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146 ONE OF HEZBOLLAH’S first American recruits was a Vietnam veteran and convert to Islam who first fought for Amal and then, as Amal lost political ground and members to Hezbollah, trained Hezbollah operatives. He reportedly served as a bodyguard for Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah (a trusted position once occupied by Imad Mughniyeh) and by 1996 would be described by then–defense secretary William Perry as “a known American terrorist.”1 The casualty of a broken home who fell in with street gangs in Southeast Washington , D.C., Clevin Holt dropped out of school at age fourteen and used forged papers to enlist in the US Army at age fifteen. Holt spent three months in Vietnam but never saw combat. Most of his tour as an Army Ranger was spent in South Korea , where he became a black nationalist and was involved in a race riot that left one US soldier dead. When the army discovered he had enlisted as a minor, he was given an honorable discharge and flown home. There, angry at the treatment of returning Vietnam veterans and the racism still pervading American society, Holt planned to find a good vantage point in Silver Spring, Maryland, and “start shooting white people.” Unable to enact his plan, he was about to commit suicide when, as he retells it, an angel told him he would go to hell if he killed himself. Three days later, he met Musa Abdul Raheem, an African American convert to Islam, and he soon converted to Sunni Islam and took on the name Isa Abdullah Ali.2 Within a couple of years, however, Abdullah Ali would leave the Sunni tradition and embrace Shi’ism. Inspired by the Iranian revolution, he and his fellow convert and friend Dawud Salahuddin (David Belfield) took jobs at the Washington, D.C., embassy of the new Islamic Republic of Iran. Salahuddin would soon be recruited by the Islamic Republic to assassinate Ali Akbar Tabatabai, a former Iranian embassy press attaché who had become a vocal critic of Khomeini. Disguised as a postal carrier, Salahuddin shot Tabatabai three times with a handgun at Tabatabai’s Bethesda, Maryland, home.3 Abdullah Ali would first come to the attention of US law enforcement following “the assassination of this criminal Tabatabai,” as Abdullah Ali later described it, as a result of to his friendship with Belfield.4 FBI officials later questioned Abdullah Ali, 6 Beirut to the Blue Ridge Hezbollah Comes to North America Beirut to the Blue Ridge 147 reporting that the “subject provided minimal information concerning the areas of FBI interests.”5 They ruled him out as a suspect, likely because by the time of the murder Abdullah Ali had already left the United States to fight in Afghanistan. Abdullah Ali was forced by illness to leave Afghanistan after just a month, returning to the United States in August 1980, a month after the Tabatabai murder. But four months later, he left for another foreign jihad, this time to fight in Lebanon with the Amal militia. He stayed in Lebanon from December 1980 to October 1981, at which point he went to Iran for eight months. He returned just days before the Israeli invasion of Lebanon on June 6, 1982. Speaking to an American reporter in 1982, Abdullah Ali declined, “for political reasons,” to specify what he did in Lebanon and Iran before the 1982 Lebanon war. Generally, he stated, “when advice is needed I give it. When it’s not, I’m a sniper.” By that time, he claimed to have killed at least nine Israelis.6 Years later, he claimed he stopped counting the number of people he had killed when the number reached 173.7 Over time, Abdullah Ali appears to have moved along the spectrum of Shi’a militancy in Lebanon from Amal to Hezbollah. According to former State Department intelligence officer Louis Mizell, Abdullah Ali appears to have trained Amal and Hezbollah operatives while in Lebanon, including female recruits.8 By the time he left Lebanon, he had also served as bodyguard for Fadlallah.9 Perhaps most interesting , however, is his role in the October 1994 kidnapping of Tod Robberson, an American journalist in Beirut. Working for the Beirut Daily Star, Robberson took particular interest in the February 11, 1984, kidnappings of American professor Frank Regier and Frenchman Christian Joubert, one of whom was Robberson’s neighbor. Hezbollah kidnapped the two Westerners during the trial of the Kuwait 17 operatives charged with carrying out acts of...

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