Interpreting The AMIA II -- President, Pimp, Prosecutor, Sp(ies)

Why Argentina?

An obvious question emerges when trying, as the oft-repeated allegation of Iranian responsibility does, to pin the AMIA bombing on international actors. Why Argentina? Given that Iran’s implacable foes are Tel Aviv and Washington, committing a major terror attack against a South American country that is not particularly a US ally seems bizarre. Growing up received the classic Algemeiner-style explanation that Iran is bent on the destruction of Jews and Judaism anywhere in the world, and thus the AMIA was not targeted for a specifically Argentine reason. But this fails under scrutiny, since:

1) Iran and its allies have never attacked another diaspora Jewish community, and

2) Iran has a domestic Jewish community that it does not persecute in any particular way. If the Iranian government had an agenda of genocidal anti-Semitism this would obviously not be the case.

Whatever the extent of Iranian official anti-Semitism — such as in the form of state-sponsored Holocaust denial conferences — even the strongest Iran-basher cannot seriously argue that Iran has a malevolent interest in individual Jews. That explanation is satisfactory for my grandparents but not for a court of law. The late prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who was the public face of Iran finger-pointing, did attempt to answer this question in order to make his narrative seem remotely credible. Nisman’s case hinged on Iranian anger over Argentine abrogation of a bilateral nuclear technology cooperation. There are a variety of issues with this, not least that the agreement was never actually cancelled (Porter, 2006). Admittedly, this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of ways that the Menem government in charge at the time of the bombing had angered Syria and Iran. But in these first few big-picture entries, we are going to try to proceed from a critical view of the Iran narrative, and examine whether the idea that it is not true holds water. Such an assumption rests on Iran’s geopolitical enemies — namely, Israel and the United States — having an interest in using a terrorist investigation in Argentina to further their interests. But to be able to dismiss the Iran story we first need to answer two questions:

1) If not Iran/Hezbollah, who was responsible for the AMIA bombing?

2) What is the political purpose of accusing Iran in a country that is not the United States (or part of the NATO bloc at all) or Israel?

It is the second of these questions that we will seek to answer in this entry. For this, we must start with Nisman rather than with the bombing itself. As most readers should know, Nisman made a sensational accusation that then-president Cristina de Fernández Kirchner had been involved in a “cover-up” of the AMIA bombing. What specifically did he mean by this? Ezequiel Adamovsky writes:

“In few words, Nisman’s argument is that Cristina Kirchner masterminded a secret plan to absolve Iranian officials accused of the 1994 bombing in return for deliveries of much-needed oil from Iran. Having that goal in mind, in 2013 she obtained approval from the Congress for an international treaty of cooperation with that country, known as the Memorandum of Understanding, that established a sort of international ‘truth commission’ with the alleged purpose of interrogating the suspects in Teheran. The real purpose–the argument goes–was to get Interpol arrest warrants against the Iranian officials dropped, which Foreign Minister Timerman tried (but failed) to do” (Adamovsky, 2015).

It is these Interpol arrest warrants, or “red alerts” that were not only the center of Nisman’s accusation against CFK but which also might go some way towards explaining the American interest in an Iran-AMIA narrative. The Memorandum mentioned by Adamovsky was meant to provide for a joint Argentina-Iran investigation that would clear the air between the two countries:

“The Memorandum of Understanding with Iran was signed by the two countries on January 27, 2013. It consisted of nine points. The idea was to permit the Iranians accused of being the authors of the AMIA [terrorist] attack to testify in front of an Argentinian judge. It established particular conditions for this testimony, for example that it would take place in Iran and not in Argentina. It also created a controversial Truth Commission … It was a negotiation in which the two countries logically pursued different objectives. Argentina wanted an inquest that would advance the case, while Iran wanted to resolve the problem of having important [government] functionaries and ex-functionaries under the threat of Interpol red alerts … However, it has to be emphasized that the red alerts were never lifted as a result of the signing of the Memorandum, therefore no [automatic] change occurred and impunity was never enshrined for anybody” (Duggan, 2018: 60-61).*

But of course, Argentina and Iran were not the only parties paying attention to these negotiations. Israel, the American neoconservative right, and their allies in Argentina feared that the Memorandum would result in an exoneration of Iran (Duggan, 2018: 62). Obviously, we can now see how Nisman’s accusation served these external interests — by delegitimizing any investigation that did not take the Iran hypothesis for granted. Any conclusion besides unambiguous Iranian guilt would at the very least, rob the AMIA case of its political salience in accusing Iran of being a terrorist state. Nisman himself planned his accusation as a desperate last move to keep the AMIA case open indefinitely, albeit for personal reasons. In the weeks prior to his death Nisman expressed to virtually all of his acquaintances an intense fear that he was imminently going to lose his position as AMIA special prosecutor. His hope was that the accusation against CFK would ensure essentially permanent job security given how politically controversial it would make a potential firing.

Nisman was no one-dimensional hero as he has been portrayed, but rather a complex and highly ambitious character. Over the eleven years he had been AMIA special prosecutor Nisman had gotten used to the prestige and wealth generated by his position as guarantees of a highly comfortable lifestyle. Comfortable in terms of international vacations (economically off limits to most other Argentines) and luxurious apartments, but not just that. Nisman was something of a playboy to the point of shading into hypersexual behavior that appears compulsive and potentially even pathological. In the early 1990s he had been accused by a young female lawyer he casually knew of harassing her with obscene phone calls, sometimes multiple times a day, for over a year (Duggan, 2018: 100-109). After his divorce from federal judge Sandra Arroyo Salgado, the mother of his children, Nisman had been involved with an unending stream of much younger women. He traveled with these “conquests” to Miami and Cancun, and would show off photos of them to his uninterested friends. After a certain point his friends understood that these were artificial and rather vulgar relationships. This brings us to an acquaintance of Nisman’s named Leandro Santos.

Santos, who Nisman had when relaxing at his favorite bar one Friday evening, was a modeling agent — thus someone who knew a lot of young and beautiful women. A lot of young and beautiful women who tended to have sex with Alberto Nisman. Santos was at best a seedy character, who made his employees sexual available to rich and powerful friends but he was probably something darker. Leandro Santos was the subject of a years-long investigation by Uruguayan justice for prostitution of minors, and had been suspected of such in Argentina as well. What is clear is he was no ordinary pimp. Santos certainly did actually manage models, but seems to have run his legitimate business alongside a “VIP prostitution” one in both Uruguay and Argentina (Duggan, 2018: 92-95). It is thus likely that his services to Nisman went beyond simply introducing the latter to women. After having to testify under oath that he knew Nisman following the latter’s death, Santos closed down his “modeling agency” business. The most recent update on Leandro Santos I found researching this piece was from 2021 — when Santos was criminally charged for making threats to one of Nisman’s youthful “conquests” to scare her out of mentioning him in court (Clarín, 2021).

What was the purpose of this long and sordid digression? Obviously, such a lifestyle was expensive to maintain. The investigation following his death discovered that Nisman had a secret bank account in the United States into which large amounts of money were deposited by unknown persons. Nisman also had a bizarre arrangement with his IT guy, Diego Lagomarsino, where the latter was immensely overpaid by the state and then gave half of his monthly salary to Nisman in cash (Duggan, 2018: 199-204). The point is that Nisman’s position as AMIA special prosecutor made him rich. It made him famous. Nisman’s belief that he was about to lose all of this was almost certainly the reason for his suicide (Duggan, 2018: 177-183).

There’s a tendency I’ve encountered to sometimes revile Nisman himself as at the center of a vast CIA-Mossad conspiracy concerning Iran and the AMIA. I don’t really think this picture is accurate, and it also rings slightly anti-Semitic. Nisman was Jewish, true, but the evidence points to him not really caring about Zionism or Israel or the AMIA or really anything beyond life’s baser pleasures. For instance, Nisman’s accusations against CFK surprised many on both the left and right, because for much of his career he had been known on friendly terms with kirchnerismo (Duggan, 2018: 36). This only began to change due to the signing of a Memorandum that posed an obvious threat to his job security (Duggan, 2018: 11; 70-71). What I will posit as true is that Nisman acted as a sort of legal mercenary for Israeli and American interests. But it was just a job to Nisman, one that he mainly valued for the hedonistic lifestyle that it made possible for him as well as the prestige it brought. Nisman’s sudden turn to the right made perfect sense if he thought that it was the only way to keep his gravy train secure. But Nisman was also mirroring his boss — his real boss, not the Argentine Minister of Justice. We have arrived at the final character in this post’s rather whimsical title — the spy, Jaime Stiuso. Or rather final characters, since the involvement of the other spies who will appear in this story is much clearer and arguably more important.

Stiuso, the director of Argentina’s then-intelligence service the Secretaría de Inteligencia del Estado** (SIDE) had been employed by this agency in some role since 1972. He had served governments of every stripe — those of the far-right dictator Videla, the neoliberal Menem, and both left-populist Kirchners, among others. But Stiuso was actually far from apolitical bureaucrat — having close ties to the United States, Israel, and their respective intelligence agencies. The Iran guilt hypothesis originated with Stiuso, a figure of sufficient standing both to make it credible to most Argentines and to quash investigation of any other suspects. He both supplied the evidence used to pursue the AMIA case judicially and was Nisman’s most powerful backer within the Argentine state (Duggan, 2018: 73-76). If this summary seems a bit rushed and vague, it’s by necessity sadly. Stiuso’s biography and role in American imperial geostrategy for the Southern Cone is so sprawling that — in the interest of narrative coherence — it would require a separate full article to even begin to detail, and so must be left for a future entry of this series.

So why did the ostensibly left-nationalist Kirchners tolerate Stiuso? And what did his relationship with them have to do with Nisman’s accusation? Put simply, Stiuso was an invaluable source of information about Argentine domestic politics. This does not mean that he spied on Kirchner opponents illegally — just that Stiuso could draw on an enormous network of friends, contacts, and informers built up over decades. Stiuso did not so much just have his finger on the pulse as on the beating heart — with unmatched knowledge of and influence over most anyone. During the Néstor Kirchner years Stiuso leaned on powerful friends in the federal judiciary to prevent corruption investigations of the then-president (Duggan, 2018: 76).*** But Stiuso got on much more poorly with Cristina Kirchner, and in December 2014 was removed from his post at her request. The firing of Stiuso in turn made threw Nisman into a panic about his own job security, which resulted in his accusation against CFK the following month. Stiuso later mysteriously vanished from Argentina after first being questioned by those investigating the death of Nisman. He apparently now lives somewhere in the United States, which has refused to cooperate with any request from the Argentine authorities regarding Stiuso (BBC, 2015). SIDE was abolished after the death of Nisman and replaced with a new agency called the Secretaría de Inteligencia (SI)****, which most Argentines still refer to by the former name.

Curiously, in spite of their close relationship Stiuso was not involved in and in fact opposed Nisman’s accusation of CFK, refusing to pick up the latter’s calls while it was being prepared (Duggan, 2018: 28). In spite of this, it was subsequently alleged by CFK’s allies in Congress that Stiuso was the architect of a calculated political libel. What seems much more likely is that Stiuso was aware that the accusation was motivated by Nisman’s personal woes and was certain not to go anywhere. However, Nisman was also in direct contact with the United States by way of its embassy in Argentina — which was the only recipient of a full version of the CFK accusation (Duggan, 2018: 21).

If the story of Nisman, Stiuso, and their foreign ties strikes the reader as murky and complicated, pre-Nisman American and Israeli involvement in the AMIA investigation was extremely overt. The first true forensic examination of the site was done by an Israeli team of experts flown in three days after the bombing. It can be argued that this was much less suspect than it sounds — for one thing, Israel never misses a chance to become involved in relief efforts for Jewish communities that experience a disaster anywhere in the world. More prosaically, it is simply true that the Argentine police did a horrendous job cordoning off the site and lacked forensic experience in attacks of this type. Family members looking for their loved ones under the rubble have described oafish destruction of crucial evidence and even looting of corpses as results of the chaotic official response (Levinas, 2014: 28). However, given the geopolitical implications of the later AMIA narrative as well as the crucial role of allegedly unimpeachable forensic evidence in creating that narrative, the Israeli control of that side of the investigation is not simply to be written off. But those details are ones that it is once again not time to explore yet.

The details of involvement by the American FBI in are far easier to research, since their role was to very publicly push the Iran story. We can only make educated guesses at how exactly the Israelis might have influenced the AMIA investigation towards their desired outcome, but in the case of the United States this is not only well-documented but quite bizarre. It is near-comical that Clinton’s ambassador to Argentina, James Cheek, actually admitted that “to our knowledge, there was no evidence the Iranians were involved.” The role of the FBI was to make it appear that such evidence existed — which, even officially it, it did not until 2003. That year, James Bernazzani, head of the FBI Hezbollah desk, announced that a new informant formerly close to Hezbollah leadership had helped to finally identify the bomber. Ibrahim Hussein Berro was fingered as the driver of the (alleged) suicide truck bomb, although one major issue with this suspect is that he apparently died in Lebanon two months after the bombing (Levinas, 2014: 72). The FBI evidence obtained from Iranian and Hezbollah defectors should already be treated critically given that defectors are notoriously poor, agenda-driven sources. One only needs to remember Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile who provided much of the false intelligence on Saddam and WMDs that was used to justify the 2003 invasion.

There are other, odder, more peripheral indications that FBI assistance to Argentine authorities in the AMIA investigation was not all that it seemed. One of the most prominent works about the AMIA bombing is a 1994 book titled Cortinas de humo***** by Jorge Lanata and Joe Goldman. The latter is an American reporter who served as Argentina correspondent for ABC news — and by his own admission, as an informant for the FBI about the family members of AMIA victims (Levinas, 2014: 21). Cortinas is interesting, since the book casts doubt on the official AMIA narrative while still ultimately pointing to culprits in the Middle East — but who Argentine authorities were supposedly in cahoots with.

We still haven’t really answered the question posed at the beginning of this entry, though. I think that as far as evidence goes, the case for state involvement or at least for some type of cover-up in the AMIA bombing is much stronger than for, say, the September 11 attacks. But proponents of 9/11 Truth have going for them that their narrative is internally concise and easy to understand. The United States allowed terrorist attacks to happen on its soil in order to gain support for wars in the Middle East among American voters. In the case of the AMIA, if it is unclear why Iran would do it it is also unclear how much the Americans would gain from manipulating the investigation. It could not really rile up U.S. citizens against Iran, happening as it did in a country fairly remote to the American consciousness. If the Iranian government were proven to have sponsored the attack it would vindicate the decades-old American narrative that Iran is a terrorist state. This would, of course, justify efforts to isolate and sanction Iran, to exclude it from the international community, and even to act militarily against the Islamic Republic.

Some commentators speculate that the specific timing of Nisman’s accusation against CFK was linked to the Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action (JCPOA) negotiations between Iran and the Obama administration. The resulting deal was supposed to lift sanctions on Iran in exchange for that country restricting its nuclear program. In this version, Nisman’s accusation would have forced the Argentine government to abandon the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran. Instead, CFK would have no choice but to request that the United Nations Security Council force Iran to extradite the aforementioned officials subject to Interpol red alerts. Although such a demand would never have actually succeeded, it might have created a scandal big enough to torpedo the Obama nuclear negotiations. Proponents of the JCPOA hypothesis have a decent case given that Nisman explicitly laid out the plan to go to the Security Council in interviews (Duggan, 2018: 65-68). And of course, the same strongly pro-Israel diaspora Jewish organizations that lobbied strongly against JCPOA have also been at the forefront of accusing Iran in the AMIA case (Levinas, 2014: 40).

Multiple, overlapping motives can exist at the same time. If the AMIA case had suddenly been dug out of obscurity in 2015, we might be able to be satisfied with that its political importance is to sabotage U.S. negotiations with Iran. But of course, this isn’t actually true — as we have seen, the American and Israeli governments were deeply invested in the AMIA investigation for decades before the JCPOA controversy. And, in trying to account for the bigger-picture of the AMIA’s political salience, we still haven’t answered the question we started with: why have Argentina be the crux of the imperialist case against Iran? I don’t think this question can be answered just by looking at Argentina as a passive intermediary for attempts to influence Middle East geopolitics.

Rather, the AMIA is part of a bigger story of not so much American narratives around Iran as of American narratives of Iran-in-Latin-America. The header image of this post is of a talk Nisman gave at the hawkish D.C. think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) about the latter theme. Though bizarre, the idea that a vast network of Hezbollah- and Iran- linked cells or front organizations operates in Latin America has been widely believed in Washington for quite some time. Over the course of the 21st century Iran-in-Latin-America has become common sense especially under Republican administrations or in times of increased U.S. antagonism towards Venezuela. This narrative has also been at times promulgated to ordinary Americans by right-wing cable news, which uses it to fuel racialized anxieties about immigration on the U.S. southern border. Hezbollah terrorists are supposedly in America’s Monroe Doctrine backyard — and could infiltrate the homeland at any moment. I don’t think Iran-in-Latin-America is really just an irrational mass hysteria. Among the jug-hooting Fox News set maybe, as it feeds perfectly pre-existing nativist and xenophobic preoccupations. But among American decision makers, I think the hype is very calculated to serve U.S. geopolitical goals less in the Middle East than in Latin America itself. To further understand the interests at play, we’re going to have to travel in the next entry to one of the most remote corners of Latin America. The place out of which the AMIA attackers supposedly operated is allegedly home to dangerous rogues of all stripes — terrorists, narcotraffickers, gun-runners, etc.. But it’s also a part of Latin America that, though obscure, has been in the sights of the Empire for a very long time:

To be continued…

*Translated from the original Spanish by author. Modified from verbatim translation for clarity.

**Lit: Secretariat of State Intelligence

***This is not remotely as dramatic as it sounds, since in Latin America not only real but imagined corruption is often selectively brought up as a political weapon against the accused (Brazil’s infamous Lava Jato is a case in point). Vitriolic media reporting can easily establish even completely unfounded accusations as proven “fact” in a large number of citizens. In Argentina specifically, the importance of regional machine politics in all major parties makes it possible to connect any president to activities construed as corrupt.

****Lit: Secretariat of Intelligence

*****Smokescreens

References:

“‘Vas a Aparecer Como El Fiscal’, Las Amenazas de Leandro Santos a Una Modelo Testigo En El Caso Nisman.” Accessed July 23, 2023. https://www.clarin.com/policiales/-vas-aparecer-fiscal-amenazas-leandro-santos-modelo-testigo-caso-nisman_0_KQZLOvG-9.html.

Adamovsky, Ezequiel. “Alberto Nisman’s Death and AMIA: Who Cares About the Truth?,” February 4, 2015. https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/alberto-nismans-death-and-amia-who-cares-about-the-truth/.

BBC News Mundo. “Antonio ‘Jaime’ Stiuso, el espía que tensa las relaciones entre Argentina y EE.UU.,” October 1, 2015. https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias/2015/10/151001_argentina_estados_unidos_stiuso_ao.

Duggan, Pablo. ¿Quién mató a Nisman?. Planeta, 2018.

Levinas, Gabriel. "La ley bajo los escombros." Buenos Aires: Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial Argentina (2014).

Porter, Gareth. "Argentina’s Iranian nuke connection." Asia Times 15 (2006).