Word: hizballah
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Lighthouse TV is on a war footing. The station, owned and operated by the Lebanese Hizballah-or Party of God-broadcasts from a dusty cellar in Beirut's southern suburbs. "We own a beautiful new building nearby," says Lighthouse's general manager, Mohammed Afif Ahmad, 37. "We don't use it because the Israelis might bomb...
Israel probably has more important targets in its long-running conflict with Hizballah, whose Shi'ite militiamen have been attacking Israeli troops in Southern Lebanon almost daily. But a look at one of the station's propaganda films shows why Yitzhak Rabin would be happy to see Lighthouse knocked out of commission. While martial music blares in the background, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, Hizballah's leader, is seen embracing departing fighters. Documentary footage shows guerrillas planting their flag, Iwo Jima-style, as they storm an Israeli position. Israeli troops load casualties onto stretchers and into helicopters. "Thousands upon thousands are waiting...
...entire broadcast day. The rest of Lighthouse TV's schedule is a wildly disjunctive cocktail of prayers and quiz shows, Egyptian sitcoms, jingle-filled ads for imported detergents and computer-generated graphics of holy men. General manager Ahmad, who abandoned a career as a mechanical engineer to join Hizballah, thinks he can "participate in the resistance" as well as turn a buck. He claims Lighthouse ranks fifth among some 50 Lebanese TV stations, and that advertising provided a third of last year's budget...
...confused with hbo; scenes enlivened by Hollywood staples like sex and alcohol are deleted, and voice-over commentaries interrupt American movies to criticize U.S. "oppression" of blacks or to point out that "in the real world, Americans don't always win." But the West wins small victories on Hizballah screens. "We use Western classical music with most of our productions," says Ahmad. "It's more sober than Arab singing." Which is why, between guerrilla recruitment ads, Vivaldi's Four Seasons wafts over the airwaves...
...would. NOC officers in Colombia who have set up import-export companies as covers--bribing drug couriers on the side for intelligence--have been wounded or killed in gunfights with traffickers. A NOC officer serving in Africa was beaten up and jailed for a month. Another, grabbed by a Hizballah faction in Beirut, managed to talk his way out by convincing his fundamentalist captors that he was a U.S. narcotics agent fighting evil drugs. ``You've got to be your own life-support system,'' says John F. Quinn, who once worked as a NOC officer in Tokyo collecting economic intelligence...