1983


TERROR Stunned Marines guard the wreckage of the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1983 after a suicide bomber killed 63 people, including 17 Americans, among them CIA station chief Robert Ames.


Rest Is History: Tales of Hostag- es, Arms Dealers, Dirty Tricks, and Spies. Six months later, Mughni-


yeh and his Iranian handlers struck again, with greater dev- astation, killing 241 U.S. Ma- rines and 63 French soldiers in twin suicide bombings near the Beirut International Air- port.


An Iranian defector told me


later that Mughniyeh himself videotaped the attack on the U.S. Marines from a nearby hilltop in the Chouf moun- tains.


Mughniyeh went on to mas-


termind the taking of Western hostages in Beirut, key among them the CIA’s new station chief in Beirut, William Buck- ley. Reagan’s determination to get Buckley and other U.S. hos- tages released ultimately led to the Iran-Contra affair. But Iran didn’t just conduct


mat at the Iranian Embassy in the U.S. under the shah, at his Bethesda, Maryland, home on July 22, 1980. Over the ensu- ing decades, regime hit squads murdered more than 200 dis- sidents, primarily in Europe, in an effort to decapitate the opposition. But the Iranian regime’s


terror war against America un- equivocally began on April 18, 1983, when a young Lebanese Shiite named Imad Mughni- yeh, along with his IRGC han- dler, Ali-Reza Asgari, orches-


trated the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. That car bomb killed 63


people, including 17 Ameri- cans. It also decapitated the CIA’s Middle East division, which was holding a top secret meeting, chaired by division chief Robert Ames, who was on a visit from Washington. Eight of the 17 Americans who died were CIA officers. I was one of the first report-


ers on the scene of the embas- sy bombing, and recount the event in a recent book, And the


terror operations in the Middle East. In 1992, Mughniyeh, now their top terror operative, at- tacked the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina. That same year, Iranian intelligence operatives got into a shooting war with their Saudi counter- parts, killing three Saudis in Thailand. In 1994, Mughniyeh struck


again with deadly force in Buenos Aires, blowing up the AMIA Jewish Community Center, killing 86. Throughout the 1990s, He-


zbollah, under Iranian con- trol, established networks in the tri-border region between Paraguay, Uruguay, and Brazil, smuggling drugs into Europe and laundering the money


DECEMBER 2023 | NEWSMAX 69


FRANCOISE DE MULDER/ROGER VIOLLET VIA GETTY IMAGES


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