Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

BEIRUT AIRPORT BOMBING • 71the technical precision needed to build the bomb, and the reluctanceof any group to claim immediate responsibility for this act all pointedto state sponsorship of the bombing. On 16 February 1985 Hezbollah,a militia under Iranian state sponsorship, claimed responsibilityunder the name of Islamic Jihad.On 4 October 1984, U.S. intelligence agencies identified Hezbollahas the local agent that supplied the suicide driver and Iran as thesupplier of the explosives used in the attacks on the Marines and theU.S. embassy. As early as 6 November 1983, an article in the Israelidaily Ma’ariv had identified the Iranian ambassador to Damascus,‘Ali Akbar Muhtashami, as having been assigned by the Iranian governmentto be a liaison with Syrian intelligence in directing terroristactivities through the group that eventually assumed responsibilityfor the bombing of the U.S. Marines barracks. This article identifiedIslamic Jihad as being the responsible group, headquartered inBaalbak under tutelage of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps(IRGC) of Iran.According to a Le Monde report dated 6–7 November 1983, citingan otherwise unspecified “confidential British document,” the principalmastermind of the 23 October operations was one Abu Muslih,actually ‘Imad Mughniyah (1962–2008), the commander of the 800or so IRGC troops in Baalbak. This report stated also that IranianDeputy Foreign Minister Husayn Shaykhulislami, one of the leadersof those students who seized the U.S. embassy on 4 November 1979,visited Damascus twice secretly, once on 16 April 1983 and againon 19 October 1983, that is, each time a few days ahead of a bombingof a major U.S. target in Lebanon. The Foreign Ministry of Iranand other officials and representatives of the regime have repeatedlydenied any knowledge of, or involvement in, these bombings. On 20July 1987, however, the former commander of the Islamic RevolutionaryGuards Corps, Muhsin Rafiqdust, revealed in an interview tothe Iranian newspaper Risilat that Tehran had supplied the explosivesused in the bombings. The shock of this bombing and the unpreparednessof the Ronald Reagan administration or the U.S. publicto face the levels of lethal violence that had become commonplacein the Lebanese civil war led to the withdrawal of U.S. troops fromLebanon in February 1984.In 2001 several relatives of U.S. servicemen killed in the bombingfiled two separate lawsuits against Iran using provisions of the