The French intelligence agency DGSE (the French acronym for Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure or General Directorate for External Security ), planned in the 1980s to blow up the Iranian embassy in Beirut.

Open gallery view Rescue operations after the 1983 barracks bombings in Beirut, which killed 299 people. Credit: Archive: AP

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.

Hundreds of French soldiers were serving in Beirut as part of an international force that was intended to oversee implementation of the agreement reached with Israel in the Lebanon War and in particular, the evacuation of Palestine Liberation Organization units from the country.

Following the attack, the French intelligence agency contacted the intelligence agencies of Israel and the U.S. and other organizations with a request for information on the identity of the perpetrators.

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. The interview was by into a documentary by the two made to be aired on the public France 5 station in the coming weeks.

The disclosure marks 50 years since the establishment of the intelligence agency and in honor of the event, the DGSE has agreed to open part of its archives, disclose documents from its history and allow its senior members, such as Lacoste, to speak to the press.

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.

The Iranian Embassy, which was identified as "the serpent's head," the headquarters where instructions were issued to handle Hezbollah in the suicide bombing attack against the French force and U.S. Marines in Lebanon and later on, also to kidnap Western citizens, was spared the attack and remained intact. 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 and according to intelligence reports he took part in a special meeting at the Iranian embassy in Damascus where the decision was made to go ahead with the terrorist attacks.

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.

The disclosure from Paris and the earlier one from Washington present assassination and anti-terror operations thought to be associated with mainly Israeli intelligence in a slightly different light.

It seems Israel, which is associated more than any other country with assassinations and revenge operations, is not alone.

Even democratic, Western countries, such as France and the United States, and in its colonial past, Britain too, did not hesitate to use terrorist methods to combat terrorism.

Nevertheless, as far as quantity goes, Israel is still far ahead of the rest. At the height of the second intifada, Israel carried out hundreds of "targeted killings" via the Shin Bet security service and the Israel Defense Forces.

In quite a few instances, air force planes were used to drop bombs on houses where the targets were hiding, which led to the deaths of innocent people.

The most prominent case was the assassination of Salah Shehadeh, a senior Hamas terrorist who was hiding in his Gaza home with others inside when the air force bombed it, killing 14.

Following criticism over the operation, then-air force Commander Dan Halutz, in defense of the action, told Haaretz in a controversial statement that the only thing a pilot feels when dropping a one-ton bomb is "a bump to the wing."

According to foreign reports, the IDF's intelligence units and special units used collaborators in dropping bombs against PLO and Hezbollah terrorists in southern Lebanon in the 1980s. However, to bomb a foreign embassy is a different matter entirely.

Over the years, there were deliberations in the Israeli intelligence community, primarily the Mossad, over how to pay back terrorists who blow up Israeli embassies abroad.

This question surfaced in full force on March 17, 1992 after the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Until then and afterward as well, there had been attempts to attack Israeli embassies - the most recent plot was uncovered in Baku, Azerbaijan about two years ago.

But what happened in Argentina over 18 years ago was the harshest terrorist attack against an Israeli embassy ever.

A car bomb blew up the building and killed 29 embassy workers and passers-by and injured 235 others. The perpetrators were Hezbollah terrorists from Lebanon who were aided by local collaborators. They received the go-ahead for the operation from the most senior echelon in Iran - President Rafsanjani, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and then-intelligence minister Ali Fallahian. The Argentine government issued international arrest warrants for all of them and for other Iranians as well.

There were some members of the Israeli intelligence community who felt that there should be a response and the attack avenged in similar fashion by bombing the Iranian embassy in a country hostile to Israel.

But in the end, the measured voices maintaining that Israel cannot be involved in such actions even if the war against terrorism is cruel and lacking any moral restraints, prevailed.