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  Abbas added that their mother felt extreme sadness over her son’s death and, with the passage of time, had come to doubt the story Hezbollah leaders told them of Ibrahim’s death in southern Lebanon. Despite its initial claim of responsibility for the AMIA bombing under an affiliated name, Hezbollah quickly retracted the statement in a new communiqué. According to an account in the Argentine press, “The communiqué issued by the Islamic guerilla group maintains that ‘the martyr Ibrahim Berro’ was part of a group of fighters who ‘died during a clash between the Islamic Resistance (the armed wing of Hezbollah) and Israeli occupation forces in southern Lebanon.’”172 The brothers provided the FBI with two pictures of Ibrahim, which were compared to the police sketch. Based on expert analysis, prosecutors determined that the person at the wheel of the Trafic van that rammed into the AMIA building was, in fact, Ibrahim Berro.173

  The 1992 Embassy Bombing

  The 1992 attack that preceded the AMIA bombing occurred on the afternoon of March 17, when a Ford F-100 panel van filled with explosives drove up onto the sidewalk in front of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and blew up, destroying the front of the building along with the entire consulate building. Twenty-three people were killed and another 242 injured. Most of the casualties were in the embassy, but some were pedestrians, including a priest from the Roman Catholic Church across the street and children at a nearby school.174

  As it happened, Yaacov Perry, then director of the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet), had visited Argentina just a week before the embassy bombing for liaison meetings with his intelligence counterpart. At a polo match and luncheon, the intelligence chiefs discussed “the menace posed by terrorists,” though neither had any idea how close the menace was or how soon it would be realized. Within days, Israeli counter-terrorism teams would be back in Buenos Aires investigating the embassy bombing alongside Argentine and American law enforcement and intelligence experts.175 Yet Argentine political leaders seemed intent on concluding the investigation as quickly as possible. Early reports suggested the explosion may have erupted inside the building; others contended the attack did not involve a suicide bomber. Both were definitively proven false in detailed forensic accounts by US and Argentine explosives experts.176 American and Israeli investigators reportedly decided not to cooperate fully with their Argentine counterparts; it would take years for confidence to be built.177

  In time investigators would determine that the Ford van had been parked in a lot just a couple of blocks from the Israeli embassy for the hour and a half immediately preceding the bombing—to be precise, from 1:18 PM to 2:42 PM, according to the stamped parking ticket.178 Three minutes later, the vehicle bomb exploded outside the embassy.

  In its claim of responsibility, delivered to a Western news agency in Beirut, Hezbollah’s IJO declared “with all pride that the operation of the martyr infant Hussein is one of our continuing strikes against the criminal Israeli enemy in an open-ended war, which will not cease until Israel is wiped out of existence.” Hussein was the five-year-old son of Hezbollah leader Abbas al-Musawi, both of whom were killed in an Israeli air strike on Musawi’s car on February 16, 1992.179 Following this initial admission of responsibility, an individual claiming to represent the IJO called a news agency denying the group’s involvement in the bombing. But shortly thereafter, the release of surveillance video by the group with footage of the Israeli embassy proved the IJO’s claim of responsibility.180 Releasing such a video, the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator testified, is itself a Hezbollah trademark.181

  While the Musawi assassination would not lead Hezbollah to resume kidnapping Westerners in Lebanon, as some feared it might, Sheikh Fadlallah issued a statement warning “there would be much more violence and much more blood would flow.”182 The CIA noted in a July 1992 intelligence report that Hezbollah held the United States and Israel equally responsible for Musawi’s death and threatened to target American interests in retaliation. According to the CIA, his was no empty threat: “Hezbollah elements began planning a retaliatory operation against US interests in Lebanon shortly after Moussawi’s death.” Hezbollah, the CIA reminded policymakers in a July 1992 report, had executed two successful attacks targeting US interests in Lebanon the previous year—firing missiles at the US embassy on October 29, 1991, and destroying the administration building at the American University of Beirut in a car bombing on November 8, 1991.183

  These plans never did materialize, perhaps because Hezbollah was supremely focused on avenging Musawi’s killing beyond Lebanon’s borders. Just eight days after the assassination, the vehicle used in the embassy bombing was purchased in Buenos Aires by an individual with a Portuguese accent who signed documents with a last name different from the one on his identification.184 Three weeks later, the embassy was in ruins. The actual speed at which the operation was executed is easier to understand, however, in light of evidence that Iran had decided to carry out an operation in Argentina well before Musawi was killed. Mohsen Rabbani, the same operative who coordinated the AMIA attack, spent ten months in Iran from January to December 1991.185 Five days after his return to Argentina, Buenos Aires suspended shipment of nuclear material to Iran due to “concrete indications that Iran had non-peaceful plans for its nuclear capacities.”186 According to Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman, Hezbollah used the Musawi assassination to justify the embassy bombing to its supporters, but the attack was carried out at the behest of Tehran in response to Argentina’s suspension of nuclear cooperation with Iran.187 Iran was positioned to facilitate such an attack because it invested over time in the patient construction of an extensive intelligence base in South America, beginning in the early to mid-1980s.

  Around the same period, security measures were enhanced at the Iranian embassy in Buenos Aires. Correspondingly, in the days leading up to the attack, Iranian officials arrived in Argentina. One prominent arrival was Jaffar Saadat Ahmad-Nia, an attaché at the Iranian embassy in Brasília, who arrived in Buenos Aires as a diplomatic courier on January 21, 1992, staying just that one day. He returned on March 16, the day before the bombing, and departed the day after the attack.188

  Embassy Bombing: The First Strike in a Broader Campaign

  According to Argentine intelligence, Samuel el-Reda headed the Hezbollah operational group that carried out the embassy bombing based on preoperational intelligence collected by MOIS agents in Buenos Aires. This finding, prosecutors noted, is corroborated by the testimony of Witness A, a former Hezbollah fighter. According to Witness A, the embassy bombing drew on the logistical support of local Hezbollah cells.189

  It is worth noting that in the two years prior to the 1992 embassy bombing, Assad Barakat made numerous trips to Lebanon and Iran, at which time he met with Iranian government leaders. In an apparent effort to obfuscate his whereabouts, he traveled to Lebanon on a Lebanese passport and onward to Iran on a Paraguayan passport.190 Several Hezbollah operatives reportedly entered the country through the tri-border area, transiting through London and Ciudad del Este on their way from the Middle East to Buenos Aires.191

  The Argentine Supreme Court investigation into the embassy bombing identified IJO chief Imad Mughniyeh as “one of the persons that was responsible for the attack.” The evidence in the case, the court concluded, “supports the contention that the March 17, 1992, attack on the Israeli embassy in Argentina was organized and carried out by the terrorist group known as Islamic Jihad, the military wing of Hezbollah.”192 American intelligence concurred: “Master terrorist Imad Mughniyah’s Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO)—an element of Hezbollah with a long history of spectacular terrorist operations—claimed responsibility for the operation less than 24 hours after the attack.”193 It would take several years, but on September 2, 1999, Argentine authorities issued an arrest warrant for Mughniyeh for his role in the embassy bombing. One piece of key evidence—handwriting on the paperwork for the purchase of the truck used in the attack—was tied to known Hezbollah operatives.194

&nbs
p; According to both Witness A and the Iranian intelligence defector, Mesbahi, Imad Mughniyeh was behind the Israeli embassy bombing. Mughniyeh, Witness A added, personally accompanied Imad Ghamlush, whom he identified as the suicide bomber, to Brazil in February 1992.195 Ghamlush may or may not be the suicide bomber’s actual name, but it rings truer than the IJO’s contention in its claim of responsibility that the suicide bomber was an Argentine convert to Islam named Abu Yasser.196 Investigators found no evidence to substantiate this latter claim.

  Interpol, Argentine intelligence, the CIA, the FBI, and the US State Department all concurred that Hezbollah was behind the embassy bombing—a determination later officially confirmed by Argentine investigators.197 Revealing communications intercepts captured in the wake of the embassy bombing appear to have reinforced these coordinated findings. These include a conversation in which the estranged wife of Iamanian Khosrow, an Iranian diplomat and suspected MOIS agent, threatened to expose her husband’s terrorism-related activities.198 Other such intercepts included a revealing exchange between Tehran and the Iranian embassy in Moscow alluding to a forthcoming attack, and similarly telling messages from the Iranian embassies in Brasília and Buenos Aires.199

  By one account, American intelligence intercepted a communication between Tehran and the Iranian embassy in Moscow three days prior to the Israeli embassy bombing indicating “an awareness of an impending attack on an Israeli legation in South America.” Unfortunately, it was only translated sometime after the bombing. Messages from the Iranian embassies in Brasília and Buenos Aires also reportedly included coded references to a nearing attack. The United States subsequently provided Israel with hard evidence of Hezbollah’s role in the attack, including reference to a phone conversation between Mughniyeh and a senior Hezbollah official, Talal Hamiyeh. The two reportedly were “heard rejoicing over ‘our project in Argentina’ and mocking the Shin Bet, which is responsible for protecting Israeli legations abroad, for not preventing it.”200

  Two weeks after the bombing, on April 3, 1992, Mohsen Rabbani placed a call from his home phone to Sheikh Fadlallah’s secretary. Argentine intelligence detected the call, and prosecutors pointed to it as timely evidence of Rabbani’s relationship with the Hezbollah leader and the fact that one of Rabbani’s primary responsibilities in Argentina was “being in charge of Hezbollah.”201

  Iran, for its part, appeared quite pleased with Rabbani’s performance leading up to the Israeli embassy bombing. In fact, the embassy not only covered the costs of Rabbani’s mosques but also underwrote the bombing of the Israeli embassy, according to Argentine investigators. On May 16, 1992, two months after the attack, Iranian ambassador Hadi Soleimanpour traveled to Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, together with a senior official from the Iranian Foreign Ministry, an officer from the Iranian embassy in Chile, and a small group of tourists. The officials stayed for three days, met with the Iranian ambassador to Brazil, and left a day before the rest of the tour group. The meeting and tour, however, were apparently a cover for the true purpose of the trip: “to make a payment due in connection with the bombing against the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires.” 202

  Rabbani, however, was not the only such agent to be dispatched to South America. Not long after Rabbani arrived in Argentina, he was followed by Mohamed Taghi Tabatabei Einaki, who arrived on a thirty-day visa. Like Rabbani, Einaki worked as a chicken and meat inspector. According to Argentine intelligence, Einaki “launched Hezbollah’s activities in Brazil in the 1980s.” So concerned were the Saudi and Iraqi governments that they protested to Brazilian authorities that Einaki was radicalizing Lebanese Shi’a in communities across Brazil. Hezbollah’s new Brazilian recruits, they warned, could be mobilized as terrorist cells.203

  Such activities were reason for still greater concern as Nasrallah replaced Abbas al-Musawi as Hezbollah’s leader after Musawi was killed in February 1992. In the wake of the embassy bombing, the CIA raised concerns that with Nasrallah’s selection as Musawi’s replacement, the leadership of Hezbollah might take on a more direct role in terrorist operations that were previously tasked to “autonomous security groups” like Mughniyeh’s IJO. “Nasrallah was directly involved in many Hezbollah terrorist operations, including hostage taking, airline hijackings, and attacks against Lebanese rivals,” the CIA noted. “Nasrallah’s terrorist credentials,” the CIA warned, “may lead him to bring terrorist-related matters under the control of the Leadership Council.”204 Looking back, the CIA’s warning seems prescient.

  Two years later, in May 1994, speaking in the wake of the Israeli kidnapping of Shi’a militant and Hezbollah ally Mustafa Dirani, Hezbollah’s Sheikh Fadlallah would allude to the Israeli embassy bombing in Buenos Aires as part of Hezbollah’s response to Musawi’s assassination: “The enemy has said that they have a long reach but when Abbas Moussawi was assassinated, the Islamic fighters proved that they can reach all the way to Argentina. The battlefront has spread throughout the world, and the battle is unfolding as time goes on.”205

  Hezbollah Activities Continue Unabated

  The day after the AMIA bombing, as cleanup crews were clearing away the debris, terrorists struck again, this time in Panama. On July 19, a twin-engine Embraer commuter plane operated by Atlas Airlines exploded shortly after takeoff from Colón on its way to Panama City. Of the twenty-one passengers and crew, most were businessmen working in the Colón Free Trade Zone; all were killed instantly. Amazingly, given the small size of the Jewish community in Panama, twelve of the passengers were Jewish, including four Israelis and three Americans. Coming just after the AMIA bombing, the tragedy shook the Panamanian Jewish community. The community’s fears were quickly confirmed when Panama’s president-elect announced that the crash “was not an accident but a planted bomb.”206 Investigators would determine that the attack was executed by a suicide bomber who was never identified beyond the Middle Eastern name with which he purchased his ticket and that appeared on the flight manifest.207

  Within days, Hezbollah claimed responsibility for both the AMIA bombing and the Panama airline bombing in a leaflet distributed in the Lebanese port city of Sidon. The claim of responsibility was issued under Ansar Allah, or Partisans of God, a well-known cover name for Hezbollah’s IJO.208 Authorities never conclusively determined who was behind the bombing of the Panamanian commuter plane, despite Hezbollah’s claim of responsibility. But according to a November 1994 FBI report, both the AMIA bombing and the Panama airline downing—as well as two other bombings in London on July 26 and 27 (both near Israeli targets)—were all “highly suspected of being perpetrated by Hizballah.”209

  Not long after the AMIA and Panama aircraft bombings, still in 1994, Uruguayan police disrupted a Hezbollah-run weapons smuggling operation with ties to the tri-border area. The following August, Paraguayan police arrested three members of a Hezbollah “sleeper cell” with possible links to the 1992 Israeli embassy bombing.210 Imad Mughniyeh himself was reported to have concocted a plot during the mid-1990s to purchase a large quantity of beef from Paraguayan cold-storage companies and poison the meat before shipping it for resale in Israel. Paraguayan police reportedly intercepted the shipment and prevented it from leaving the country.211

  Following the AMIA attack, law enforcement and intelligence agencies in Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay launched a coordinated effort, in tandem with US agencies, to disrupt the activities of Middle Eastern terrorists groups in the region. Dubbed Operation Double Top, the strategy was to target the illicit logistical and financial activities for which such groups had become infamous. “We realized the best way was to hit their dirty businesses in the region,” one former Argentine official involved in the operation explained. “We didn’t want them to work in peace, so we used methods you could call a little ‘mafiosi’—disrupting commercial operations, burning containers, blocking bank accounts, stealing their passports, and the police arrested them.”212

  Sometimes the operational ties between criminal activities like drug-running and terrorism
cases became clear only after the fact, as in the 1996 arrest of Marwan Kadi (also known as Marwan Safadi), who was caught by US agents after conducting surveillance as part of a plot to bomb the US embassy in Asunción, Paraguay. Convicted in a Canadian court of smuggling cocaine from Brazil, Kadi came to the tri-border area after escaping from prison in Canada, possibly with the help of Hezbollah elements. He obtained an American passport under an alias and returned to the tri-border area, where Brazilian police arrested him for cocaine possession. Amazingly, he escaped from jail again and fled across the border to Paraguay. Following his surveillance of the US embassy, police arrested him at his apartment in Ciudad del Este, where they found explosives, firearms, counterfeit Canadian and American passports, and a large quantity of cash. However, after he was deported to the United States, prosecutors were only able to charge him with simple passport fraud. He would later be sent to Canada to serve out the remainder of his previous prison sentence.213

  While Double Top operations continued through 2001, they succeeded only on the margins in part due to insufficient buy-in and coordination among countries in the tri-border area. Hezbollah operational activity continued through the 1990s and into the next decade. For example, Sobhi Fayyad, the Hezbollah military leader in the tri-border area who served as Assad Barakat’s personal secretary, was arrested in 1999, like Kadi before him, for conducting surveillance of the US embassy in Asunción. That prosecution fizzled, but Fayyad later served time for tax evasion related to his illicit financial dealings, some of which supported Hezbollah.214