The Lebanese Hezbollah has suffered an unfortunate couple of days. The terrorist group figuratively and literally dropped the ball.
On Tuesday, Israel’s Mossad intelligence service detonated preplanted explosives hidden in thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah operatives. On Wednesday, it detonated preplanted explosives hidden in thousands of Hezbollah operatives’ walkie-talkies. Nearly 20 of the terrorist group’s personnel were killed, and thousands were wounded in the two incidents.
Out of the many questions on Hezbollah’s mind, one likely lurks largest: What might Thursday bring? Befitting Israeli intelligence tradecraft at its best, this action is both a targeted physical and psychological hammer blow. Hezbollah’s logistics officers will likely face some very unpleasant interactions with the organization’s reliably fanatical counter-intelligence section, for example. Hezbollah operatives will take far greater caution when using electronic devices in the future. This will introduce significant, enduring friction into the group’s command and control apparatus and operational efficiency.
What happens next?
An Israel-Hezbollah war seems increasingly likely. That war might be preferable for Israel in its attempt to restore northern communities that have been abandoned after many months of Hezbollah rocket fire. It would, however, obviously be undesirable for Lebanese civilians and the United States. The U.S. needs its Navy out of the Middle East and into the Pacific to deter increasingly aggressive Chinese action against the Philippines and Taiwan. The Navy is taking on war-ready water under the pressure of the Biden administration’s attempt to make it globally ubiquitous.
Still, strategic considerations notwithstanding, the U.S. should welcome Hezbollah’s present malaise. Hezbollah is an enemy of the U.S. staffed by terrorists who deserve U.S. hate. This is not a debatable point.
Hezbollah, alongside Iran, was responsible for the April 1983 U.S. Embassy bombing in Beirut, Lebanon, which killed 17 Americans, and the Beirut U.S. Marine barracks bombing in October 1983, which killed 241 Americans. Hezbollah conducted these attacks as the U.S. attempted to bring peace and stability to a nation wrecked by a brutal civil war. Active and former U.S. government personnel still remember these victims today.
My father, for example, recalls his colleague and friend, William McIntyre, who was killed in the Beirut embassy bombing.
But these attacks are just the tip of the iceberg of Hezbollah’s sustainably murderous record against the U.S. The group has provided instrumental support for anti-U.S. militias in Iraq and Syria. Support that has cost many Americans their lives, limbs, and maximal brain function. Hezbollah has also engaged in numerous publicly undisclosed killings of CIA personnel.
One attack that is publicly known is that of William Buckley, former CIA Beirut station chief.
A U.S. Army special forces veteran, Buckley was kidnapped by Hezbollah in 1984 and tortured for many months. Hezbollah sent three videos of Buckley in an escalating state of distress to the U.S. Embassy in Athens. One showed a naked Buckley covering his genitalia with his unused burn bag (used to destroy classified documents in a crisis). It was a taunt to the CIA. As Canada Free Press‘s Gordon Thomas reported, Buckley was believed to have been held in near-total darkness in a tiny cell. But the third and final video sent to the CIA was the worst.
“Buckley was close to a gibbering wretch. His words were often incoherent. He slobbered and drooled and, most unnerving of all, he would suddenly scream in terror, his eyes rolling helplessly and his body shaking,” Thomas wrote.
Buckley was believed to have died in 1985, and his dumped remains were finally repatriated in 1991.
It is unsurprising, then, that the CIA’s operational cadres will be taking satisfaction from Hezbollah’s groin and head proximate discomfort. One retired senior CIA operations officer, Marc Polymeropoulos, put it to me this way, “This is kind of like me winning the World Series today. Hezbollah, in the eyes of CIA Near East Division officers, is frankly as bad as Al Qaeda.”
Listing Hezbollah’s attacks on Americans, Polymeropoulos added, “So watching their nuts get blown off, I’m enjoying this, all of it.”
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Put another way, expect Mossad to be getting a few bottles of Johnnie Walker Blue Label from CIA-Jerusalem.
They and the Israelis Unit 8200 signal intelligence service have earned it. They’ve made real what only formerly existed in Under Siege 2 fiction.