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 1st, 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 2nd, 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.
[4] MEK
was classified as a terrorist organization by the European Union until 2009 and
by the United States from 1997 to 2012.
[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.
