Early this past February I was in Paris for a few days to do some preliminary research for an upcoming project. Two of my dozen-plus meetings were with the man who formed the basis for the character of Shahram Shahristani in Direct Action, my novel (released last month in paperback by Avon) about the search for an al-Qa'ida master bombmaker. The real Shahram is an Iranian émigré whose background is military intelligence. He has also, over the years, trafficked in everything from carpets to arms to information.

He was also connected to what has been come to be knows as the Iran Contra affair, and because of that involvement he is on the CIA's black list. In fact, there is a pair of burn notices attached to Shahram's file at Langley, telling all and sundry he is a fabricator, a no-goodnik with a personal agenda, and that he is to be shunned at all costs.

Anyway, we were sitting, Shahram and I, at the Brasserie Lorraine, a rather overpriced restaurant known for its seafood that sits at the edge of the eighth arrondissement on the Place des Ternes, at the confluence of the Boulevard de Courcelles and the Rue du Faubourg St. Honore. Our conversation was mostly about Iran and the upcoming confrontation with the United States over its nuclear program and about Iran's support for terrorism.

“You know,” Shahram said to me late in the conversation, “Imad Mugniyah was in Damascus last month. He went as part of the official party when President Ahmadinejad visited Bashar al-Asad.”

I put my coffee cup down. That was news. Imad Mugniyah is, after Usama bin Laden, the world's most wanted terrorist. He's been at it much longer than bin Laden, and his prime targets over the past two-and-a-half decades have been largely American.

A little bit of history. Imad Mugniyah was responsible for coordinating the April, 1983, homicide bombing attack on the American Embassy in Beirut in which 63 people died.

In October of the same year, he staged simultaneous attacks on a U.S. Marine barracks near Beirut's airport (241 U.S. Sailors and Marines died), and a French Army barracks (58 KIA).

He was responsible for the kidnapping and torture/murders of CIA Beirut station chief William Buckley, and Marine Lt. Col. Rich Higgins.

He staged the high-profile hijacking of TWA 847, during which U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem was brutally murdered.

We don't know much about Imad Mugniyah's childhood or background. Some intelligence sources say he was born in South Lebanon. Others think he is from Ayn al-Dilbah, a village long ago absorbed into the slums that have become Beirut's Shia dominated southern suburbs. What is certain is that as a teenager, Mugniyah was recruited into Force 17, the Praetorian Guard of Yasser Arafat's Fatah organization. Force 17's leader was the charismatic “Red Prince of Terror,” Ali Hassan Salameh, the operations boss of Black September, Arafat's version of Murder, Inc. Black September perpetrated the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre that ended with the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes.

Early in 1979, the Israelis finally caught up with Salameh. He was killed on January 29, when a covert Mossad team led by a woman using the alias Mary Erika Chambers detonated a Volkswagen packed with 100 kilograms of explosives as Salameh's motorcade turned out of Beirut's Rue Verdun onto Rue Madam Curie.

After Salameh's death and especially after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon to dislodge the PLO's state-within-a-state, many of the Shia who'd been a part of Force 17 were actively recruited by Iranian agents who had been active in Lebanon since the mid-1970s. Long before the shah's Western-leaning government fell to Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution, many of the individuals who would become the nucleus of Khomeini's Seppah-e Pasdaran -- his Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps -- were, with Yasser Arafat's blessing, allowed to train in Lebanon's Beka'a Valley.

After Arafat was exiled to Tunis, the Iranians scooped up scores of Shia fighters, provided them with financing, planning, weapons, and, by the early 1980s, a new target: the United States. Imad Mugniyah became chief of operations. The cover names used for these terror organizations included Islamic Amal, Da'wa, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. But in reality, names didn't matter. What mattered was control. And real control of Hezbollah lay not with the Musawi clan or the organization's so-called “spiritual leader,” Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, but with the mullahs, the Seppah, and Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, Tehran's one-time ambassador in Damascus.

After Lebanon's civil war ended in 1990, Imad Mugniyah found a safe haven in Tehran, where he assisted the mullahs implementing their long-term program of expanding support for Islamist terror on a worldwide basis.

Not that he stopped traveling. In the mid-1990s he visited Usama bin Laden in Khartoum to discuss mutual interests. According to RUMINT, he and Bin Laden actually worked together on the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in which 19 Americans were killed. In July 1996, Western intelligence learned Mugniyah was a passenger aboard the Kuwaiti-flagged freighter Ibn Tafil. A joint U.S. Marine/SEAL snatch operation was put together. But at the last minute, the Clinton White House scrubbed the Navy's plan to board the ship and capture or kill him. Since then, there have been other rumored sightings: Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Gaza. It's alleged he's had multiple plastic surgeries to change his appearance. Intelligence agencies have only a few photographs of Imad Mugniyah, and most of those are more than 20 years old.

Anyway, immediately after my meeting with Shahram I called an old contact in Tel Aviv and asked if he'd heard about Imad Mugniyah's trip to Damascus. He answered in the affirmative, and said it had come from a good source within Israel's intelligence community.

And the reason? Maybe, he speculated, Mugniyah's visit was cover for a high-level conference of terrorists.

I met again with Shahram. We sat at a corner table at Fouquet's on the Champs Elysees. He munched on a millefeuille; I took notes. I asked if he knew with whom Imad Mugniyah had met during his visit to Damascus.

Shahram deflected the question. “The Iranians met with Hamas,” he said. “They told Hamas, ‘It is time to move now. You have free rein to act.'”

“With Meshal?” Khalid Meshal has been, since 2004, the leader of Hamas. He lives in Damascus under the protection of president Asad.

Shahram waved his hand dismissively. “Something big is coming.” He looked at me, his expression grave. “I promise you, the Iranians before the eighth of March will deliver two loads of equipment -- special weapons, missiles, explosives--to Hezbollah. There will be a crisis. Big crisis.”

I forgot about that conversation for a couple of months. I shouldn't have, because Shahram was onto something significant. Not that he could have gone to CIA with it, of course. But that's the subject for another column.

Now, I'm not big into conspiracies. Still, let's look at what Shahram told me and then lay a few things out in chronological sequence.

•  In February, Imad Mugniyah and Iranian representatives meet with the Hamas leadership in Damascus and tell them they have “free rein to act.”

•  In March, according to Shahram, a huge shipment of armaments is scheduled for covert delivery to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Most likely the delivery is sent through Syria.

•  Over the spring the urgency over Iran's nuclear weapons development program escalates.

•  As the US-Iranian rhetoric gets more heated, Iranian president Ahmadinejad issues threats to wipe Israel off the map. At the same time, Hamas, which receives Iranian backing and money, starts lobbing more and...