Edition: U.S. / Global

The Accountant Is a Terrorist

By Douglas Frantz
Published: November 10, 1996

East Jerusalem was beginning to stir. Arab women in embroidered, ankle-length dresses balanced baskets of figs and grapes atop their heads on their way to market stalls inside the walls of the Old City. Lumbering delivery trucks on Salah-a-Din Street belched diesel fumes and forced boys with pushcarts to the curb in front of the nondescript Lawrence Hotel. Graffiti in Arabic script, blood red on the mud-brown brick of the hotel's entrance, declared, ''Yes to an independent Palestinian State.''

In Room 27, at the rear of the hotel's third floor, a man sat hunched on the side of his narrow wooden bed. He was in his early 30's, with a thin mustache, cropped black hair and tinted aviator glasses. Between his fleshy thighs he clasped a black Sony 12-band clock radio, the back removed to expose its electronic innards. Perhaps a truck horn ruptured the stillness. Maybe a curse from tourists struggling with luggage down the hall. Something caused his sweat-damp hands to slip.

The explosion ripped through the hotel at 7:15 A.M. on April 12. It shattered every window on the third floor, spewing glass on the street below. Doors of all 10 rooms on the floor were ripped from their hinges and scattered. One narrowly missed a sleeping child. Walls were knocked down in the room next to Room 27 and in the one across the hall, both vacated only a short time before the blast. In the man's room, the bathroom wall was blown down, the bed was shattered and a crater six inches deep and three feet in diameter was gouged into the concrete floor.

A young husband and wife from Chicago peered from their room down the hall as a man crawled out of Room 27, covered with blood and debris and calling out: ''Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar.'' The tourists recognized the Arabic words: ''God is Great. God is Great.'' Within minutes, the street was filled with sirens as emergency vehicles arrived and dazed guests emerged from the narrow entrance of the hotel. They watched medics rush out moments later carrying a man on a stretcher. No one else suffered anything more serious than scratches and shock.

Police first suspected a gas leak, and the building was evacuated. Even in security-conscious Jerusalem, it seemed to be a logical explanation. There was no reason to be suspicious of the victim. Hotel records identified him as a British citizen named Andrew Jonathan Charles Newman, an accountant from London. Hotel workers said they had noticed nothing unusual about his behavior since his arrival three days earlier. He was polite and quiet, leaving in the mornings, carrying maps and a simple tourist's camera, and returning at night. A briefcase pulled from the rubble contained accounting papers in English, with a firm's address in London.

Clues quickly pointed in a more menacing direction. There was no gas leak, and the crater indicated that the blast had occurred in the center of Room 27. Half a radio was found intact. There was a key from a hotel in Tel Aviv near the site where a Palestinian suicide bomber had killed 13 and wounded 130 a month earlier. Then there was that Arabic shout the couple from Chicago had described to police.

By 5 P.M. that afternoon, police forensic crews were picking through the pieces of Room 27 and scouring the hotel room in Tel Aviv, where the man remained registered. And the police had been joined by experts from Shin Bet, Israel's counterespionage and internal security service. The experts soon found more ominous signs. A close examination of the hotel registry showed that the guest had misspelled Newman when he printed it in neat block letters -- N-E-M-A-N. On inspection, his passport turned out to be a forgery of professional quality -- the real Andrew Newman's photograph replaced with that of the injured man. Preliminary lab reports found residue in the room from C-4, a plastic explosive manufactured for the American military and not seen in Israel for a decade. Also discovered in the room was a box of nails, a common component in the suicide bombs plaguing the country.

''For us, the picture changed by evening,'' a senior Shin Bet official recalled. ''It was a sign that there was something unusual going on here. And maybe that we had a stranger among us. A stranger who tried to do something bad with this explosive.''

At that moment, on the other side of Jerusalem, surgeons at Hadassah-Ein Kerem hospital were fighting to save the stranger's life. He had lost a lot of blood. Both legs and his left arm had been amputated, and he could not see. In his favor was the fact that he was a large man, about six feet tall and 200 pounds. To the doctors, it was a miracle that he was still alive. To Shin Bet, it was a godsend. A 24-hour police guard was posted outside his room. The stranger's survival was suddenly a matter of national security.

In the months since the explosion, the picture has become much clearer. The man who blew himself up was a member of Hezbollah, one of the world's most successful terrorist organizations. That discovery sent shudders through the Israeli security apparatus: it was the first time that anyone from the Lebanese-based organization had penetrated Israel. The man, whose real name is Hussein Mohammed Hussein Mikdad, is indeed a professional accountant, but the rest of his cover story was a fabrication. He is a 33-year-old Lebanese Shiite and the married father of a young daughter. His path to the Lawrence Hotel winds through the enclaves of Arab unrest in Beirut to a secret terrorist training camp in Lebanon's infamous Bekaa Valley, from Vienna and the shores of Lake Zurich to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. There are some gaps along the way; in the real world of terrorism, truth often hides in shadows.