Outraged by the slaughter of American citizens, the president stood before television cameras outside the White House and declared war on terrorism, vowing to stop the shadowy extremists who claimed to kill for Islam.
"Terrorists and those who support them, especially governments, have been put on notice," he said. "We're committed to winning this war and wiping this scourge from the face of the Earth."
That was in 1986. The president was not George W. Bush but Ronald Reagan. And the most wanted terrorist was not Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden, but a son of Lebanese slums named Imad Fayez Mugniyah.
Sixteen years later, Mugniyah is alive, at large and still an important player in the global infrastructure of terror.
The failed manhunt for Mugniyah, of the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah, is a cautionary tale as Congress considers how the CIA, FBI and other agencies can better protect the nation against terrorism. As months pass and the administration is unable to make good on President Bush's pledge to hunt down bin Laden, the Mugniyah story is a reminder of how difficult it can be to capture or kill even the most lethal enemies of America.
"It shows how hard it is to get one individual," said Nancy Soderberg, who had responsibility for terrorism as a top National Security Council official in the Clinton administration. "He's managed to elude serious and repeated attempts to catch him."
Others say the United States' failure to punish Mugniyah emboldened other terrorists, paving the way for the Sept. 11 attacks.
"Policy-makers here hoped it would all go away," said Marius Deeb, a professor of Mideast studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. "We had illusions. And in a way, bin Laden built on that."
At 39, Mugniyah has been sought for half his life by U.S. and Israeli security agencies, and the United States is offering a $25 million reward for his capture, the same as for bin Laden. Though he has never achieved the celebrity status of bin Laden, until Sept. 11 he was implicated in the deaths of more Americans than any other terrorist.
The U.S. government holds Mugniyah responsible for planning or executing a long list of atrocities in Lebanon: the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, which killed 63, including 17 Americans; the bombing the same year of the Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 troops; the 1984 torture and murder of William Buckley, the CIA's station chief in Lebanon; the 1989 kidnapping and killing of U.S. Marine Col. William R. Higgins; and the taking of many other hostages.
In addition, Mugniyah was secretly indicted in 1985 in organizing the hijacking that year of TWA Flight 847, which resulted in the beating and killing of Robert Stethem, a young Navy diver from Maryland whose body was thrown on the tarmac in Beirut. Stethem's family was recently awarded a $321 million judgment against Iran, the chief financial and political sponsor of Hezbollah.
Within Hezbollah, or "Party of God," there are a few higher-ranking spiritual and political leaders. But Mugniyah "is the operator on the ground," said Deeb, of Johns Hopkins. "He's the guy in Hezbollah who tells everyone else what to do."
Biography a mystery
No bin Laden-style pronouncements and videotapes exist to reveal Mugniyah's biography or personality. Sources give his nickname as "the Hyena" and say he has had plastic surgery to change his appearance. One recent report, scoffed at by most experts, says he has abandoned terror to study Islam in Iran.
It is not easy to separate fact from myth in assessing Mugniyah, of whom only two or three photographs are known. "I wouldn't trust anyone who says they know exactly what Imad Mugniyah thinks unless they're reading from an NSA transcript of his telephone calls," said a former government counter-terrorism analyst, referring to the eavesdropping National Security Agency.
What is known suggests that Mugniyah was a kind of wunderkind of terror. Born in 1962 in the impoverished South Lebanon village of Tayr Dibba, he moved with his family to Beirut's southern suburbs, long a center of Shiite radicalism. As a teen-ager, Mugniyah served in the elite Force 17 commando unit of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who was based in Lebanon during the 1970s.
In 1982, Arafat moved the Palestine Liberation Organization to Tunisia after Israel invaded Lebanon. But Mugniyah evidently stayed behind and took a leading role in Hezbollah as it took shape in the early 1980s. Barely into his 20s, he helped pioneer the suicide attacks that have since become the chief tactic of terror.
Personal motives
Since 1983, Mugniyah seems to have had personal motives for his terrorism. His brother-in-law, Mustafa Badreddin, a Hezbollah explosives expert, was among 17 prisoners held for years in Kuwait - and freed in advance of Iraq's 1990 invasion. Mugniyah told Western hostages in Beirut that they had been kidnapped partly to bargain for Badreddin's freedom.
In addition, according to Israeli publications, one of Mugniyah's brothers, Jihad Mugniyah, was killed by a car bomb in Beirut in 1985 for which Hezbollah publicly blamed the CIA. In 1994, another car bomb, attributed to Israeli agents and possibly aimed at Imad Mugniyah, killed another brother, Fuad.
Lesson for bin Laden
In a sense, Mugniyah and Hezbollah proved that terrorism could work. The United States withdrew its peacekeeping force from Lebanon after the 1983 attacks - a fact bin Laden has gloated over in statements calling for jihad, or holy war, to drive U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia.
"Where was this false courage of yours when the explosion in Beirut took place in 1983?" bin Laden wrote in a mocking 1996 "Declaration of War Against the Americans." "You were turned into scattered pits and pieces at that time ... the extent of your impotence and your weaknesses became very clear."
Active through 1990s
As bin Laden's profile rose in the 1990s, Mugniyah - who is five years younger - did not retire. He is accused of extending the reach of Mideast terror to Argentina, where he is alleged to have organized bombings of the Israeli Embassy in 1992 and a Jewish community center in 1994 in which 116 people died.
Some analysts believe he also had a hand in planning the Khobar Towers bombing that killed 19 Americans in Saudi Arabia in 1996, though the attack was carried out by Saudi nationals.
In January, according to Israeli officials, Mugniyah surfaced again, helping organize a major arms shipment from Iran to the Palestinian Authority aboard the ship Karine A, which was intercepted by Israeli forces. A few weeks later, Israeli Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer told journalists that, in his opinion, Mugniyah is "worse than bin Laden."
Oliver "Buck" Revell, a former associate deputy director of the FBI, told Congress last fall that the failure to stop Mugniyah, "the leading terrorist against America," had grave consequences.
"He was directly responsible for the attacks against our personnel and facilities in Lebanon, and yet he and his organization have never been punished for their crimes against our nation," Revell said. "This example was not lost on the founders of al-Qaida. ... [Bin Laden] learned from Mugniyah that America was not likely to fight back."
Opinions differ on why Mugniyah has never been captured. Magnus Ranstorp, deputy director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, said U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials "have made every conceivable effort" to stop him.
"Your CIA has been hunting him relentlessly for 15 years," Ranstorp said. "He's a professional. He's invisible."
A huge challenge
Former government officials insist that while little was publicly reported, enormous efforts were made to track down Mugniyah. But as the case of bin Laden shows, it can be a daunting challenge even to find a well-protected terrorist, and Mugniyah is widely reported to use multiple identities and frequently alter his appearance.
While bin Laden was harbored by the rickety Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Mugniyah has far more powerful states as protectors.
"Mugniyah is a very big fish," said Deeb. "But the bigger fish who look after him are Iran and Syria."
Friendlier governments, too, have sometimes failed to cooperate in the U.S. manhunt.
In 1986, U.S. authorities got word that Mugniyah was traveling to France and asked for help in apprehending him. But French authorities, worried about the fate of four French hostages in Lebanon, chose not to make the arrest, U.S. officials have said.
In 1995, FBI agents tracking the terrorist learned that a jet with Mugniyah aboard was about to stop in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, for refueling. An FBI team was dispatched to intercept him. But Saudi authorities refused to let the FBI plane land, and he escaped again.
The next year, U.S. intelligence got word that Mugniyah was aboard a merchant ship in the Persian Gulf, and the Navy and Marines quickly organized a force to seize him. But the plan was aborted at the last minute, when new intelligence indicated he was not on board after all.
"We were ready to pounce if we'd had the chance to get him," said Soderberg, the former NSC official. She insists that though a decade had passed since his biggest strikes against Americans, the Clinton administration put substantial efforts into catching him: "He was very much in our cross hairs."
In his recently published memoir, See No Evil, former CIA officer Robert Baer says he once proposed getting at Mugniyah by abducting the terrorist's family. Baer, who recruited agents in Lebanon, never believed the idea would be seriously considered and was amazed to learn that Oliver L. North, the Reagan administration NSC aide and an Iran-contra figure, circulated it on the White House e-mail system.
Later, Baer writes, he did look into hiring someone to blow Mugniyah up. But nothing came of the scheme because of the risk of harming innocent bystanders.
Suggestions of alliance
Now, some terrorism experts are haunted by suggestions of a possible alliance between past and present most-wanted terrorists.
Mugniyah and bin Laden have met at least once, in 1994 in Sudan, said Ali A. Mohamed, a former Army sergeant who worked for bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network. Mohamed testified in court in 2000 that he arranged security for the meeting and that Hezbollah operatives had provided explosives training to al-Qaida.
In recent months, al-Qaida members fleeing Afghanistan have sought refuge in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Mugniyah's home turf, said Matthew A. Levitt, a former FBI counter-terrorism analyst who works at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Theology may place limits on the cooperation: Mugniyah's Hezbollah is Shiite, while bin Laden and his followers are Sunni Muslims. But they are united by their enmity toward Israel and the United States.
"There's been a marriage of convenience between al-Qaida and Mugniyah for training and other purposes," said Ranstorp, of St. Andrews, who considers the alliance very worrisome.
"That's the ultimate nightmare - the globalization of terrorism," he said.