Hezbollah (25 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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Just months after Hezbollah’s surveillance was detected, photos surfaced in early 2000 of local Lebanese businessmen standing next to Iranian and Hezbollah al-Muqawama (“resistance”) flags at a training camp allegedly located outside Foz do Iguaçu. Argentine intelligence believes that Hezbollah operated a weekend military and ideological training camp in the tri-border area.
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According to a former FBI agent who worked on Hezbollah in South America, Hezbollah operatives have also engaged in military training in Panama and Venezuela.
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Barakat himself is reported to have planned attacks on Jewish targets in Canada, Argentina, and Ciudad de Este. When a plot was broken up on December 22, 1999, Argentine intelligence arrested, but later released, suspected members of Hamas and Hezbollah, along with an Iranian intelligence agent.
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In 2000, an FBI delegation traveled to Argentina to help with the renewed effort to investigate the AMIA bombing and coordinate with local authorities to deal with the Hezbollah presence in the region. Briefed extensively by Argentine intelligence in both Buenos Aires and the tri-border area, the FBI agent who led the delegation left convinced that local intelligence services “had the goods” on Hezbollah and its role in the AMIA bombing.
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Still, Hezbollah’s activity in the region would continue to thrive.

Abdallah el-Reda, Farouk Abdul Omairi, and Assad Ahmad Barakat, the players identified early on by Argentine intelligence, were suspected not only of membership in Hezbollah but also of a host of other criminal activities including “smuggling, support to terrorism, drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, documents counterfeiting, car thefts, forgery of products, and money laundering activities.”
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Sticking to the principle that the simpler the cover, the more effective the ruse, their preferred means of concealing their covert support for terrorism and criminal enterprises was to operate travel agencies and import-export companies. The potential for big money, however, came from involvement in drugs.

Hezbollah’s growth into the narcotics industry began in the early 1980s but really took root later on. “Drug trafficking organizations based in the tri-border area have ties to radical Islamic organizations such as Hezbollah,” according to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) senior intelligence officer.
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Hezbollah’s later involvement in the drug trade was a consequence of the growth in commercial narcotics cultivation in the Bekaa Valley in the late 1970s.
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According to an Israeli daily, “The civil war virtually destroyed all other economic fields; however, the production of marijuana became a key import sector in which almost all the ethnic communities and forces involved in Lebanon played a part.”
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Over time, Lebanese Shi’a involved in narcotics in Lebanon began to work with criminal associates within the Lebanese Shi’a diaspora in South America.
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