Hezbollah (82 page)

177.
The presence of Lebanese Hezbollah supporters in Venezuela should not be confused with Hezbollah Venezuela, also known as Hezbollah America Latina, also known as “Autonomía Islámica Wayyu,” which emerged in July 2005 and gained prominence during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Initially led by Teodoro Fafael Darnott, also known as Comandante Teodoro, a Marxist activist, the group is
mostly composed of an indigenous tribe, the Wayuu Indians, who embraced Shi’a Islam in the early twenty-first century. See Ely Karmon, “Hezbollah America Latina: Strange Group or Real Threat,”
International Institute for Counter-Terrorism
(Herzliya), November 14, 2006.

178.
Roger F. Noriega and José R. Cárdenas, “The Mounting Hezbollah Threat in Latin America,” American Enterprise Institute, October 6, 2011;
United States of America v. Mohamad Youssef Hammoud and Chawki Youssef Hammoud
, trial transcript, May 23, 2002.

179.
US Congress, House,
A Line in the Sand: Confronting the Threat at the Southwest Border
, report prepared by House Committee on Homeland Security, Subcommittee on Investigations, October 13, 2006, 31.

180.
US Congress, House, Committee on International Relations, Statement of Edward Royce,
Venezuela
: Terrorism Hub of South America.

181.
Ibid.

182.
Statement of Frank C. Urbancic,
Venezuela: Terrorism Hub of South America;
Anna Mahjar-Barducci, “Venezuelan Minister Hangs out with Hezbollah,” Gatestone Institute (New York, NY), February 11, 2011.

183.
Robert M. Morgenthau, “The Link between Iran and Venezuela: A Crisis in the Making?” briefing, Brookings Institution (Washington, DC), September 8, 2009.

184.
Martin Arostegui, “Analysis: Venezuela’s Islamic Links,” United Press International, September 1, 2003.

185.
US Department of the Treasury, “Treasury Targets Hezbollah in Venezuela,” press release, June 18, 2008.

186.
Vanessa Neumann, “The New Nexus of Narcoterrorism: Hezbollah and Venezuela,” Foreign Policy Research Institute (Philadelphia, PA), December 2011.

187.
J. J. Green, “Iran’s Secret Pipeline into the U.S.,” WTOP 103.5 FM radio (Washington, DC), August 18, 2010.

188.
US Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, “Two Men Charged in Alleged Plot to Assassinate Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the United States,” press release, October 11, 2011; Jerry Markon and Karen DeYoung, “Iran behind Alleged Terrorist Plot, U.S. Says,”
Washington Post
, October 11, 2011.

ON JULY 18, 2012,
at the height of the summer tourist season, a group of Israelis landed at the Sarafovo Airport in Burgas, Bulgaria, and boarded buses for the thirty-mile drive south to a Black Sea beachfront resort. An affordable destination and a short flight away, Bulgaria had become popular with Israeli vacationers as a winter ski and summer beach destination. But on July 18—eighteen years to the day after the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) Jewish Community Center was bombed in Buenos Aires—a bomb destroyed one of the seven tour buses, killing the Bulgarian bus driver and five Israelis and wounding some thirty more.
¹

None of the travelers in the large group noticed when a Caucasian man in Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt, wearing a baseball cap and glasses and carrying a backpack, joined the crowd in the airport terminal and walked with them to the buses. Later, airport surveillance footage showed the man, apparently in his thirties, entering and exiting the terminal as he waited for the Israeli flight to arrive. At the time, he wore a long, blond wig, but a car rental clerk would recognize him from the video, recalling that he spoke English with an Arabic accent, had short hair, carried a wad of 500-euro notes, and seemed upset when he had rented a car.
²

At first, authorities assumed a suicide bomber had detonated the device. But forensic investigation quickly determined that a Caucasian man placed the bomb in the bus’s luggage compartment before it was then remotely denotated. It appears the bomber was not a knowing suicide bomber, though it remained unclear if something went wrong when he tried to plant the bomb on the bus or if he was a mule duped into carrying the backpack bomb and unaware his accomplices planned to use him as a delivery mechanism.
³
Either way, DNA tests of the bomber’s remains failed to definitively identify him, though it determined he was related to a Canadian co-conspirator.
⁴
In time, Bulgarian investigators would conclude that the Burgas bomber’s handlers traveled on Canadian and Australian passports, respectively, and returned to Lebanon after the bombing through Romania and Poland.
⁵

Only one thing was clear: The American driver’s license found on the bomber’s body was a fake, and not a very good one at that—the Michigan license listed a
Louisiana address. As they searched for the bomber’s accomplices, authorities determined that one carried another fake Michigan license, but at least this one listed a Michigan address. Suspicious about the license, one travel agency reportedly chose not to rent a car to the nervous accomplice.
⁶

Even before they uncovered much about the bomber, Israeli intelligence apparently knew something about him from other sources. According to Israeli officials, whether he was a mule or not, the bomber was selected in part because he was not Lebanese “in order to avoid any suspicions.”
⁷
From the outset, Israeli officials publicly insisted—and anonymous American and British officials confirmed—that Lebanese Hezbollah was behind the attack.
⁸
“We are confident,” Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak told CNN, “without any doubt about the responsibility of Hezbollah [for] the actual execution of the operation—preparation, planning and execution.” This judgment, he added, was based on “direct, hard evidence” that Israel had already shared with Washington and others.
⁹

At least part of this evidence was apparently based on intercepted telephone calls between Lebanon and Bulgaria. For two months before the bombing, authorities listened in as Hezbollah officials in Lebanon plotted with unknown operatives on the ground in Bulgaria. These operatives must have been Hezbollah facilitators, because the bomber and an accomplice flew into the country only a month before the attack, one via Germany and the other through Belgium.
¹⁰
In the three days leading up to the bombing, the flurry of calls intensified. To protect sources and methods, Israel refused to publicly release details of these calls. The Hezbollah officials in Lebanon “shouldn’t know that we know the numbers [they use] in Lebanon.”
¹¹
Nor, officials added, was the attack the work of rogue Hezbollah gunmen. “Nobody pushes the button in Burgas without Nasrallah’s approval,” explained an Israeli official close to the investigation.
¹²

A similar plot targeting Israeli tourists in Bulgaria was thwarted a few months earlier, in January, just weeks ahead of the anniversary of Mughniyeh’s assassination, when a suspicious package was spotted on a bus carrying Israeli tourists from Turkey to Bulgaria. Officials in Bulgaria subsequently honored Israeli requests to provide enhanced security for buses carrying Israeli tourists. Additional security was reportedly put in place at the country’s premier ski resort as well. At the time Israeli officials had deemed airport security sufficient.
¹³
In fact, Western intelligence officials had long worried about Bulgaria as a potential venue for Hezbollah or Qods Force attacks. Five years earlier, Western intelligence indicated “that Hezbollah chiefs and Iranian intelligence officials had put Bulgaria on a list of nations propitious for developing plots against Western targets.”
¹⁴

The July Burgas attack came just days after the arrest of a suspected Hezbollah operative accused of plotting an eerily similar attack on Israeli tourists in Cyprus. On July 7, Cypriot authorities raided the hotel room of Hossam Taleb Yaakoub, a twenty-four-year-old Lebanese-Swedish man traveling on his European passport. While authorities recognized that Hezbollah members raised money in Sweden to finance terrorist activities elsewhere, European officials in particular were alarmed
by the second arrest, within six months, of a dual Swedish-Lebanese citizen accused of participating in Hezbollah operations. In Cyprus, Yaakoub had in his possession photographs of Israeli targets, including information on buses carrying Israeli tourists and Israeli flights to and from the island nation.
¹⁵

In court, Yaakoub testified that he conducted surveillance of Israeli tourists arriving on the island nation on flights from Israel and took note of the buses they boarded to their hotels. Cypriot police tracked the suspect before arresting him, and found in his possession information on arriving Israeli flights and buses taking Israeli tourists to their hotels. Though he initially denied ties to Hezbollah, Yaakoub later admitted being a Hezbollah operative sent to Cyprus to conduct surveillance for Hezbollah. Just four hours after insisting to police he was just in Cyprus on business, Yaakoub sat back down and conceded to police, “I did not tell the whole truth.” He claimed he did not know what his reconnaissance was for, but knew “something weird was going on” and speculated it was “probably to bring down a plane, but I don’t know, I just make assumptions.” Later, he put it to police differently: he was not part of a terrorist plot in Cyprus at all: “it was just collecting information about the Jews, and this is what my organization is doing everywhere in the world.” Further underscoring the European bent to the case, Yaakoub admitted that before sending him to Cyprus, first to create a cover story and then to conduct surveillance, Hezbollah initially used him as a courier to deliver or retrieve packages to or from Hezbollah operatives in places like Turkey, the Netherlands, and France.
¹⁶

In Bulgaria, Hezbollah may have long relied on Lebanese drug and other criminal organizations to fund the group. A 2008 Bulgarian government commission concluded that profits from drug trafficking through the country support Hezbollah and other militant groups.
¹⁷
This was likely on the agenda when then–Mossad chief Meir Dagan visited Sofia in 2010 to meet with the Bulgarian prime minister.
¹⁸
Whatever the logistical details, most commentators (including this one) assumed the Burgas bombing was part of Hezbollah’s declared commitment to avenge the assassination of Imad Mughniyeh.
¹⁹
It was not. To be sure, Hezbollah remained committed to avenging Mughniyeh’s death, but the Burgas bombing represented something different, and more ominous: Hezbollah’s entry into the shadow war raging between Iran and the West.

Hezbollah’s anti-Western militancy began with attacks against Western targets in Lebanon, then expanded to attacks abroad intended to exact revenge for actions threatening its or Iran’s interests, or to press foreign governments to release captured operatives. At times, such as the 1992 and 1994 bombings in Argentina, Hezbollah’s own interests in carrying out attacks abroad were magnified by Iran’s interest in the same. Their coincident interest led to joint operations—such as the bombing of Khobar Towers—that leveraged each party’s strengths and maximized their combined capabilities.

Over the course of the always intimate relationship between Iran and Hezbollah, the head of the Qods Force or other senior Iranian leaders might have told Hezbollah to “jump” and the response would have been, “How high?” In part, this is a function of the close alignment between Hezbollah’s senior leadership and Iran’s clerical regime. Yet how firmly do Hezbollah leaders believe in
velayat-e faqih
, the Islamic Republic’s principle of rule of the jurisprudent? According to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, “the subject of the
velayat-e faqih
and the Imamate is at the heart of our religious doctrine, and any offense to it is an offense to our religion.”
²⁰
According to Hezbollah official Nawaf Musawi, Nasrallah reportedly has said that he would divorce his own wife if Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were to make such an order; according to the theory of
velayat-e faqih
, one would do no less.
²¹
But the close relationship also persists because of Hezbollah’s dependence on Iran for financial, material, and political support. For years Hezbollah relied almost exclusively on Iranian largesse, which hovered around $100 to $200 million a year or more.
²²
Criminal and other funding enterprises initiated by expatriate supporters were a welcome bonus but were not considered central to Hezbollah’s business model. Such generous state sponsorship, however, came with strings attached that Hezbollah, as Tehran’s primary pan-Shi’a militant proxy group, could not easily ignore.

Over the years, American and other Western intelligence assessments have consistently judged that Hezbollah could attack their respective interests if the group, or Iran, perceived a direct threat to its interests. A British report issued prior to the July 2006 war Hezbollah fought with Israel warned “of an increased threat to the UK from Iranian state-sponsored terrorism should the diplomatic situation deteriorate.”
²³
Similarly, a July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate assessed that “Lebanese Hezbollah, which has conducted anti-US attacks outside the United States in the past, may be more likely to consider attacking the Homeland over the next three years if it perceives the United States as posing a direct threat to the group or Iran.”
²⁴
US intelligence officials believe that Hezbollah and Iran, through the Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO) and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, “had a list of American facilities around the world they were prepared to strike whenever they received orders from Tehran.”
²⁵