Guest post by Cait
At the end of a lengthy interview on the Argentine news program Dos Voces, televised on January 14, the late Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman calmly said that whether he lived or died, he had evidence to back his formal accusation that the Argentine president and her foreign minister conspired with Iran to cover up Iran’s role in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires: “Esté Nisman o no esté Nisman,” he said, “las pruebas están.”
Two months later – and within hours of being published – “Chavistas confirmam conspiração denunciada por Nisman,” investigative journalist Leonardo Coutinho’s special report for the Brazilian news magazine Veja, made front-page headlines throughout Latin America.
According to Coutinho’s sources, Hugo Chávez himself served as the go-between in a deal between Iran and Argentina, with Iran trading US dollars for Argentine nuclear expertise and impunity for Iran in the AMIA bombing, which killed 85 people. Moreover, the cash was destined for Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s 2007 presidential election campaign. And between 2007 and 2010, a Venezuelan government plane regularly flew the Caracas-Damascus-Tehran route with cocaine shipments bound for Hezbollah.
Coutinho based his report in part on separate interviews with three former high-ranking chávistas who fell out with Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, and subsequently sought political asylum in the United States.
None of the three interviewed knew whether Argentina gave Iran the nuclear information it wanted. That, they said, was settled by higher-ranking officials on both sides, with Nilda Garré representing Argentina. Garré, a former Montonero guerrilla and former Argentine ambassador to Venezuela, is the Argentine ambassador to the OAS.
For some days, Coutinho’s report sparked little interest outside of Latin America. Notable exceptions were the Times of Israel, the Jewish Telegraph Agency, various local Jewish newspapers in the United States, and some of the business press (notably Linette Lopez in Business Insider’s Money & Markets section on March 16).
That changed after Coutinho testified before the US Congress’s House Foreign Affairs Committee on March 18. His written submission discussed his research and Nisman’s findings. Two days later, Business Insider ran a follow-up story on Coutinho’s submission. (Hat tip to Armaros for the link to BI’s follow-up.)
Is Coutinho’s report credible?
Perfil.com on March 21 said the report confirms details gleaned from the wiretaps Nisman ordered and cited in particular a June 2013 wiretap of a conversation between Jorge “Yusuf” Khalil and Ramón Allan Bogado in which the two lament changes in the Cabinet, particularly the exit of Nilda Garré, then minister of defense.
References to Coutinho’s “A Rede o Terror Finca Bases no Brasil,” appear in various English-language works on Iran’s involvement in Latin America. The day Coutinho spoke to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Veja published his short follow-up piece: “Venezuela deu abrigo à família de Bashar Assad” – “Venezuela gave shelter to Bashar Assad’s family”: “According to ex-chávistas interviewed by Veja, the dictator’s sister and nephew hid out in Venezuela after fleeing the civil war that had devastated Syria for four years.” No doubt there is more to come.
A day earlier – but with relatively little press coverage – independent national security consultant and analyst Douglas Farah’s written submission to the Senate Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere had explicitly backed up both Coutinho’s report for Veja and Nisman’s findings.
Farah had earlier been an award-winning investigative journalist, perhaps best known for his Washington Post series on El Salvador’s government-organized death squads during that country’s civil war and more recently for a breaking-news series on Al Qaeda’s link to the blood-diamond trade, also for The Post.
On the Iran-Venezuela-Argentina connection itself, Farah’s testified:
As the Veja investigation shows, Venezuela was a key player in the efforts of Iran to re-establish nuclear ties to Argentina, and … such a relationship was of primary interest to the Iranians. Because of the high value Iran placed on the acquisition of nuclear technology, Chávez promised to personally request Argentina’s help, and to do so immediately.
A footnote to the preceding paragraph reminds the subcommittee that:
It is important to remember that throughout the 1970s until 1993 Argentina had a robust nuclear relationship with Iran, and the current Iranian reactors were retrofitted and upgraded with Argentine nuclear technology. Nisman, in his indictment of Iranian leaders for planning the AMIA bombing, stated that a major trigger for Iran’s decision to blow up the AMIA building was the decision by Argentina, under pressure from the U.S. and Europe, to pause its nuclear cooperation with Iran. In addition to the Veja article, see: Kaveh L. Afrasiabi, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KK06Ak02.html.
Later, Farah gave an overview of Nisman’s earlier findings:
In 2013, the Argentine prosecutor Nisman released a report documenting through little-studied reports, informants, and the Iranian media, how official Iran state policy embraced assassination and terror, something which it never tried to hide and has never recanted, and the role of Venezuela in Iran’s strategy….
Shortly after (that) report the U.S. Department of State issued a Congressionally–mandated report on Iran’s activities in Latin America which completely ignored Nisman’s fieldwork, as well as dissenting views within the U.S. government – most notably U.S. Southern Command, which has military responsibility for the region. Instead the State Department concluded that, while Iran’s interest in Latin America “is of concern,” Iranian “influence in Latin America and the Caribbean is waning.”
Farah, who knew Nisman personally, wrote elsewhere:
Among the 40,000 legally authorized wiretapped conversations that Nisman had access to in his case – since leaked to the media – are conversations indicating that the architecture of the plot went far beyond what Nisman publicly alleged, although he clearly knew and understood the breadth of the plan.
Sources:
Alberto Nisman’s interview on A Dos Voces, January 14th, in Spanish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nFQ7AsXmf8
Coutinho’s report in English, Veja International: http://vejainternational.com/news/the-teheran-caracas-buenos-aires-connection/
Coutinho’s report in Portuguese: http://veja.abril.com.br/noticia/mundo/chavistas-confirmam-conspiracao-denunciada-por-nisman/
Countinho’s report in Spanish, as published by El Clarín: http://www.clarin.com/ultimo_momento/veja-ex_funcionarios_chavistas-nisman-chavez_0_1320468154.html
Coutinho’s follow-up article, “Venezuela deu abrigo à família de Bashar Assad,” Veja, March 18, 2015: http://veja.abril.com.br/noticia/mundo/venezuela-deu-abrigo-a-familia-de-bashar-assad
Coutinho’s “A Rede o Terror Finca Bases no Brasil” (April 6, 2011 edition of Veja) can be read in Portuguese at Veja Digital: http://veja.abril.com.br/acervodigital/home.aspx , but it’s complicated to get to. For a Portuguese text version, go to http://ecoeantigos.blogspot.ca/2011/04/rede-o-terror-finca-bases-no-brasil.html; for an English summary see WikiLeaks: https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/44/4484963_fwd-terrorism-in-brazil-.html
Douglas Farah. Testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere: http://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/031715_Farah_Testimony.pdf
Douglas Farah. “The Murder of Alberto Nisman: How The Government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner Created the Environment for a Perfect Crime,” March 16, 2015 (the sixth in a series on Argentina and the Fernández de Kirchner government): http://strategycenter.net/docLib/20150316_Farah_NismanFinala_031615.pdf
Business Insider coverage: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/brazils-iran-argentina-nuclear-ties-story-2015-3 and http://www.businessinsider.in/Dead-Argentine-prosecutor-was-zeroing-in-on-a-terror-threat-to-the-entire-Western-Hemisphere/articleshow/46637922.cms
Escuchas de Nisman | En 2013 Khalil y Bogado lamentaban la salida de Garré de Defensa: http://www.perfil.com/politica/Escuchas-de-Nisman–En-2013-Khalil-y-Bogado-lamentaban-la-salida-de-Garre-de-Defensa-20150317-0053.html
