Hezbollah Read online

  Whoever coordinated the attack on the ground, whether Mughniyeh or someone else, that person carried the full weight and authority of the Hezbollah leadership back in Lebanon. According to one witness interviewed by investigators, an order was handed down from Hassan Nasrallah himself to Abbas Hijazi and Farouk Omairi that Hezbollah members in the tri-border area were to provide members of the Barakat network with “everything they needed to realize” the AMIA attack. To that end, the witness continued, Hijazi and Omairi provided the “Barakat brothers” with high-quality forged passports and identity cards, money, maps of the region and of Buenos Aires, and “information concerning the persons they were to contact in Buenos Aires to carry out the operation,” including at least one person at the Iranian embassy.136

  On average, one call a month was placed to Iran from Omairi’s travel agency, according to phone records the FBI reviewed. One Iranian number was called more than others and stood out because it was called from multiple locations in the tri-border area, including a phone number registered to Farouk Omairi at the Iguazú Falls mosque.137 Taken together, the telephone records amount to “evidence of coordination between the Triple Frontier area and ‘sleeper cells’ in Buenos Aires,” Argentine investigators concluded.138

  In an attempt to shield from potential eavesdropping, Iran routed calls between field agents at diplomatic posts and MOIS in Tehran through what they thought was a secure network. Calls, for example, from the Iranian embassy in Buenos Aires to Department 240—a cutout established to liaise with the Iranian Foreign Ministry and MOIS—were run through an Iranian military switchboard that triangulated them to prevent their being detected. According to Argentine intelligence, the Iranian embassy in Buenos Aires started using this communications cutout the day before the bombing of the Israeli embassy, on March 16, 1992, and continued using it until July 6, 1994, twelve days before the AMIA bombing. Having identified this technical cutout, Argentine intelligence was able to track calls before and after the Israeli embassy bombing, including calls placed from Ambassador Hadi Soleimanpour’s cell and home phone lines.139

  More than a communications hub, the tri-border area is known as a travel facilitation hot spot through which people can come and go across the region’s multiple and loosely controlled borders. While investigators were unable to definitively identify who accompanied the AMIA suicide bomber, Ibrahim Berro, on his trip from Lebanon to South America, they are convinced a Hezbollah operative traveled with him—and that he entered Argentina through the tri-border area. In the opinion of one FBI agent who investigated the AMIA attack, “any participation in the AMIA attack on the part of elements in the Triple Border area would have involved logistics, obtaining explosives and money, and helping operatives to enter and leave Argentina.”140 Investigations determined that Berro and whoever accompanied him passed through Europe on their way to the tri-border area, whereupon they “entered Ciudad del Este using false European passports; and after a stay in this area, during which time they received new logistics support for purposes of carrying out their mission, [they] left for their final destination, which was Buenos Aires.”141

  In January 2003, an Argentine intelligence report concluded that the C4 plastic explosive Hezbollah used in the AMIA bombing came to Buenos Aires through Ciudad del Este.142 According to one Israeli intelligence official, the C4 explosive was smuggled into the country from Iran via an Iranian diplomatic pouch.143 The C4 formed the core of the bomb, which was assembled in the tri-border area before being delivered to Buenos Aires.144 Evidence collected by police suggested either parts of the explosive or the detonator came from Foz do Iguaçu.145

  Bombing the AMIA Building

  Iran’s ambassadors to Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile all returned to Iran in the weeks leading up to the AMIA bombing. The Iranian ambassador to Buenos Aires, Hadi Soleimanpour, departed for Tehran by way of Miami on June 30. Though Soleimanpour and his fellow Iranian heads of the mission would later claim they were coincidentally all taking vacation at that particular time, other officials interviewed would report they were recalled to Iran for a meeting of regional ambassadors. The Iranian ambassadors to Uruguay and Chile boarded the same flight from Santiago, Chile, to Frankfurt, Germany, on July 17, the day before the bombing.146 After the sharp increase in diplomatic visits to South America leading up to the AMIA bombing, the sudden absence of the senior Iranian officials in the region when the bombing took place was hard to miss.

  According to Argentine intelligence, Ambassador Soleimanpour had a track record of engaging in espionage under cover of diplomatic activity and working with spies operating under cover of accredited Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) journalists. Prior to his posting in Buenos Aires, Soleimanpour served as chargé d’affaires and then ambassador in Spain from 1985 to 1989.147 “During this period,” investigators determined, “Soleimanpour was instructed by the Iranian government to take charge of the collaboration of a group of five residents of Spain with a view to providing Pasdaran [IRGC] with support in the event a reprisal action was carried out against the U.S. and Israel.”148

  Meanwhile, in the two-and-a-half-week period between the departures of Soleimanpour and his fellow ambassadors, the influx of Hezbollah operatives and the staggered departure of Iranian officials continued. About a month before the bombing, Samuel el-Reda’s wife departed for Lebanon.149 The morning of July 1, Samuel el-Reda made his way to Buenos Aires’s Ezeiza International Airport to meet a group of Hezbollah operatives arriving for the sole purpose of executing the AMIA bombing. From the airport, el-Reda placed a call at 10:53 AM to a cell phone in Foz—registered under the cover name Andre Marques and used by the Hezbollah operative who coordinated the attack from the tri-border area—to report that the Hezbollah operatives had arrived as planned.150 According to investigators, the Marques cell phone “belonged to the Agencia Piloto tourist [agency] and currency exchange agency owned by Farouk Abdul Omairi.”151

  The Marques cell phone, it warrants noting, received calls from Buenos Aires from July 1 to July 18, never before and never again. The last call to this phone from Buenos Aires came at 7:41 AM on July 18, just two hours before the attack and about forty minutes before the Hezbollah hit squad and el-Reda boarded a flight from Jorge Newberry Metropolitan Airport to Puerto Iguazú in the tri-border area. El-Reda, prosecutors determined, was a busy man over this short period of time.152

  El-Reda called the Hezbollah coordinator in Foz on the Marques cell phone once again four hours later from a pay phone at the airport, likely to report that the Hezbollah operatives had deplaned and were about to depart for one of el-Reda’s safe houses in Buenos Aires. That evening, the Marques phone received a third call from Buenos Aires, this one placed from a pay phone about a mile from the AMIA building. Six minutes later, a call was placed to a Hezbollah operative in Foz from another pay phone in the same area. Finally, just nine minutes after this call, yet another call was placed from the same pay phone in Buenos Aires to a telephone subscriber in Beirut identified by investigators as “the head office of Hezbollah in Beirut.”153

  All these calls, investigators believe, were placed by el-Reda. The calls, for example, were all placed to numbers that el-Reda also called from his home landline in Foz on other occasions. Moreover, the call to the Hezbollah head office in Beirut was immediately followed by a call from the same pay phone to a member of el-Reda’s family in Germany. In fact, el-Reda apparently dropped his guard and, ignoring the operational security protocols for which Hezbollah is well known, called his wife or parents several times immediately after placing calls to Hezbollah operatives, including call sequences captured by investigators on July 8, 9, and 15.154

  Calls from el-Reda frequently led to a flurry of telephone traffic within Hezbollah circles. For example, at 9:28 AM on July 8, el-Reda placed a call from a pay phone near the AMIA building to the cell phone of “the coordinator of the operational group,” presumably the same person in Foz who used the Marques cell phone. Over the next ninete
en minutes, authorities would later learn, this one call initiated a chain of more than twenty additional calls made to people in Lebanon who, according to Argentine intelligence, were members of Hezbollah. Such calls, investigators determined, “involved an extensive exchange of information.” Tellingly, this particular telephone chain occurred on the day that Ahmad Asghari, having successfully run Iran’s clandestine networks in the area in support of the bombing plot, abruptly left Argentina for good despite being scheduled to remain at his post for another three months. Asghari did not give the standard diplomatic notice of his intent to exit his posting, leaving Argentine authorities to surmise that “Asghari left not of his own volition, but in response to a direct order from his boss in Tehran, namely [Iranian foreign minister] Ali Velayati.”155

  Interestingly, on July 1 a call was placed from the pay phone near the AMIA building (presumably by el-Reda) to a New York City telephone number. Two minutes later a call was placed from the same pay phone to the Marques cell phone. Eleven days would go by, and on July 12 another call was placed to the New York City number, this time from a pay phone less than two miles west of the AMIA building. Seven minutes later, the call to New York was followed by a call to the Marques cell phone. A third call was placed to the New York number on July 17, the day before the bombing, followed minutes later by a call to the Marques cell phone. In one instance a call was placed from the same pay phone to a line “identified as a Hezbollah communication center in Beirut.” These calls and others reveal what investigators concluded was a command-and-control communication system among Hezbollah operatives on the ground in Buenos Aires, coordinators in the tri-border area and New York, and Hezbollah operatives in Beirut.156

  Approximately a week before the AMIA bombing, a walk-in intelligence source warned Argentine, Brazilian, and Israeli officials of a pending terrorist attack in Argentina similar to the March 1992 attack on the Israeli embassy. Wilson Dos Santos, a Brazilian citizen, contacted these countries’ consulates in Milan around July 8, asking not for money but for protection. He was clearly nervous, but nobody believed his story that he was having an affair with an Iranian spy and prostitute who confided to him that she was involved in both the 1992 bombing and another that was about to strike Argentina.157 “Something big is going to happen,” he warned, but his story was deemed too farfetched.158 Years later Dos Santos would recant his timely prediction, telling Brazilian investigators he had only approached authorities about knowledge of the 1992 bombing, not the soon-to-be-executed AMIA attack. Yet an investigation carried out in the wake of the AMIA bombing corroborated much of Dos Santos’s story. It also determined that Narim Mokhtari, Dos Santos’s girlfriend, had a “highly suspicious” history. The home address in Iran she provided on her application for Argentine citizenship was tracked to a cemetery. The references she gave on the application denied knowing her. And the addresses where Dos Santos claimed Mokhtari met her Iranian colleagues were identified by investigators as “places suspected Iranian intelligence agents met,” including the home of a person whose nephew Argentine intelligence considered to be an Iranian intelligence agent.159

  Iranian and Hezbollah agents, unaware of how close their plot came to being disrupted, continued coordinating the logistical support for the final phase of the operation. The actual Hezbollah suicide bomber, Ibrahim Berro, arrived in Buenos Aires via the tri-border area within the last few days before the attack. Details emerged in a report from a “collateral unit” of Argentine intelligence: “Berro made this trip [to the tri-border area] in the company of a Paraguayan resident by the name of Saad. Berro stayed at the home of the brothers Fuad Ismael and Abdallah Ismael Tormos, who had arrived in the Triple Border area in 1992 and are thought to have been members of Hezbollah.”160

  According to an Argentine intelligence source, Saad, a military coordinator of a group of supporters of the Lebanese Shi’a Amal Party in the tri-border area, maintained a romantic relationship with a female law enforcement officer at the Tancredo Neves Bridge, whom he described as being “fat with short hair” and who allowed people to cross the border into Argentina unchecked in exchange for gifts or money.161 FBI and press reports describe a woman named Nora Gonzalez, also known as Fat Nora, who at one time ran the Argentine customs station at the bridge and who allegedly helped people and goods cross the border illicitly.162

  The Trafic van that Berro would ultimately drive into the AMIA building had a bad paint job and damaged roof. It likely came as a pleasant surprise when the seller, a police officer named Carlos Telleldin, found a buyer the very day he placed his ad. As it happens, neither chipped paint nor a dented roof presented much of a problem for a truck bomb. The buyer gave the name Ramon Martinez, provided what was later determined to be a false address, and said he was buying the vehicle for someone else. According to Telleldin, Martinez wore a hat and glasses, spoke with a Central American accent, and had difficulty operating the vehicle.163

  The van would not be seen for five days, during which time it was fitted with 300 to 400 kilograms of explosives, a new set of rear-axle shock absorbers, and extra-large rear wheels to carry the extra weight. Just a few weeks earlier, and halfway across the globe, Hezbollah operatives had made the same modifications to the truck used in a Bangkok bombing plot (see chapter 5).164 Investigators never could determine where the mechanic work in Argentina was done. But on July 15, just five days after Telleldin’s ad appeared in the newspaper and only three days before the bombing, the explosives-filled Trafic van was driven to the Jet parking lot, located a mere 400 meters from the AMIA building.165

  According to prosecutors, the man who parked the car gave his name as Carlos Martinez, although his true identify remains unknown. The parking lot operators described the driver as a short, dark-skinned man in his thirties who wore a brown suit. “Martinez” claimed to be visiting a sick relative and staying at the Hotel de las Americas. This statement seemed odd since the hotel was located nowhere near the Jet parking lot. Another anomaly the parking lot employees noticed was that Martinez struggled to park the van, which had stalled. A second individual, who walked over on foot, parked the car for Martinez and left after the two exchanged hand signals. Martinez told the parking lot attendant he wanted to park the car for four or five days, during which time he would need to remove the vehicle once or twice. In the end, he paid $100 cash for a fifteen-day pass, the same as the higher daily rate for just a few days. Apparently nervous, Martinez entered a wrong license plate number on the parking registration form.166

  By 6:00 PM, the van was parked in the lot. About ten minutes later, Mohsen Rabbani placed a call on his cell phone from the vicinity of the Jet parking lot to Samuel el-Reda at the al-Tauhid mosque. The call lasted a mere twenty-six seconds, “just the amount of time,” prosecutors would later comment, “that would have been necessary to confirm the success of a key phase of the operation.”167 Informed that the car bomb was successfully parked at the lot just blocks from the AMIA building, el-Reda left the mosque within minutes of taking the call from Rabbani and walked to a nearby phone booth. At 7:18 PM, he received instructions (presumably in the form of a call to that pay phone) to pass along the news that the car bomb had arrived at the parking lot. This he did, calling Khodor Barakat, who was back in the tri-border area.168

  On the morning of July 18 around 7:41 AM, el-Reda again called his contact in the tri-border area on the Marquis cell phone. El-Reda’s final assignment was to escort the rest of the Hezbollah hit team back to the airport and see that they caught their flight to Puerto Iguazú in the tri-border area. According to investigators, this final call to the Hezbollah coordinator in Foz was to inform him that the Hezbollah team was checked in for their flight, which took off forty minutes after the call.169 By the time the flight landed, eighty-five people were dead, and emergency responders were tending to the wounded and dying victims of the AMIA bombing.

  According to Israeli sources, the suicide bomber Ibrahim Berro called home to his family in Lebanon just
a few hours before the bombing and informed them he was “about to join his brother,” an apparent reference to Assad Hussein Berro, a brother who carried out a Hezbollah suicide bombing targeting Israeli soldiers in Lebanon in August 1989.170 Proof was slow in coming, however, and Hezbollah claimed Ibrahim was killed in a Hezbollah operation in Lebanon. In 2005, with evidence pointing to Berro as the AMIA suicide bomber, FBI agents and Argentine officials interviewed two of Ibrahim’s brothers, Abbas and Hussein, both naturalized US citizens, in Dearborn, Michigan.

  At the interview, held at the Berro’s home on April 26, 2005, the Berro brothers confirmed that another of their brothers, Assad, had died carrying out a Hezbollah suicide attack on Israeli troops in southern Lebanon on August 3, 1989. Still another, Ali, worked at a hospital run by Hezbollah. The family was unaware, however, that Ibrahim had also been active in Hezbollah. According to Abbas, “When he died, my parents were told … that he had died fighting in Lebanon. We didn’t know at this point that he was a member of Hezbollah.” But Abbas, who lived with Ibrahim in the period leading up to the AMIA bombing, also noted that “Ibrahim was often away for lengthy periods of two to three months, and when the family learned of his death, he’d been away for a while.” The brothers flew in from the United States for the funeral, which Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah personally attended. According to Hussein, he learned of his brother’s role in the AMIA attack only in 2003, when his teenage son came across press reports about the attack on the Internet.171