“He is the most dangerous terrorist we’ve ever faced. He’s a pathological murderer,” says longtime CIA agent Bob Baer, who has chased Mugniyah for years. “Mugniyah is probably the most intelligent, most capable operative we’ve ever run across, including the KGB or anybody else. He enters by one door, exits by another, changes his cars daily, never makes appointments on a telephone, never is predictable. He only uses people that are related to him that he can trust. He doesn’t just recruit people. He is the master terrorist, the grail that we have been after since 1983.”
That’s when Mugniyah began his bloody career. He is accused of planning the bombing of the Beirut Marine barracks, murdering 241 Americans. He is the prime suspect in two bombings of America’s embassy in Beirut. Then in 1985, Mugniyah was identified as the man behind the brutal hijacking of a jet bound for Rome. Among the passengers was American Navy diver Robert Stethem. Mugniyah and his men beat Stethem for hours, then shot him and dumped his body onto the tarmac.
For two decades, Mugniyah has been so elusive that even capturing his image is difficult. Before the mission, SEAL platoon commander Tom Short was handed one of the few photos to help identify Mugniyah when he and his team were ordered to take over the Ibn Tufail. It was, he says, a very important mission.
“This guy was responsible for the deaths of 250 Marines, maybe more. That made you want to get him. But you know, not only what happened in the past, but what was gonna happen in the future, if we didn’t get him,” says Short. Every man on the mission was a volunteer, he says.
The plan came together quickly. U.S. Navy forces and marines were on routine duty in the Gulf. When without warning, they were scrambled for the top-secret operation.
The opportunity unfolded on July 23, when word came that Mugniyah was aboard the Ibn Tufail, which was docked in Doha, unaware that four American warships were stalking it.
Beginning in Bahrain, they sailed around the Peninsula of Qatar, and shadowed the ship as it moved along the Persian Gulf Coast. Ship logs show the Americans practiced their takedown tactics, and pored over intelligence reports.
“I’d never seen the kind of intelligence we had during this mission. I mean, in less than 48 hours,” says Short. “We had blueprints to the ship, the layout of the ship, pictures of the ship. Who was the crew, what they were carrying, what was their schedule. I mean it was just amazing to me the amount of intelligence that we had.”
“Every minute counts. Time is of the essence. Every minute’s golden. And so for 24 hours, we just planned around the clock,” says Garrett.
Bill McSwain was a Marine sniper. “I had four sniper teams on the ship with me, arranged from bow to stern in different positions. And in addition, because this was such a critical mission, we actually put snipers in helicopters.”