The writer Kai Bird claimed that on August 8, 1982, shortly before Yasser Arafat's departure for Tunis, Stevens visited Arafat in his bunker, begged him not to leave with his PLO fighters, and warned him of the dangers the Palestinian women and children would face if left alone in the camps. Bird traced this account of Stevens's meeting with Arafat to Imad Mughniyah, Arafat's bodyguard at the time, who went on to become a leader in Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shi'ia Islamist militant party. Mughniyah later orchestrated a string of kidnappings and attacks, including the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut of October 1983, the hijacking of TWA flight 847 in June 1985, the bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in March 1992, and the bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in June 1996.
