Spies, cover-ups and the mysterious death of an Argentinian prosecutor
|
Version 0 of 1. The CCTV images are both familiar and sinister: the recordings show Buenos Aires’ Ezeiza international airport on the day that prosecutor Alberto Nisman flew home for the last time. Nisman looks like any father might after interrupting a family holiday for a work emergency. He seems tired, busy and bored as the cameras track his progress through immigration, beyond the luggage carousel, into the arrival lounge and out to the street. But he appears to be treated as more than an ordinary traveller. The security cameras dwell on Nisman more than anyone around him. He comes across as a marked man. The footage, which has aired on Argentinian TV this week, captures a moment of calm before the storm that has left Nisman dead, threatened a president and plunged Argentina into an espionage scandal. Days after his return, Nisman publicly accused President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of conspiring to cover up Iran’s alleged involvement in the deadliest terrorist attack in the country’s history: the 1994 bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (Amia), a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, that killed 85 people. Within a week, he was dead. Nisman was returning to the frontline of a battle for power inside Argentina’s intelligence and justice communities, where friction had been quietly building for more than a year as a result of President Fernández’s efforts to build closer ties with Iran. The 2013 signing of a memorandum of understanding with Tehran had outraged the chiefs of the Intelligence Secretariat (IS), Argentina’s all-powerful domestic and foreign spy service. The agency has long had close ties to the CIA and Mossad, and one of its primary roles in the modern era has been to help prosecutors, led by Nisman, to build a case against Iranian diplomats for the Amia bombing. When political leaders suddenly told them their old enemies should now be considered friends, they started to question their loyalties, according to a senior law enforcement source. Related: Alberto Nisman's death: the unaswered questions For years Antonio Stiuso, the general director of operations, had been the president’s eavesdropper-in-chief, helping Fernández use the state intelligence agency as a weapon against opposition politicians, journalists and critics, according to human rights monitors. Now, though, he and Nisman had begun plotting to indict the president. It was a move worthy of a novel by John Le Carré or Michael Crichton – the equivalent of the NSA conspiring with a district attorney to accuse Barack Obama and John Kerry of treasonous dealings with al-Qaida over 9/11, or of MI6 building a case against David Cameron and William Hague for colluding with Libya to cover up the Lockerbie bombing. The plot did not remain secret long. When Fernández found out last December, she fired Stiuso. It is thought that Nisman rushed back from his holiday to file his indictment because he was tipped off that he, too, was about to be replaced. In the days after his return, Nisman jumped on to the offensive with a series of TV interviews. “The president and her foreign minister took the criminal decision to fabricate Iran’s innocence to satisfy Argentina’s commercial, political and geopolitical interests,” Nisman told reporters in TV interviews. Nisman clearly knew that he was taking a risk, and even told one journalist: “I might get out of this dead.” The day before he was to due to present his evidence to Congress, he was found in his bathroom with a Bersa handgun by his side and a .22-calibre bullet in his brain. Investigators have yet to determine whether it was suicide or murder. Nisman was supposed to have been protected in his upscale 13th-floor apartment by a 10-man security detail. He had borrowed the gun that killed him a day earlier after receiving warnings that his daughters were in danger – and that he could not trust his bodyguards. His body was not found for more than 10 hours because guards said the door was locked from the inside, though a locksmith later declared access was relatively easy and there were two other ways inside. Few Argentinians expect the case to be satisfactorily solved – a cynicism that seems etched in the character of a nation where politics and conspiracy are taken, with or without evidence, to be as synonymous as football and match-fixing. Related: Argentinian president accused of covering up details about the country's worst terrorist attack But this scepticism has not stopped a flood of speculation on who might benefit most from Nisman’s demise. Competing theories present an array of suspects and motives: the president and her aides (who wanted to silence a critic); Stiuso (who wanted to make the president look bad); a foreign intelligence agency (scheming to turn the world against Iran); the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah (executing a man who secured Interpol warrants against leading officials from Tehran); or the prosecutor himself, who may have taken his own life after finding the pressure too much to bear (a suggestion rejected by family and friends) or being blackmailed that it was either him or his children. The head of Nisman’s security team, Rubén Benítez, was suspended on Wednesday – the third protection officer to come under investigation over the death. The mystery has brought protesters on to the streets holding “Yo Soy Nisman” (I am Nisman) banners, but it has more importantly thrown the spotlight on three key issues: Argentina’s international allegiances, the country’s weak oversight of its intelligence agency – and the prosecutor’s allegations of a government cover-up involving Iran. Nisman, a member of Argentina’s large Jewish community, was close to the United States. US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show he frequently visited the US embassy, shared advance information with diplomats and sometimes amended his strategy according to the suggestions of US officials. US diplomats considered him someone who was unlikely to go it alone. In one leaked cable, the former US ambassador E Anthony Wayne in 2008 expresses to the CIA rare dissatisfaction with Nisman, after he publicly recommended that the former president Carlos Menem be detained for trying to cover up the Amia bombing. The ambassador assumed he had been ordered to do so by President Fernández, noting: “Nisman is not the sort to have gone public with the recommendation for Menem’s and others’ arrests without some direction from higher-ups.” Critics – including, unsurprisingly, the Peronist president – claim Nisman was also a pawn of the pro-US Stiuso, who is believed to have provided the bulk of his staff and fed him wiretaps. In a long statement posted to her website last week, Fernández made the case that Nisman’s accusation was actually written by Stiuso, and that Nisman was then killed by the same people who convinced him to present the charges. “They used him alive and then they needed him dead,” Fernández wrote. “As sad and as terrible as that.” One source acquainted with both the prosecutor and the spy said: “When he started investigating the cover-up, Nisman wanted to break away from the intelligence channel but over time he came to rely on it.” The same might be said of Fernández. Argentina emerged from military dictatorship in 1983, but the country’s powerful intelligence agency has its roots in the secret police force which tracked down opponents of the military dictatorship during the Dirty War. Many of its personnel remained unchanged after Argentina became a democracy. In recent years, under the administrations of Fernández and her husband and predecessor, the late Néstor Kirchner, the SI’s power is alleged to have grown exponentially, with little oversight and enormous influence. Far from trimming their sails, the president has increased their budget and reach. In 2003 the agency’s budget was 138m pesos; by 2014 it had ballooned to 800m. This was highlighted by a report released earlier this month by the Association for Civil Rights, which said the excessive autonomy of the spy agencies showed the flaws in Argentina’s transition to democracy. “Since 1983, democratic government have been unable or unwilling to establish effective checks on the intelligence services what have become an essential part of presidential power,” it notes. Some of those who have benefited agree the clandestine operations need to be reined in. “Intelligence agents are out of control,” Marcelo Sain, a former chief of airport security police who is tipped by some to be a future intelligence agency boss, told the Guardian. The latest budget figures indicate military intelligence spending is rising twice as fast as that for the IS, prompting speculation that Fernández is turning to the army to conduct monitoring of opponents – despite constitutional constraints against this that were put in place after the fall of the military dictatorship. The lack of trust in other branches of the police was also apparent in the prosecutor’s decision to have the border police guard suspects instead of the federal police, who failed to protect Nisman. Tension between Argentina’s spies and their political masters also grew over the government’s attempts to steer away from traditional alliances with the US. Like fellow Latin American populists Hugo Chávez, Rafael Correa and Evo Morales, Fernández built up ties with Iran and Cuba, but in doing so she appears to have run into opposition from security officials who for years had worked closely with the CIA and Mossad. The behind-the-scenes tension became public knowledge on Monday when Fernández called a special session of parliament to break up the intelligence agency and create a new system with greater oversight by the legislature and attorney general. Fernández framed this as one of the outstanding tasks still undone in the country’s transition from dictatorship to democracy. Related: Argentinian government moves to dissolve domestic intelligence agency Critics accuse her of hypocrisy. “For more than 10 years, the president has used the intelligence service for domestic operations against politicians and journalists. So now the agents think they can do anything,” said Bullrich, a legislator who heads the criminal legislation committee of the House of Deputies. Then what of the indictment that Nisman rushed back to Argentina to file against the president? The nearly 300-page document was widely circulated after his death. It describes a shady parallel diplomatic track of negotiations between trusted supporters of Fernández such as Luis D’Elía, a prominent street activist, and a go-between for Iran, Jorge Khalil – an Argentinian of Lebanese descent – in the runup to the 2013 agreement to establish a joint commission to investigate the blast in return for Argentina closing down the judicial investigation and cancelling the Interpol warrants. The government, the document said, was ready to trade oil for immunity, which meant it had to shift responsibility for the Amia attack. A handful of wiretap recordings have been leaked to radio stations that suggest the Argentinians proposed blaming the assault on a fascist group as a way of lifting the Interpol “red notices” that Nisman – with US support – had secured against six senior Iranian officials, including the alleged mastermind, Mohsen Rabbani, a former cultural attache who is also accused of setting up Hezbollah cells across South America. But many question whether the Nisman indictment was the bombshell it claimed to be. The secret negotiations between Argentina and Iran had already been reported by journalist José Eliaschev in 2011. The goals of the talks were never achieved. Since the memorandum, trade between the two countries has not improved and the red notices were never lifted. The former head of Interpol has denied that Argentina even requested they be dropped. Opposition lawmakers believe Nisman would have presented more evidence if he had lived. “We know just 2% or 3% of what he had from the two or three years of wiretaps of Rabbani and Khalil. I think he would have given us more,” said Bullrich, who spoke to Nisman the day before he died about his plans to testify. Legal experts are less convinced. They say the document appears to be written to the verification standard of intelligence officials rather than lawyers and that it contains contradictions. If such criticisms are recognised by judge Ariel Lijo, who will rule on the document next month, the indictment that Nisman died for will be doomed. Additional research by Mariano Parada López |