By Gareth Porter
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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