The terrorist Imad Mughniyeh eluded American and Israeli intelligence forces for over 25 years. He spent his career as the number two of Lebanese Shia militant group Hezbollah, and as the founder of Lebanon’s Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO), pulling strings from the shadows and organising suicide attacks and high-profile kidnappings.
Although he was placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list, and had a $5 million bounty on his head, he was seemingly impossible to catch. His elusiveness meant that he became know among his trackers as ‘the ghost’. That was until 2008, when he was not only discovered, but killed, in a car bomb blast in Damascus that is widely assumed to have been orchestrated by Israel’s Mossad in collaboration with the CIA.
