these matters. Thanks to his efforts, Hezbollah became the most powerful terrorist organization ever — even more powerful than al Qaeda in many ways — with "firepower that 90 percent of the countries in the world do not have," according to Dagan.

As early as the mid-1990s, there were Aman officers who marked Lakkis as a potential target, believing that he should be eliminated. But Hezbollah was not a preferred target at the time and was considered more of a nuisance than a strategic threat. By the time that this changed in the 2000s, he was already taking extreme precautions to protect himself.

As I detail in my book, The Secret War With Iran, Lakkis was also wanted in Canada and the United States for running Hezbollah cells in thosecountries in the early 1990s. He had dispatched "elements with criminal tendencies there, and they were therefore happy to send them to North America so that they would not carry on such activities close to the organizations members" in Lebanon, according to a classified Aman paper. These Lebanese criminals settled in Vancouver, North Carolina, and Michigan, where they worked in the wholesale counterfeiting of visas, driver’s licenses, and credit cards, raking in huge profits. Lakkis permitted them to skim off a fat commission, as long as most of the cash was used for the procurement of sophisticated equipment that Hezbollah was finding it difficult to acquire elsewhere, such as GPS and night-vision equipment and various kinds of flak jackets.

In the wake of information conveyed by Israeli intelligence, the