Iran Behind Bombing of Argentine Jewish Center
Iran Leader Is Fingered In Bombing, By Defector
Khamenei Named In Argentina Case
By MARC PERELMAN
FORWARD STAFF
Iran's supreme religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered the deadly bombing of the Jewish communal center in Buenos Aires in July 1994, according to a former top Iranian intelligence official whose testimony is being given credence by Western intelligence services and the Argentine judge investigating the case.
The official, Abdolghasem Mesbahi, made the accusation in April 1998 and again in May 2000 in two sworn statements given to Juan Jose Galeano, the Argentine judge, in which Mr. Mesbahi gave a detailed description of how Iran makes its decisions on carrying out terrorist attacks abroad.
Ayatollah Khamenei "is the one who signed the fatwa [religious order] for the AMIA bombing," Mr. Mesbahi was quoted as saying in a transcript of his May 2000 testimony obtained by the Forward (see article, Page 9). AMIA is the acronym for the Jewish center, the Associacion Mutual Israelita Argentina.
The accusation, which has been reported in the Argentine press, is the latest bombshell in Argentina's mounting case against Iran, which has been building as a trial of some of the alleged henchmen of the 1994 bombing goes on in Buenos Aires. Previous disclosures have pointed to the suspicious movements of Iranian diplomats in the days before the bombing. The case has been plagued by accusations that the government has dragged its feet to protect some local Middle Easterners with ties to former president Carlos Menem.
In his 1998 testimony, Mr. Mesbahi said the decision to bomb the AMIA center was taken in 1992 by a special committee headed by Mr. Khamenei and including then-president of the Republic Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and then-minister of Foreign Affairs Ali Akbar Velayati. He added that the decision was handed to then-intelligence minister Ali Fallahian, who was in charge of coordinating the attack.
Iran has repeatedly denied any involvement in the bombing of the AMIA building, which left 85 people dead, and charges that Mr. Mesbahi in fact fled Iran to avoid facing fraud charges.
But a former president of Islamic Iran, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, told the Forward in a telephone interview that Mr. Mesbahi is indeed a reliable witness, and he suggested that Ayatollah Khamenei may well have been involved in the bombing decision.
"If it was Iran, then the decision can only have been made by Khamenei" after a discussion by a special committee, Mr. Bani-Sadr said.
The testimony of Mr. Mesbahi, who was reportedly the third-ranking officer of the Vevak, the Iranian secret service, until he defected in 1996, forms the core of an indictment Mr. Galeano is about to issue against Iran for masterminding the attack and against Iran's proxy, the Lebanese Shi'ite terrorist group Hezbollah, for carrying it out.
"He is the narrator, his testimony is the Christmas tree of the accusation," Mr. Galeano told the Forward in an interview two weeks ago in Washington. "Now we still have to decorate the tree."
The rest of the indictment will be based on intelligence reports, phone intercepts, expert interviews and testimonies from other defectors. Mr. Galeano declined to discuss the details.
Previous cases of alleged Iranian sponsored terrorism in Europe and the United States, however, show that diplomatic considerations play a large role in framing such indictments.
Asked if issuing high-level indictments was politically sensitive, Mr. Galeano demurred, acknowledging, however, that he would meet with intelligence and law-enforcement officials before making a decision.
Mr. Mesbahi is considered a highly credible source by Western intelligence. He was the key witness in a trial in Germany four years ago in which the "highest levels" of the Iranian leadership were accused of ordering the murder of four Iranian dissidents in Germany. Mr. Mesbahi now reportedly lives in Germany in a witness-protection program.
"He is definitely a very solid witness," said Vincent Cannistraro, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency's counterterrorism unit.
Two weeks ago, Mr. Galeano also asked Mr. Bani-Sadr, who was the first president of the Islamic Republic of Iran before he went into exile in July 1981, what he thought about Mr. Mesbahi. The ex-president, who now lives in suburban Paris, told the Forward in a telephone interview that he told the judge Mr. Mesbahi was a reliable witness based on the "precise answers" the spymaster gave to several of his inquiries.
Mr. Bani-Sadr said he had first met Mr. Mesbahi when the spy was studying in Paris at the Sorbonne in the early 1980s, when he was in fact the station chief of the Vevak in the French capital. He said he saw him again three months before the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988.
"He was sent by Khomeini to ask me to come back to Iran," Mr. Bani-Sadr recounted. "I refused, but this shows he was an important person."
Mr. Mesbahi acknowledged in his testimony he had not seen the AMIA fatwa but said he had seen several others and that they always had the same form — a written order signed by the supreme leader, in that case, Mr. Khamenei, who succeeded Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini after his death in 1989.
Mr. Mesbahi said the motive for the attack was a turf war between the Vevak and the Mossad in Latin America. "In 1994, the building was attacked because it was assumed that a Mossad center was functioning there," he said. "When the bombing took place, it was said in Iran that it had killed eight Mossad agents."
It is generally assumed that Argentina was targeted because then-President Menem, under American pressure, stopped several programs of military cooperation with Middle Eastern countries. A Jewish target was hit for the second time in two years — the Israeli embassy was bombed in March 1992 — as a direct response by Hezbollah to Israeli attacks in Lebanon.
Mr. Mesbahi said Mr. Fallahian was the overall coordinator of the attack, which was organized on the ground by a Lebanese commander he identified only as "Ahad" ("The One") and prepared by two main relays in Argentina — the cultural attaché Mohsen Rabbani and an Iranian intelligence official known as Hamid Nagashan. Mr. Rabbani was asked to leave Argentina in December 1997 after evidence of his involvement in the attack accumulated. He is now reportedly in Iran and most observers say Mr. Galeano will issue a warrant for his arrest.
But issuing an indictment against top-level officials seems unlikely, if only because of the most recent precedents. In the German case, the court accused the "highest levels" in Iran but stopped short of naming names. The same holds for the indictment issued last June by a federal grand jury in Virginia for the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, in which Iran — but none of its officials — was accused of inspiring, supporting and supervising the attack. |
