Word: hizballah
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That turned out to be the right, or at least the successful, policy. But it is difficult to see that any U.S. initiatives on the hostages' behalf actually forced their release. In the end, the faceless Shi'ite kidnappers under the Hizballah umbrella in Lebanon were simply overtaken by events. The world around them changed so dramatically that Iran and Syria, their main supporters, no longer found them or their captives useful. Some of the lessons gleaned from years of terrorism and hostage taking...
Israel's invasion and subsequent occupation of the self-proclaimed security zone nine miles deep into Lebanese territory uprooted Shi'ite towns and sparked the creation of Hizballah, the radical Party of God, built up with Iranian advisers and money. Its proclaimed mission: to drive the Israelis and their Lebanese auxiliaries of the South Lebanon Army out of the country. The U.S. became a target when it moved Marines into Lebanon to support the Israeli-backed Christian government in Beirut, reinforcing Hizballah's belief that Israel's strength came from the aid and political support the Jewish state got from...
...rescuing the hostages. In the summer of 1985, Lieut. Colonel Oliver North and Amiram Nir, the Israeli government's counterterrorism adviser, recruited 40 Lebanese Druze and paid them $1 million to help mount a rescue bid that never came off. The problem was a lack of good intelligence. The Hizballah groups were so secretive and fanatic that Western agents could never get close enough to them to keep track of precisely where they were holding the hostages. But Syria could have helped, according to a Western intelligence report that reached the Israeli government. The report claimed that whenever and wherever...
...agents were engaging in criminal behavior, the domestic and international backlash would be severe. It also would hand the advantage to the terrorists: it would be easier for them to seize more and more unsuspecting civilians than for Western intelligence agencies to identify and locate Hizballah members for effective reprisals...
Some politicians in the Middle East did think the U.S. should have threatened Ayatullah Khomeini with force. A French intelligence report, based partly on testimony of Hizballah defectors and Iranian opposition members, claimed that every act of terrorism committed by Iranian or pro-Iranian agents during 1986 was personally approved by the Ayatullah...