Hezbollah (20 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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The State Department’s 2009 annual report on global terrorism summarized global concerns about terrorist supporters 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.”
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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.
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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.
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By mid-2000, experts would put the estimated number of Hezbollah operatives living and working in the tri-border area at several hundred.
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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.

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.
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As the investigation into the AMIA bombing progressed, it focused increasingly on these three Hezbollah operatives.

A US district court sentencing memorandum for a convicted Hezbollah terrorist in 1999 revealed that the FBI had been running a confidential informant—a Lebanese immigrant—in the tri-border area.
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According to the informant, Mohammad Abdallah was regarded as “the principal leader of Hezbollah in the region”; his brother, Adnan Yousef Abdallah, functioned as his deputy. As the “second most important Hezbollah figure in the tri-border area,” the FBI reported, Adnan “oversees the clandestine extremist activities of the Abdallah clan.”
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Only much later, in December 2006, would the US government publicly designate Mohammad Abdallah as a Hezbollah terrorist.
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According to Argentine intelligence and the reports of a protected witness, Farouk Omairi maintained regular contact with the Iranian embassy in Buenos Aires and with the city’s al-Tauhid mosque, where Omairi lived briefly. Along with his business partner, Mohammad Abdallah, he was closely tied to the Husseinia mosque and the Islamic Charitable Association.
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Prosecutors were especially interested in Omairi’s contacts with the recently minted Iranian diplomat Mohsen Rabbani.
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In time, these connections would be leveraged by Rabbani to help execute the AMIA bombing, as demonstrated through telephone calls traced to and from the travel agency co-owned by Omairi and Abdallah, Piloto Turismo. Intelligence officers would later determine that Piloto Turismo was not just a business that provided convenient cover for illicit conduct but rather that it was opened with start-up funds supplied by Hezbollah and that it was meant explicitly to serve as a Hezbollah front company.
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Uniquely positioned to provide cover for a wide array of illicit activities, travel agencies like Piloto Turismo enabled the subjects of terrorism-support and criminal investigations to obtain false documents, such as fake passports and residency documents. This positioned the travel agencies as de facto points of contact for individuals overseas, especially in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East, seeking to enter the tri-border area surreptitiously. As cash-heavy businesses, the travel agencies could also serve as underground currency exchangers and alternative money remittance services. As their investigations progressed, Argentine law enforcement
authorities quickly found additional cases to corroborate their initial findings. For example, the Interpol office in Brazil reported that the communities of Middle Eastern immigrants in Foz do Iguaçu and Ciudad del Este appeared to have ties both to Hezbollah and to Palestinian extremists.
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The result of these activities was that Hezbollah built formal and informal support networks in the tri-border area, a process made easy thanks to the large Lebanese and Shi’a populations. Hiding in plain sight, the Hezbollah operatives brought over through Piloto Turismo and other travel agencies found themselves in an ideal operating environment to raise funds, provide logistical support, and engage in operational activities in the region. This included, according to a protected witness, the formation of sleeper or “dormant” cells operating under strict operational security guidelines such that members of one cell were not aware of members of another. To avoid attracting attention, they reportedly settled and worked among friends and relatives in Ciudad del Este, where they used businesses, schools, and mosques to help establish their cover.
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After the AMIA attack, Omairi would run a new travel agency for a time before authorities arrested him and his son on charges of using the travel agency and a money-exchange business to falsify documents and launder drug money.
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The arrests were the result of a 2006 Brazilian Federal Police counternarcotics investigation dubbed Operation Camel, which determined that Omairi provided travel support to drug mules transporting cocaine and that he had obtained Brazilian citizenship illegally.
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The arrests came within months of the US Treasury Department’s designation of Omairi and Abdallah as Hezbollah operatives. Omairi, Treasury stated, served as a regional coordinator for Hezbollah and procured false Brazilian and Paraguayan documentation with which he helped people obtain Brazilian citizenship illegally. He was also involved in trafficking narcotics between South America, Europe, and the Middle East.
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Omairi and Abdallah were key pillars of the “Barakat network” in the tri-border area; the extent of the network’s criminal support for Hezbollah was staggering. Abdallah’s role included personally carrying monies raised in the region to Hezbollah in Lebanon, where he met with senior Hezbollah officials and members of Hezbollah’s security division, Treasury revealed. Sometimes money flowed in the reverse direction, and Hezbollah would send Abdallah back with funds intended to support the Hezbollah network in the tri-border area.
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As the personal representative of Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah to the tri-border area, Assad Ahmad Barakat commanded respect. Even as of late 2001, he reportedly traveled to Lebanon and Iran annually, meeting with both Nasrallah and Fadlallah.
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This proved important for maintaining unity among the tri-border area’s Hezbollah supporters, some of whom, like Barakat, were closer to Nasrallah, while others, like Abdallah, were closer to Fadlallah. (Abdallah’s cousin was Fadlallah’s spokesman.)
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At times when the two Beirut-based Hezbollah leaders were vying for leadership of the group, tensions would quickly reverberate across oceans and time zones all the way to their respective supporters in South America. In the late 1990s, for example, tensions rose to such a level that a member of the Hezbollah network with familial and business ties to both the Abdallah and Barakat clans,
Hussein Ali Hmaid, served as a liaison between the two rival clans.
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In an effort to demonstrate the high regard in which the Hezbollah leadership in Lebanon held its tri-border support network and to foster unity within the local Hezbollah community, Fadlallah reportedly traveled to Ciudad del Este in 1994 on an Iranian passport bearing another name to bless the Profeta Mahoma mosque, which Abdallah owned and ran.
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Barakat first arrived in Paraguay with his father, a former chauffeur for a Lebanese politician, in 1985.
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Though only eighteen years old at the time, Barakat soon became a prominent businessman within the Lebanese community in Ciudad del Este.
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Like so many other Hezbollah supporters, Barakat lived primarily on the Foz do Iguaçu side of the Friendship Bridge but traversed the bridge regularly on his way to his various businesses based in Ciudad del Este. Among these was an electronics wholesale store, Casa Apollo, located in the Galeria Page shopping center, that authorities determined served “as a cover for Hezbollah fundraising activities and as a way to transfer information to and from Hezbollah operatives.” He used another of his companies, Barakat Import Export Ltd., to raise money for Hezbollah “by mortgaging the company in order to borrow money from a bank in a fraud scheme.”
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The extent of Barakat’s criminal activity in support of Hezbollah was impressive. From distributing and selling counterfeit US dollars to shaking down local shopkeepers for donations to Hezbollah, Barakat was accused by the Treasury Department of engaging in “every financial crime in the book” to generate funds for the group.
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“Barakat is more than a financier,” explained a Paraguayan investigator.
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According to Argentine authorities, Barakat was a card-carrying member of Hezbollah’s Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO) terrorist wing.
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He and his network collected sensitive information about the activities of other Arabs in the tri-border area, including those who traveled to the United States or Israel. This was of particular interest to the group and duly collected and passed along to Hezbollah’s Foreign Relations Department in Lebanon.
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Even in his fundraising role, Barakat’s heavy-handed tactics underscored that he was no mere fundraiser. His threats to shopkeepers were a case in point: instead of threatening local store owners themselves, Barakat threatened that family members in Lebanon would be put on a “Hezbollah blacklist” if they did not pay their quota to Hezbollah through Barakat.
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Residents knew to take such threats seriously. In the fall of 2000, Barakat reportedly attended a meeting where Hezbollah members in the tri-border area discussed assassinating Israelis and former members of the recently disbanded South Lebanon Army (SLA).
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A year and a half later, Michael Youssef Nasser, a former SLA member and cousin of SLA commander Antoine Lahad, was gunned down in São Paulo in a carefully planned assassination. While the case was never fully resolved, it should not surprise that suspicions pointed to Hezbollah.
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Given his history and personal ties, Barakat’s participation in discussions about violent activities is no anomaly. Some law enforcement officials, for example, maintain he was a “close collaborator” of Hezbollah hijacker Mohammad Ali Hamadi, who participated in the 1985 hijacking of TWA flight 847 and the murder of US Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem.
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