Hezbollah (17 page)

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.
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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.”
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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
.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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Much of the information surrounding the Mykonos plot was relayed by 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.
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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.
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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.”
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In a statement to German prosecutors, Ataollah Ayad, one of Darabi’s recruits, made clear that Darabi was “the boss of Hezbollah in Berlin.”
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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.
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Already concerned about Darabi’s activities in their country, German officials attempted to deport him in June 1992. However, the Iranian government intervened and asked Germany to allow Darabi to remain in the country.
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The second gunman, Abbas Rhayel, and one of the co-conspirators, Youssef Amin, “were members of Hezbollah,” according to Argentine prosecutors, adding they received training at an IRGC center near Rasht in Iran.
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According to German prosecutors, when the “Hit Team” arrived in Berlin and command was transferred from Darabi to Banihashemi, two of the co-conspirators who were not members of Hezbollah “were shut out of the immediate involvement in the act.”
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The operational stage of the Mykonos attack began on the morning of September 16, when Rhayel and Farajollah Haider, another Hezbollah member of Lebanese origin, received an Uzi machine gun, a pistol, and two silencers. The source of these arms was never identified but was suspected to be linked to Iranian intelligence. German investigators later traced both the pistol and silencer to Iran. On the next morning, September 17, Rhayel and Haider purchased the bags they would use to conceal the weapons as they entered the Mykonos Restaurant.
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On the night of September 17, Banihashemi and Rhayel entered the restaurant at 10:50
PM
, while Amin waited outside to block the door. Haider and an Iranian known only as Mohammad, who had previously been tasked with keeping the targets under surveillance, waited several blocks away with the getaway car. The car had been purchased several days earlier by Ali Dakhil Sabra, who had served with Amin and Rhayel in Lebanon and then come with them to Germany. When the targets emerged into view, Banihashemi shouted, “You sons of whores” in Persian and opened fire. Rhayel followed Banihashemi inside and shot both Sharafkandi and Homayoun Ardalan, the PDKI’s representative in Germany. Between the two assassins, thirty shots were fired. The assailants then fled on foot to the getaway vehicle.
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The police investigation quickly revealed Iranian involvement in the attack. On September 22, the bag containing the weapons and silencers was discovered, and
tests revealed significant similarities between these weapons and those used in the assassination of Iranian dissidents Akbar Mohammadi in Hamburg in 1987 and Bahman Javadi in Cyprus in 1989. The police also matched the serial number on the pistol used by Rhayel to a shipment delivered by a Spanish dealer to the Iranian military in 1972. Rhayel’s palm print was discovered on one of the pistol magazines, the blood of one of the victims was identified on the pistol itself, and Amin’s fingerprints were found on a plastic shopping bag inside the getaway vehicle.
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According to German prosecutors, Abdolraham Banihashemi “left the city by airplane after the crime and went via Turkey to Iran. There, he was rewarded for his role in the attack with a Mercedes 230 and participation in profitable business transactions.”
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The others were not so fortunate. Darabi and Rhayel were sentenced to life in prison in Germany in April 1997, while Amin and Mohammad Atris, a document forger who assisted the attackers, were given terms of eleven and about five years, respectively.
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While Amin and Atris served out their shorter terms, in December 2007 Darabi and Rhayel were released from prison and returned to Iran. Germany’s
Der Spiegel
suggested they were released in exchange for a German tourist arrested in Iran in November 2005. Germany, it appears, was not the only country seeking collateral for Darabi and Rhayel’s release; Israel had hoped to bargain for an early release in return for information about Ron Arad, an Israeli aviator shot down over Lebanon in 1986.
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The brazen assassination in public of four Iranian dissidents at Mykonos, in the opinion of Germany’s highest criminal court, signaled culpability for terrorism at the highest levels of the Islamic Republic. The court judgment rejected the premise that the attack was executed by “mavericks,” concluding that “the assassination [was] put into action much more through the powers in Iran.” By identifying President Rafsanjani and the Supreme Leader himself as the orchestrators of the assassination, the judgment found that “Iranian powers not only allow terrorist attacks abroad … but that they themselves set in action such attacks.” When the Tehran regime encountered political opposition, the court determined, its solution was simply to have the opponents “liquidated.”
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Yet the ruling would not translate into durable and tangible action against Iran or Hezbollah. Iran responded to the placement of a plaque memorializing the victims of the Mykonos attack by displaying one of its own near the German embassy in Tehran denouncing Germany for arming Saddam Hussein with chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq War. Apparently concerned over the diplomatic ramifications, the German ambassador to Iran distanced his government from the original plaque’s assertion of Iranian responsibility for the Mykonos attack.
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While many European nations withdrew their ambassadors from Iran following the ruling, this diplomatic freeze lasted only months. And along with the release of perpetrators Darabi and Rhayel, none of the Iranian leaders identified in the court judgment—Rafsanjani, Fallahian, Velayati, or Khamenei—were ever held to account for their roles in the attack.

Hezbollah’s emergence as a terrorist force operating in Europe, well beyond the confines of the Middle East, elicited neither a unified nor a coherent strategy by
European capitals. Hezbollah was undeterred, and its European operations marked only the beginning of its rapid transformation from a regional threat into a global terrorist network. The European Union would repeatedly refrain from designating Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, in whole or in part. The consequence would be felt not only in Europe but around the world.

1.
Testrake,
Triumph over Terror
, 67.

2.
Ron Eschmann, “Terror on Flight 847,”
The Officer
79, no. 7 (October 2003): 23; Testrake,
Triumph over Terror
, 67–68.

3.
Eschmann, “Terror on Flight 847”; Testrake,
Triumph over Terror
, 69–71.

4.
Eschmann, “Terror on Flight 847.”