Before there was Osama Bin Laden, there was Imad Mugniyah, Hezbollah’s terrorist mastermind.
He was called the "father of smoke," because he disappeared like a wisp after engineering his spectacular terrorist attacks, including two that took the lives of hundreds of Americans in Lebanon in 1983 alone.
By most accounts, Imad Mugniyah killed more Americans than Al-Qaeda before most people had even heard of Bin Laden. By the mid-1980s, he topped the FBI’s Most Wanted list. But to the CIA, especially, he was public enemy No. 1 — Mugniyah engineered the 1983 obliteration of the American Embassy in Beirut, which killed legendary CIA Middle East hand Robert Ames — and directed the kidnapping and murder of Beirut CIA station chief William Buckley.