Dagan had asked Mossad’s psychiatrists, psychologists, behavioral scientists, psychoanalysts, and the profilers—collectively known as “the specialists”—to focus on where Imad Mughniyeh could be and the best way to kill him. There was a concensus the ideal means of doing so was with a car bomb. “It would be poetic justice,” one specialist said. Using the only photograph of him published in a newspaper and a handful of biographical details, they set to work.
Born in a south Lebanese village, the son of a fruit seller, Imad Mughniyeh had joined Force 17, Yasser Arafat’s personal bodyguards, at the age of fifteen. He was sixteen-years-old when he had killed his first Israeli, a settler in the Golan Heights. After Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was forced to leave Lebanon in 1982, Mughniyeh stayed behind in Beirut and joined Hezbollah, the organization, which had already established itself as the prime militant force resisting Israel. He came to the notice of Sheikh Fadlallah, who arranged for Mughniyeh to rise quickly in the Hezbollah ranks. By the age of twenty, Mughniyeh was a full-fledged terrorist after a spell of training in Tehran under the auspices of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
The newspaper snapshot, showing an exultant Mughniyeh addressing a Hezbollah rally in Beirut, was studied under computer analysis. Various shapes of beard were superimposed to suggest how he might look now as the specialists tried to create an image of him and to seek clues to his mindset. Using a technique, which they properly called “remote in-depth analysis,” but referred to among themselves as RIDA, they continued the task of mapping out his personality. They evoked a great deal in their analysis: Allah and the devil and the role each might play in his life. Much of what they posited was only intended to remain between them, verbal signposts along the road of trying to discover Imad Mughniyeh’s thinking as well as his physical appearance.
Other specialists worked to discover the psychological forces, which motivated Mughniyeh. He was a mass murderer, certainly, yet he did not fit the typology of fanatics, those who were driven by anger. It would be satisfying—at least for the behaviorists—to conclude that at the root of his evil was all-consuming rage. It was there of course, but was it an all-animating and life-energizing force? The psychologists wondered if he was what they deemed “inhabited by a strong streak of masked violence?” This would have allowed him to go about his work in a business-like manner, whether he was recruiting little more than children to be suicide bombers or ordering the bomb-makers to make even more powerful explosives. But again there was no clear answer—no more than there was to the question of how he maintained order within his own immediate psychological universe so he could equate his unspeakable actions to his own belief he was right to kill and destroy. Was he the man who had been psychologically shaped by all he had done over the past twenty-five years?
In the photo that had been taken in the 1980s at that Hezbollah rally, a full beard covered his chin and the peaked cap he wore covered his hair. Rimless spectacles also hid his eyes. One by one the facial analysts used their computer skills to remove his beard, spectacles, and hat, and aged him to his present forty-five years. The specialists concluded there was evidence that at some point Mughniyeh’s face had undergone some surgical work. But the traces of scar tissue indicated it had been done at least five years ago when he had first disappeared after the spate of suicide bomb attacks on Israel.
The Chinese were the acknowledged leaders in the field of facial surgery. But the Beijing regime had turned its back on Hezbollah. The Russians were a possibility, but again the Mossad medical experts ruled out plastic surgeons that had once worked for the KGB. Others who operated on what the experts called “close to the wind” were checked in Romania, Serbia, and North African countries. But Mossad agents did not discover any evidence Mughniyeh had undergone plastic surgery in any of these countries.
Then, in June 2007, came the break. Since the end of the war with Hezbollah in south Lebanon, Mossad had been steadily recruiting Israeli Arabs in the West Bank who were opposed to Hezbollah. One of the informers had a relative in a village near Mughniyeh’s birthplace. The cousin had told him that a friend of her family had heard Mughniyeh had traveled to Europe from the safe house the Syrian regime had provided. He had sent postcards from Paris, Frankfurt, Munich, and finally Berlin. It was little to go on, but it was a start.
First a Mossad agent, a fluent Arab speaker, had traveled to south Lebanon and had met the informer’s cousin. The agent had posed as an old friend of Mughniyeh. Little more had emerged except the cousin was certain Mughniyeh was back in Damascus, but according to her friend’s family, he now looked different.
