He was indisputably involved in several terror cases beginning with the 1985 hijacking of TWA 847 (his fingerprints were found on board). Giandomenico Picco, the UN envoy who finally closed the Western hostage file in 1991, affirmed that Mughniyah was principal interlocutor in the negotiations. I assisted the Argentinian Supreme Court investigation into the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires that resulted in the indictment of several Iranians as well as Mughniyah. The evidence left no doubt about Mughniyah’s extensive involvement.

Over the years I’ve also interviewed several intelligence officers and investigators from France, the United States, Germany and other countries where Mughniyah was active, and they unanimously agreed that the threat posed by Mughniyah remained very real, extraordinarily dangerous and complex. Just two weeks ago I conducted such an interview at a European intelligence agency, and they continued to regard Mughniyah as a serious security threat. Martin Kramer is right in affirming that Hezbollah has maintained a clandestine terror capability revolving around Mughniyah, as a node to other terror channels within Iran’s intelligence achitecture.

Hezbollah’s denial of Mughniyah was evidence for its fragile double identity. I perfectly understand why they opted for plausible deniability. Why should they have admitted his existence or role in terrorism? Less understandable are the many academics who allowed themselves to be misled about Hezbollah’s clandestine wing and its use by Iran and, at times, Syria. Some of them were blinded by going “native,” or they never really got close enough to Hezbollah to grasp the centrality of the clandestine wing and the crucial role of Mughniyah, the Hamadi clan and others. They preferred to believe that Hezbollah could not possibly harbor a secret structure involved in terrorism, when its above-the-board operations—social, political and military—were so effective and (according to some) so noble and legitimate. And so Hezbollah was allowed to have its cake and eat it too.

Hezbollah’s present embrace of Mughniyah as a great commander and hero has vindicated experts such as myself, who were right to underscore Mughniyah’s significance. We were not surprised to see Nasrallah standing over Mughniyah’s coffin and vowing vengeance. The same cannot be said for Amal Saad-Ghorayeb and others, who downplayed or altogether ignored the most senior Hezbollah commander.

Magnus Ranstorp is Research Director of the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defence College, and the author of Hizb’allah in Lebanon.

In recent days, I’ve learned that while Mughniyah was indeed a shadowy figure, there were quite a lot of people who knew him from his early days when he was a member of Fatah, and who sporadically knew what he was up to afterward. That’s not to say that they would have spoken to researchers, or even that they had much to say; but it was not especially difficult for scholars to dig deeper and discover that Mughniyah at least existed and was not the non-entity that some “experts” made him out to be.

This is emblematic of a wider problem. Hezbollah has been very adept at turning contacts with the party into a supposedly valuable favor. Scholars, particularly in the West, who can claim to have a Hezbollah contact are already regarded as “special” for having penetrated a closed society, so that readers are less inclined to judge critically the merits of what the scholars got out of Hezbollah. The same goes for book editors. Since Hezbollah denied knowing Mughniyah, few were willing to say “This is rubbish, I’m going to push further.” The mere fact of getting that denial was regarded as an achievement—one the authors were not about to jeopardize by calling Hezbollah liars.

My friend Mohamad Bazzi, in an interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, seems to have fallen into this trap. On the CFR site, he told Bernard Gwertzman the following about Mughniyah: “The reports that list him as an active senior leader of Hezbollah at the time of his death are mistaken. He might have had some contact with some people in Hezbollah leadership but he wasn’t giving out orders and he wasn’t in the position to do that.”

How does Bazzi know this? These are not details that Hezbollah would share with journalists, unless it is to begin a process of disinformation. And how does this square with Hezbollah’s own statements and behavior to the contrary since the assassination? I can understand the logic of downplaying the importance of someone important who was murdered, as a means of telling the perpetrators that they did less damage than they think. But what’s the logic of affirming the importance of someone like Mughniyah if he is unimportant? Doesn’t it just confirm that Hezbollah suffered a terrible blow?

My feeling is that Bazzi, like others, perhaps internalized the denials he heard from Hezbollah before the assassination, and has yet to adjust his argument to the aftermath. Writers and scholars quite naturally don’t like to admit that they’ve believed lies. But Hezbollah’s response to Mughniyah’s murder surely imposes a reassessment.

But if downplaying Mughniyah’s importance is not a case of scholars wanting to remove egg from their face, then we could be seeing something different: a situation where writers and scholars are consciously or unconsciously perpetuating their initial belief that Mughniyah was always little more than an American, Israeli, or European creation, therefore that he was another excuse to justify further Western hegemony over the Arabs.

Since so much Middle Eastern commentary and scholarship tends to be filtered into that template, it will be worth watching how writers and scholars comment on the further revelations in the Mughniyah case—assuming any are believable.

Michael Young is opinion page editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.

It is worth remembering that very little is definitively known about the life and career of Imad Mughniyah. Perhaps now that he is dead, an interview might surface in Hezbollah media such as al-Manar or al-Intiqad that reveals more. The degree to which Mughniyah has been publicly claimed by Hezbollah gives us hope the organization will be more transparent about the role he once played. In the meantime, Marc Sirois makes a point in today’s edition of the Daily Star worth noting: “…virtually everything that is thought to be known about Mughniyeh—including, now, his death itself—is suspect.”

Andrew Exum is a member of MESH.