---
aliases:
- Imad Mughniyah
category: "Extremism & Violent Networks"
tags:
  - Person
summary: "Imad Mughniyah (1962–2008) was a prominent leader of Hezbollah's terrorist operations."
born: 1962-12-07
died: 2008-02-12
location: "Tayr Dibba, Lebanon"
---

Imad Mughniyah (1962–2008) was a prominent leader of [[Hezbollah]]'s terrorist operations. The writer Annie Jacobsen wrote that he orchestrated the abduction of Marine Lieutenant Colonel [[William Richard Higgins]] in [[Lebanon]] in 1988[^1].

Mughniyah had a history of involvement in significant terrorist attacks against U.S. interests. He oversaw the 1983 suicide bombing of the [[U.S. Embassy in Beirut]], which killed sixty-three people, mostly [[Central Intelligence Agency]] and embassy staff. Six months later, he also oversaw the Beirut Marine barracks suicide bombing, a terrorist attack that resulted in the deaths of 241 U.S. service personnel, including 220 Marines[^1].

In the 1980s, Mughniyah was considered one of the leading terrorist masterminds in the world. The [[Defense Intelligence Agency|DIA]] feared he was holding Higgins captive and that he would torture Higgins to extract classified information[^1].

### Footnotes
[^1]: Jacobsen, Annie. *Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis*. Little, Brown and Company, 2017.