Interpreting The AMIA IV -- Jaime
The Puppetmaster
“Stiles, para servirle.”
If, at any point between the years 1983 and 2015, you had the misfortune to be elected President of Argentina these are the first words you might hear upon stepping down from the inauguration stage. Before that, a military man might hear them before even having the chance to wash the gore from his hands after a recent session of torture. Generals who could kill with a whisper might hear those words from a youthful underling, a kid really, whose go-getter attitude belies his humble rank. As an older man— perhaps under the influence of his beloved wife, a nutritionist — he will lose a considerable amount of weight, giving him a somewhat wolfish appearance to finally match the fearsome reputation. We have been up to now walking the road towards the meat of our story. We have been slowly approaching a curtain that we will now have to pull back. And behind that curtain is an ordinary-looking man, stocky but not short, whose olive complexion betrays the Italian peasant stock common to so many Argentines. He is holding out a hand to shake, and greeting us with the words:
“Stiles, para servirle.”
“Aldo Stiles… at your service.”
Antonio Horacio Stiuso was born 21 June 1953, the only child of immigrant parents who originally hailed from Sicily. American readers, who associate spymasters with dynastic names like Dulles and Bush, may be slightly surprised to learn that Stiuso decidedly lacks any blue-blood pedigree. His is a true Horatio Alger story. Raised in the working-class Buenos Aires suburb of San Justo, Stiuso’s ascent began in a way somewhat unique to mid-20th century Buenos Aires. Private education, such as it existed, was the preserve of Argentina’s criollo old-money: aristocratic families with Spanish colonial heritage and rural landed estates. This meant effectively that urban ethnic kids went to the same schools and by extension that community and social activities had a degree of class heterogeneity. This author’s own grandparents, of wildly different class backgrounds, met in a Jewish youth group. So we will skip over Stiuso’s boyhood of street football matches and start with the serendipity which made him Aldo Stiles.
Stiuso’s childhood best friend and then-classmate in engineering school, Horacio Germán García, came from a family that had friends in high places. When it came time for García to be called up for his mandatory military service, his parents leaned on some contacts to get him a cushy placement. One which would be prestigious without requiring their boy even temporarily to leave the glitz and glamour of Buenos Aires. In intelligence. At SIDE. And since Horacio García loved his friend Antonio like a brother, the García family made all the arrangements they would have for a real second son, and Stiuso went along with him (Young, 2015: 30).
A good transition into the next part of the story would be to acknowledge my own ignorance. Given that SIDE was a civilian intelligence agency akin to the American CIA, the precise mechanics of how young military conscripts came to be posted there are quite unclear to me. However, it bears noting that, as will be seen shortly, the lines between SIDE and military intelligence were more than a little blurred prior to the mid-1980s. In any case, Stiuso entered SIDE at the tender age of eighteen as a category “A,” or administrative, employee. He would retain that designation, at least formally, for the next forty-two years. He was a pencil-pusher. But one who listened. And stayed. By this time, he had already received the name Aldo Stiles, being almost immediately made privy to secretive goings-on via his assigned role as stenographer for monthly conferences of the SIDE top leadership. He paid rapt attention. And remembered. And stayed.
One of the most interesting things about Stiuso the man is that he was not only later very powerful at SIDE, but gave the agency his entire adult life. Why? Military-intelligence careers are a classic route to upward mobility across times and places, so maybe the working-class kid just knew not to look a gift horse in the mouth. No self-respecting striver is going to decide to go back to school — or worse, risk ending up a factory worker like his dad — after being dropped into one of the most powerful institutions in the country. The Golden Age of Bond coincided with Stiuso’s adolescence, so maybe youthful trips to the cinema inspired in him — as so many other young men the world over — a romantic fascination with espionage. Or maybe, he loved wielding power from the shadows for its own inscrutable sake.
In a recent conversation with my friend Felix on Chapo, I compared Stiuso to Tywin Lannister. It wasn’t merely a forced pop-culture reference. Before my most recent reread of the fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin, Lord Tywin was oddly the character I found myself most excited to revisit. As long as we’re leaning all the way into lame nerd bullshit, the description of his service as Hand to Aerys II was the part I most enjoyed in The World of Ice and Fire. The thing about Tywin is that he is one of the least complex characters in that franchise. He is brutally violent, but not a sadist as almost all of the other villains are. He doesn’t seem to have much of an inner life at all really. What primarily defines the Tywin Lannister character is his embodiment of hypercompetent, if ruthless, power. This is also why I can’t help but find Jaime Stiuso a uniquely fascinating personality, un-Marxist as it might be.
Stiuso is not a particularly colorful character on the surface. Unlike many contemporaneous Anglo-American spymasters, there is nothing particularly lurid or bizarre to recount about him. He is not a heavy drinker, or a teetotaler. He is not a paranoiac like Angleton, and when he appears to be one it is a very obvious performance. The sinister aura around him is a result not of any sort of apparent mental or emotional lack of balance, but rather the opposite. Jaime Stiuso is a perfectly controlled, disturbingly well-adjusted man at the center of genuinely surreal events. His marriage and family life are by all accounts wholesome. Stiuso is not simple a spook, he is the Platonic ideal of one. The man and the career are one, his self-expression solely consists of manipulating, intimidating and killing with absolute efficiency. But for that, he would be a totally nondescript individual.
I think that digression was necessary to frame the elephant in the room: Stiuso’s service under, and relationship to, the infamous Proceso de Reorganización Nacional military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983. It could suffice to say that Stiuso remained a desk-bound administrator. But to leave it there would be a disservice to the reader, since crucial parts of the groundwork for his later career take-off were indeed laid during this period. While, being civilians, SIDE personnel did not take a major part in actual torture and murder, as foreign intelligence service the agency did serve as primary Argentine liaison to the broader Operation Condor network. Its focus was particularly on Uruguayan Tupamaros guerillas, and their possible cross-border support for likeminded movements in Argentina. The one exception to SIDE’s largely coordination role in Condor was a torture chamber operated at the peripheral agency office on Billinghurst Street, Buenos Aires. Stiuso never visited the Billinghurst facility, though his later right-hand man, Roberto “El Gordo Miguel” Saller, was affiliated with it. Jaime remained safely ensconced in the sterile SIDE headquarters, where he continued to play the part of quiet but diligent book-keeper and minutes-taker. Leadership at SIDE underwent frequent shake-ups during the dictatorship years. In the waning days of the Proceso a new boss, Brig. Gen. Carlos Alberto “Pelusa” Martínez, took notice of the young Stiuso, who soon became his personal assistant. Jaime organized the daily agenda of the general, kept his files, etc., assuming roles of personal confidence. In other words, after years of being an invisible presence same room as the big bosses, Jaime was suddenly catapulted into their inner circle (Young, 2015: 33-37). Maybe not in terms of formal rank (as yet). But in a place like SIDE, where discreetness is the highest virtue, is formal rank even a reliable means of identifying the true powerholders…
My somewhat delicate approach of Stiuso’s dictatorship-era service is in no way intended to downplay his moral culpability in SIDE… activities. Eichmann also only kept the books. But at the end of the day, Jaime Stiuso as the figure he eventually came to be is entirely a creature of Argentine democracy. It was deft manipulation of elected officials and judges, rather than brutish violence, that built his kingdom. To put it in more theoretical terms, Stiuso should be seen as emerging out of of the transition from authoritarian to polyarchic management of Argentine peripheral capitalism (Robinson, 1996: 6-7). As right-wing dictatorships across the Global South were replaced with capitalist democracy during the 1980s, a need arose for the more subtle management of coercive force from behind a veil of elite consensus. It was in this niche that Stiuso excelled. Indeed, he took the spirit of polyarchy rather literally by simultaneously serving all elite factions, as will be seen in the following paragraph.
The return of democratic elections to Argentina saw Raúl Alfonsín, of the anti-Peronist but ostensibly center-left (at least at the time) Radical Civic Union (UCR) party sworn in as president. While trying to explain Argentina through a series of American analogues makes me cringe, I do think the most evocative way to sum up Alfonsín is as a sort of Argentine Jimmy Carter. Neoliberalization steadily got underway during his tenure, though high inflation eventually caused UCR to lose at the ballot box to a much more radical market fundamentalism. Like Carter, Alfonsín had a pleasant, calm affect and spouted forth about the importance of kindness and national healing. His reputation as “father of Argentine democracy” is no doubt helped by the fact that everyone who could lead opposition to neoliberal economic policies had been tortured to death, thrown from helicopters, etc., where not simply vanished over the preceding seven years of military rule. In any case, Alfonsín was a rather different man in private, consumed with (not unjustified) paranoia about schemes to undermine him coming from all directions — Peronism, dissident sectors of UCR, or die-hard loyalists of the dictatorship. His anxieties were only kept in check by a businesslike figure who emerged from the shadows with the comforting words:
“Aldo Stiles, para servile.”
“Aldo Stiles, at your service.”
Jaime’s M.O. in relation to Argentine domestic politics was largely established during the Alfonsín period and changed little over the following decades. We have seen in prior installments that Stiuso was obsessed with telephone surveillance, and kept it a priority across evolving levels of technological sophistication. That interest emerged from how Stiuso ingratiated himself with Alfonsín, namely the seemingly benevolent gathering of information for the president about his political opponents (Young, 2015: 45-47). And about the president for those same political opponents. And about everyone for Jaime. I don’t think it even needs to be spelled out that the subtext here is blackmail and the collection of Russian-style kompromat against absolutely every figure of some prominence (Lewin and Lutzky, 2015: 66-67). Stiuso thus created an enormous network of contacts, sources and dependents in every Argentine political party, court and bureaucratic agency. To be sure, the priority was always the president. But Stiuso made sure that small humiliations and setbacks would befall Alfonsín just enough to keep the latter man on his toes (Young, 2015: 53-57). The president was SIDE’s boss, and thus pleasing him (or her) was important. The agency nevertheless had its own interests, which were rather more plastic.
We have extensively reviewed the beginnings of SIDE collaboration with American and Israeli intelligence as a result of the 1990s bombings (and I do hope no one is reading this before at the very least having read part III). So we will fast-forward through most of the Menem era, and come to Stiuso’s role in the middle- and later-stages of the AMIA investigation, In particular to his relationships with three individuals: Nestor Kirchner, Cristina Kirchner, and one Natalio Alberto Nisman.
Again, the previous entry already described in great detail Stiuso’s dubious effort to prove Hezbollah and/or Iran responsible for the AMIA bombing through convoluted and rather tendentious analysis of phone records. This was only the first of what I would identify as three distinct articulations of the Iran hypothesis. The second, as we have also alluded to in the previous entry, was the identification of the supposed AMIA suicide bomber as one Ibrahim Hussein Berro.
The case against Berro based itself primarily on the fact that senior Hezbollah leadership attended his funeral in Lebanon. Reasoning backwards, SIDE argued that an ordinary fighter would not have been honored in this way unless he had carried out some important mission for Hezbollah, and that the timing of the funeral (in 1994) meant that said mission could only have been the AMIA bombing. The Berro family, for their part, have consistently maintained that Ibrahim was killed in a clash with Israeli border troops two months prior to the attack in Buenos Aires. Stiuso and Nisman would in 2005 travel to Detroit together, visiting Berro’s brothers who had emigrated there and taking DNA samples from them. Samples which were never tested, and eventually which were lost. To this day, Argentine authorities maintain that a DNA profile of the bomber has been isolated and is kept on file. Boasting of sophisticated and ironclad evidence-gathering abilities, though, is decidedly less impressive when you are unable to do the easy part of identifying someone with them.
I digress into the Berro story in order not only to complete our interrogation of supposed Iranian guilt, but also to address the primary criticism which Felix and I got for our show on AMIA. I was quite surprised when certain quarters online claimed we had ignored Nisman’s own suspicious connections to foreign intelligence agencies like CIA and Mossad. The entire thesis of my dissection of the Nisman investigation is that said investigation was constructed by the United States and Israel as a weapon of imperial geostrategy. That doesn’t mean Nisman was a Mossad or CIA asset in the vulgar sense, but nor does it mean that he was not one de facto. Nisman was Stiuso’s asset, and Stiuso was in partnership with American empire to promote its interests in a way the public Argentine state structurally could not, by virtue of being democratically accountable to a populace on whom servility to Washington could in the last instance be imposed only through force. That is why there was an Argentine dictatorship in the first place. So yes, Nisman’s case against Iran and later against the Argentine left was dictated by CIA and Mossad. Duh. Of course. Since all the (misinformation) used in it came down from Stiuso, who himself was a partner of those states in a mutually beneficial effort to undermine the national interests of Argentina.
Generally, one of my big grudges against deep politics writing is its smugness about noticing extremely banal historical details. Yes, Nisman had a secret foreign bank account which received large deposits from persons unknown. Yes, it is reasonable to guess that said money had origins in the world of espionage. So of course Nisman was on a payroll. But the mere fact that he was is not much of a story. As we have seen, Nisman was to be frank, rather airheaded. He was an upper middle-class Jewish kid who became a lawyer so he could make a lot of money and fuck hot chicks. If you grew up in any diaspora Jewish community, you know this archetype. In the United States their great passion is the NBA, in Argentina Boca.* Nisman was being paid for his role in the show, not for running it. It is strange that those who fetishize the CIA as responsible for the entire functioning of global capitalism also think it does things as amateurish as handing over suitcases of cash to an Argentine prosecutor. Nisman was suspicious, yes. But suspicion does not equate to identifying true power, which was in actual fact wielded by one Antonio Horacio Stiuso. It is to him that we now return.
That perhaps unnecessarily long detour should become concrete enough by virtue of the fact that Ibrahim Hussein Berro (or someone with a similar name like Brru or Borro) was identified as the bomber by a CIA informant named Bassan Chamás, A Lebanese expat living in Montevideo, Uruguay, Chamás survived (as defectors tend to do) by selling his alleged inside knowledge of Hezbollah to interested parties. The dubious intelligence sources on which the Bush Administration built its case for Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction are a famous illustration of how defectors are incentivized to exaggerate or lie. You gotta keep the audience interested, but I digress (for a full account of the Iraq example see Kulwin and James, 2020). Point being, the Americans made Chamás accessible to SIDE, agents of which interviewed him in Uruguay and in so doing first extracted the name Berro (Young, 2015: 140-143). And so it came to be that Jaime manufactured Ibrahim Hussein Berro as suspect, and passed the finished product down to Alberto Nisman who then held it up as a break in the public-facing AMIA investigation.
In general, one does not have to travel far into each one of Nisman’s ever-changing and inconsistent articulations of the case against Iran to discover the fingerprints of Stiuso on all of them. A few more details are of relevance:
Returning to that first incarnation of the AMIA case I discussed (the one dependent on phone link analysis), it fell apart early and spectacularly for reasons besides the dubious methodology. Nisman never put a name to the actual bomber here, but he did attempt to prosecute a rather slimy used-car dealer named Carlos Telleldín, who had been arrested by SIDE itself in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Telleldín, an Argentine of Lebanese heritage, was accused alongside a number of corrupt low-ranking Buenos Aires cops to whom he was connected through the resale of stolen vehicles as well as possibly through the sex trade. It was alleged that Telleldín had sold a white Renault Traffic van to the cultural attaché to the Iranian embassy in Buenos Aires, Mohsen Rabbani, after intentionally modifying it to carry thousands of pounds of explosives (Lewin and Lutzky, 2015: 48). The interrogation under from which SIDE had supposedly obtained this information was in reality one where agents offered Telleldín $400,000 USD to testify to the accuracy of its case (Young, 2015: 103-105). Such a scandalous payoff ultimately helped no one, as the case utterly collapsed once it was revealed while Telleldín nevertheless experienced an torturous legal odyssey which lasted decades until it eventually ended in his complete and total exoneration.
So we have thoroughly attended to the first and second incarnations of the case against Iran. Now on to the third, which set in motion in the series of events leading up to Nisman himself dying. The primary evidence on which his explosive allegations of a cover-up directed by CFK in league with Iran rested was witness statements from nine Iranian exiles, who testified to a secret meeting at which then-president of Iran Ali Akbar Rafsanjani explicitly approved an attack on Argentina. All of these exile witnesses were activists of the infamous political cult Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), a military organization in its own right whose backing by the United States and Israel is something of an open secret (Porter, 2013). Their testimonies had also largely emerged from extensive interviews conducted in Europe by Jaime Stiuso. One key Iranian remained entirely anonymous as “Witness C,” his identity kept secret even from Nisman and from the presiding judge and known only to Jaime (Young, 2015: 184-185).
So Nisman followed Jaime Stiuso like a puppy, pulled ever deeper into a web of international intrigue by his puppeteer. We have already seen how being abandoned by Jaime drove Nisman to desperation as a life built around AMIA seemed at imminent risk of crumbling. AMIA was, to be sure very important for Stiuso as well, being as it was his ticket to run with the big dogs of global espionage. But Jaime was a busy man, and it is worth noting some of what else he was up to until he fell together with Nisman in 2014-15.
In 2001, the cost of Carlos Menem’s project to subsidize hyper-consumerism for wealthy urbanites through a peso-dollar peg finally came due. A social and economic crisis, comparable in severity to the Great Depression, struck Argentina and caused massive lower middle- and working-class unrest in the form of protests and factory occupations. It was a true revolutionary situation which, in best Argentine tradition, called for truly savage counter-revolutionary violence. No one in the repressive bodies of the Argentine capitalist state was more prepared to benefit from this need than Jaime Stiuso. In the months leading up to the uprising, local Argentine police departments were repeatedly told by SIDE intelligence reports that working-class activists were in fact violent militants associated with the Colombian FARC. Planting this narrative gave fruit when dozens of unarmed protesters across Argentina were gunned down by police in December 2001. One particularly notorious incident, the killing of two young demonstrators named Maximiliano Kosteki and Darío Santillán, has long been subject to speculations of SIDE culpability. In any case, while it appears that Buenos Aires police fired the fatal shots, SIDE agents were embedded among them at that specific demonstration and the agency later attempted to falsely pin the Kosteki and Santillán deaths on other protestors (Young, 2015: 144-145).
Ultimately, the 2001 crisis didn’t need to be repressed by a secret police. A new left-wing president, Nestor Kirchner, was elected in its wake with promises of national healing and an end to neoliberalism. That was fine. Jaime was prepared for that too.
The most interesting aspect of the warm relationship between the Kirchners and Stiuso is less what it consisted of than what went wrong during the presidency of Cristina Kirchner. Nestor Kirchner largely received the same types of assistance from Stiuso as his predecessors had: information about enemies (primarily those within the Justicialist party itself), protection from lawfare, and assistance with soothing electorally relevant public concerns around crime and internal security. This last aspect included some of the most brazen SIDE operations under democracy, ones whose reckless overconfidence would indirectly cause the death of Aldo Stiles.
Nestor Kirchner entered office promising a total overhaul of Argentine capitalism, and while he delivered to a certain extent (playing hardball with the IMF, instituting extensive public employment, etc.), it is a promised change that did not occur which is of interest to us here. A mouthpiece for the Kirchner transition team promised early on to “end the SIDE which persecutes Argentines, which taps phones” and replace it with a “SIDE that provides the state with the information it needs to plan national development” (that is, a completely different agency) (Young, 2015: 159). Jaime took a variety of steps to prevent this from occurring, which were so successful that he grew overconfident and was publicly humiliated.
First, in order to make itself seem necessary, SIDE pulled off a series of what can legitimately be called false-flag operations in order to keep security fears even after the peak of civil unrest in December 2001. Large protests continued for some time before eventually tapering off, though in a generally peaceful form (whether the Kirchners bear responsibility for the demobilization of the Argentine working-class is beyond the scope of this article). Shortly after the inauguration of Nestor Kirchner, a trash can exploded in the midst of one such demonstration. While no one died, many were injured in the subsequent stampede and, more importantly, memories were conjured not just of 2001 but of the guerilla-ridden 1970s. It emerged subsequently that SIDE had taken the unusual step of installing cameras prior to the fateful protest overlooking the square where it took place, but that several minutes from immediately before the explosion had been mysteriously erased (Young, 2015: 159-161).
Jaime’s gimmick of saving the day from crises transparently of his own making worked, but not all were as trusting (or willing to overlook) as the Kirchners themselves. He made particularly bitter enemy of then-Minister of Justice Gustavo Béliz, who perceived Stiuso as on a mission to humiliate him personally. Following a particularly embarrassing incident, in which Béliz — acting on the basis of deliberately faulty intelligence supplied by SIDE — failed to prevent a riot from taking place outside the Argentine Congress, he was fired (Young, 2015: 169-171). Béliz responded to his firing with a televised jeremiad in which he angry proclaimed:
“Who runs SIDE? It is run, all things considered, by a man whose name should be the most publicized in Argentina, of whom the entire world is afraid. If you mention him in a meeting, everyone says ‘no, be careful, don’t get involved with that guy. Don’t get involved because he’s a dangerous guys. He can send [people] to kill you, he can put you in very sticky situations…’ He can ‘set up operations,’ as they say habitually.
It’s this man. Jaime Stiuso. One of the bad actors who has stonewalled the entire AMIA case… One of those most responsible for the AMIA investigation being frustrated.”
And just like that, the mystique shattered.
Except not really. Public humiliation galled Jaime, but had minimal effect on his career, at least in the immediate-term. The extraordinary indulgence shown by Nestor Kirchner towards his spies meant that SIDE, though still saddled with accusations of being an unaccountable political police, had already begun to appear in increasingly visible roles even before Béliz made his grand reveal. Chief among these was investigating serious organized crime — primarily drug trafficking and kidnapping-for-ransom — in Buenos Aires province, in which much of the public (and Nestor Kirchner himself) believed local police were institutionally complicit. The latter crime had become particularly widespread in the post-crisis years. High-profile cases were often accompanied by huge demonstrations from an Argentine populace fresh off a recent experience with making itself heard in the street. Stiuso still endeavored to keep a low profile, with the new anti-kidnapping unit at SIDE ostensibly headed by his old lieutenant El Gordo Miguel. But at the end of the day, Jaime was SIDE, and the worried family members of kidnapping victims who were sometimes received at headquarters a firm handshake and the words “Stiles, para servile…” would come away feeling assured that the state was doing everything to save their loved ones and mete out justice (Young, 2015: 161-163). Stiuso, to the extent he was now in the public consciousness, had a menacing reputation to be sure. But the anti-kidnapping operations may have helped turn this into a family-Rottweiler-who-mauls-a-home-invader kind of menacing. No one wants the bad guys who have taken their child to be dealt with by someone cuddly and forgiving. The victim rights advocate Juan Carlos Blumberg — whose 24 year-old son Axel was kidnapped and almost immediately murdered by an extortion ring in a widely-reported 2004 case — was during the Nisman firestorm virtually the only public persona to express affection for Stiuso:
“Stiuso is a very good professional, [but also] quite empathetic. It is a travesty what the government is doing to him.”
But the good times under Nestor Kirchner (for both Stiuso and Argentina) could not last forever, and with their end Jaime finally met his match: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. And so we return to where we started, with AMIA.
Stiuso was blindsided by the announcement of the Memorandum of Understanding which Cristina Kirchner negotiated with Iran (discussed extensively in part II of this series). That such a shift in the AMIA investigation — his AMIA investigation — could take place without Stiuso finding out about was disquieting, it signaled that he not only could but actively was being frozen out of power (Young, 2015: 210). Cristina had never entirely shared her husband’s affection for Jaime, though while Nestor still lived she had vouched for SIDE professionalism in regard to all things AMIA (see Lewin and Lutzky, 2015: 66). Women tend to have a more finely-tuned sense of danger than men, though, and CFK’s decision to distance herself from Stiuso was certainly vindicated by everything which occurred in the wake of the Memorandum.
Where Nestor had been magnanimous and trusting, his widow was shrewd, assertive and suspicious by nature — like Jaime. Two such personalities, both aspiring to run the Argentine state (if through different mechanisms), could not coexist for long (Young, 2015: 197-198). What followed the Memorandum was thus an increasingly convoluted game of chicken, in which each of the two players saw the hand of the other in any difficulty, crisis or setback they encountered (Young, 2015: 211-215**). To be sure, Stiuso without a doubt would not have been any better-disposed towards the Memorandum of Understanding had he been kept in the loop about its negotiation. We have already reviewed how maintaining the AMIA case an unsolved phantom was necessary for the twin imperial objectives of:
Portraying Iran as a terrorist state.
And, securitizing the Southern Cone in both a discursive and material (basing rights) sense.
We said in the last entry that the second is probably much more germane in explaining why the collective West is so invested in promoting AMIA-Iran. While I still view that as the case, we should never entirely lose sight of the first point. It is important now because the Memorandum of Understanding came at a particularly critical time for Israel and the Republican right in the United States. In 2013-15 Obama Administration (with assistance from Russia, China, the UK, and France) was deep into negotiations for Iran to pause its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. Israeli decision-makers reacted hysterically to the prospect, and found an eager ally in right-wing Republicans seeking to smear Obama as soft on terrorism. So it would not do for Iran to be exonerated, or seen to be cooperating civilly in the investigation of, the most heinous international crime of which it stood accused — even if said crime took place in far-away Argentina (Duggan, 2019: 57-58). Luckily, Israel and American neoconservatives had a friend in Argentina equally committed to Iranian guilt. Jaime Stiuso’s efforts to derail the Memorandum of Understanding were primarily channeled through his old proxy, Alberto Nisman. A probable misstep was accompanying Nisman to meetings with Kirchner advisors where the latter man sought to make his case against the Memorandum (Young, 2015: 216). While with any past Argentine president, the very presence of Stiuso would have served to lend gravitas to Nisman’s pleas, it only antagonized CFK given her now-intense suspicion of the spymaster. Nisman, who up until the Memorandum had been firmly aligned with CFK, was suddenly caught in the middle of a cold war between the President and his boss. He was, as he have already discussed, the figure with by far the most to lose. Jaime was an old man, and that year had begun experiencing severe back pain. He may have been somewhat reconciled to retirement, particularly given the unattractive prospect of continuing to work with a government which loathed him and was clearly seeking to clip his wings (Young, 2015: 217-218). As we shall see below, though Jaime Stiuso ultimately left SIDE involuntarily, he does seem to be enjoying the retired life.
What happened next is old hat. Nisman, desperate to save himself, constructed an indictment which Jaime (correctly) saw as baseless and an exercise in futility. As Stiuso became increasingly distant and disinterested, the prosecutor found a new patron in the hard-right congresswoman Patricia Bullrich (Duggan, 2019: 35). First as tragedy, then as farce (as anyone who has seen Pato Bullrich speak for even a minute will readily agree). Pato invited Nisman to present the indictment to a closed parliamentary committee which she would chair, but he lost heart and then perished (most likely) by suicide before said testimony could take place. And Nisman’s body was hardly cold before anyone thought to look for Jaime, the man who started it all. But he was already gone.
The irony of Nisman’s death is that it accomplished everything the man failed to in life. It resulted in a political firestorm and widespread vilification of CFK which helped the right-wing Mauricio Macri to win the following elections, and promptly cancel the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran. Jaime, meanwhile, spent the intervening year on a mysterious American sojourn. He was apparently protected by the Obama administration, whose refusal to cooperate with Argentine authorities seeking to question him chilled bilateral relations. However, once Macri — with his platform of total servility to the United States — came to power, all was forgiven.
Stiuso was also forgiven. He returned to Argentina following the elections, suddenly shorn of all his previous reticence to testify and answer questions. In fact, testifying in the Nisman case seems to be his main retirement pastime -- Stiuso has now done so four times, and is now requesting to give further testimony. You can probably guess what he says. That Cristina Kirchner had Nisman killed as part of her conspiracy to exculpate Iran, that dark forces of kirchernismo within the Argentine state want to hide the truth about AMIA. Stiuso has additionally claimed that an espionage faction loyal to CFK had been surveilling him and Nisman, and that his flight was motivated by fear that he and his beloved daughters would meet the same fate as the martyred prosecutor. These latter two claims are somewhat discordant from the mouth of a man who was once all-powerful Head of Counterintelligence, although several people have been indicted in connection with them. But one of many legacies of Jaime Stiuso is that Argentine courts are often not what they seem. Jaime is gone, and El Gordo Miguel too, and SIDE has been rechristened AFI (Federal Intelligence Agency). But who’s to say that new Carlos Telleldíns are not constantly being made?
Jaime says all these things with a twinkle in his eye and a Cheshire Cat grin that makes it clear that he always, always still has secrets that will never be known to a given interlocutor. To be sure, his retirement is a rich and active one of which talking to Argentine justice is only a part. Stiuso seems to have picked up at least one American habit during his time in the United States. He now runs a security firm, which is purportedly far more lucrative than his old job at SIDE, and which idiosyncratically also provides nutrition consulting courtesy of Sra. Stiuso. And although Jaime can’t be said to court attention, he does appear in the news a few times yearly. Always in full trickster-god persona. Most recently, when it was revealed that Brazilian neo-Nazi Fernando Sebag Montiel had repeatedly searched Stiuso on the Internet before attempting to assassinate CFK, Jaime magnanimously offered to investigate the crime against his old enemy. That offer was rejected.
Stiuso has consented to interviews on Argentine TV, and more recently for a Netflix documentary series about the Nisman case. With the latter, he seemingly made a good enough impression on Netflix executives that they offered him an advisory position on Fauda — the colonial-snuff-film-cum-soap-opera about Israeli counterinsurgency in the West Bank. If my mother and her friends are indicative, that program has been a hit among middle-aged Argentine Jews. It would be fitting for Jaime to go into making fictional entertainment for the group of people whose reality he spent three decades shaping, forming, and manipulating. Sadly, in research for this article I could not find out whether Stiuso actually accepted the offer from Netflix.
But hey, if any reader has the stomach to actually watch Fauda (I don’t), keep an eye out during the credits for the name Aldo Stiles.
*This part of the stereotype is groundless, but as a River fan it would make me sad to identify my club with a type of person I dislike.
**I wasn’t sure how to fit the specifics into this AMIA-centric narrative, but I would highly encourage Spanish-speaking subscribers to read the pages cited from Young, particularly on the fascinating “El Lauchón” incident in which CFK-allied police seemingly carried out a hit on a narcotrafficker linked to Stiuso.
References:
Duggan, Pablo. ¿Quién mató a Nisman?. Planeta, 2018.
Kulwin, Noah and Brendan James. “S1E2: Curveball.” Produced by Kulwin, Noah and Brendan James. Blowback. June, 2020. Podcast.
Lewin, Miriam and Horacio Lutzky. Iosi. El espía arrepentido. Sudamericana, 2015.
Porter, Gareth. «Indictment of Iran for ’94 Terror Bombing Relied on MEK». Inter Press Service. 7 de agosto de 2023. https://www.ipsnews.net/2013/08/indictment-of-iran-for-94-terror-bombing-relied-on-mek/.
Robinson, William I. Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Young, Gerardo “Tato.” Código Stiuso. Grupo Planeta Spain, 2015.