Imad Mughniyah - Organizational Affiliation

Organizational Affiliation

Mugniyah has been allegedly linked to Palestinian operations such as the Karine A incident in 2002, where the Palestinian Authority was accused of importing fifty tons of weapons. He was a member of Force 17, an armed branch of the Fatah movement charged with providing security for Yasser Arafat and other prominent PLO officials.

In mid-February 1997, the pro-Israeli South Lebanese Army radio station reported that Iran's intelligence service had dispatched Mughniyah to Lebanon to directly supervise the reorganisation of Hezbollah's security apparatus concerned with Palestinian affairs in Lebanon and to work as a security liaison between Hezbollah and Iranian intelligence. Mughniyah also reportedly controlled Hezbollah's security apparatus, the Special Operations Command, which handles intelligence and conducts overseas terrorist acts. Allegedly, although he used Hezbollah as a cover, he reported to the Iranians. According to Jeffery Goldberg, writing in the New Yorker, "It is believed that Mugniyah takes orders from the office of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, but that he reports to a man named Ghassem Soleimani, the chief of a branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps called Al Quds, or the Jerusalem Force—the arm of the Iranian government responsible for sponsoring terror attacks on Israeli targets."

The European Union lists him as "Senior Intelligence Officer of Hezbollah".