Israelis said to be annoyed at US claiming 2008 Mughniyeh hit

Israelis are reportedly miffed that US spies are taking too much credit for helping kill Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh in 2008, saying the covert operation was mostly a “blue-and-white mission.”

Israeli sources offered a revised version of the dramatic assassination of a top Hezbollah commander after earlier reports put US intelligence services front and center in the joint CIA-Mossad operation.

Details of the 2008 slaying of Mughniyeh were last month leaked to Newsweek and The Washington Post, and revealed that he was killed in a joint Mossad-CIA operation.

However, the reports played up the US involvement in what was in essence an Israeli operation, angering Israelis who then complained to Western counterparts, CBS presenter and author Dan Raviv reported in an essay published by CBS Sunday.

Mughniyeh was killed by a car bomb outside his apartment in Damascus, Syria.

One unnamed Israeli source said it was the Mossad and Israel Defense Forces Military Intelligence efforts that tracked down Mughniyeh — who had resorted to plastic surgery to change his appearance — and found where he was living in the Syrian capital.

A key element in the attack was the specially crafted explosive designed to ensure it only injured the target and not any bystanders.

Raviv quoted an Israeli source as saying it was “almost all blue-and-white, and just a little bit red-white-and-blue,” a reference to the Israeli and US national flag colors.

The bomb was manufactured in Israel and tested there, rather than in a “US base,” as described in the earlier version of the story. The US, which had to obtain high-level clearance from the Washington administration to go ahead with the operation, had laid down the demands that it injure Mughniyeh alone.

Israeli sources said US input on the device came when then-prime minister of Israel Ehud Olmert showed former US president George Bush videos of the bomb being tested, impressing the US leader.

On the day of the attack, surveillance teams noticed that Mughniyeh had entertained visitors at his apartment — the Syrian general Muhammad Suleiman, along with an Iranian contact — but after both men left an half an hour later, Mughniyeh came outside.

Mossad operatives back in Tel Aviv, under the watchful eyes of CIA officials in the same room, pushed the button to remotely detonate the bomb, killing Mughniyeh but causing no injuries to others.

Then-vice president Dick Cheney reportedly called Olmert to congratulate him on the success of the mission.

Israel and the US have never officially admitted to involvement in the killing, which was widely thought to have been a Mossad operation.

The reports by Newsweek and The Washington Post were the first time US involvement was revealed.

Mughniyeh was implicated in some of the terror group’s major attacks, including the 1992 bombing at the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, and the 1994 bombing of the AMIA building in the Argentinian capital, in which 85 were killed.

The senior Hezbollah terrorist was also involved in the 1983 bombing at the US Embassy in Beirut, the killing in 1994 of the CIA’s Lebanon chief William F. Buckley and the 1996 bombing at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.

In the years after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, Mughniyeh was responsible for the arming and training of Iranian-backed Shiite militias in Iraq who carried out deadly attacks on American troops — all of which put him at the top of the US’s Wanted list.

Raviv noted that the mildly different versions of how the mission played out may only be about getting credit for the job done. Western officials believe the CIA and Mossad are still working together, despite ongoing political tensions surrounding a planned visit by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the US Congress next month.

However, there are concerns that Hezbollah could now take revenge on America after the revelations about Mughniyeh’s death.

The Lebanon-based Hezbollah already pointed the finger at Israel in the past, vowed to retaliate and is believed, with Iranian involvement, to have carried out several consequent attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets abroad, including the 2012 bombing of an Israeli tourist bus in Burgas, Bulgaria, and the coordinated attacks in Thailand, Georgia and India that same year. In January 2012, Israel thwarted a plan, already in its advanced stages, to kill the Israeli ambassador to Azerbaijan.

Mughniyeh’s son, Jihad, a Hezbollah commander, was killed on January 18, along with 11 other Lebanese and Iranian operatives, including a general, in an airstrike attributed to Israel, on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights.

The strike reportedly targeted the leaders of a substantial new Hezbollah terror hierarchy, based in the Syrian Golan, that was set to attempt kidnappings, rocket attacks and other assaults on military and civilian targets in northern Israel.