Applying SNA to analyze Iranian and Hezbollah Activities outside of the Middle East

Background and Research Question

In a May 21, 2018 speech on US-Iranian relations at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., the then-recently minted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that “Today, the Iranian Qods Force conducts covert assassination operations in the heart of Europe.”[1] The remark caught security experts off guard.[2] Since the 1991 assassination of Shapour Bakhtiar in France and the 1992 targeted killing of four Iranian-Kurdish dissidents in Germany, Western governments had not publicly accused Iran of carrying out assassination plots in Europe. Following the speech, some analysts suspected that the secretary’s remark, delivered without corroborating evidence and made less than two weeks after President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was either meant to signal Iran’s rogue status or that it was an inadvertent disclosure of information that had not been made public.[3]

Although Pompeo never clarified what he meant by his May 21 remark, news reports coming from Europe in the summer of 2018 detailed an alleged Iranian plan to detonate a bomb in Paris. German, Belgian, French, and Luxembourgian authorities accused a Vienna-based Iranian diplomat of being an undercover intelligence officer and providing explosives to an Iranian-Belgian couple to be used in an attack. The alleged target was a rally organized by Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), an Iranian opposition group whom Iran classifies as a terrorist group,[4] in the outskirts of the French capital. On the morning of the rally, June 30, Belgian authorities arrested the couple in Brussels with 500 grams of explosive and a detonator in their car. On the same day, French law enforcement arrested a suspected co-conspirator in Paris. On July 1^st, German officers arrested the Iranian diplomat and suspected covert agent as he drove through Germany towards Austria.[5]

Investigations are still underway, and the full scope and context of this incident are not likely to become publicly available anytime soon, but the French government has deemed the likelihood of Iranian involvement to be credible enough to accuse, on October 2^nd, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) of being involved.[6] Iranian authorities have in turn accused MEK operatives of staging a false flag operation in order to damage EU-Iranian relations.[7]

For the past 17 years, analysts have built a significant body of case studies and social network analyses on non-state Sunni terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Meanwhile, the existing literature on Iran’s clandestine operations unit, the Qods Force,[8] and on Iranian-sponsored non-state Shiite groups, such as Hezbollah, is relatively meager. Contemporary Western understanding of Iranian covert operations would benefit from a social network analysis of previous incidents in which Iranian MOIS and Qods Force operatives, as well as Hezbollah auxiliaries, were believed to have been involved. 

Hypothesis

While full details and unequivocal confirmation of official Iranian involvement in the MEK rally attack in Paris are not likely to emerge soon and the large scale of this plot deviates from Iran’s 1990s pattern of covert, targeted assassinations in Europe, this is not the first time that Western intelligence agencies have suspected Iranian diplomats and MOIS agents of directing or providing support to bomb attacks outside of the Middle East. In 1992 and 1994, under circumstances that have never been completely clarified, car bomb attacks that closely followed the modus operandi of Hezbollah-attacks in the Lebanese Civil War partly destroyed the Israeli embassy and the Argentine Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA) community center in Buenos Aires, killing 107 people. Some Argentine and American authorities believe that Iranian MOIS agents working under diplomatic cover at the Iranian embassy in Buenos Aires as well as Hezbollah members and sympathizers living in the triple border area between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, were involved in the attacks. Despite their strong suspicion, investigators were never able to produce conclusive evidence linking the Iranian government to the bombings.

In a 2008 article about the AMIA bombing, investigative journalist Gareth Porter reported that both James Cheek and Ron Goddard, who had respectively been US Ambassador to Argentina and deputy chief of mission in Buenos Aires at the time of the attack, told him that evidence of Iranian involvement in the bombing “wasn’t credible” and “the whole Iranian thing seemed kind of flimsy.”[9] Nevertheless, documents compiled and produced by Argentine and American investigators who support the thesis of Iranian involvement provide a solid database from which is possible to devise what a covert, lethal Iranian operation far from the Middle East could look like.

While the AMIA bombing is removed from the alleged MEK rally bomb plot in space and time by thousands of miles and nearly a quarter of a century, and acknowledging that Western intelligence has not confirmed direct Iranian involvement in either events beyond a doubt, a closer study of the AMIA case might provide important insight into how Iran might organize and conduct its clandestine operations. The trove of publicly available legal documents, news articles, and books in Spanish and in English regarding the bombing provide enough material for an analyst to compile identifying information on the main suspects, build network graphs, and conduct social network analyses of the event.      

Data and Methodology

I will compile information from sources such as Argentina’s AMIA bombing indictments, US Treasury Department’s designations of implicated South America-based Hezbollah members, and open source reporting on the incident to map out the network of individuals Argentine and American authorities suspect were involved in the attack. My starting point will be Matthew Levitt’s 2013 book Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon's Party of God. In this book, Matthew Levitt, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Studies who served as deputy assistant secretary for intelligence and analysis at the Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence from 2005 to 2007, uses publicly available American and foreign official documents, reporting, and interviews he conducted with US officials to describe Hezbollah’s global operations, including a chapter on the AMIA bombing. His chapter on AMIA contains extensive description of how and when suspects interacted in the months leading up to the bombing and after.

Limitations

Due to the clandestine nature of the operation and given that Iranian involvement has not been unequivocally confirmed, it is not possible to verify the accuracy of the allegations levied against the individuals identified in this analysis. Instead of trying to conduct a comprehensive investigative project on the AMIA bombing, my objective is to construct, with the information available publicly in analyses, news articles, and official reports, a graphic representation of the network of Iranian-linked individuals whom American and Argentine authorities have singled out as suspects.

It is possible that this analysis will be more historically-oriented and descriptive than policy-oriented and predictive. In the 24 years that have transpired since the AMIA attack, Iran’s goals, methods, and behavior, at the strategic as well as tactical levels, are likely to have changed. Nevertheless, an understanding of its early operations might provide insights into the organizational development and methods of Iran’s covert actions abroad.  

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[1] https://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2018/05/282301.htm

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/22/mike-pompeo-iran-assassination-operations-europe

[3] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/05/mike-pompeo-says-iran-is-carrying-out-assassination-operations-in-europe-what-is-he-talking-about.html

[4] MEK was classified as a terrorist organization by the European Union until 2009 and by the United States from 1997 to 2012.

[5] https://www.rferl.org/a/german-court-approves-extradition-of-iranian-diplomat-suspected-in-bomb-plot/29518877.html

[6] https://www.lemonde.fr/proche-orient/article/2018/10/02/attentat-dejoue-de-villepinte-des-avoirs-iraniens-geles_5363334_3218.html?xtmc=iran&xtcr=35

[7] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/foiled-paris-bomb-plot-raises-fears-that-iran-is-planning-attacks-in-europe/2018/10/11/2ccf8d0a-c8b9-11e8-b1ed-1d2d65b86d0c_story.html?utm_term=.7513a4a631a3.

[8] In 2007, the Treasury Department sanctioned the Qods Force as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. https://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/hp644.aspx.

[9] https://www.thenation.com/article/bushs-iranargentina-terror-frame/