by Ami Pedahzur
Heavy pressure from Arad’s family and friends kept Arad’s fate on the public agenda in Israel, and the government continued its quest for ways to bring home the captured navigator. The next move, planned shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union, involved Israel, Hezbollah, the United States, West Germany, and the decaying Soviet empire. Under the terms of the swap, Israel agreed to release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, as well as two Israeli citizens—Marcus Klingberg and Shabtai Kalmanovich—who were serving long prison sentences for spying for the Soviet Union. In exchange, Israel was supposed to receive information on Arad. The changing of the regime in Moscow, however, led to the dismissal of the deal. Subsequent attempts to get hold of information from Tehran via German sources also proved fruitless.3
In light of the futility of diplomatic efforts and continued public pressure, Israel also resorted to other modes of operation. Elite commando units were sent deep into Lebanon to kidnap senior Hezbollah members. The Israeli intelligence community, especially Aman, devised this method, and the Israeli security cabinet supported it for several reasons. First, it was believed that the Hezbollah abductees would provide Israel critical information about Arad’s fate and his situation. Second, Israel thought that the kidnappings were one of the only ways to put real pressure on the Hezbollah leadership and the Iranian regime in order to obtain information on Arad’s fate or negotiate his release. Later, it would be revealed that none of these assumptions had any solid basis.
On December 15, 1988, a Sayeret Matkal force set up an ambush near the Lebanese town of Tibnin. The unit’s mission was to capture Jawad Kasfi, Dirani’s operations officer. Kasfi was seized from his car and, along with three of his men, taken to the security zone in southern Lebanon. After a preliminary interrogation, two of the captured men were released, while the other two, including Kasfi, were transferred to Israel. The next kidnapping occurred seven months later. This time the target was more important—Sheikh Abdel Karim Obeid, a highly respected Shiite leader and senior Hezbollah activist. Israel had hoped that his abduction would exert direct pressure on the organization. On July 28, 1989, at 1:00 a.m., a force of thirty Sayeret Matkal commandos landed near Obeid’s home village of Jibchit, some five miles north of the security zone. Deputy Commander Amos Ben Avraham led the force, which approached the village at a quick march, identified Obeid’s house, and broke into it. The astonished cleric, who was caught in his bed, was ordered to dress and was led away at gunpoint to a helicopter that took him to Israel.4
When we take into account the overall outcomes of the abductions policy, the picture is not very flattering to Israeli policymakers. These complicated military operations, which were largely the result of the Arad family’s and other Israeli private citizens’ pressure on policymakers and the security establishment to bolster the efforts to bring Arad home, endangered the lives of large number of soldiers from the Israeli elite forces, but they had a very little, if any, strategic value. The abductions of Kasfi and Obeid did not result in the revelation of any new information on Arad and did not advance negotiations for his release one iota.5 Moreover, instead of putting pressure on Hezbollah and the Iranian regime, the abductions actually prompted them to escalate their operations against Israel.
HEZBOLLAH STRIKES BACK
On February 14, 1992, three Israeli soldiers were killed in an attack by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad on an IDF basic training base in Gilad in an operation dubbed Night of the Pitchforks. Two days later Israel responded, but not necessarily aiming for the right target. Israeli Air Force Apache helicopters fired seven missiles at the car of Hezbollah leader, Abbas Musawi. He was killed, along with his wife, Siham, and their five-year-old son, Hussein, who were with him in the car. Hezbollah’s response to the elimination of its leader was severe. The target of the first attack was the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The incident took place on March 17, 1992, a little before 3:00 p.m. A suicide bomber drove a Ford F-100 truck laden with about 120 pounds of explosives straight into 910/916 Arroyo Street. Twenty-nine people were killed in the blast. A short while later, the Islamic Jihad organization in Beirut took responsibility for the carnage, stating that it was in response to the Musawi assassination. In those days, before the emergence of global Salafi jihad terrorism, the success of a local organization such as Hezbollah in being able to build an operational infrastructure in a country on the other side of the globe was tantamount to an intelligence bolt from the blue.6
After long years of intensive inquiry by Mossad, the following picture of the bombing in Argentina emerged. The masterminds behind the attack were Imad Mughniyah and Mohsen Rabbani. The latter was the cultural attaché at the Iranian Embassy in Buenos Aires but in effect also functioned as representative of the Iranian Intelligence Ministry there. In the earlier groundwork for the operation, a courier was sent on behalf of Mughniyah from Lebanon to Argentina equipped with false documents provided by the Iranian Embassy in Beirut. His mission was to set up a local cell and select the target of the attack. Individuals in the Argentine security system divulged information on the security arrangements of the Israel Embassy to the courier in exchange for bribes. A man who carried a Brazilian identity card showing the name of Elias Griveiro Da Luz purchased the truck the suicide bomber drove. (To this day, the identity of the bomber is unknown.) When they received the signal that the arrangements were complete, three members of Hezbollah who had undergone training in Iran set out for Argentina. The cell, including the suicide bomber, entered Argentina by way of the border with Paraguay, where Mughniyah’s courier awaited them. He then took them to Buenos Aires and supervised the execution of the operation.7
The escalation between Israel and Hezbollah also became evident in southern Lebanon. The mounting tension between the two sides was discernible mainly in the gradual rise in the number of clashes in the security zone between Israeli and Hezbollah ground forces in the summer of 1993. After Hezbollah fighters succeeded in killing five IDF soldiers on July 8 and 9, and also in the wake of Hezbollah missile attacks on settlements in northern Israel twelve days later, Israel responded forcefully. On July 25, Israeli aircraft and the IDF Artillery Corps began heavily bombarding villages in southern Lebanon where Hezbollah operatives were based. The rationale of the operation, which was termed Din Veheshbon (Accountability), was that the Israeli bombardments would drive masses of Lebanese refugees to flee north toward Beirut. This, in turn, would put pressure on the Lebanese government to force Hezbollah to stop its violent campaign against Israel. The Israeli response indicated an escalation in the use of the war model, given that it was the first time Israel used heavy artillery in its struggle against a subnational armed group except for the PLO. However, this did not prevent Hezbollah from continuing to rain Katyusha missiles on northern Israel, and the rigorous Israeli response had no profound influence on its operational capabilities. After seven days, on July 31, the operation came to an end after Israel and Hezbollah, by means of American mediation, came to a set of understandings. At its core was the agreement that the two sides consented not to take action against civilian populations.8
HEZBOLLAH STRIKES AGAIN
Even though the abductions of Kasfi and Obeid did not lead to information on Ron Arad, and despite the escalation of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, policymakers in Jerusalem did not abandon the kidnapping policy. The next target was Mustafa Dirani himself. While it seems that Israeli policymakers, Aman, and Mossad operatives already understood that the chances of success in using the abductees as bargaining chips were low, they believed that this time they would succeed in gaining new information on Arad’s fate because of Dirani’s direct involvement in his kidnapping and confinement.
The method described previously to capture Obeid was repeated, with a few improvements, about five years later. On Friday, May 20, 1994, at 11:00 p.m., two CH-53 Sikorsky helicopters landed near Dirani’s home village of Kasser Naba. Two Mercedes cars carrying Sayeret Matkal fighters rolled down the ramps and
drove straight to their destination. The soldiers broke into Dirani’s house and seized him. This time, however, there were some complications. The force was discovered while they were still in the village, and in the ensuing exchange of gunfire, the commander of one of the units was lightly wounded. Nevertheless, even Dirani’s abduction did not budge Hezbollah from its policy of silence concerning Ron Arad. “We do not understand this language,” declared a senior Hezbollah spokesman the morning after Dirani’s kidnapping, “and the Israelis will not achieve anything.”9
Two months later, on July 18, 1994, at 9:53 in the morning, a Renault Traffic commercial vehicle blew up in proximity to a four-story building on 663 Pasteur Street in the heart of a Jewish neighborhood in Buenos Aires. The massive explosion led to the collapse of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) building on top of its inhabitants. This time the death toll was much worse, at eighty-six fatalities. Once again, the tracks led back to Tehran. Investigation reports issued by Western intelligence agencies indicated that the decision in principal to execute the action was already made in August 1993 in a session of the Iranian Supreme National Security Council. Present were the Iranian spiritual leader, Ali Khamenei; the incumbent president at the time, Hashemi Rafsanjani; the Minister of Intelligence, Ali Fallahian; the officer in charge of intelligence and security in the Office of the Iranian Leader, Mohammed Hijazi; and the Foreign Minister, Ali Akbar Velayati. The green light was given following the IDF attack on the Hezbollah training camp in Baalbek and the abduction of Dirani. This time, as well, the responsibility for carrying out the mission was assigned to Mughniyah’s unit. He recruited suicide bomber Ibrahim Hussein Berro, who entered Argentina near the borders of Brazil and Paraguay accompanied by a Hezbollah collaborator by the name of Samuel Salman El Reda, a Colombian of Lebanese origin who was married to an Argentinean citizen.10
Nearly ten days before the explosion, the Iranian ambassadors in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile were summoned to urgent meetings in Tehran and were thus absent from their embassies on the day of the attack. At the same time, the head of the Iranian intelligence station in Buenos Aires, Mohsen Rabbani, also left Buenos Aires. The Iranian intelligence was responsible for the operational aspect of the bombing and relied on a network of local Shiite Muslims. The most prominent figure among these local collaborators was a car dealer by the name of Carlos Alberto Talaldin, an Argentinean of Lebanese Shiite descent, who supplied the booby-trapped car. The Iranian Foreign Ministry furnished Mughniyah’s associates with diplomatic papers that allowed them to access Argentina and circulate within its borders freely. This time, as well, Argentinean security people provided information on the security arrangements of the building in exchange for bribes. When Berro arrived at Buenos Aires, the explosives-rigged vehicle was already waiting for him in the public parking lot not far from the Jewish community building. Several hours before the attack, the suicide bomber called up his family in Lebanon. A transcription of the intercepted conversation confirms that he conveyed a message to them according to which he would soon join his brother, who had blown himself up in a car-bomb attack on Israeli soldiers in Lebanon in August 1989. At the end of the conversation, Berro left for the parking lot, started up the car, and blew it up next to the building some five minutes later.11
In the first days following the explosion, there was a strong feeling in Israel that the Argentinean police and intelligence service investigation was being conducted in an amateurish manner. According to Yigal Carmon, then counter-terrorism advisor to the prime minister, the Argentinean investigators purposely refrained from interrogating certain suspects, including Carlos Talaldin, who held critical information that may have helped get to the bottom of the affair. Important documents that were presented to the investigating judge and indicated an Iranian connection mysteriously vanished. The frustration in Israel was immense. According to Mossad and the CIA, although Argentine President Carlos Menem made a dramatic denunciation immediately after the explosion, saying, “The animals that committed this attack don’t deserve to be among the living,” his extensive connections with Iran and Syria led him to sabotage the investigation. This included the rejection of offers by Israel to take part in the investigation as well as a refusal to receive relevant information from it.12
Menem, from an Arab family of Syrian descent, grew up in the province of La Rioja, where he also took his first political steps as head of the Syrian-Lebanese Association. In the year 1983, he was elected to the position of the province’s governor and six years later became president of the republic. During the course of his presidency, Menem cultivated his connections with the Arab world and improved Argentina’s relations with Iran. Mossad claims that he was concerned that the disclosure of the involvement of Iran in a terrorist incident in his country might harm these relations. Menem’s motives were also not free of personal interests. A member of the Iranian security services who defected to the West related that the Iranian authorities deposited the impressive sum of $10 million into Menem’s personal account in the Bank of Luxembourg in Switzerland. This was to ensure that the investigation would not point an accusing finger at Tehran.13
Menem’s unwillingness to allow the Israeli intelligence services to take part in the investigations would not have captured the headlines if not for the severe accusations directed at Argentina. These alleged that the Menem administration in fact could have prevented the attack on the Jewish community building but chose not to do anything. On May 31, 1994, forty-eight days before the attack on the AMIA building, representatives of the Argentinean intelligence services (SIDE) were summoned to the Foreign Ministry and presented with a special message sent from the Argentinean embassy in Lebanon. The message was a specific warning in regard to a terrorist attack against an Israeli or Jewish target in the near future. The information was passed on to neither the Israeli embassy nor the Jewish community. The actions of Menem and his people left a bad taste in the relations between the intelligence agencies of the two countries. Signs of change came only after the events of September 11, 2001, when Argentina joined the Global Coalition against Terrorism, a program established by U.S. President George W. Bush. In March 2003, the head of SIDE, Miguel Angel Toma, visited Israel. After a postponement of many years, he finally delivered the report of the investigation of the attacks to members of the Israeli security establishment.14
MOSSAD RETURNS TO LEBANON
Meanwhile, in 1994, frustration in the Israel security establishment grew worse. In Mossad’s painstaking investigation that followed the attack on the AMIA building, Mughniyah’s name kept cropping up. It was already familiar to intelligence services in the West owing to his involvement in the planning of suicide attacks against the U.S. embassy in Beirut and the Multinational Force bases in Lebanon in the year 1983. One year later, his name was associated with the abduction and murder of William Buckley, chief of the CIA station in Beirut. However, while the bulk of intelligence efforts focused on Mughniyah’s activities in Lebanon, he was actually engaged in the cultivation of “sleeper” Hezbollah terrorist cells in other places in the world. These latter efforts had been carried out with the utmost secrecy; even when they came to the attention of the local intelligence agencies, they were treated as a Middle Eastern problem. In this way, instead of detecting the development and expansion of an international terrorist network, each agency concentrated on the activities in its own country and did not share this information with other intelligence services.15
Shortly after the second attack in Argentina, Israel initiated a reprisal. Mossad operatives made contact with Ahmed Hallaq, formerly a member of the pro-Syrian Al-Saiqa organization. When they first attempted to entice him into their employment, the agents identified themselves as American government officers and only several months later revealed their real identity. In June 1994, Hallaq was asked to recruit Fuad Mughniyah, a mid-ranking Hezbollah official, to be an informer. Fuad himself was not a particularly interesting objective for Israeli intelligence. Hi
s importance was rooted in his family relations: He was Imad Mughniyah’s brother. Nearly six months after initial efforts to solicit his services, Mossad decided to change course. On December 23, 1994, Ahmed Hallaq rigged up a bomb under a Volkswagen car parked right next to a store Fuad owned. When Hallaq received the signal that Fuad was inside the store, the bomb was detonated. As a result of the powerful explosion, Fuad Mughniyah and two passersby were killed. While some sources claimed that Israel’s actual intention was to kill Imad while he attended his brother’s funeral, others insisted that this was a revenge operation, aiming to hurt Imad by killing his brother, who was a far more accessible target. At any rate, on that very same day, Hallaq and his family fled to southern Lebanon, where a man called “Dani” awaited them and helped them cross the border into Israeli territory. Hallaq was offered the chance to settle down in Costa Rica under a fictitious identity, but he preferred the Philippines. However, five months of dwelling in the “diaspora” were more than enough for him. He demanded that his operators in Israel allow him to return to his homeland. They acceded, providing him with a new identity card with the name of Michel Hir Amin, and put him up in the Christian town of Qlaya, which was then under the control of the IDF and the SLA.16
