Killing 'Mr Terror'

The Israelis are cagey about whether they killed Imad Mughinyah, a man they referred to, without excessive hyperbole, as "Mr. Terror". The nearest we got was when Prime Minister Ehud Olmert deigned to have lunch in the Knesset canteen on the day the Hezballah chief was blown up in Damascus. Olmert never shows up in the canteen unless he's got good news, and he wants to bask in a rare display of fondness by Knesset members, usually a surly bunch.

The Israelis may be coy about confessing to Mughinyah's killing. And indeed, there's a long list of possible suspects, including the Americans. But in the Arab world, the Israelis are taking the rap anyway. Hezballlah Leader Hassan Nasrallah has sworn revenge. These are threats that Isrealis are taking seriously, as well they should. On Thursday, Israel issued travel warnings to its citizens living abroad, and in northern Israel, the army is braced for a possible barrage of rockets.

As a serving Israeli intelligence officer told my Time colleague, Aaron Klein: "This is a nightmare that has finally ended." In recent years, this officer says, "Whenever we got a tip-off that Mughinyah was visiting southern Lebanon, we'd be on alert for a possible kidnapping. This went on for many, many years." The Israelis suspect that as Hezballah's chief of operations, Mughinyah had a hand in the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers in July 2006, an incident that triggered a 34-day war between Israel and Hezballah. During that war, Mughinyah was also allegedly responsible for organizing the militia's battle defenses in southern Lebanon. Israeli intelligence described him as Hezballah's go-between with the Iranian regime, which may explain why Iranian President Ahmedinejad was so livid about the assassination.

Will Hezballah seek revenge? Based on past evidence, probably. And overseas Israeli and Jewish targets are the most vulnerable. When Israel killed former Hezballah leader Abbas Mussawi in 1992, the militia retaliated by setting off two bombs in Buenos Aires, one in 1992, at the Israeli embassy, and two years later in a Jewish community center, killing over a hundred people. Israeli and Argentine investigators considered Mughinyah to have been the mastermind.

But for now, killing Mughinyah has severely paralyzed Hezballah"s operations. As one serving Israeli intelligence officer told us. "It's like destroying Langley (the CIA headquarters)," he added: "If Nasrallah spent 60% of his time protecting himself, he now knows that he has to has to spend 90%. You won't see Nasrallah in public for a long time." Sure enough, the hirsute Hezballah leader decided it wasn't a good idea to attend Mughniyah's rain-sodden funeral in Beirut, preferring, instead, to televise his threats against Israel from somewhere in hiding.

---by Tim McGirk/Jerusalem