Hezbollah (21 page)

The day after the September 11 attacks, a SWAT team descended on the Galeria Page shopping center in Ciudad del Este and raided Assad Barakat’s Casa Apollo electronics shop. Barakat either was away on business or, according to one account, had fled home to Foz do Iguaçu on the Brazilian side of the border. Either way, while he evaded capture, two of his employees were arrested and his shop shuttered.
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Among the items found during this initial search was a letter from Hezbollah acknowledging receipt of $3,535,149 from Barakat in 2000.
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The following month, thirty masked Paraguayan antiterrorism police raided Casa Apollo once more, netting still more incriminating documents, videos, and computer files and arresting Barakat’s executive assistant, Sobhi Fayyad.
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Investigators found hundreds of receipts, often from Hezbollah’s Martyrs Foundation. “The money goes to charities,” explained the head of Paraguay’s antiterrorism unit, “and the Martyr Foundation is managed by Nasrallah so it is obviously suspicious.” Speaking in 2003, he noted, “We believe he [Barakat] sent some $50 million to Hezbollah since 1995.”
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But one letter in particular, signed by “brother Hassan Nasrallah,” was especially damning. In the letter, the Hezbollah leader expresses his gratitude for Barakat’s collaboration with the “protection program for brothers and martyrs.”
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The sixty or so seized videos included footage of militants and speeches inciting people “to armed struggle and revolution, and [arguing] that it was better to die and become a martyr than be subjected to the whims of Israel and the U.S.”
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On one computer police found a video of Hezbollah military operations, including operatives detonating explosives and the ensuing deaths. Another file detailed “Hezbollah military orders for each town and village in southern Lebanon.”
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When ultimately detained and questioned, Barakat played down the significance of the seized material, claiming he merely supported Lebanese charities and collected videos that are commonly available on Hezbollah’s al-Manar television station. Authorities found his protestations unconvincing, however, especially given the attention then being paid to his activities elsewhere.

Branching out from the tri-border area, Barakat’s import-export business took him to other regional free trade zones like Iquique, Chile, where authorities observed Barakat, Mohammad Abdallah, and other members of their clans open import-export companies, conduct lengthy meetings, and engage in a range of suspicious activities. Paralleling its Paraguayan counterpart’s investigation into Barakat’s illicit financial activities and links to Hezbollah, the Chilean Ministry of the Interior initiated an investigation into what it suspected was “illicit association for the purpose of committing terrorist acts.” Barakat’s financial activities in Chile, it seemed to investigators, were an extension of his Paraguay-based schemes, which were aimed at supporting “relatives fallen in terrorist acts and the economic strengthening of Hezbollah.”
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According to Chilean intelligence, in March 2001 Barakat set up two fictitious businesses in Iquique, Saleh Trading Limitada and Importadora/Exportadora Barakat Limitada, for the purpose of laundering money earned through his criminal enterprises in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay.
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Barakat’s business ties extended to Miami and New York as well, and were allegedly established as cutouts to receive international shipments of goods that could then be re-exported to the tri-border area.
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Traveling on a multiple-entry US visa, Barakat acknowledged making a half dozen trips to the United States. Although theoretically he could have entered the United States on false documents of the kind his network was known to produce, the last entry stamp into the United States on Barakat’s Paraguayan passport was in April 2001, when he visited Miami. The visa was reportedly revoked later that year when “his name appeared on the US Department of State’s list of suspected terrorists.”
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As a result of evidence collected during the 2001 raids of Barakat’s store, Brazilian police eventually arrested Barakat in June 2002 on tax evasion charges, just as Barakat was making plans to flee to Angola. The arrest prompted a leader of the Husseinia Iman al-Khomeini mosque in Foz, where Barakat served as deputy financial director, to ban all non-Hezbollah members from attending services.
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As for Barakat’s Africa plans, they were far from original. According to Brazilian police, Hezbollah accomplices were known to move about Africa on forged Paraguayan travel and identity documents of the kind Barakat’s network produced.
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As Barakat sat in a Brasília prison, investigators uncovered evidence that his network had partnered with Hong Kong Mafia barons to receive and distribute a broad array of pirated goods, including knockoff Barbie dolls and other toys. Raids of incoming shipping containers netted goods valued at half a million dollars, leading prosecutors to add trademark counterfeiting to Barakat’s charge sheet.
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Barakat’s legal troubles took another turn for the worse in May 2003, when Argentine prosecutors issued their own warrants for Barakat’s arrest, this time for his roles in the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the 1994 AMIA bombing.
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Finally, in November 2003, Barakat was extradited to Paraguay. He was ultimately convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to a six-and-a-half-year prison term. In 2007, he was also stripped of his naturalized citizenship based on evidence that he operated as a “financial agent” of Hezbollah.
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The Barakat network continued to function, however, leading the US Treasury Department to add Assad Barakat and two of his companies—the Casa Apollo shop in Paraguay and Barakat Import Export Ltd. in Chile—to its list of Specially Designated Global Terrorist entities. Targeting a “key terrorist financier,” the Treasury designation aimed to disrupt the Barakat network by denying these companies access to their US-based re-exporters, pressuring local governments to take action of their own targeting this hybrid criminal-terrorist network, and signaling such behavior was now in the US government’s crosshairs.
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Shaking the tree, as law enforcement officials would describe it, often forces criminals to scramble about to protect other assets from being targeted and can provide valuable intelligence if authorities are properly prepared to watch how members of the criminal network react to any given public action.

And react they did. A host of other members of the Hezbollah network stepped in to assume responsibility for various activities, from running parlor-meeting fundraisers to extorting businessmen with Mafia-style strong-arm tactics to carrying out counterintelligence activities and overseeing counterfeit currency operations,
drug running, and more. Two of Assad Barakat’s brothers, Hamzi and Hatim, took over Assad’s Galeria Page storefront and his business activities in Chile. His cousin Muhammad took over responsibility for the Barakat network’s overall finances in the tri-border area, held fundraisers for Hezbollah, and arranged the transfer of funds to the Middle East. Barakat’s successor as leader of the tri-border Hezbollah network, Ali Muhammad Kazan, additionally helped oversee the group’s counter-intelligence activities in the region. Muhammad Chamas and Saleh Fayyad served as counterintelligence operatives providing “security information” on local residents. Chamas, who was also Mohammad Abdallah’s private secretary, maintained daily contact with Hezbollah officials in Lebanon and Iran. Meanwhile, Assad Barakat’s assistant Sobhi Fayyad served as the local Hezbollah community’s liaison to the Iranian embassy in Buenos Aires, met Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon and Iran, and was a “professional” Hezbollah operative who received military training in the group’s camps in Iran and Lebanon.
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The four-story Galeria Page shopping center in Ciudad del Este, which Abdallah and members of the Barakat network co-owned with other Hezbollah operatives, was described by Argentine police as the “regional command post for Hezbollah.”
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The shopping center, the US Treasury Department concurred, “is locally considered the central headquarters for Hizballah members in the TBA.” Mohammed Abdallah not only maintained ties to senior Hezbollah officials and met with members of Hezbollah’s security division, according to the US government, but managed day-to-day operations at Galeria Page and paid a regular quota to Hezbollah from profits earned at the shopping center.
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According to telephone call records obtained by Argentine intelligence, by fall 1993 Assad Barakat was in touch with Samuel Salman el-Reda, a “Hezbollah contact person” who had lived in Foz but also maintained a residence in Buenos Aires, and where he lived for long periods over the seven years before the AMIA attack.
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Based on phone call records and the protected testimony of a Hezbollah operative referred to in the AMIA indictment only as “Witness A,” authorities pieced together evidence pegging el-Reda as “an active member of Hezbollah” who coordinated the activities of the Hezbollah attack squad in Buenos Aires and maintained communication with Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon and the operation’s logistics command in the tri-border area.
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El-Reda, prosecutors concluded, “was the coordinator of [Hezbollah] sleeper cells” in Buenos Aires and the tri-border area.
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As the AMIA plot took shape, el-Reda and Assad Barakat kept in touch. Investigators tracked additional telephone calls between the two in January and June 1994.
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Investigators determined further that it was around 1993–94 that el-Reda settled in Foz, “from where he provided all the necessary support to perpetrate the terrorist attack against the [AMIA] building.”
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Samuel el-Reda was first radicalized within the extremist, pro-Iranian community Mohsen Rabbani built around himself and the al-Tauhid mosque. A Lebanese
citizen born in San Andres, Colombia, el-Reda reportedly left Colombia after getting involved in a “huge street fight” that led to two murders. He moved to Argentina around 1987, seven years prior to the AMIA bombing, and married Silvina Gabriela Sain, an Argentine woman from a Lebanese family, two years later. After a brief return to Colombia, el-Reda moved his family in September 1992 to the tri-border area, where they lived on the more comfortable Brazilian side of the bridge. El-Reda commuted to his job in Ciudad de Este at a business in the Galeria Page shopping center. While in the tri-border area, he developed a reputation as an “Arab from the mafia” and a Hezbollah member.
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El-Reda’s brother married Sain’s sister and they, too, were close followers of Rabbani. The sisters, described by authorities as “zealot Islamist militants,” were both active members of the al-Tauhid mosque, where they worked with Rabbani.
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During this period el-Reda apparently returned to Lebanon at least once, where he spent time as a Hezbollah fighter in the south.
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In Buenos Aires el-Reda’s friendships with the likes of Mohsen Rabbani and Mohammed Reza Javadi-Nia help explain investigators’ finding that he was involved with the “most radical core” elements within the local Muslim community in Buenos Aires.
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According to investigators, telephone calls like the one placed from el-Reda’s home in Foz to the al-Tauhid mosque on May 26, 1994, underscore el-Reda’s ties to Rabbani in the period leading up to the AMIA attack. For his part, both before and after the AMIA bombing, Rabbani was in regular contact with a wide array of Hezbollah-related personalities, including Sheikh Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah’s secretary in Beirut, according to a call on April 3, 1992. On August 2, 1994, just a couple of weeks after the bombing, Rabbani met with a Brazilian national and suspected Hezbollah operative named Ghazi Iskhandar. Iskhandar was presumably from the tri-border area, and his name was found in the appointment calendar of Bassem Harakeh, described by authorities as a “Hezbollah terrorist” who was at the time under detention in Norway.
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Hezbollah would later link the AMIA bombing to the capture of Hezbollah militant Mustafa Dirani by Israeli commandos. But in May 1993—a full year prior to Dirani’s capture by Israeli commandos—and again in November 1993, Rabbani visited car dealerships to inquire about purchasing a Renault Trafic van, according to Argentine intelligence. No purchase was made at the time, though authorities grew suspicious when they learned that Rabbani gave each car salesperson a different story explaining his interest in the purchase. Then, in a television interview following the AMIA bombing, Rabbani would deny having inquired about buying a van at all, insisting he was looking for a sedan all along despite the detailed testimonies of several salespersons at multiple dealerships.
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Further investigation would reveal a much earlier start date for Rabbani’s field-work in support of the AMIA bombing. From the time he first arrived in the country in 1983, investigators found, Rabbani recruited local Shi’a scouts to assess potential
Jewish and American targets in the city, providing the basis for surveillance and targeting reports that Rabbani drafted and passed along to senior intelligence officials back in Iran. According to prosecutors, Rabbani’s surveillance reports would later prove to be “a determining factor in making the decision to carry out the AMIA attack.”
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With Rabbani’s reports in hand, senior Iranian officials meeting in Mashhad, in northwest Iran, would select the AMIA building from a list of potential targets on August 14, 1993.
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The testimony corroborating the occurrence of this meeting by intelligence defector Abolghasem Mesbahi, prosecutors noted, was particularly useful “by virtue of his having worked for [Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, MOIS], his participation in operations similar in nature to the AMIA bombing, and his close relationship with the then–second in command of [MOIS], Said Eslami.”
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Around the time of this August meeting, intelligence reports indicated Hezbollah was “planning some sort of spectacular act against Western interests, probably Israeli but perhaps against the United States.”
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