IN MAY 2003 I PARTICIPATED in a conference for current and former US law enforcement and intelligence personnel on Lebanon. Sponsored by the US government and featuring speakers from the United States and Lebanon, each of the conference panels was chaired by a US official. Strikingly, when participants on several panels insinuated that Hezbollah had never engaged in an act of terrorism or that there was no such person as Imad Mughniyeh (Hezbollah’s late operations chief)—both concepts being American or Israeli fabrications—the US officials chairing the respective panels said nothing. The issue was put to rest once the...

FOR A WHILE, the two Hezbollah operatives sat in their car, scoping out the Israeli embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan. Concentrating on their stakeout, the operatives were unaware that police were watching them watch the building. When the operatives finally realized they were under surveillance, they pulled into traffic, but not quite quickly enough, and were caught fleeing the scene. Police inspected their car, where they found explosives, binoculars, cameras, pistols with silencers, and pictures from earlier surveillance runs. Police arrested the two Lebanese men, later identified as Ali Karaki and Ali Najem Aladine, raided several safe houses, and arrested four...

BEIRUT, A CITY BATTERED BY WAR, was experiencing a period of relative calm in fall 1983. US diplomats and soldiers were still coming to terms with the suicide bombing that struck the US embassy in April, and US Marines wore their combat uniforms everywhere they went—even to social events and diplomatic functions. But to the US Marine commander on site, the threat environment seemed to have eased somewhat. The embassy bombing was seen as an outlier event. Marines were free to roam the city and were interacting with Lebanese children in public without fear of ambush.¹ Beirut was under...

“WE’VE GOT A HIJACK,” flight engineer Christian Zimmermann told the captain, John Testrake, as he reached for the cockpit fire ax by the bulkhead door. Who knew what weapons the hijackers had, or what weapons the crew might be able to use? Either way, Zimmermann thought, better to hide the ax. TWA flight 847 had just taken off from Athens on a short flight to Rome, with continuing service to the United States. But the routine trip became a terrifying, 8,500-mile journey around the Mediterranean aimed at securing the release of Lebanese Shi’a militants from Israeli and other jails. The...

IT WAS AROUND 9:45 AM ON JULY 18, 1994, and Monica Lucía Arnaudo was in her bedroom, which looked out onto Pasteur Street. As she watched television, Monica heard a car outside speed up and then slam on the brakes. “The tires creaked,” she would later recall, “and then [there was] a sort of a crash or collision.” She sat upright in bed, just in time to hear a tremendous explosion and feel “something like sand and dust” bursting in through her window.¹ It was 9:53 am.

What Ms. Arnaudo had actually felt and heard were the shock waves and...

AS HE NAVIGATED his motorcycle taxi through Bangkok’s notoriously congested streets, Boonserm Saendi likely had his eye out for oncoming traffic. It was about 9am on March 11, 1994, and rush hour was at its peak. Saendi drove a passenger to the Chidlom branch of the Central Department Store in the Lumpini neighborhood of the city’s Patumwan district. Saendi was parked at an entry-exit zone when a truck turning left out of the department store’s underground garage hit him. Little did he know it, but Saendi had just inadvertently foiled a Hezbollah plot, almost a year in the making, to...

ONE OF HEZBOLLAH’S first American recruits was a Vietnam veteran and convert to Islam who first fought for Amal and then, as Amal lost political ground and members to Hezbollah, trained Hezbollah operatives. He reportedly served as a bodyguard for Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah (a trusted position once occupied by Imad Mughniyeh) and by 1996 would be described by then–defense secretary William Perry as “a known American terrorist.”¹

The casualty of a broken home who fell in with street gangs in Southeast Washington, D.C., Clevin Holt dropped out of school at age fourteen and used forged papers to enlist in...

IT WAS JUNE 25, 1996, Brig. Gen. Terryl J. Schwalier’s last day commanding US troops stationed in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. The 4404th Wing of the US Air Force was a critical component of the coalition’s enforcement of the no-fly and no-drive zones south of the 32nd parallel in southern Iraq under Operation Southern Watch following the 1991 Gulf War. General Schwalier had already packed his bags before venturing into Dhahran that evening for a dinner of Saudi-style Mexican food with Maj. Gen. Kurt B. Anderson, commander of Joint Task Force–Southwest Asia. General Anderson was visiting the...

IN THE EARLY TO MID-1990S, with the Oslo peace accords signed and Palestinian autonomy slowly growing in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, opponents of peace funded, supported, and executed terrorist attacks to undermine the prospects for peace. Iran was especially active in promoting terrorism targeting Israel at this time. According to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, “in February 1999, it was reported that Palestinian police had discovered documents that attest to the transfer of $35 million to Hamas from Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), money reportedly meant to finance terrorist activities against Israeli targets.”¹ Iran’s primary proxy...

AT THE ISRAELI National Security Council’s Counterterrorism Bureau, located at a military base not far from Tel Aviv, one particular stream of threat reporting commanded the nearly singular focus of senior officials for several weeks in the summer of 2008: kidnappings. And those kidnappings were happening on one particular continent: Africa.

Ever since the October 2000 kidnapping of Elhanan Tannenbaum, Israeli intelligence regularly uncovered information suggesting that Hezbollah was planning more such kidnappings. The targets, as with Tannenbaum, were Israeli businesspersons, most of them former military officers or government officials. In February 2002, for instance, Hezbollah considered kidnapping an Israeli...

IN THE EARLY EVENING OF JANUARY 20, 2007, American military officers and their Iraqi counterparts met at the Provincial Joint Coordination Center in Karbala, about thirty miles south of Baghdad, to coordinate security for the upcoming celebrations of the Shi’a holiday of Ashura. It was just after nightfall when a five-car convoy of black GMC Suburban trucks—the preferred vehicles of US government convoys—was waved through three checkpoints approaching the Coordination Center. The trucks carried about a dozen English-speaking men dressed in US military-style fatigues, carrying American-type weapons and fake identity cards. At the checkpoints, Iraqi soldiers assumed the...

IN THE SPRING OF 2012, the head of the FBI’s counterterrorism office in Detroit told an audience at the local Jewish community center that while he knew of no specific Hezbollah threat to Jewish communities in metropolitan Detroit, he remained concerned about potential and “general” threats in the area, from Hezbollah and other violent extremists. “The Iranian issue . . . that is a huge deal,” he said. “Their use of the proxy group Hezbollah—these are things we’re very concerned about.” ¹ But while Detroit has seen its share of trained Hezbollah gunslingers pass through town, the vast majority...

ON JULY 18, 2012, at the height of the summer tourist season, a group of Israelis landed at the Sarafovo Airport in Burgas, Bulgaria, and boarded buses for the thirty-mile drive south to a Black Sea beachfront resort. An affordable destination and a short flight away, Bulgaria had become popular with Israeli vacationers as a winter ski and summer beach destination. But on July 18—eighteen years to the day after the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) Jewish Community Center was bombed in Buenos Aires—a bomb destroyed one of the seven tour buses, killing the Bulgarian bus driver and...

SINCE THE ORIGINAL EDITION OF this book went to press in mid-2013, Hez bollah’s international activities have continued apace. Thai security disrupted yet another planned attack in Bangkok in April 2014. Yemen and Bahrain are struggling with Shi’a rebellions aided and abetted by Hez bollah and the IRGC. Peruvian authorities arrested a suspected Hez bollah member in October 2014, who allegedly planned to attack Israeli and Jewish targets. And considerably more evidence has emerged in the case of Hossam Yaakoub, the Hez bollah operative in Cyprus, who is now serving a four-year sentence for helping to plan attacks against Israeli...