Hezbollah (23 page)

Mesbahi’s testimony, meanwhile, indicated that the person chosen by Intelligence Chief Fallahian to head the operation (whether Mughniyeh or not) went by the cover name “Ahad.” To oversee the attack, Ahad traveled to Argentina some five or six days before the bombing on an authentic Greek passport refitted with a false name. He left the country on that same passport two or three days after the attack. Mesbahi further explained, “[Ahad] can be found in the area of Baalbek, Lebanon, Iman Hossein headquarters, where he is now the Commander in Chief of the Hezbollah’s Army.” Based on Mesbahi’s description, Argentine authorities made a police sketch of Ahad that was circulated to several other countries as well as Interpol and provided to the media in an effort to identify him. That effort proved fruitless, an unsurprising result given the dearth of public pictures of Mughniyeh.
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Ahad has never been proved to be Mughniyeh, despite strong suspicions to this effect; even Mesbahi could not state the tie definitively. But whether he was there in person or oversaw the operation from abroad, investigators believe Mughniyeh masterminded the
AMIA bombing. “Mughniyeh would be the ultimate [suspect],” AMIA prosecutor Nisman would admit in 2002, “that is our target.”
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The following year, prosecutors would issue arrest warrants for both Imad Mughniyeh and Assad Barakat.
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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.
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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.
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Taken together, the telephone records amount to “evidence of coordination between the Triple Frontier area and ‘sleeper cells’ in Buenos Aires,” Argentine investigators concluded.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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According to one Israeli intelligence official, the C4 explosive was smuggled into the country from Iran via an Iranian diplomatic pouch.
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The C4 formed the core of the bomb, which was assembled in the tri-border area before being delivered to Buenos Aires.
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Evidence collected by police suggested either parts of the explosive or the detonator came from Foz do Iguaçu.
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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.
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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.
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“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.”
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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.
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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.
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According to investigators, the Marques cell phone “belonged to the Agencia Piloto tourist [agency] and currency exchange agency owned by Farouk Abdul Omairi.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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 nineteen 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.”
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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.
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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.
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“Something big is going to happen,” he warned, but his story was deemed too farfetched.
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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.
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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.”
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