A special investigation conducted by DEBKAfile’s intelligence, Iranian and counter-terror sources has discovered that the Argentine-Jewish prosecutor Natalio Alberto Nisman, 51, was murdered on Jan. 18 by an Iranian agent, who had won his trust by posing as a defector under the assumed name of Abbas Haqiqat-Ju. His killer struck hours before Nisman showed the Argentine parliament evidence that President Cristina Kirchner and Foreign Minister Hector Timerman had covered up Iran’s complicity in the country’s worst ever terrorist attack, the 1994 bombing of the Buenos Aires Jewish community center in which 85 people died, two years after 29 people were killed by a blast at the Israeli embassy.
Nisman’s evidence
had it been presented would have ultimately proved Iran's culpability in the
two terrorist attacks.
According to our investigation, two Iranian Intelligence Ministers, the
incumbent Mahmoud Alavi and his predecessor Hojjat-ol-Eslam Heydar Moslehi, had
for nine years wracked their brains for a way to silence the Jewish prosecutor,
ever since he began probing the two attacks. They worked hand in glove with
senior Argentinean government and intelligence agencies.
(In Iran, intelligence ministers take their orders directly from supreme leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei although they attend cabinet meetings.)
Tehran's
clandestine hand deep in the Americas
Nisman had made the powers-that-be in Tehran jittery, because a) he was
ambitious, honest and a courageous searcher after the truth; b) he was Jewish
and had active connections with Israel; and c) in pursuit of his inquiry, he
spread his net wide to include contacts with the Israeli Mossad and the
American CIA.
Furthermore, in
2006, after three years on the job, the prosecutor had put together an
intelligence file on the unbelievable scope of Iranian intelligence
penetration, using Lebanese Hizballah agents, deep into the government and
intelligence establishments of many Latin American countries - not only Argentina,
but also Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Surinam, Trinidad-Tobago and Guyana.
No sooner was this file put before the government in Buenos Aires when it was
locked away to prevent its publication.
Undeterred, Nisman
went to New York in 2007 and put the contents of his file orally before senior
CIA officials and UN Secretariat bureaucrats. His briefing also uncovered
scores of Iranian diplomats and agents operating in the United States under
cover out the Pakistani embassy in Washington.
It is hardly
surprising that in no time, the information leaked from the UN Secretariat to
Tehran, adding to the urgency of getting rid of this thorn in the side of the
Islamic Revolution’s clandestine operations against the West.
Bribery
wouldn’t work on Nisman
Iran’s security organs
are no strangers to political assassination at home and among its exile
communities, in such places as France, Austria and Germany.
But at first, they tried to win the Argentinean round by bribery, which had
always worked before in Buenos Aires. For $10 million, Carlos Saul Menem
(Argentine president from 1989 to 1999) and his minions agreed to close the
investigation of the two terrorist bombings in its tracks.
Tehran handled President Kirchner differently. She was promised economic and
trade benefits for Argentina, along with financial perks for government and
intelligence heads.
DEBKAfile’s Buenos
Aires sources report that, at first, Kirchner feared that Nisman’s sudden
demise would bring her under suspicion at the cost of her presidency. But
Tehran assured her through their private channels of communication that the
deed would be accomplished cleanly without leaving the slightest trace. Some of
the heads of Argentine intelligence eagerly adopted the assassination plan and
offered their assistance.
The first step was
taken in 2010 when an Iranian contacted prosecutor Nisman to request a secret
meeting. He presented himself as a former high Iranian intelligence official
who had defected, fled to Denmark and was willing to fly to Buenos Aires with a
valuable cache of confidential documents relating to the Jewish Center bombing.
Fake
defector spent 4 years to build trust
He claimed that
those documents exposed in detail the complicity in the crime of Mohsen
Rabbani, then senior intelligence official at the Iranian embassy in the
Argentine capital.
According to DEBKAfile’s
inquiry, Rabbani was the senior plotter of the operation.
The agreed rendezvous took place in Buenos Aires. The phony “defector,” who
introduced himself as “Abbas Haqiqat-Ju,” handed Nisman genuine documents
containing evidence of Iran’s involvement in the bombings. This consolidated
his role as an enemy of the regime who was ready to betray its secrets.
In a relationship
lasting four years, the phony defector convinced the prosecutor of his good
faith. The Argentinean called on the help of colleagues in friendly agencies to
check some of the confidential material he was given and found them to be the
real article. Ergo, their donor was a genuine Iranian dissident.
By December 2014, Nissen was ready to submit a finished 300-page report
documenting his findings on Kirchner’s role in covering up the investigation of
Iran’s terrorist crimes two decades after the event.
Tehran decided that the bird was ready for plucking and it was time for Haqiqat-Ju
to cash in on his long investment in trust-building.
In a secret call to Nisman, the fake defector reported that a fellow
high-ranking Iranian intelligence officer had managed to flee Tehran with a
suitcase full of very important papers that shed valuable light on the criminal
collaboration between Argentinean security agencies and Iranian operatives in
the bombing attack on the Jewish center.
Three
knocks on the door to murder
He explained that the second defector required a sterile location for their
meeting. Haqiqat-Ju warned the prosecutor that he must keep mum about the
rendezvous. Argentine intelligence was riddled with Iranian agents and the
slightest hint of the meeting would give the game away to Tehran. Above all, if
he wanted to see the new documents, he must get rid of the 10 bodyguards
assigned him and be alone when the guest arrived at his home on the 13th floor
of the Le Parc tower in the Buenos Aires district of Puerto Madero.
That guest would
signal his arrival with three knocks on the door. Nisman must not let the
Iranian wait but admit him at once.
Before setting the
scene for the assassination, Haqiqat-Ju had secretly rented an apartment next
door.
It was he who
knocked on the door three times on Jan. 18. The prosecutor opened the door to
his murderer. As his confidant, he knew exactly where the small gun Nisman had
borrowed from a friend was to be found and used it to shoot him dead.
The Iranian assassin
then escaped through the central heating system connecting the two flats and
assumed a disguise. His Argentinean confederates had earlier disarmed the
security cameras in the building and so he was able to walk out, reach the
airport and fly out on a false passport to Montevideo, thence to Dubai and
finally to Tehran.
His murderer was long gone when the prosecutor was found lifeless in a pool of
blood in his bathroom, killed by a single bullet to the head from a small
.22-caliber gun. On Feb. 18, hundreds of thousands of people marched in his
honor in Buenos Aires and called for justice.