all of them. The list was headed by two men: Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah’s supreme military commander, and Gen. Muhammad Suleiman, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s head of secret special projects, including the building of a nuclear reactor, and the person in charge of Syria’s ties with Iran and Hezbollah. As Meir Dagan, the former Mossad chief, told me: "Gen. Muhammad Suleiman was in charge of Assad’s shady businesses, including the connection with Hezbollah and Iran and all sensitive projects. He was a figure Assad was leaning upon. And these days, he misses him."

After them came Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, head of missile development for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the export of missiles to Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Islamic Jihad; Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the Hamas official in charge oftactical ties with Iran; and Hassan Lakkis (also spelled in FBI documents as Haj Hassan Hilu Laqis), who was identified by Aman in the early 1990s as Hezbollah’s weapons development expert. In an article about Lakkis’s death, Lebanon’s Daily Star called him a "key figure in Hezbollah[‘s] drone program." The Israeli intelligence source continued the analogy with the Bond movies and called him "Hezbollah’s Q."

According to his Aman file, Lakkis was active in the radical Shiite movement since age 19, enlisting shortly after it was established. He had a certain amount of technical education at a Lebanese university, but most of his skills were acquired from his experience in developing and manufacturing weaponry. Almost from the outset he was the top procurement officer and coordinator with Iran on