Breaking Hezbollah’s ‘Golden Rule’: An Inside Look at the Modus Operandi of Hezbollah’s Islamic Jihad Organization

In September 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the arrest of Alexei (Ali) Saab, a naturalized American citizen from Lebanon, on charges of marriage fraud and material support to the designated terrorist group Hezbollah. Saab reportedly served as an operative of Hezbollah’s external terrorist operations wing, the Islamic Jihad Organization (also known as the External Security Organization or Unit 910). In this role, he carried out surveillance of potential target locations in several American cities to “prepare for potential future attacks against the United States.”Saab’s case came on the heels of two others in the United States, including the conviction of Ali Kourani for engaging in similar preoperational surveillance for Hezbollah and an apparent plea-bargain for Samer el-Debek who was dispatched on Hezbollah missions abroad. Just a few years earlier, in 2012 and 2015, two Hezbollah operatives had been arrested in Cyprus. One was arrested for carrying out surveillance of Israeli tourists and other targets in Larnaca and Limassol, while the other was stockpiling ammonium nitrate for the production of explosives. Law enforcement officials learned much about Hezbollah’s covert operations from these cases, including details being made public for the first time in this article. Taken together, these cases - along with those involving operatives in Thailand and Peru - illustrate Hezbollah’s external operations modus operandi, senior handlers, communications techniques, travel patterns, terrorist training, and offer even limited information about the pay scale for Hezbollah operatives. Publicly disclosing such information breaks the “golden rule” of Hezbollah’s Unit 910, as expressed to Kourani by his Hezbollah handler: “The less you know about the unit, the better.”