The CIA teamed up with Mossad in 2008 to kill a Hezbollah leader, according to a new report published Friday.
Imad Mughniyah, the international operations chief for Hezbollah, was killed in 2008 by a car bomb in Damascus triggered by a remote device.
Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service, was in communications with a CIA team on the ground in the Syrian capital, who knew when to go through with the plan, according to the Washington Post.
“The way it was set up, the U.S. could object and call it off, but it could not execute,” a former U.S. intelligence official said of the operation.
The bomb was built by the U.S., which was tested repeatedly at a CIA facility in North Carolina.
Five former U.S. intelligence officials, confirmed the cooperation between the U.S. and Israel on the operation, which took out the man who was instrumental in some of Hezbollah’s biggest terrorist attacks, including those against the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and the Israeli Embassy in Argentina.
Mughniyah’s connection to the arming and training of Shiite militias in Iraq targeting U.S. forces via suicide bombings and IED attacks reportedly made the operation allowable.
The Bush administration was also able to get the authority to kill Mughniyah by showing “he was a continuing threat to Americans,” one official said.
