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  The 1986 bombing campaign resulted from a convergence of interests between Hezbollah and Iran. Hezbollah sought the release of its imprisoned members, while Iran desired to make France pay for its support of Iraq and other anti-Iranian policies.79 Despite Salah’s arrest and the destruction of his network, the terror campaign of 1986 accomplished many of its goals. In July of 1986, Masoud Radjavi, leader of the Iranian opposition movement Mujahedin-e Khalq (People’s Mujahedin of Iran, or MEK) also known as the National Council of Iranian Resistance, was expelled from Paris along with his organization and forced to transfer its headquarters to Iraq. In 1988, France also agreed to repay $300 million of the $1 billion loan from Iran to the French nuclear consortium Eurodiff, a deal dating from before the Islamic Revolution aimed at financing the construction of a nuclear plant.80 In return for these goodwill gestures, overt attacks against French targets and the kidnapping of French nationals in Lebanon ceased. However, Europe overall remained an arena for Hezbollah’s attacks against Israeli, Jewish, and American targets.

  The Long Arm of the Hamadi Clan

  It would not be long before Mohammad Hamadi followed up on the hijacking of TWA flight 847 with further European attacks. The Hamadi clan had long been part of the core of Hezbollah—there at its founding and central to its IJO. A July 1987 CIA report tied “Hizballah’s success in the Bekaa” to Shi’a clans in the valley, in particular “the Musawi, Tufayli, and Hamadi clans.”81 The agency had no mere parochial interest in the Hamadi clan—the family’s members were popping up in a series of international Hezbollah plots.

  Around the time of Mohammad Hamadi’s 1987 arrest at the Frankfurt airport, another Hezbollah operative was arrested in Italy, indicating the group was “apparently preparing the logistic grounds for future terrorist attacks,” according to the CIA.82 Meanwhile, Abbas Hamadi, who returned to Lebanon after being briefly detained along with his brother, helped kidnap two West German businessmen in an attempt to pressure the West German government to release his younger brother, Mohammad. The eldest Hamadi brother, Abdel, was chief of security for Hezbollah in the Beirut suburbs and the de facto leader of an operational network that went by the name “Freedom Fighters” and which claimed responsibility for three kidnappings in West Beirut following Mohammad Hamadi’s arrest in Germany.83 When these actions failed to secure Mohammad’s release, Abbas took the fight to Germany, but—just twelve days after his initial release—he was arrested at the Frankfurt airport again.84

  Mohammad might have been the youngest Hamadi brother, but his star burned brightest given his role in the TWA flight 847 hijacking. So when Mohammad was caught in Frankfurt, the retribution was high: not just the kidnapping of two Germans in Lebanon but also that of two Swedish journalists (thought to be West Germans) on February 11, 1987, in Beirut. Once the kidnappers realized they had grabbed Swedes, not Germans, the captives were promptly released. These kidnappings closely followed the January 27 capture of another West German hostage, also taken in an effort to secure the Hamadis’ release. Two years later, Hezbollah operatives kidnapped two German charity workers in southern Lebanon, the day before Mohammad Hamadi was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in Germany in May 1989.85 The Hezbollah hijacking of a flight in 1987, led by Hussein Ali Mohammad Hariri, was also aimed at securing the release of detained Hezbollah operatives, chief among them the Hamadi brothers (see chapter 9).

  Hezbollah saw Europe in general and Germany in particular as a permissive operating environment, however, and had bigger plans than just kidnapping Germans in Lebanon. According to a US Senate report, Hezbollah leveraged the acumen and connections of sympathetic Lebanese businessmen in Europe to build a “web of import-export companies in Western Europe as part of its dormant network.” The purpose of this network: “to insert large quantities of explosive and related equipment into target countries.”86 The Hamadi brothers’ operational plans had been thwarted with Mohammad’s arrest and conviction, but other Hezbollah operatives were ready to pick up where the Hamadis had left off.

  Casing Targets in Germany

  In 1989, Hezbollah operative Bassam Gharib Makki was apprehended in Germany, where he was planning to carry out a bombing attack. Makki was found in possession of preoperational intelligence about Israeli, Jewish, American, and other targets in Germany, and Arabic bomb-making instructions were discovered in his apartment in Darmstadt, in the southwest part of the country.87

  Born on July 25, 1967, in Bint Jbeil, in southern Lebanon, Bassam Makki first arrived in Germany on December 2, 1985, and filed an asylum claim. However, after learning he could not attend university under asylum status, he flew back to Lebanon and later returned under the auspices of a church group. In April 1988, Makki received his residency permit and began studying physics at the Institute of Technology in Darmstadt, on a full scholarship from the Hariri Foundation.88 However, Makki’s interest in higher education was merely a cover for his real mission in Germany, which was to case American, Israeli, and Jewish targets.89

  On September 23, 1988, German authorities intercepted a package sent by Makki to his contact in Lebanon containing an atlas of the Rhine-Main area and thirteen color photographs of Israeli targets. It also contained an odd letter referring to various BMW cars that he claimed to have located, with a particular focus on the BMW 320 and 520 models. The Germans intercepted another package en route to Lebanon on May 31, 1989, which contained a list of twenty Mercedes cars and a statement from Makki that buying larger models such as the 450 and 480 would be difficult. If there were some “marks or checks,” he added, he would be willing to buy the cars.90 Investigators would make sense of the letters only later, when they found Makki’s codebooks and realized the references to cars were code for his operational planning.

  When Bassam Makki was apprehended by German authorities on June 22, 1989, he was found in possession of a letter identifying all his targets.91 A search of his apartment revealed codebooks hidden in a suitcase and behind a picture frame as well as instructions on the use of explosives. The codebooks were simple but effective. For example, the sentence “I have found a car in good condition” indicated he had discovered a good bombing target. “BMW” referred to Israeli and Jewish targets, and “Mercedes” indicated an American target. The combination 320 and 520 BMW referred to the Israeli religious community at Reichensbachstrasse 27, while the numbers indicated that both injuries to persons and property damage could be achieved. For this reason, it was considered the best target. The references to the Mercedes 450 and 480 implied difficulty scouting out special buildings or people. And “marks or checks” referred to the weapons or explosives needed to make feasible an attack on the targets.92

  During his trial Bassam claimed that he had been coerced into conducting reconnaissance by a man named Jozef, an Arab who appeared in his apartment in September 1988 and threatened his family unless Bassam complied with his demands. “Jozef,” also the name signed to the letters seized en route to Lebanon, was determined by the German court to be a fabrication.93 “For an undetermined time,” the court concluded, “he has had connections with similarly-minded persons or organizations in Beirut, Lebanon, who engage in or have an interest in preparing and executing bomb attacks against Israeli, Jewish, or American installations” in Germany.94

  Makki was sentenced to two years in prison on December 22, 1989, and deported to Syria on July 22, 1990.95 This was hardly the end of his involvement with Hezbollah, however; Makki turned up again in South America several years later under incriminating circumstances (see chapter 11).

  Iran’s Dissident Hit List

  Immediately following the founding of the Islamic Republic, the Iranian leadership embarked on an assassination campaign targeting individuals deemed to be working against the regime’s interests. Between 1979 and 1994, the CIA reported, Iran “murdered Iranian defectors and dissidents in West Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Turkey.”96 Overall, more than sixty individuals were targeted in assassination attempts.9
7 In many cases Hezbollah members functioned as the logistics experts or gunmen in these plots.

  The first successful assassination of an Iranian dissident in Western Europe occurred in 1984. On February 7, Gen. Gholam Ali Oveissi and his brother were fatally shot on a Paris street by what French police described as “professional assassins.” Police claimed there were “two or three men involved and that one or two of them had fired a 9-millimeter pistol at the victims who were walking on Rue de Passy.”98 Oveissi, the former military governor of Tehran under the shah who was known as the Butcher of Tehran, distinguished himself by responding to protests with tanks. Just before his death, Oveissi claimed that he had assembled a small counterrevolutionary army to retake Iran. Hezbollah’s IJO and another group, the Revolutionary Organization for Liberation and Reform, claimed responsibility for the killings. The day after the attack, the Iranian government described the event as a “revolutionary execution.”99

  Oveissi’s assassination ushered in a period of great danger for Iranian dissidents in Europe. On July 19, 1987, for example, Amir Parvis, a former Iranian cabinet member and the British chairman of the National Movement of the Iranian Resistance, suffered a broken leg, cuts, and burns when a car bomb exploded as he drove past the Royal Kensington Hotel in London. Several months later, on October 3, Ali Tavakoli and his son Nader, both Iranian monarchist exiles, were found shot in the head in their London apartment.100 Both attacks were claimed by a previously unknown group, the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, which according to a March 3, 1989, report by the Times of London, “is believe[d] to be closely linked to the Hezbollah extremists in south Beirut, but all its London-based members are Iranian.”101

  A year later, on July 13, 1989, Dr. Abdolrahman Ghassemlou, secretary-general of the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI); Abdollah Ghaeri-Azar, the PDKI’s European representative; and Fazil Rassoul, an Iraqi Kurd serving as a mediator were assassinated in a Vienna apartment while meeting with a delegation from the Iranian government. Although forced underground after the 1979 revolution, Ghassemlou and the PDKI were informed after the Iran-Iraq War that the Iranian government was open to conducting talks. On December 30 and 31, 1988, Ghassemlou met with an Iranian delegation headed by Mohammad Jafari Sahraroudi, the head of the Kurdish Affairs Section of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence. The two met regularly until July 13, when a meeting was held that included Sahraroudi; governor of the Iranian province of Kurdistan Mostafa Ajoudi; an undercover Iranian agent, Amir Mansour Bozorgian; and the victims. At one point during the meeting, Rassoul and Ghassemlou proposed a break and suggested that the negotiations resume the next day. Soon after, gunshots were heard. In the shooting the three Kurds were killed and Sahraroudi was injured. Investigators found a blue baseball cap in Ghassemlou’s lap, the same call sign that was left at the scene of the murder of an Iranian pilot, Ahmad Moradi Talebi, in 1987 and the 1990 murder of resistance leader Kazem Radjavi.102 Bozorgian was taken into custody; however, he was later released and fled the country, along with several other suspects.103

  Just one month after the Vienna assassination, on August 3, 1989, Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh died when an explosive device he was preparing detonated prematurely inside the Paddington Hotel in London. His target was Salman Rushdie, whose 1988 publication of The Satanic Verses prompted Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa condemning the writer, his editors, and his publishers to death, and to place a $2.5 million bounty on his head. Mazeh, a Lebanese citizen born in the Guinean capital of Conakry, had joined a local Hezbollah cell in his teens. Though he was being watched by security agencies, he succeeded in obtaining a French passport in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, from an official later arrested by the French authorities in Toulouse. Mazeh apparently went to Lebanon and stayed in his parents’ village before traveling to London through the Netherlands.104

  Later, speaking about Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie, a Hezbollah commander would tell an interviewer that “one member of the Islamic Resistance, Mustafa Mazeh, had been martyred in London.”105 According to the CIA, attacks on the book’s Italian, Norwegian, and Japanese translators in July 1991 suggested “that Iran has shifted from attacking organizations affiliated with the novel—publishing houses and bookstores—to individuals involved in its publication, as called for in the original fatwa.”106 Today, a shrine dedicated to Mazeh still stands in Tehran’s Behesht Zahra cemetery with an inscription reading, “The first martyr to die on a mission to kill Salman Rushdie.”107

  Less than a year after the Vienna assassinations and the abortive attempt on Rushdie’s life in London, Kazem Radjavi, former Iranian ambassador to the UN and brother of the leader of the MEK, was assassinated. On April 24, 1990, his car was forced off the road in Coppet, Switzerland, by two vehicles, after which two armed men exited one of the vehicles and opened fire. Again, a blue baseball cap was left at the scene, marking the third use of this call sign at the site of a suspected Iranian assassination.108

  According to the report of the Swiss investigating judge, evidence pointed to the direct involvement of one or more official Iranian services in the murder. All in all, there were thirteen suspects—all of whom had traveled to Switzerland on official Iranian passports.109 One report indicated that “all 13 came to Switzerland on brand-new government-service passports, many issued in Tehran on the same date. Most listed the same personal address, Karim-Khan 40, which turns out to be an intelligence ministry building. All 13 arrived on Iran Air flights, using tickets issued on the same date and numbered sequentially.” International warrants for the thirteen suspects’ arrests were issued on June 15, 1990.110

  No death, however, shook the Iranian expatriate community more than the assassination of Chapour Bakhtiar, former Iranian prime minister and secretary-general of the Iranian National Resistance Movement. On August 6, 1991, Bakhtiar and an aide were stabbed to death by Iranian operatives in Bakhtiar’s Paris apartment.111 Previously, in July 1980, Bakhtiar had been targeted in another assassination attempt led by Anis Naccache that killed a policeman and a female neighbor. One reason Hezbollah abducted French citizens in Lebanon was to secure the release of Naccache, who was imprisoned in France for the attempted killing.112

  In a 1991 interview Naccache recalled, “I had no personal feelings against Bakhtiar…. It was purely political. He had been sentenced to death by the Iranian Revolutionary Tribunal. They sent five of us to execute him.”113 Hezbollah, for its part, pushed hard for Naccache’s release following its various kidnappings and terrorist acts and on July 28, 1990, finally got its wish. Naccache was sent to Tehran, with his pardon granted in a bid to improve relations with Tehran that would lead to the release of French hostages held in Lebanon.114

  Death at the Mykonos Restaurant

  The most daring and public assassinations Hezbollah carried out at the behest of its Iranian masters occurred September 17, 1992, when operatives gunned down Dr. Sadegh Sharafkandi, secretary-general of the PDKI—the biggest movement of Iranian Kurdish opposition to Tehran—and three of his colleagues at the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin.115

  In its findings, a Berlin court ruled that the attack was carried out by a Hezbollah cell by order of the Iranian government. In delivering the opinion, presiding judge Frithjof Kubsch said the judges were particularly struck by Iranian leaders’ assertions that they could “silence an uncomfortable voice” any way they pleased. To strengthen his point, he cited a television interview given by Iran’s intelligence minister, Ali Fallahian, one month before the Mykonos attack, in which Fallahian bragged that Iran could launch “decisive strikes” against its opponents abroad.116 Furthermore, on August 30, 1992, Fallahian admitted in an interview with an Iranian television reporter that Iran monitored Iranian dissidents both at home and abroad: “We track them outside the country, too,” he said. “We have them under surveillance…. Last year, we succeeded in striking fundamental blows to their top members.”117

  Much of the information surrounding the Mykonos plot was relayed b
y an Iranian defector named Abolghasem Mesbahi, who claimed to be a founding member of the Iranian Security Service. According to him, the decision to carry out the attack was made by the Committee for Special Operations, which included President Rafsanjani, Minister of Intelligence Fallahian, Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati, representatives of the Security Apparatus, and, most significantly, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.118

  The “attack group,” organized by Fallahian, arrived in Berlin from Iran on September 7, 1992. It was headed by Abdolraham Banihashemi (also known as Abu Sharif, an operative for the Ministry of Intelligence and Security who trained in Lebanon), who also served as one of the attack’s two gunmen and who has been implicated in the August 1987 assassination of a former Iranian F-14 pilot in Geneva.119 The operation’s logistics chief, Kazem Darabi, was a former Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah member who had been living in Germany since 1980 and belonged to an association of Iranian students in Europe. According to Argentine prosecutors, “[Association of Islamic Students in Europe] UISA and the associations that belonged to it worked closely with extremist Islamic groups, particularly Hezbollah and Iranian government bodies such as the embassy and consulate. UISA was the main organization from which Iran’s intelligence service recruited collaborators for propaganda and intelligence activities in Iran.”120

  In a statement to German prosecutors, Ataollah Ayad, one of Darabi’s recruits, made clear that Darabi was “the boss of Hezbollah in Berlin.”121 Moreover, Darabi would also be linked to an attack at the 1991 Iran Cultural Festival in Dusseldorf. Before the festival, German intelligence reportedly intercepted a telephone call in which Darabi was instructed by someone at the Iranian cultural center in Cologne with ties to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence to enlist some “Arab friends” from Berlin and head to Dusseldorf. Armed with pistols, gas, guns, and mace, Darabi and his accomplices assaulted members of the Iranian opposition group MEK, who were exhibiting books and pictures at the festival. Several MEK members were seriously injured. Eyewitnesses later testified that Darabi appeared to be the leader of the assault.122