Crying (Iranian) wolf in
Argentina By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - The Iranian defector who was
the source of Argentina's allegation that Iranian
officials began planning the July 18, 1994, terror
bombing of a Jewish community center at a meeting
nearly a year earlier had been dismissed as
unreliable by US officials, according to the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)agent who led
the US team assisting the investigation in
1997-98.
The FBI agent, James Bernazzani,
also says Argentine investigators had no real
leads on an Iranian link to the bombing when his
team was in Argentina. Three top officials in the US
Embassy in Buenos Aires at
the time - including ambassador James Cheek - have
confirmed the absence of evidence linking Iran to
the bombing, which killed 85 people and wounded
another 300.
All four discussed the case
with this writer between November 2006 and June
2007.
Both the Bill Clinton and George W
Bush administrations have also charged
consistently over 13 years that Iran was behind
the blast. Argentine prosecutors issued
indictments of seven former Iranian officials,
including former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, in
October 2006, but the case against five Argentines
accused of being accomplices was thrown out in
2004, because of bribery of the key witness and
other irregularities.
Last November, the
general assembly of Interpol voted to put five
former Iranian officials and a Hezbollah leader on
the international police organization's "red list"
for allegedly having planned the 1994 bombing. The
Wall Street Journal reported at the time it was
pressure from the Bush administration, along with
Israeli and Argentine diplomats, that secured the
Interpol vote.
Bernazzani, now head of the
FBI's New Orleans office, was in charge of the
agency's office of Hezbollah operations when he
was sent to Buenos Aires in late 1997 to lead a
team of FBI specialists helping Argentine
investigators to crack the AMIA bombing case.
In an interview in November 2006,
Bernazzani threw new light on the man whose
testimony became the centerpiece of the Argentine
case against Iran, Abolghassem Mesbahi, an Iranian
who claimed he had been the third-ranking man in
Iran's intelligence service before defecting to
the West in 1996. Mesbahi later testified that the
decision to plan the bombing was made by top
Iranian officials at a meeting on August 14, 1993.
However, Mesbahi had been discredited
among US analysts, according to Bernazzani,
because he had lost his access to high-level
Iranian officials well before the 1994 bombing and
was "poor, even broke". Bernazzani said Mesbahi
was "prepared to provide testimony to any country
on any case involving Iran".
Bernazzani
recalled that when he arrived in the Argentine
capital, he found the only evidence the
investigators claimed to have of Iranian
responsibility was a surveillance tape of Iranian
cultural attache Mohsen Rabbani shopping for a
white Renault van similar to the one allegedly
used in the bombing.
However, the original
intelligence report on the surveillance, which is
available to researchers in the official Argentine
investigation files, shows that Rabbani was filmed
on May 1, 1993 - nearly 15 months before the
bombing. That was also three-and-a-half months
before the time Mesbahi would later claim top
Iranian officials had made the decision to plan
the bombing operation.
Bernazzani said
Argentine intelligence had also used a technique
called "link analysis" of telephone records to
make a circumstantial case that the Iranian
Embassy had been involved in the plot. The
analysis consisted of linking a series of calls
made between July 1, 1994, and the bombing 17 days
later to a mobile phone in the Brazilian city of
Foz de Iguazu, which must have been made by the
"operational group" for the bombing. They claimed
a link between a cell phone said to be owned by
Rabbani and the other calls.
Bernazzani
said he had regarded such a use of link analysis
as "very dangerous" because, using the same
methodology, "you could link my telephone with bin
Laden's". The Argentine prosecutors' 2006 report,
however, devoted several pages to a presentation
of the "link analysis" of phone calls as evidence
of Iranian culpability.
The three top US
diplomats in Buenos Aires from the time the AMIA
was bombed - ambassador Cheek, deputy chief of
mission Ronald Goddard and chief of political
section William Brencick - all agreed in
interviews that US and Argentine efforts had
turned up no evidence that Iran or Hezbollah had
been involved in the bombing.
Cheek, who
was ambassador in Argentina from 1993 until late
1996, said in an interview last May, "To my
knowledge there was never any real evidence [of
Iranian responsibility]. They never came up with
anything."
Cheek recalled only one
promising lead had pointed to Iran - an Iranian
defector named Manoucher Moatamer, who had claimed
in 1994 to have inside information implicating
Tehran in the bomb plot. But Cheek said it had
soon become clear that Moatamer had actually been
just a low-ranking official who hadn't known as
much about Iranian government decision-making as
he had claimed.
"We finally decided that
he wasn't credible," Cheek said.
Former
deputy chief of mission Goddard, who was in Buenos
Aires until late 1997, recalled in an interview
that the US government had "suspected very
seriously" that Hezbollah had carried out the
bombing, because many Hezbollah sympathizers lived
in the tri-border area where Argentina, Paraguay
and Brazil meet.
The investigation found
no evidence, however, to link either Hezbollah or
Iran to the bombing, according to Goddard. "The
whole Iran thing seemed kind of flimsy," he said.
As chief of political section, Brencick
was the primary embassy contact with the Argentine
investigation. He recalled in an interview that a
"wall of assumptions" had guided the US approach
to the case.
The dominant assumption, said
Brencick, was that the bombing was a suicide
attack against Jews, and that it therefore must
have been done by Hezbollah, which had been
carrying out suicide bombings against Israelis in
Lebanon.
"What struck me initially was
that there were a lot of assumptions but no hard
evidence to connect those assumptions to the
case," Brencick recalled.
Bernazzani said
the US intelligence community's conviction that
Hezbollah had a terrorist organization in the
tri-border area, which it could have used to carry
out the bombing, was not based on concrete
evidence. "It's conjecture - purely conjecture,"
the FBI agent said.
The case against Iran
was entirely "circumstantial", according to
Bernazzani, until the Argentine prosecutors
identified the suicide bomber as Ibrahim Hussein
Berro, a Lebanese Hezbollah militant who Hezbollah
insists was killed in fighting with an Israeli
unit in southern Lebanon on September 9, 1994.
That identification was contested,
however, by Patricio Pfinnen, the head of
counter-intelligence for the Argentine
intelligence agency, SIDE. Testifying on the case
in court in October 2003, Pfinnen recalled that
Berro's name had come from an informant in Lebanon
he had recruited but whose credibility he had then
come to question. Pfinnen expressed doubt that
Berro was "the person who was immolated" in the
bombing.
Argentine prosecutor Alberto
Nisman told the press in November 2005 that
Nicolasa Romero, the only eyewitness to the AMIA
bombing who had claimed she had seen the driver of
a white Renault van seconds before the blast, had
identified Berro from pictures obtained from
Berro's brothers in Detroit, Michigan.
Romero had admitted in secret court
testimony, however, that she had been unable to
identify Berro from two different sets of four
pictures. Even after police prompted her by
showing her the police sketch made from her
description at the time, she said, she was only
"80% certain" of the identification.
Gareth Porter is an historian
and national security policy analyst. His latest
book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power
and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published
in June 2005.
(The research on which
this article is based was supported by the Nation
Institute.)
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