Hezbollah Read online

  111. Burgos and Nisman, 31; US Department of State, Patterns of Global Terrorism: 1991, Washington, DC, April 1992, 30.

  112. Patrick Marnham, “Jailed Iranian Puts Pressure on France,” Independent (London), February 3, 1989.

  113. Robert Fisk, “Two Faces of an Unlikely Assassin,” Independent (London), October 27, 1991; Ranstorp, Hizb’allah in Lebanon, 95.

  114. Ibid.

  115. Burgos and Nisman, 33; Agence France Press, “Iran Ordered Slaying of Kurdish Leaders: German Prosecutor,” May 27, 1993.

  116. William Drozdiak, “German Court: Tehran Ordered Exile Killings; Verdict Blaming Top Iranians Ruptures Ties,” Washington Post, April 11, 1997.

  117. Rick Atkinson, “Killing of Iranian Dissenters: Bloody Trail Back to Tehran,” Washington Post, November 21, 1993.

  118. Burgos and Nisman, 37.

  119. Burgos and Nisman, 37; Ely Karmon, “Iranian Terror in Switzerland against Opposition Activists,” IDC Herzliya, International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, April 20, 2009.

  120. Burgos and Nisman, 38–41.

  121. Mykonos Urteil [Mykonos Judgment], Urteil des Kammergerichts Berlin vom 10. April 1997 [Judgment of the Court of Appeal of Berlin on April 10, 1997], OLGSt Berlin, (1) 2 StE 2/93 (19/93).

  122. Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, “Murder at Mykonos: Anatomy of a Political Assassination,” March 2007.

  123. Burgos and Nisman, 70–71.

  124. Ibid., 38–39.

  125. Mykonos Urteil [Mykonos Judgment], Urteil des Kammergerichts Berlin vom 10. April 1997.

  126. Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, “Murder at Mykonos,” 2–8.

  127. Ibid., 8–11.

  128. Ibid., 12.

  129. Mykonos Urteil [Mykonos Judgment], Urteil des Kammergerichts Berlin vom 10. April 1997.

  130. Drozdiak, “German Court: Tehran Ordered Exile Killings.”

  131. “Germany Releases ‘Mykonos’ Assassins,” Der Spiegel (Germany), December 11, 2007.

  132. Germany, Judgment of the Court of Appeal of Berlin on April 10, 1997, OLGSt Berlin, (1) 2 StE 2/93 (19/93), 50.

  133. DW Staff, “Germany and Iran Embroiled in Diplomatic Spat,” Deutsche Welle (Germany), April 28, 2004.

  4

  Bombings in Buenos Aires

  IT WAS AROUND 9:45 AM ON JULY 18, 1994, and Monica Lucía Arnaudo was in her bedroom, which looked out onto Pasteur Street. As she watched television, Monica heard a car outside speed up and then slam on the brakes. “The tires creaked,” she would later recall, “and then [there was] a sort of a crash or collision.” She sat upright in bed, just in time to hear a tremendous explosion and feel “something like sand and dust” bursting in through her window.1 It was 9:53 AM.

  What Ms. Arnaudo had actually felt and heard were the shock waves and debris from the explosives-laden van that had just blown the face off the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), just across the street—the community center for the largest Jewish community in South America. The Renault Trafic van carried 300 to 400 kilograms of explosives composed of ammonium nitrate, combined with aluminum, a heavy hydrocarbon, TNT, and nitroglycerine. The explosion killed 85 people and wounded some 150 more. The force of the blast instantly destroyed roughly 2,000 of the AMIA building’s 4,600 square meters, killing many instantly and trapping others beneath the rubble.2

  Within forty-eight hours of the attack, the United States sent thirteen International Response Team (IRT) investigators to help investigate the bombing—including FBI investigators; Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) explosive experts; and State Department Diplomatic Security agents.3 By Friday, July 22, Israeli forensic police, part of a Disaster Victims Identification group, arrived in Buenos Aires as well.4 For twelve days, the American IRT members worked side by side at the bomb site with their Israeli and Argentine police and emergency response counterparts sifting through the debris for pieces of the bomb, the van, and the victims.5 The attack was classified as a double aggravated homicide owing to its nature as a “racial or religious crime” carried out in a manner intended to create “public hazard” and kill and wound as many people as possible.6

  Within weeks, Argentine federal police had released the composite sketch of the suicide bomber to the local press from testimony that included a door-to-door survey of neighborhood residents shortly after the bombing. Other sketches were publicized of the person who parked the van used in the bombing in a nearby garage three days before the attack.7

  But as quickly as authorities produced these sketches, and as useful as they would later be in definitively identifying the perpetrators as members of a Hezbollah hit team, they were too late to help apprehend them before they escaped the country. The Iranian diplomatic support network left the country in waves in the weeks leading up to the attack.

  The exception was Mohsen Rabbani, an Iranian who lived in Argentina for eleven years. Rabbani, the primary architect of the AMIA plot, reportedly had come from Iran for the express purpose of heading the state-owned al-Tauhid mosque in the Floresta neighborhood, but he also served as a representative of the Iranian Ministry of Agriculture, which was tasked with ensuring the quality of Argentine meat exported to Iran.8 Prosecutors would later conclude that Rabbani was “the driving force behind these efforts [to establish an Iranian intelligence network in Argentina]…. From the time of his arrival in the country in 1983, Mr. Rabbani began laying the groundwork that allowed for the later implementation and further development of the [Iranian] spy network.”9

  Rabbani had never traveled abroad before this assignment but wasted no time establishing himself as a religious leader in the local Muslim community. Rabbani’s political views permeated his religious and cultural activities to the point that congregants described his religious activities as a “mask” used to promote the Iranian revolution and condemn Zionism. By one account, for example, several students at the mosque told another congregant that on many occasions, Rabbani exhorted them to “export the revolution,” stressing to them, “We are all Hezbollah.”10

  It was widely known within the local Muslim community that the network of followers Rabbani cultivated proactively collected intelligence on his behalf for Iran; they were commonly referred to as “the antennas.” Rabbani deployed trusted members of his network as spotters to scout potential Jewish and American targets.11 Some, like intelligence agent Mohammad Reza Javadi-Nia, went so far as to work as taxi drivers to better carry out the surveillance, targeting, and other intelligence functions assigned by Rabbani.12 According to an FBI report, Javadi-Nia was believed to be an agent of Iran’s Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance (Ershad), which, together with other Iranian government agencies such as the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), the Cultural Bureaus, and the Foreign Ministry, along with the Qods Force, was believed to have provided cover for Iranian intelligence activities. In the case of Ershad, these activities would have occurred under the guise of religious activity. Previously, the FBI determined, Javadi-Nia had served in similar capacities in Belgium, Spain, Colombia, and Brazil in the mid-to late 1980s. Then, from 1988 to 1993, he served as a cultural attaché at the Iranian embassy in Buenos Aires, before Rabbani took over that position in 1994.13

  Just four months before the attack, Rabbani suddenly was named an official Iranian diplomat, complete with diplomatic credentials and immunity. As for the Hezbollah operatives brought in to execute the bombing, Argentine law enforcement and intelligence officials would later determine that they left the country about two hours prior to the actual explosion.14 Some of the operatives, including the suicide bomber, entered the country at Argentina’s highly unregulated border crossings in the tri-border area, where Argentina meets Brazil and Paraguay. Others arrived—presumably with false documents—at Ezeiza International Airport in Buenos Aires on July 1, 1994, and left the morning of the attack through Jorge Newberry Metropolitan Airport, also in Buenos Aires, some on flights to the tri-border area.15 Investigators would later trace ph
one calls placed from pay phones at these airports, as well as calls from pay phones near the AMIA building during the operatives’ stay, to a cellular phone in Foz do Iguaçu, on the Brazilian side of the Friendship Bridge spanning the Parana River in the tri-border area. From Foz, as it is locally known, a network of Hezbollah supporters coordinated the activities of the terrorist cell members operating in Buenos Aires. Frequent calls were made between phones in Argentina and the cell phone in Foz as preparations for the bombing progressed. Then, the day of the attack, the flow of calls suddenly stopped.16

  Ultimately, Argentine authorities would conclude that “the decision to carry out the AMIA attack was made, and the attack was orchestrated, by the highest officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran at the time, and that these officials instructed Lebanese Hezbollah … to carry out the attack.”17

  From the outset, the Argentine investigation into the AMIA attack was poorly handled. Argentine president Nestor Kirchner would later describe it as a national disgrace.18 The only people convicted of crimes related to the attack were corrupt police officers involved in the sale of the Renault Trafic van used in the attack. Judge Jose Galeano, the judge appointed to serve as chief prosecutor in the AMIA case, originally maintained his full caseload while overseeing this major case. Then, once he took on the AMIA investigation full time, he was caught attempting to bribe a defendant—himself an accused corrupt police officer—to falsely accuse other police officers of involvement in the case. This and other “irregularities” led a grand jury to impeach Galeano in December 2003 for official misconduct. Other irregularities included the charge that then–president of Argentina Carlos Saúl Menem had long maintained close ties to Iranian intelligence and accepted a $10 million bribe from Iran to cover up the Islamic Republic’s role in the attack.19

  Eventually, Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral would take over the case and assign a team of experienced federal prosecutors to the investigation. Led by Alberto Nisman, the team reinvestigated the AMIA bombing from scratch, despite the passage of more than a decade since the crime was committed. The investigation covered hundreds of files, produced 113,600 pages of documentation, leveraged telephone intercepts, and incorporated material from the Secretariat of Intelligence of the Executive Branch (SIDE, formerly the Federal Secretariat of Intelligence), which was ordered declassified by then president Nestor Kirchner. Some material the prosecutors sought was no longer available, such as certain financial records destroyed by banks after ten years, as required by local law. Other information the prosecutors sought was, to their dismay and surprise, never maintained in the first place, such as detailed immigration records. Until 1996, all immigration records were recorded manually—a slow bureaucratic process. As the prosecutors dryly concluded in their 2006 report, “it is well known that at the time of the AMIA attack, the Argentine immigration control system suffered serious deficiencies.”20

  While concluding that the evidence did not suffice to call for the indictment and arrest of some of the individuals indicted by Galeano in March 2003, prosecutors determined in 2006 that several additional suspects should be indicted. Moreover, the prosecutors’ report reserved particular criticism for Galeano’s findings regarding Iran and Hezbollah. While Galeano concluded that the AMIA bombing was the work of “radicalized elements of the Iranian regime,” Nisman’s team determined “that the decision to carry out the attack was made not by a small splinter group of extremist Islamic officials, but was instead a decision that was extensively discussed and was ultimately adopted by a consensus of the highest representatives of the Iranian government.”21 Regarding the role of Hezbollah, Nisman’s report was clearer still: “Whereas Judge Galeano made a point of stating that there was no need to determine whether Hezbollah is a ‘terrorist movement, or a movement that is resisting Israel’s illegal occupation of Lebanon,’ it is obvious to us that the ‘terrorist movement’ characterization is the correct one.”22

  Even though a claim of responsibility for the AMIA attack was issued under one of Hezbollah’s known affiliated names, Galeano concluded that “no evidence has come to light as yet indicating that Hezbollah could have known of the plans, and subsequent to that, could have been implicated in the consequences.”23 To be fair, some of the material available to Nisman’s team emerged only after Galeano was excused from the case. By some accounts, the flaws in Galeano’s investigation were exacerbated by SIDE’s failure to share key intelligence related to the AMIA attack, such as details about the links among Iranian officials suspected of playing various roles in the bombing plot. This included information gleaned from telephone intercepts as well as social network analysis of key addresses where many of the suspects lived at one time or another.24

  Yet Galeano’s indictment includes substantial information about the role of Hezbollah in the attack, including that of Hezbollah’s chief of international operations, Imad Mughniyeh, and Hezbollah supporters based in the tri-border area. Coming on the heels of the 1992 Hezbollah bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, this role should not have come as much of a surprise. According to the FBI, as early as summer 1993, “a number of reports from various sources indicated that Hizballah was planning some sort of spectacular act against Western interests, probably Israeli but perhaps against the United States.”25

  Hezbollah Comes to South America

  The first waves of immigration from Lebanon and Syria to South America, particularly Argentina and Brazil, came in the 1880s. According to records from the Argentine Immigration Directorate, more than 80,000 immigrants from Arabic-speaking countries arrived from 1882 to 1925. Most were considered “Turks,” since they came from countries within the declining Ottoman Empire, and they carried Ottoman identity and travel documents.26 Lebanese communities in South America saw another large influx of immigrants during the Lebanese civil war of 1975–1990.

  According to a study conducted for US Special Operations Command, “Hezbollah clerics reportedly began planting agents and recruiting sympathizers among Arab and Muslim immigrants in the TBA [tri-border area] at the height of the Lebanese Civil War in the mid 1980s.”27 The result was the establishment of more formal Hezbollah cells in the region beyond the comparably amorphous networks of individuals of Lebanese descent, particularly Shi’a Muslims, who provided some measure of financial support to Hezbollah. This was one of the “opportunities” Rabbani was sent to South America to pursue in 1983.28

  According to witness testimony, known Hezbollah militants would sometimes stay at mosques associated with Rabbani. One former “Hezbollah fighter,” who stayed at both the Canuelas and al-Tauhid mosques in the early 1990s, seemed depressed. According to a mosque official, this former fighter was upset because nine of his ten siblings had died in combat, but he was denied the opportunity of martyrdom. Congregants found the visitor’s stay strange; he spoke only Arabic, no Spanish, and looked very weak.29

  But Buenos Aires was always more Rabbani’s base of operations than the center of the Hezbollah support network in the region. That distinction was then and remains today the claim of the tri-border area, located some 800 miles north of the Argentine capital. The transformation of the tri-border area from a backwater into a center of economic activity began in the early 1970s when Brazil and Paraguay reached an agreement to build the Itaipu hydroelectric dam. Around the same time, several South American countries joined together to form the Common Market of the South (Mercosur), which created a series of regional free trade zones, including one in Ciudad del Este. Already Paraguay’s second largest city, Ciudad del Este quickly grew into the biggest commercial center in South America.

  Sandwiched between Brazil and Argentina, Ciudad del Este has been described as “the United Nations of crime,” a “jungle hub for [the] world’s outlaws,” a classic “terrorist safe haven,” and a counterfeiting capital, where “just about everything that is not biodegradable is fake.”30 The State Department’s 2009 annual report on global terrorism summarized global concerns about terrorist suppo
rters and a flourishing black market economy being collocated in the tri-border area. Terrorist supporters “take advantage of loosely regulated territory” in the tri-border area “to participate in a wide range of illicit activities,” State reported, including “arms and drugs smuggling, document fraud, money laundering, trafficking in persons, and the manufacture and movement of contraband goods through the TBA.”31

  As the Muslim community in the tri-border area grew, so did its need for educational, cultural, and religious institutions catering to the local Arab and Muslim communities. One such institution, the Profeta Mahoma mosque in Ciudad del Este, was reportedly built by a prominent member of the local Arab community, Mohammad Yousef Abdallah, who had been living in Ciudad del Este since July 1980. According to Argentine intelligence officials, Abdallah was one of the first Hezbollah members to settle in the tri-border area, though they did not know it at the time.32 Only four years later, in April 1984, would the Argentine Federal Police see the first indications of a Hezbollah network in the tri-border area.33 By mid-2000, experts would put the estimated number of Hezbollah operatives living and working in the tri-border area at several hundred.34 The number of supporters or sympathizers who are neither trained operatives nor official group members but provide services or support—out of a more general affinity or to improve the lot of their families back home in Lebanon—is believed to be much larger.

  Hezbollah’s Tri-Border Support Hub

  Early reports from Argentine intelligence following the AMIA attack informed that “the main activists” suspected of being members of an Islamist terrorist organization included Mohammad Youssef Abdallah, Farouk Abdul Omairi, and Samuel Salman el-Reda, among others.35 As the investigation into the AMIA bombing progressed, it focused increasingly on these three Hezbollah operatives.