CIA and Mossad killed senior Hezbollah figure in car bombing

(WaPo) On Feb. 12, 2008, Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah’s international operations chief, walked on a quiet nighttime street in Damascus after dinner at a nearby restaurant. Not far away, a team of CIA spotters in the Syrian capital was tracking his movements.

As Mughniyah approached a parked SUV, a bomb planted in a spare tire on the back of the vehicle exploded, sending a burst of shrapnel across a tight radius. He was killed instantly.

The device was triggered remotely from Tel Aviv by agents with Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service, who were in communication with the operatives on the ground in Damascus. “The way it was set up, the U.S. could object and call it off, but it could not execute,” said a former U.S. intelligence official.

The United States helped build the bomb, the former official said, and tested it repeatedly at a CIA facility in North Carolina to ensure the potential blast area was contained and would not result in collateral damage.

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Mossad infiltrates Hezbollah?

Hezbollah claims to expose Mossad mega-spy in its ranks

(Times of Israel) Lebanese terror group Hezbollah recently exposed a senior spy working for the Israeli Mossad intelligence agency within its foreign operations branch, a Lebanese news agency reported Tuesday.

Unnamed sources told the El-Nashra news outlet Tuesday that the “collaborator,” exposed a few weeks ago, was an official in unit 910, responsible for “external operations against specific Israeli targets.”

A resident of southern Lebanon whose initials are M. Sh., the man worked as a traveling businessman and was recruited by the Mossad in a “western Asian country,” El-Nashra reported.

Lebanon’s security agencies periodically report the exposure of Israeli-recruited agents in the country, as well as of listening devices often planted in the south.

According to the report, the collaborator had been working for Israel for years and succeeded in thwarting a number of Hezbollah operations planned to avenge the assassination of movement official Imad Mughniyeh in February 2008, ostensibly by Israel.

He also reportedly exposed other Hezbollah agents, including Mohammed Amadar, arrested in Peru in late October with TNT and detonators following a Mossad tip-off; Hossam Yaacoub, convicted in Cyprus for planning attacks against Israeli tourists in March 2013; and Daoud Farhat and Youssef Ayad, arrested in April 2014 in Bangkok for planning terror attacks against Israeli tourists in Thailand.

El-Nashra reported that the collaborator is also suspected of taking part in Mughniyeh’s assassination in Damascus, using an explosive device placed in his car seat, as well as the assassination of Hezbollah official Hassan al-Laqis in December 2013.

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