‘Ghosts of Beirut’ co-creators Greg Barker and Avi Issacharoff on hunting down terrorists

Imad Mughniyeh was responsible for more American deaths in terrorist attacks before the devastating 9/11 bombings and was able to outsmart not only the CIA but also the Mossad. Making matters even more difficult was the fact that no one knew what he looked like. By 2001, he was on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list with a $15 million bounty for information leading to his arrest. The reward was later bumped up to $25 million. He ultimately appeared on the most wanted list in 42 countries before he died was assassinated at the age of 45 in a car bombing in 2008.

Showtime’s new limited series “Ghosts of Beirut” shines the spotlight on the terrorist and the CIA and Mossad’s attempts to capture him. The Washington Post’s national security reporter Shane Harris recently conducted a Zoom conversation with co-creators Greg Barker and Avi Issacharoff and star Dina Shihabi.

“He’s one of the most fascinating characters I’ve ever come across,” said Barker. “He was a man who from ages 19, 21, outwitted the CIA and the Mossad and rose to incredible prominence in the Middle East as a key player in the region from nowhere. And he drove the agency and Mossad kind of crazy because they couldn’t find him. And his story plays out over two-and-a-half decades.”

And in Barker’s opinion, Mughniyeh shaped the modern CIA “from what happened in the 1980s, which resonates in the mid-2ooos. So, he was complicated. He was a guy from a poor family, a poor neighborhood, who started working as a bodyguard to Yasser Arafat in Beirut in the late ‘70s, early 80s. Kind of when the PLO left Beirut he sort of found an opening and was also recruited by Iranian intelligence, kind of stepped into a void and exploited that to his own ends and became, I think, sort of more powerful and more influential at an extremely young age than he ever imagined.”

It is shocking to learn just what terrorist events Mughniyeh was involved in.

“There’s the initial suicide bombing on an Israeli base in Tyre [Lebanon},” said Barker, “soon followed by an attack , a massive attack on the United State embassy in 1983 in Beirut, which killed hundreds of people and wiped out the entire CIA station at the time including-well I won’t give it away-one of the very, very prominent CIA officers who was on the cusp of what he hoped was a Middle East peace plan, a regional peace plan.  You think about the Beirut hostage crisis in the ’80s, it was all Mughniyeh, including the kidnapping of the CIA U.S. station chief, William Buckley, which sort of brought the agency to its knees. And then he was a military strategist, so he was the architect of Hezbollah’s military strategy.”

Issacharoff explained the differences between Mughniyeh and Osama bin Laden. “Bin Laden was in a very twisted way talented in what he did. But Imad Mughniyeh was one level up if not two levels up. He was so sophisticated and smart and clever. He was very careful about his identity. He used nicknames all the time. He switched identities. He traveled to Iran. He traveled to Central America. He traveled to Africa. He met Osama bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan, using a fake passport and he was very smart about the way he managed to maneuver everyone.”

And outmaneuvered the CIA and Mossad.  “Over and over, they failed in trying to get him,” said Issacharoff. “But when they managed to collaborate and go together into the first-ever joint assassination attempt operation of the CIA and the Mossad, this is where the success came from including finding out about the way he looks, including about reaching his whereabouts and of course executing the assassination.”

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