Steve Quayle News Alerts

June 30, 2002; Page A01
By Dana Priest and Douglas Farah, Washington Post Staff Writers

The Lebanon-based Hezbollah organization, one of the world's most formidable terrorist groups, is increasingly teaming up with al Qaeda on logistics and training for terrorist operations, according to U.S. and European intelligence officials and terrorism experts.

The new cooperation, which is ad hoc and tactical and involves mid- and low-level operatives, mutes years of rivalry between Hezbollah, which draws its support primarily from Shiite Muslims, and al Qaeda, which is predominantly Sunni. It includes coordination on explosives and tactics training, money laundering, weapons smuggling and acquiring forged documents, according to knowledgeable sources.

This new alliance, even if informal, has greatly concerned U.S. officials in Washington and intelligence operatives abroad who believe the assets and organization of Hezbollah's formidable militant wing will enable a hobbled al Qaeda network to increase its ability to launch attacks against American targets.

Hezbollah, which was founded by Lebanese clerics in 1982, has two wings. One is political and social, and its vibrant political party holds nine seats in the Lebanese parliament. The other wing is a guerrilla military force. The United States put Hezbollah on its terrorist list in 1997.

Unlike al Qaeda, Hezbollah has never targeted Americans on U.S. soil. But its operatives have killed nearly 300 Americans overseas in the last 20 years, including 241 service members in a Marine barracks in Beirut.

The concerns over the new partnership have reached the Senate and House intelligence committees' chairmen and vice chairmen, who, under special rules, are regularly briefed by CIA Director George J. Tenet and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III on highly classified information and operations not revealed to other committee members.

"Hezbollah is the A-team of terrorism," said Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), the chairman of the Senate panel, who has been briefed on the subject.

The new collaboration illustrates what analysts say is an evolving pattern of decentralized alliances between terrorist groups and cells that share enough of the same goals to find common ground: crippling the United States, and forcing the U.S. military out of the Middle East and Israel out of Palestinian territory.

"There's a convergence of objectives," said Steven Simon, a former National Security Council terrorism expert. "There's something in the zeitgeist that is pretty well established now."

Although cooperation between al Qaeda and Hezbollah may have been going on at some level for years, the U.S. war against al Qaeda has hastened and deepened the relationship. U.S. officials believe that after al Qaeda was driven from Afghanistan, leader Osama bin Laden sanctioned his operatives to ally themselves with helpful Islamic-based groups, said a senior administration official with access to daily intelligence reports.

Bin Laden or his top associates have used the Internet to convey this message, the official added. There is "no doubt at all" that Hezbollah and al Qaeda have communicated on logistical matters, the official said.

Loose partnerships are being facilitated by members' ability to communicate using Internet chat rooms accessible with constantly changing passwords. The connections, intelligence officials believe, are made case by case, depending on the needs of a particular local group. "When someone's traveling and needs assistance in passing through, whomever happens to have that capacity will be turned to," said Paul R. Pillar, former deputy director of the CIA counterterrorism center and author of "Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy."

The chat rooms are set up to avoid detection. New recruits can enter only rooms where "holy war" against America or other general topics are discussed. Only trusted and vetted operatives can access chat rooms where specific deals are discussed.

Hezbollah's original goal was to create an Islamic state in Lebanon. For 18 years, with financial and intelligence support from Iran and Syria, the group fought to end Israel's military occupation of a buffer zone in southern Lebanon. It attacked American targets in a bid to drive the United States from the country.

Hezbollah first devised suicide bombings as a terrorist tactic, and its successes inspired a generation of terrorists in the Middle East.

In 1983, a Hezbollah suicide bomber attacked the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans and six of the CIA's best Middle East experts. Six months later, two suicide bombers drove trucks into western military barracks in Lebanon, killing 58 French paratroopers in one and 241 American service members in the other -- the largest peacetime loss ever for the U.S. military. It prompted President Ronald Reagan to withdraw American troops from the country.

In the mid-1980s, at Iran's behest, Hezbollah and its factions were responsible for kidnapping 18 Americans in Lebanon. They killed three, including William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut. Over the next decade, the United States alleged that Iranian intelligence officials, posing as diplomats, were involved in anti-U.S. and anti-Israel violence around the world. Hezbollah's intelligence officer, Imad Mughniyah, was implicated in the 1996 attack on Khobar Towers, the U.S. military housing complex in Saudi Arabia, in which 19 U.S. servicemen were killed.

After Israel pulled out of Lebanon in May 2000, the political wing of Hezbollah wanted to focus exclusively on political activities and charitable work. Some intelligence officials believe Iran and Syria have dampened their support for Hezbollah's militant wing. Iran, in particular, a senior U.S. intelligence official said, has tried to restrict Hezbollah's contacts with al Qaeda for fear of being targeted in the U.S. war on terrorism.

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