How Israel Killed a Ghost

Hezbollah’s commander Fuad Shukr lived a life so secret few knew his name or face before an airstrike killed him and helped put the Middle East on the brink of war

By Sune Engel Rasmussen, Adam Chamseddine and Carrie Keller-Lynn - WSJ

BEIRUT—Fuad Shukr had eluded the U.S. for four decades, ever since a bombing killed 241 U.S. servicemen in a Marine barracks in the Lebanese capital, which it says he helped plan. At the end of July, an Israeli airstrike found him on the seventh floor of a residential building not far away.

The militant was one of the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hezbollah’s founders and most senior operatives, a longtime trusted friend of the leader Hassan Nasrallah who played a key role in developing the missile arsenal that has made Hezbollah the world’s best-armed nonstate militia. For the past 10 months, he had commanded the group’s increasingly intense cross-border skirmishing with Israel.

Yet despite being one of the most important figures in Hezbollah’s history, he lived an almost invisible life, appearing only in small gatherings of the group’s trusted veterans. He emerged in public early this year to attend the funeral of a nephew killed fighting Israel— but only for a couple of minutes, an acquaintance said. Shukr was so secretive that Lebanese media outlets reporting on his death published photos of the wrong man.

The commander few people knew spent his last day, July 30, in his office on the second floor of a residential building in the southern Beirut neighborhood of Dahiyeh, a Hezbollah official said. He lived on the seventh floor of the same building, likely to limit the need to move around in the open. Nasrallah said during his eulogy for Shukr that he had been in touch with him until just hours before his death.

That evening, according to the Hezbollah official, Shukr received a call from someone telling him to go to his apartment five floors up. Around 7 p.m., Israeli munitions slammed into the apartment and the three floors underneath, killing Shukr, his wife, two other women and two children. More than 70 people were injured, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.

The call to draw Shukr to the seventh floor, where he would be easier to target amid the surrounding buildings, likely came from someone who had breached Hezbollah’s internal communications network, the official said. Hezbollah and Iran continue to investigate the intelligence failure but believe that Israel beat the group’s countersurveillance with better technology and hacking, the official said.

The killing was a major blow to Hezbollah, taking out one of the group’s best strategists and exposing the degree to which its operations have been penetrated. Paired with the death hours later of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in a suspected Israeli attack in Tehran, it also pushed the Middle East to the brink of a regional war that the U.S. is scrambling to head off.

“These targeted killings have a cumulative effect on the operational capability of the organization,” said Carmit Valensi, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv and expert on Hezbollah, referring to the Lebanese group. “He was a source of knowledge,” she said of Shukr.

“He knew how to work and communicate with Nasrallah. They spoke the same language.”

Shukr lived nearly his entire adult life at the heart of Hezbollah’s operations and decision-making and was a key link between the group and its main benefactor, Iran. In 1982, still in his early 20s, he helped organize Shiite guerrilla fighters in Beirut to oppose Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.

After Israel laid siege to Beirut that year, the resistance retreated to the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, where it made contact with about 1,500 members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who had arrived through Syria. Shukr at the time worked for Lebanon’s intelligence agency.

He was asked to escort a group of Iranian diplomats from the Syrian border to the embassy in Beirut, according to Qassem Kassir, a political analyst familiar with Hezbollah who had known Shukr since the early 1980s. The diplomats were abducted along the way—allegedly by the Lebanese Forces, an armed Christian faction—and never seen again. Shukr, as a state security employee, was let go.

Known by his nom de guerre, Hajj Mohsin, Shukr became the point man between the Iranians and the camp they established in the Bekaa to train Hezbollah militants, said Kassir, who worked at the Iranian Embassy in Beirut at the time. Shukr later traveled to Iran to oversee the training of elite Hezbollah forces.

Early in the morning of Oct. 23, 1983, a truck bomb containing 12,000 pounds of TNT exploded outside a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. The U.S. later said Shukr played a key role in planning and executing the attack.

Hezbollah formally announced its formation in 1985, and Shukr became its first military commander. He continued to wage a guerrilla campaign in the south until Israeli forces withdrew from the country in 2000 and earned a reputation as a strategic thinker.

“We used to joke with him in our sessions and in our meetings, and say that the engine of his brain was working with terrible force,” Nasrallah said in his speech.

On June 14, 1985, hijackers seized TWA Flight 847 after takeoff from Athens, and flew the plane back and forth between Beirut and Algiers for three days demanding the release of prisoners held by Israel. Shukr helped plan the operation, according to Kassir, and shortly thereafter went underground as his notoriety spread.

“He became invisible,” Shukr’s acquaintance said.

The secretive life took its toll on Shukr, who compensated for the time he lost seeing friends and associates by treating those around him, when he saw them, with extra attention and care, Kassir said. He was fiercely loyal to a close circle of friends, many of whom had come of age with him, including Nasrallah.

Yet, in recent years Shukr appeared to grow more relaxed, Kassir said.

Shukr came into Israel’s crosshairs after a rocket landed in a soccer field in the Israelioccupied Golan Heights in late July, killing a dozen young people. Hezbollah denied involvement, but Israel said the rocket was Hezbollah’s.

Early on the day Shukr was targeted, Hezbollah sent out orders for high-ranking commanders to disperse amid concerns they were at risk, the Hezbollah officia