lebanese terrorist Imad Mughniyeh killed hundreds of individuals with automotive bombs — including 220 Marines stationed in Beirut in 1983 — before he himself was blown up in Syria 25 years later.
The story of Mughniyeh, an Islamic jihadist nicknamed “The Smoke Man”, was first detailed in a drama in “Ghosts of BeirutShowtime’s four-part series combining real, on-camera documentary interviews with a script that deals with a joint CIA/Mossad operation to trace down and kill Mughniyeh… or so the story goes, as US and Israeli officials have never officially acknowledged their agencies’ role in sending him to the approaching kingdom.
Ghosts were created by Once AND Avi Issacharoffwho also developed a success Netflix series “fakeduring which Raz stars as a member of the Israeli Defense Forces team, Doron Kavillio. (Sam Raz was a commando within the IDF counter-terrorism unit).
Raz and Issacharoff also co-wrote Ghosts of Beirut, shot in Morocco, with Joëlle Tauma and Greg Barker (who directed all 4 episodes).
“We are able to guess [the Mughniyeh assassination] was a joint operation,” Raz, 51, told The Post. “I even have read several books and articles about the involvement of the CIA and the Mossad. But nobody will ever officially say it. We won’t confirm anything, but… we have spoken to loads of people from each side [the CIA and Mossad] and so they are very reliable.
“We have done every kind of research within the US, Lebanon and Israel,” he said. “We talked to individuals who were involved within the operation to… understand how he carried out all these terrorist attacks, what his motivation was, what effect it had on the CIA, the Mossad, the Israeli army that was in Lebanon within the Nineteen Eighties.
“We went digging within the archives to grasp what was really there.”
“Ghost of Beirut” unfolds with a parallel storyline – interspersed with interviews with talking heads – centering on Mughniyeh – who originally of the series is a 21-year-old garage mechanic in Beirut (played by Amir Khoury). He is understood for his hatred of the US and Israel – each countries have troops stationed in Beirut – and is approached by shadowy Iranian officials who fund his mass killings that eventually spread to other countries (including Argentina and Kuwait).
![Amir Khoury as Imad Mughniyeh (1982) in THE GHOSTS OF BEIRUT](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/Ghosts1-1.jpg?w=1024)
![Hisham Suleiman and Khalid Benchegra as Lebanese terrorist Imad Mughniyeh and his Iranian counterpart Qassem Suleimani. They sit side by side on chairs and are deep in discussion. They are both casually dressed and Imad is holding a glass of wine.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/Ghosts3-1.jpg?w=1024)
![Dina Shahibi as CIA agent Lena Asaryan. He stands in the doorway of his office and looks thoughtfully off the camera.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/Ghosts4-1.jpg?w=1024)
“Imad was the world’s worst terrorist. He was wanted for therefore a few years and was chargeable for killing so many Americans, Israelis and Lebanese,” Raz said. “He was the guy who invented suicide bombing within the Middle East and you possibly can see that [in ‘Ghosts’] how does he do it”.
For years, the CIA and Mossad cannot even determine Imad’s face, the one picture of him being taken a few years ago when he was a teen. One of his first automotive bombs kills Robert Ames (Dermot Mulroney), CIA station chief in Beirut; later the Imad orders the death of Ames’s successor, William Buckley (Garrett Dillahunt) — kidnapped and tortured for over a 12 months before his body was thrown onto the roadway of a bridge.
In the long run, the CIA and Mossad, whose history is tense, reluctantly team as much as catch and kill Imadi. The hunt is led by Lebanese-American CIA agent Lena Asayran (b.Dina Shahibi) and Mossad agent Teddy (Ido Goldberg“Snow Piercer”).
![Iddo Goldberg as Teddy, a Mossad agent who worked with Lena to overthrow Imad. He has a beard and wears a long-sleeved shirt open at the neck when he looks off-camera. Some of his co-workers can be seen in the background.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/Ghosts5-1.jpg?w=1024)
Raz and Issacharoff, as in “Fauda”, show the several sides of the conflict “Ghosts of Beirut” – including the non-public evolution of Imad, who marries his childhood sweetheart and has children along with her until he gets drained of his lifestyle and falls in love with a Syrian a businesswoman on a business trip to Damascus (to satisfy her Iranian contacts) – revealing her whereabouts in the method.
Hisham Suleiman he plays an older version of Imad, who never falters in his fanaticism – and before he’s killed in Ghosts of Beirut, he plans to unleash chemical warfare on his enemies with Iran’s blessing.
“To see how [Imad] he was so effective at manipulating people into doing it [car bombings] … was speculated to be very charming and you possibly can’t do things like that when you’re not good with people,” said Raz.
![Rafi Gavron and Garrett Dillahunt as CIA agent Chet and his boss, Station Chief William Buckley, who is later tortured and killed by Imad. They talk in a bar; Buckley has a drink in his hand.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/Ghosts6-1.jpg?w=1024)
![](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/WireImage_1482254952.jpg?w=683)
“He was eventually married, had kids, and died because he fell in love with one other woman – so it is not about ‘humanizing’ him, it’s about telling the actual story and the way we assumed it happened.
“Nobody knew exactly where he was, what he was doing, where he was hiding, so we needed to fill this puzzle out of our imagination,” he said. “You already know, there is a saying, ‘The higher the villain, the higher the movie, and this guy, like in ‘Fauda’ … you need to understand why he does these crazy and terrible things, and to grasp that you’ve got to indicate the entire picture and that is what we’re attempting to do.” to do.
“I believe that in modern television, bad people usually are not just flat characters … that is why you’ve got to grasp that these monsters do these terrible things, but still love their children.”
He once said he hoped “Ghosts of Beirut” would tell Imad’s true story as accurately as possible.
“It’s extremely necessary that individuals … know history,” he said. “Everybody knows the name of Osama bin Laden – and I believe they need to know the name of Imad Mughinyeh too.”