Hezbollah

Western Targets

Early on, Hezbollah targeted Western institutions and individuals. U.S. officials maintain that former Hezbollah security chief Imad Mughniyah, who is one of the FBI's “most wanted terrorists,” planned the 1983 suicide truck bombings of the U.S. embassy in Beirut and the attacks on the French and American military headquarters in the city later that year. More than 350 people were killed in the suicide attacks, and the U.S. Marines withdrew from Lebanon soon thereafter.

In the mid-1980s, Hezbollah began kidnapping Westerners and holding them hostage, hoping to gain more influence in regional affairs and bargain for the release of Shiites held in Israeli, Kuwaiti, or Western jails. Militants kidnapped, in separate instances, U.S., British, Irish, French, Saudi, West German, and South Korean nationals. A splinter group called Islamic Jihad, later revealed to also be a front for Hezbollah, publicly claimed responsibility for many of the kidnappings. Ten of the hostages died in captivity, including Beirut CIA station chief William Buckley. For nearly a decade, the kidnappers fed dictated communiqués and orchestrated images to the media.

Associated Press journalist Terry Anderson was seized at gunpoint in western Beirut on March 16, 1985, becoming one of the first Americans to be kidnapped. The former Marine was held in windowless cells, often blindfolded or chained to the floor. Irish national Brian Keenan was abducted in April 1986 as he left his apartment to give a lecture at the American University in Beirut. Four armed men threw him into the back of an old Mercedes and took him to a 4-by-6-foot cell, where he was held in solitary confinement.

English journalist John McCarthy, who had traveled to Beirut to film a news feature on Keenan's kidnapping, was himself abducted on the way to the airport. The kidnappers later confined the two men together in a large room. Still later, Keenan and McCarthy were transferred to a dungeon in the Bekaa Valley where they were imprisoned with Anderson, American University professor Thomas Sutherland, and American Frank Reed. It was common for the captors to beat all of the hostages on the feet, and some of them were chained for days on end.

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