Authorities for years attributed it to a gas leak, but the truth is that the explosion was caused by Islamist militants from the Shiite population of southern Lebanon in a suicide car bombing, one of the first of its kind. Those responsible for the explosion would later join Hezbollah, founded the following summer with the supervision and support of the new Iranian revolutionary regime, in power since 1979.
The same radical Shiite youth would succeed again in a new attack on the Shin Bet headquarters in Tyre. It was in November 1983 and they killed 28 Israeli prisoners and 32 Lebanese. The Israeli services were also unable to prevent other mass suicide attacks in which hundreds of people died in France and the United States. Thus began what would become one of the most terrible clandestine conflicts the world has known in recent decades.
The Israeli military fought Hezbollah directly in Lebanon until it was forced to withdraw from the country in 1999. It did so again in 2006, in a brief war. But Israeli intelligence never stopped doing so.
For much of the 1980s, Israel had little knowledge of Hezbollah’s plans due to a severe lack of personnel to provide intelligence on the ground. Notably, the whereabouts of a young Shiite, Lebanese Imad Mughniyeh, the mastermind behind the bombings and kidnappings, were unknown. After several failed attempts, it took the Israelis more than 20 years to find him. Until 2008, when a car bomb in Damascus ended Mughniyeh’s life.
In the early 1990s, Latin America was a major battleground, with Hezbollah recruiting sympathizers among Lebanon’s large Shiite diaspora.
After Israeli attack helicopters killed Abbas al-Musawi, Hezbollah’s new leader, in southern Lebanon in February 1992, the Islamist militant organization sought revenge in Argentina. The first attack was on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 people. Then came the 1994 suicide bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people. Investigators blamed both attacks on Hezbollah.
South America also became a major funding center for Hezbollah, with its sympathizers generating vast sums of money by conducting a wide variety of legal and illegal activities. The sheer scale of these operations, which often took place in remote locations where local security services had little information or presence, made Israel’s attempts to stop them difficult.
Europe has been another scene of hostilities that, in recent decades, have produced this shadow war. Israeli intelligence services have not given up on blocking Hezbollah’s operations to expand its logistics on the continent by using dozens of companies. Israel has had some success with a series of discreet operations, in many cases thanks to the discreet help of local security services.
It was thus possible to thwart Hezbollah’s attempt to attack the Israeli embassy in Azerbaijan in revenge for Mughniyeh’s death. But what could not be prevented was the July 2012 suicide bombing in the Bulgarian city of Burgas on the Black Sea coast, where a bomb on a bus killed five young Israelis and the driver (investigators found evidence linking the attack to Hezbollah).
By then, the battle had already spread to the rest of the world. In 2012, U.S. intelligence analysts identified a multitude of Hezbollah plots against Israeli or Jewish targets over a period of just six months. Among them were two in Bangkok, one in Delhi, one in Tbilisi, one in Mombasa and one in Cyprus. A Delhi diplomat was injured after a series of magnetic car bomb attacks, a complex operation involving people from Thailand and India, including several with ties to Iran and Hezbollah.
For Hezbollah, the United States is primarily a logistical hub, with a focus on large-scale fundraising operations. These operations reportedly allowed sympathizers to send hundreds of millions of dollars to Hezbollah, a major source of funding for its military operations and a large social budget.
US government officials reported in 2011 that Hezbollah-controlled money laundering mechanisms were being used to funnel money from car sales and drug trafficking to Lebanon. In 2023, a well-known art collector was placed on a US Treasury sanctions list. They accuse him of using his collection, which includes masterpieces by Pablo Picasso, Antony Gormley and Andy Warhol, to launder money for Hezbollah.
The covert war has also been waged more closely. David Barnea, the director of the Mossad, spoke in 2023 of 27 Iranian plots against the Israelis. According to the head of Israel’s main foreign spy service, plots have taken place even in Georgia, Cyprus, Greece and Germany. Hezbollah operatives have been active in Iraq, Yemen and Syria, where thousands of Hezbollah fighters have been deployed during the civil war.
While in recent decades there have been victories and defeats on both sides, in recent months the balance seems to have tipped clearly in Israel’s favor. Israeli authorities have reported several assassination attempts in Israel by Iranian agents or Hezbollah members. None have come close to success.
The Mossad and other Israeli spy services are believed to be responsible for last week’s pager and walkie-talkie attacks, which killed 42 people and wounded some 3,000. A clear victory for Israel, analysts say, in the long-running conflict.
The organization’s top command has also been decimated after a series of Israeli assassinations of senior military officials, suggesting a continuing source of accurate and timely information. Most likely, this information comes from multiple sources: intercepted communications, electronic surveillance, and agents infiltrated within Hezbollah’s ranks. “This is a major intelligence coup… The Israelis are attacking the top and middle levels, leaving Hezbollah blind, deaf, and dumb,” said Magnus Ranstorp, a senior Hezbollah analyst at Sweden’s National Defense College.
The targeted assassinations also demonstrate the long institutional memory of the Mossad and other Israeli agencies. Fouad Shukr, the Hezbollah chief of staff assassinated by Israel in July, and Ibrahim Aqil, assassinated last week, were founding members of Hezbollah and part of the network responsible for the attacks in 1982 and 1983. Both held senior positions in Hezbollah’s current military hierarchy. Had they not died, they would have played a vital role in any future all-out war.
Translation of Francisco de Zárate
