Hezbollah (24 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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
).
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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American and Israeli investigators reportedly decided not to cooperate fully with their Argentine counterparts; it would take years for confidence to be built.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Releasing such a video, the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator testified, is itself a Hezbollah trademark.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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