A French booby-trapped car for the Iranian Embassy in Beirut & Saudi financed CIA plan to kill Fadlallah..... ...

The Casey-Fahd plan is known, but the French 'car' is news to me.

"...This was revealed by Pierre Lacoste, who was the DGSE director from 1982-1985 and served under French President Francois Mitterrand. The operation was planned to avenge the October 23, 1983 bombing of French and American army barracks in the Lebanese capital, killing 58 French soldiers and 241 American servicemen.....

According to the information received, they were from Hezbollah, which had just been established, prompted by the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. According to the intelligence, senior Iranian intelligence officials approved the attack in the hope that it would lead to an end to the French and international military presence in Lebanon.

Lacoste instructed the DGSE's operations people to prepare a revenge attack. In an interview he gave to Le Point journalist Jean Guisnel and film director David Korn-Brzoza he disclosed the details of the operation.... Lacoste says a booby-trapped car was prepared and it was parked near the Iranian Embassy in Beirut with the goal of blowing it up. As a backup, a bazooka was also prepared which was to fire bombs at the building. But due to malfunctions, the car did not explode and the bazooka did not work...... This dramatic revelation from Paris joins a similar, earlier revelation regarding what can be called "intelligence-agency sponsored terrorism," published in American journalist Bob Woodward's 1987 book "Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987"

Woodward's book is based on lengthy talks with then-CIA chief William Casey. Woodward writes that Casey decided on a revenge attack following the Beirut bombing. Casey, who received intelligence data from Israel, decided that the target for revenge would be Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, who died this summer. Fadlallah was then seen as the spiritual leader of Hezbollah .... In order to conceal the CIA's involvement and bypass Congress, which at the time banned the American intelligence agency from carrying out assassination operations, Casey was assisted by King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, who agreed to pay $3 million for the revenge operation. Through the offices of the Saudi Arabian ambassador in Washington, Prince Bandar, the money was deposited in a Swiss bank account for a mercenary, a British commando who was hired for the mission. The mercenary arranged the operation with the help of Lebanese collaborators.on March 8, 1985, a car bomb placed near Fadlallah's home exploded, killing 80 civilians, but not Fadlallah...."