Christopher Ketcham: An Israeli Trojan Horse: (Virtually all) US Telecommunications Monitored by the Mossad

Weekend Edition
September 27 / 28, 2008
How Israeli Backdoor Technology Penetrated the U.S. Government's Telecom System and Compromised National Security
An Israeli Trojan Horse

http://
www.counterpunch.org/ketcham09272008.html

By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

Since the late 1990s, federal agents have reported systemic communications security breaches at the Department of Justice, FBI, DEA, the State Department, and the White House. Several of the alleged breaches, these agents say, can be traced to two hi-tech communications companies, Verint Inc. (formerly Comverse Infosys), and Amdocs Ltd., that respectively provide major wiretap and phone billing/record-keeping software contracts for the U.S. government. Together, Verint and Amdocs form part of the backbone of the government’s domestic intelligence surveillance technology. Both companies are based in Israel – having arisen to prominence from that country’s cornering of the information technology market – and are heavily funded by the Israeli government, with connections to the Israeli military and Israeli intelligence (both companies have a long history of board memberships dominated by current and former Israeli military and intelligence officers). Verint is considered the world leader in “electronic interception” and hence an ideal private sector candidate for wiretap outsourcing. Amdocs is the world’s largest billing service for telecommunications, with some $2.8 billion in revenues in 2007, offices worldwide, and clients that include the top 25 phone companies in the United States that together handle 90 percent of all call traffic among U.S. residents. The companies’ operations, sources suggest, have been infiltrated by freelance spies exploiting encrypted trapdoors in Verint/Amdocs technology and gathering data on Americans for transfer to Israeli intelligence and other willing customers (particularly organized crime). “The fact of the vulnerability of our telecom backbone is indisputable,” says a high level U.S. intelligence officer who has monitored the fears among federal agents. “How it came to pass, why nothing has been done, who has done what – these are the incendiary questions.” If the allegations are true, the electronic communications gathered up by the NSA and other U.S. intelligence agencies might be falling into the hands of a foreign government. Reviewing the available evidence, Robert David Steele, a former CIA case officer and today one of the foremost international proponents for “public intelligence in the public interest,” tells me that “Israeli penetration of the entire US telecommunications system means that NSA's warrantless wiretapping actually means Israeli warrantless wiretapping.”

As early as 1999, the National Security Agency issued a warning that records of U.S. government telephone calls were ending up in foreign hands – Israel’s, in particular. In 2002, assistant U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Diegelman issued an eyes only memo on the matter to the chief information technology (IT) officers at the Department of Justice. IT officers oversee everything from the kind of cell phones agents carry to the wiretap equipment they use in the field; their defining purpose is secure communications. Diegelman’s memo was a reiteration, with overtones of reprimand, of a new IT policy instituted a year earlier, in July 2001, in an internal Justice order titled “2640.2D Information Technology Security.” Order 2640.2D stated that “Foreign Nationals shall not be authorized to access or assist in the development, operation, management or maintenance of Department IT systems.” This might not seem much to blink at in the post-9/11 intel and security overhaul. Yet 2640.2D was issued a full two months before the Sept. 11 attacks. What group or groups of foreign nationals had close access to IT systems at the Department of Justice? Israelis, according to officials in law enforcement. One former Justice Department computer crimes prosecutor tells me, speaking on background, “I’ve heard that the Israelis can listen in to our calls.”

Retired CIA counterterrorism and counterintelligence officer Philip Giraldi says this is par for the course in the history of Israeli penetrations in the U.S. He notes that Israel always features prominently in the annual FBI report called “Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage” – Israel is second only to China in stealing U.S. business secrets. The 2005 FBI report states, for example, “Israel has an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States. These collection activities are primarily directed at obtaining information on military systems and advanced computing applications that can be used in Israel’s sizable armaments industry.” A key Israeli method, warns the FBI report, is computer intrusion.

In the big picture of U.S. government spying on Americans, the story ties into 1994 legislation called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, which effected a sea-change in methods of electronic surveillance. Gone are the days when wiretaps were conducted through on-site tinkering with copper switches. CALEA mandated sweeping new powers of surveillance for the digital age, by linking remote computers into the routers and hubs of telecom firms – a spyware apparatus linked in real-time, all the time, to American telephones and modems. CALEA made spy equipment an inextricable ligature in our telephonic life. Top officials at the FBI pushed for the legislation, claiming it would improve security, but many field agents have spoken up to complain that CALEA has done exactly the opposite. The data-mining techniques employed by NSA in its wiretapping exploits could not have succeeded without the technology mandated by CALEA. It could be argued that CALEA is the hidden heart of the NSA wiretap scandal.



THE VERINT CONNECTION

According to former CIA officer Giraldi and other US intelligence sources, software manufactured and maintained by Verint, Inc. handles most of American law enforcement’s wiretaps. Says Giraldi: “Phone calls are intercepted, recorded, and transmitted to U.S. investigators by Verint, which claims that it has to be ‘hands on’ with its equipment to maintain the system.” Giraldi also notes Verint is reimbursed for up to 50 percent of its R&D costs by the Israeli Ministry of Industry and Trade. According to Giraldi, the extent of the use of Verint technology “is considered classified,” but sources have spoken out and told Giraldi they are worried about the security of Verint wiretap systems. The key concern, says Giraldi, is the issue of a “trojan” embedded in the software.

A trojan in information security hardware/software is a backdoor that can be accessed remotely by parties who normally would not have access to the secure system. Allegations of massive trojan spying have rocked the Israeli business community in recent years. An AP article in 2005 noted, “Top Israeli blue chip companies…are suspected of using illicit surveillance software to steal information from their rivals and enemies.” Over 40 companies have come under scrutiny. “It is the largest cybercrime case in Israeli history,” Boaz Guttmann, a veteran cybercrimes investigator with the Israeli national police, tells me. “Trojan horse espionage is part of the way of life of companies in Israel. It’s a culture of spying.”

This is of course the culture on which the U.S. depends for much of its secure software for data encryption and telephonic security. “There’s been a lot discussion of how much we should trust security products by Israeli telecom firms,” says Philip Zimmerman, one of the legendary pioneers of encryption technology (Zimmerman invented the cryptographic and privacy authentication system known as Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, now one of the basic modern standards for communications encryption). “Generally speaking, I wouldn’t trust stuff made overseas for data security,” says Zimmerman. “A guy at NSA InfoSec” – the information security division of the National Security Agency – “once told me, ‘Foreign-made crypto is our nightmare.’ But to be fair, as our domestic electronics industry becomes weaker and weaker, foreign-made becomes inevitable.” Look at where the expertise is, Zimmerman adds: Among the ranks of the International Association for Cryptological Research, which meets annually, there is a higher percentage of Israelis than any other nationality. The Israeli-run Verint is today the provider of telecom interception systems deployed in over 50 countries.

Carl Cameron, chief politics correspondent at Fox News Channel, is one of the few reporters to look into federal agents’ deepening distress over possible trojans embedded in Verint technology. In a wide-ranging four-part investigation into Israeli-linked espionage that aired in December 2001, Cameron made a number of startling discoveries regarding Verint, then known as Comverse Infosys. Sources told Cameron that “while various FBI inquiries into Comverse have been conducted over the years,” the inquiries had “been halted before the actual equipment has ever been thoroughly tested for leaks.” Cameron also noted a 1999 internal FCC document indicating that “several government agencies expressed deep concerns that too many unauthorized non-law enforcement personnel can access the wiretap system.” Much of this access was facilitated through “remote maintenance.”

Immediately following the Cameron report, Comverse Infosys changed its name to Verint, saying the company was “maturing.” (The company issued no response to Cameron’s allegations, nor did it threaten a lawsuit.) Meanwhile, security officers at DEA, an adjunct of the Justice Department, began examining the agency’s own relationship with Comverse/Verint. In 1997, DEA transformed its wiretap infrastructure with the $25 million procurement from Comverse/Verint of a technology called “T2S2” – “translation and transcription support services” – with Comverse/Verint contracted to provide the hardware and software, plus “support services, training, upgrades, enhancements and options throughout the life of the contract,” according to the “contracts and acquisitions” notice posted on the DEA’s website. This was unprecedented. Prior to 1997, DEA staff used equipment that was developed and maintained in-house.

But now Cameron’s report raised some ugly questions of vulnerability in T2S2.

The director of security programs at DEA, Heidi Raffanello, was rattled enough to issue an internal communiqué on the matter, dated Dec. 18, 2001, four days after the final installment in the Cameron series. Referencing the Fox News report, she worried that “Comverse remote maintenance” was “not addressed in the C&A [contracts and acquisitions] process.” She also cited the concerns in Justice Department order 2640.2D, and noted that the “Administrator” – meaning then DEA head Asa Hutchinson – had been briefed. Then there was this stunner: “It remains unclear if Comverse personnel are security cleared, and if so, who are they and what type of clearances are on record….Bottom line we should have caught it.” On its face, the Raffanello memo is a frightening glimpse into a bureaucracy caught with its pants down.

American law enforcement was not alone in suspecting T2S2 equipment purchased from Comverse/Verint. In November 2002, sources in the Dutch counterintelligence community began airing what they claimed was “strong evidence that the Israeli secret service has uncontrolled access to confidential tapping data collected by the Dutch police and intelligence services,” according to the Dutch broadcast radio station Evangelische Omroep (EO). In January 2003, the respected Dutch technology and computing magazine, c’t, ran a follow-up to the EO scoop, headlined “Dutch Tapping Room not Kosher.” The article began: “All tapping equipment of the Dutch intelligence services and half the tapping equipment of the national police force…is insecure and is leaking information to Israel.” The writer, Paul Wouters, goes on to discuss the T2S2 tap-ware “delivered to the government in the last few years by the Israeli company Verint,” and quoted several cryptography experts on the viability of remote monitoring of encrypted “blackbox” data. Wouters writes of this “blackbox cryptography”:

…a very important part of strong cryptography is a good random source. Without a proper random generator, or worse, with an intentionally crippled random generator, the resulting ciphertext becomes trivial to break. If there is one single unknown chip involved with the random generation, such as a hardware accelerator chip, all bets are off….If you can trust the hardware and you have access to the source code, then it should theoretically be possible to verify the system. This, however, can just not be done without the source code.

Yet, as Wouters was careful to add, “when the equipment was bought from the Israelis, it was agreed that no one except [Verint] personnel was authorized to touch the systems....Source code would never be available to anyone.”

Cryptography pioneer Philip Zimmerman warns that “you should never trust crypto if the source code isn’t published. Open source code means two things: if there are deliberate backdoors in the crypto, peer review will reveal those backdoors. If there are inadvertent bugs in the crypto, they too will be discovered. Whether the weaknesses are by accident or design, they will be found. If the weakness is by design, they will not want to publish the source code. Some of the best products we know have been subject to open source review: Linux; Apache. The most respected crypto products have been tested through open source. The little padlock in the corner when you visit a browser? You’re going through a protocol called Secure Socket Layer. Open source tested and an Internet standard. FireFox, the popular and highly secure browser, is all open source.”



THE CALEA CONNECTION

None of U.S. law enforcement’s problems with Amdocs and Verint could have come to pass without the changes mandated by the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which, as noted, sought to lock spyware into telecom networks. CALEA, to cite the literature, requires that terrestrial carriers, cellular phone services and other telecom entities enable the government to intercept “all wire and oral communications carried by the carrier concurrently with their transmission.” T2S2 technology fit the bill perfectly: Tied into the network, T2S2 bifurcates the line without interrupting the data-stream (a T2S2 bifurcation is considered virtually undetectable). One half of the bifurcated line is recorded and stored in a remote tapping room; the other half continues on its way from your mouth or keyboard to your friend’s. (What is “T2S2”? To simplify: The S2 computer collects and encrypts the data; the T2 receives and decrypts.)

CALEA was touted as a law enforcement triumph, the work of decades of lobbying by FBI. Director Louis Freeh went so far as to call it the bureau’s “highest legislative priority.” Indeed, CALEA was the widest expansion of the government’s electronic surveillance powers since the Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, which mandated carefully limited conditions for wiretaps. Now the government could use coercive powers in ordering telecom providers to “devise solutions” to law enforcement’s “emerging technology-generated problems” (imposing a $10,000 per day penalty on non-compliant carriers). The government’s hand would be permanently inserted into the design of the nation's telecom infrastructure. Law professor Lillian BeVier, of the University of Virginia, writes extensively of the problems inherent to CALEA. “The rosy scenario imagined by the drafters cannot survive a moment's reflection,” BeVier observes. “While it is conventionally portrayed as ‘but the latest chapter in the thirty year history of the federal wiretap laws,’ CALEA is not simply the next installment of a technologically impelled statutory evolution. Instead, in terms of the nature and magnitude of the interests it purports to ‘compromise’ and the industry it seeks to regulate, in terms of the extent to which it purports to coerce private sector solutions to public sector problems, and in terms of the foothold it gives government to control the design of telecommunications networks, the Act is a paradigm shift. On close and disinterested inspection, moreover, CALEA appears to embody potentially wrong-headed sacrifices of privacy principles, flawed and incomplete conceptions of law enforcement's ends and means, and an imperfect appreciation of the incompatible incentives of the players in the game that would inevitably be played in the process of its implementation.”(emphasis mine)

The real novelty – and the danger – of CALEA is that telecom networks are today configured so that they are vulnerable to surveillance. “We’ve deliberately weakened the computer and phone networks, making them much less secure, much more vulnerable both to legal surveillance and illegal hacking,” says former DOJ cybercrimes prosecutor Mark Rasch. “Everybody is much less secure in their communications since the adopting of CALEA. So how are you going to have secure communications? You have to secure the communications themselves, because you cannot have a secure network. To do this, you need encryption. What CALEA forced businesses and individuals to do is go to third parties to purchase encryption technology. What is the major country that the U.S. purchases IT encryption from overseas? I would say it’s a small Middle Eastern democracy. What we’ve done is the worst of all worlds. We’ve made sure that most communications are subject to hacking and interception by bad guys. At the same time, the bad guys – organized crime, terrorist operations – can very easily encrypt their communications.” It is notable that the first CALEA-compliant telecom systems installed in the U.S. were courtesy of Verint Inc.

THE AMDOCS CONNECTION

If a phone is dialed in the U.S., Amdocs Ltd. likely has a record of it, which includes who you dialed and how long you spoke. This is known as transactional call data. Amdocs’ biggest customers in the U.S. are AT&T and Verizon, which have collaborated widely with the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping programs. Transactional call data has been identified as a key element in NSA data mining to look for “suspicious” patterns in communications.

Over the last decade, Amdocs has been the target of several investigations looking into whether individuals within the company shared sensitive U.S. government data with organized crime elements and Israeli intelligence services. Beginning in 1997, the FBI conducted a far-flung inquiry into alleged spying by an Israeli employee of Amdocs, who worked on a telephone billing program purchased by the CIA. According to Paul Rodriguez and J. Michael Waller, of Insight Magazine, which broke the story in May of 2000, the targeted Israeli had apparently also facilitated the tapping of telephone lines at the Clinton White House (recall Monica Lewinsky’s testimony before Ken Starr: the president, she claimed, had warned her that “a foreign embassy” was listening to their phone sex, though Clinton under oath later denied saying this). More than two dozen intelligence, counterintelligence, law-enforcement and other officials told Insight that a “daring operation,” run by Israeli intelligence, had “intercepted telephone and modem communications on some of the most sensitive lines of the U.S. government on an ongoing basis.” Insight’s chief investigative reporter, Paul Rodriguez, told me in an e-mail that the May 2000 spy probe story “was (and is) one of the strangest I've ever worked on, considering the state of alert, concern and puzzlement” among federal agents. According to the Insight report, FBI investigators were particularly unnerved over discovering the targeted Israeli subcontractor had somehow gotten his hands on the FBI’s “most sensitive telephone numbers, including the Bureau's ‘black’ lines used for wiretapping.” “Some of the listed numbers,” the Insight article added, “were lines that FBI counterintelligence used to keep track of the suspected Israeli spy operation. The hunted were tracking the hunters.” Rodriguez confirmed the panic this caused in American intel. “It's a huge security nightmare,” one senior U.S. official told him. “The implications are severe,” said a second official. “All I can tell you is that we think we know how it was done,” a third intelligence executive told Rodriguez. “That alone is serious enough, but it's the unknown that has such deep consequences.” No charges, however, were made public in the case. (What happened behind the scenes depends on who you talk to in law enforcement: When FBI counterintelligence sought a warrant for the Israeli subcontractor, the Justice Department strangely refused to cooperate, and in the end no warrant was issued. FBI investigators were baffled.)

London Sunday Times reporter Uzi Mahnaimi quotes sources in Tel Aviv saying that during this period e-mails from President Clinton had also been intercepted by Israeli intelligence. Mahnaimi’s May 2000 article reveals that the operation involved “hacking into White House computer systems during intense speculation about the direction of the peace process.” Israeli intelligence had allegedly infiltrated a company called Telrad, subcontracted by Nortel, to develop a communications system for the White House. According to the Sunday Times, “Company managers were said to have been unaware that virtually undetectable chips installed during manufacture made it possible for outside agents to tap into the flow of data from the White House.”

In 1997, detectives with the Los Angeles Police Department, working in tandem with the Secret Service, FBI, and DEA, found themselves suffering a similar inexplicable collapse in communications security. LAPD was investigating Israeli organized crime: drug runners and credit card thieves based in Israel and L.A., with tentacles in New York, Miami, Las Vegas, and Egypt. The name of the crime group and its members remains classified in “threat assessment” papers this reporter obtained from LAPD, but the documents list in some detail the colorful scope of the group’s operations: $1.4 million stolen from Fidelity Investments in Boston through sophisticated computer fraud; extortion and kidnapping of Israelis in L.A. and New York; cocaine distribution in connection with Italian, Russian, Armenian and Mexican organized crime; money laundering; and murder. The group also had access to extremely sophisticated counter-surveillance technology and data, which was a disaster for LAPD. According to LAPD internal documents, the Israeli crime group obtained the unlisted home phone, cell phone, and pager numbers of some 500 of LAPD’s narcotics investigators, as well as the contact information for scores of federal agents – black info, numbers unknown even to the investigators’ kin. The Israelis even set up wiretaps of LAPD investigators, grabbing from cell-phones and landlines conversations with other agents – FBI and DEA, mostly – whose names and phone numbers were also traced and grabbed.

LAPD was horrified, and as the word got out of the seeming total breakdown in security, the shock spread to agents at DEA, FBI and even CIA, who together spearheaded an investigation. It turned out that the source of much of this black intel could be traced to a company called J&J Beepers, which was getting its phone numbers from a billing service that happened to be a subsidiary of Amdocs.

A source familiar with the inquiries into Amdocs put to me several theories regarding the allegations of espionage against the company. “Back in the early 1970s, when it became clear that AT&T was going to be broken up and that there was an imminent information and technology revolution, Israel understood that it had a highly-educated and highly-worldly population and it made a few calculated economic and diplomatic discoveries,” the source says. “One was that telecommunications was something they could do: because it doesn’t require natural resources, but just intellect, training and cash. They became highly involved in telecommunications. Per capita, Israel is probably the strongest telecommunications nation in the world. AT&T break-up occurs in 1984; Internet technology explodes; and Israel has all of these companies aggressively buying up contracts in the form of companies like Amdocs. Amdocs started out as a tiny company and now it’s the biggest billing service for telecommunications in the world. They get this massive telecommunications network underway. Like just about everything in Israel, it’s a government sponsored undertaking.

“So it’s been argued that Amdocs was using its billing records as an intelligence-gathering exercise because its executive board over the years has been heavily peopled by retired and current members of the Israeli government and military. They used this as an opportunity to collect information about worldwide telephone calls. As an intelligence-gathering phenomenon, an analyst with an MIT degree in algorithms would rather have 50 pages of who called who than 50 hours of actual conversation. Think about conversations with friends, husbands, wives. That raw information doesn’t mean anything. But if there’s a pattern of 30 phone calls over the course of a day, that can mean a lot. It’s a much simpler algorithm.”

Another anonymous source – a former CIA operative – tells me that U.S. intelligence agents who have aired their concerns about Verint and Amdocs have found themselves attacked from all sides. “Once it’s learned that an individual is doing footwork on this [the Verint/Amdocs question], he or she is typically identified somehow as a troublemaker, an instigator, and is hammered mercilessly,” says the former CIA operative. “Typically, what happens is the individual finds him or herself in a scenario where their retirement is jeopardized – and worse. The fact that if you simply take a look at this question, all of a sudden you’re an Arabist or anti-Semitic – it’s pure baloney, because I will tell you first-hand that people whose heritage lies back in that country have heavily worked this matter. You can’t buy that kind of dedication.”

The former CIA operative adds, “There is no defined policy, at this time, for how to deal with this [security issues involving Israel] – other than wall it off, contain it. It’s not cutting it. Not after 9/11. The funeral pyre that burned on for months at the bottom of the rubble told a lot of people they did not need to be ‘politically correct.’ The communications nexuses [i.e. Amdocs/Verint] didn’t occur yesterday; they started many years ago. And that’s a major embarrassment to organizations that would like to say they’re on top of things and not co-opted or compromised. As you start to work this, you soon learn that many people have either looked the other way or have been co-opted along the way. Some people, when they figure out what has occurred, are highly embarrassed to realize that they’ve been duped. Because many of them are bureaucrats, they don’t want to be made to look as stupid as they are. So they just go along with it. Sometimes, it’s just that simple.”

Christopher Ketcham writes for Vanity Fair, GQ, Harper’s, Salon and many other magazines and websites. You can reach him at cketcham99@mindspring.com.

Book Review: Ronald Bleier: Annie Machon: Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers: MI5, MI6 Agents of Terror

It’s the (Intelligence and Security) Services, Stupid: A review of Annie Machon’s Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers: MI5, MI6 And the Shayler Affair[1]

By Ronald Bleier

February 2008


We joined the services to stop terrorism, not become involved in it.”

“It appears that we have given up on the notion of due process, fair trials and democratic rights in Britain.”
-- Annie Machon



In August 1997 two ex- MI5 officers, David Shayler and his companion Annie Machon, fled to France in connection with their plan to expose corruption and mismanagement in MI5 and MI6, Britain’s domestic and foreign intelligence services. Both highly rated agents, they had spent years unsuccessfully attempting to redress issues of corruption and mismanagement. Spies, Lies tells their story in remarkable and eye opening detail as they blow the whistle on outmoded procedures, low officer morale and drunkenness, and on misguided and illegal operations. Their book traces the steps by which they came to the alarming conclusion that the intelligence and security services have devolved into the enablers and initiators of terror.

At the heart of the book is the exposure of a sensational case of MI6 collusion with an Islamic extremist group that tried to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi. The public didn’t learn of the plot until the New York Times (NYT) published an account on August 5, 1998 under the interrogative title: “Did the British government try to assassinate Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi the Libyan leader, in February 1996 by planting a bomb under his motorcade?” The Times noted that MI6 paid $160,000 to the group. (pp. 247- 250) The NYT story was soon confirmed on BBC’s Panorama TV program and a few months later, in November 1998, the government of Libya showed TV footage of the attack.

Machon explains that she and Shayler decided to voluntarily leave the service about a year before they fled England. They coordinated their flight with the publication of an article by Shayler in the Mail on Sunday, the sister publication of Britain’s popular newspaper, The Daily Mail. They fled in order to give the newly elected Labour government led by Tony Blair time to investigate their evidence. They were optimistic about getting a fair hearing since Blair had just won an election by a landslide on a reform platform that included human rights and an ethical foreign policy. (p. 192)

Shayler and Machon placed much of their hopes in a public interest defence, which Tony Blair, his new Home Secretary, Jack Straw, and his Attorney General, John Morris, had unsuccessfully supported while in opposition when the Official Secrets Act had been updated in 1989. Moreover Machon expected that government ministers would be “outraged” to find that the “secret state” had compiled and maintained personal files on them as if they were security risks. “If there was ever a time,” Machon writes, “to make Britain’s outdated and anti-democratic system – -particularly with regard to the intelligence establishment –- more open and accountable, this was it.” (p. 192)

In the end Shayler and Machon were cruelly disillusioned when they found that the Blair government chose not to address the issues they raised, but instead launched a vicious and libelous smear campaign against them. The government’s damage control/cover up operation was largely successful, and it wasn’t until a year later that the news of the MI6 terror conspiracy rose to such a level that it required a public denial by Foreign Secretary Robin Cook.

The Real Security Issue

The key issue raised by the Gaddafi assassination conspiracy is the basic one of security. Machon writes that most experts believe that assassinations of heads of state tend to destabilize a region. Such actions create a power vacuum that leads to unrest and violence. Had the assassination attempt succeeded, it might have led to the emergence of an Islamic state in Libya that could have posed a regional and international security threat. Machon wonders if “at the very least” MI5 might have been dupes of the extremists, unwittingly creating the circumstances leading to a state controlled by fundamentalists. (pp. 282-284)

Machon here limits her consideration to the least worst-case scenario. However, readers may well doubt that MI6 didn’t understand the implications of an extremist takeover in a strategic North African country. Is it not simpler to conclude that MI6 deliberately intended the very destabilization that would be the predictable consequence of the success of such a conspiracy?

Why would the services deliberately work at cross-purposes to their mission to protect the public from crime, disorder and terror? Spies, Lies argues that the intelligence and security services in Britain (and doubtless elsewhere if not everywhere) have morphed into the very enemy that they were created to defend. Instead of fighting terror, they sponsor terror.

Much of the problem lies in the natural tendency of government agencies to grow larger and more powerful. With the collapse of the Soviet Union (1989-1991) Western military and intelligence agencies scrambled to create a substitute enemy. At the time it may have seemed that Islamic terrorism would not be perceived as sufficiently threatening to justify Cold War budgets. However, since fear of Moslem terror was grounded in the Israeli-Arab conflict and the powerful pro Zionist/anti Muslim ethos, it only awaited adequate fertilization. In the academic world, Bernard Lewis, English born, Jewish professor of Middle East studies at Princeton, supplied a Zionist perspective for his scholarly justification for the clash of Western vs. Moslem cultures. In Lewis’s view, nationalist Islamists posed a threat not merely to the Jewish state that they believed discriminated against Muslims, but to the Western world and its values.

In the end it didn’t take long for militarists in the U.S. and in Europe to shift their targets. As chance or a decisive covert push from the CIA would have it, the anti-Muslim movement was propelled by Saddam Hussein’s decision to invade Kuwait in August 1990. There soon followed such high profile set pieces as the World Trade Center bombing in New York City in 1993, the African Embassy bombings of August 1998, the USS Cole bombing of October 2000, and others – most or all attributed to Al Qaeda.[2] Yet these and other high profile terror events tellingly display the distinctive red flag (as does the MI6 Gaddafi assassination plot, not to mention the terror of 9/11) of a covert government connection with those accused of responsibility for the attacks.

Sadiq living in London

For example, in addition to the London based Libyan agent codenamed Tunworth with whom MI6 negotiated, the BBC TV Panorama program reported that Libya accused the UK of giving refuge to Abdullah Al-Sadiq, the leader of the Militant (or Fighting) Islamic Group (FIG), the organization which planned the Gaddafi assassination. The Foreign Office, pressured to address the media report, issued a non-denial denial; simply saying said that they didn’t know if Sadiq was in the country, which, according to Machon, was also a lie. (pp. 247-248)


Kalifa Bazelya

Machon also devotes a chapter to the strange (or not so strange) case of Khalifa Bazelya, the charge d’affairs of the Libyan Interest section in London, a known member of a Libyan terrorist organization, the ESO. Machon claims that the ESO was responsible for the Lockerbie bombing of December 1988 in which 270 people were killed, and the 1989 bombing of a French plane, UTA 772 in which 171 people died.


Bazelya was allowed into England in 1993 on the unconvincing pretext that MI6 thought that they could recruit him. Machon argues that if the government had really wanted to do so, they could have approached him while he was in Libya, saving the British taxpayers the millions of pounds that it cost for his surveillance from June 1993 to December 1995. Moreover, as part of the intelligence services’ surveillance protocol, Bazelya was allowed to operate freely. While in the UK he intimidated opposition Libyans and created local terror cells. After a great deal of effort, Shayler finally managed to get Bazelya declared persona non grata, forcing him to return home. (pp. 139ff)

Judith Hart --How MI5 vetoed Wilson’s choice of a Cabinet Minister

Machon presents several characteristic instances revealing the services’ abuse of their powers. One of these, the case of Judith Hart, rose to the level of a cause célèbre in the 1970s in Harold Wilson’s government. MI5 prevented Hart from obtaining a ministerial post alleging that she had connections with communists. In an unprecedented move, a skeptical Harold Wilson demanded the raw intelligence on which MI5 based their allegations rather than simply the summaries usually supplied to ministers. As it turned out, a telephone tap revealed that Hart had indeed been in contact with the Communist Party HQ in King Street, but only to talk to a friend who worked there. Nevertheless, Wilson agreed to post Hart to a less sensitive area of government. (pp. 48-49)

Breaking and entering the home of an Opposition Journalist

The case of Victoria Brittain, a journalist for the left of center Guardian newspaper, was one where MI5 not only abused its powers but also engaged, Machon claims, in gross illegality. The pretext for their harassment of someone MI5 apparently considered an ideological enemy was that Brittain was involved in supporting Libyan terrorists. Shayler, who was handed the Brittain brief in 1995, soon found that the evidence against her was wholly without merit and that she was by no means a security threat. He also learned that MI5 falsified evidence that was presented to the Home Secretary in order to obtain a warrant to break and enter her home, to search her papers and to install an eavesdropping device. Shayler also discovered that MI5 also illegally collected financial information from her bank without a warrant. (pp. 158-159)

Despite Shayler’s protests, MI5 refused to shut down the operation and the case threw him into a crisis. He was faced with the choice of following orders based on illegal operations or resigning. In 1995, about a year before he finally resigned, he still had hopes of effecting change from within and he decided that it was best not to be labeled a troublemaker.

When he fled to France in August 1997, Shayler went public with his information about the “flawed” Victoria Brittain investigation, which is how she learned of MI5’s trampling her rights. Shayler’s leak of the Brittain case was specifically cited as one of the reasons that he was later convicted and imprisoned for offenses against the Official Secrets Act. (p. 199; 206)

The power of the secret government

One means by which the services secure and maintain their power in the UK and elsewhere has already been mentioned: the practice of maintaining files with potentially embarrassing or career destroying information on a wide variety of people. Machon found that MI5 was rife with personnel imbued with a Cold War, “Reds under the bed” mentality. Often senior management types, they tended to view politicians, professionals and others as enemies of the state if their views were left of center or if they pressed for reform.

Machon explains that during her MI5 induction courses she was told that MI5 had compiled over a million such files. They were taught that the files were rife with errors and recruits understood that they offered possibilities for abuse. In her almost six-year career with MI5 Machon reviewed or was shown by colleagues the files kept by MI5 on about 30 politicians, celebrities, union leaders and others, including such well known figures as John Lennon, Tony Blair and his wife Cherie, cabinet members Jack Straw, Clare Short, Robin Cook, Conservative British prime minister Ted Heath, Labour MP leader Neil Kinnock, Labour PM Harold Wilson, and others.

The judicial system – an arm of the government

Machon’s chapter on “British Justice in Action,” details Shayler’s trial and his unsuccessful appeal in all its fascinating and infuriating detail. Machon argues that Shayler’s ordeal was not about due process but was intended to shield the services from scandal and embarrassment.

As he expected, when he returned to England in 2000, Shayler was charged with offenses against the Official Secrets Act among other transgressions. In lengthy pre trial procedures the Crown successfully worked to ensure the inadmissibility of Shayler’s core contention that he was forced to go public because no one in the chain of command, including the prime minister’s office, would accept his evidence. In the end the courts accepted the fiction that he made no such effort. (pp. 322-323)

On November 4, 2002, Shayler was found guilty of offenses against the Official Secrets Act and was sentenced to 6 months in jail. Upon his conviction the media didn’t shrink from piling on, dishing out disinformation supporting the government position. One egregious lie widely broadcast was the claim that Shayler had “sold agent lives down the river for money” although no one ever produced any such evidence.

The Services Prolong the Irish Civil War

Both Shayler and Machon served in departments at MI5 that worked on IRA terror. Accordingly they could both testify that, as she puts it in one of her chapter heads, “MI5 Fails to get to Grips with the IRA.” In 1971 the British Army was sent to Northern Ireland to protect Catholics from Protestant violence since the local police forces, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, effectively took the side of the Protestants. Very soon the British Army lost the support of Catholics when they embarked on a policy of imprisoning IRA suspects without trial. This policy led directly to the events of Bloody Sunday, January 30 1972, when the British Army shot 26 Catholics (13 were killed, including 6 minors) who were marching in protest against arbitrary detentions. Over the next three decades more than 3,000 people died and hundreds of millions of pounds were spent in insurance payouts alone. (pp. 58-59)

MI5’s Failure to Prevent Bishopsgate

Machon devotes a chapter to the bombing of Bishopsgate, the IRA attack of April 1993 in the City of London, which she claims is one of four attacks that could have been prevented had MI5 acted on available information. The Bishopsgate bombing was the most financially devastating attack in UK history (one person was killed, none injured). It cost the taxpayer 350 million pounds; it hit at the heart of the UK financial infrastructure, gave PIRA (the Provisional IRA) worldwide publicity and forced the government to negotiate for the first time in the 25 years of the modern conflict. (p. 289)

In a July 2000 expose published in the British weekly magazine Punch, Shayler argues that the authorities missed two opportunities to prevent the bombing. Machon also goes into some detail about the government’s reaction to Shayler’s expose. Instead of using Shayler’s information to investigate and reform the services, the government decided to throw all its weight against the messenger and took Punch to court for alleged offenses against secrecy laws. (pp. 302-309

Jobs for the boys, secrecy for the public

The inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday conducted by the senior Metropolitan police commander, Sir John Stephens[3] revealed that British Army intelligence conspired with Loyalist terrorists to murder innocent Catholics, most notably the Catholic lawyer Patrick Finucane in February1989. The 2003 inquiry report also found that a key British agent codenamed Stakeknife, who had deeply infiltrated PIRA, was personally responsible for the torture and execution of fellow British undercover agents. (p. 61)

Machon uses the findings of the Stephens Report to argue that the shoot to kill policy employed by the British Army in Northern Ireland “only served to prolong the conflict.” In Machon’s view, “the British intelligence establishment never wanted an end to the civil war in Northern Ireland. It wanted jobs for the boys and of course the suspension of civil liberties and secrecy [about its illegal operations] made possible by the conflict.” (p. 62)


The Israeli Embassy Bombing – a Mossad Operation?

On July 26, 1994 a bomb exploded in an Audi car parked outside the Israeli Embassy in London and another bomb exploded outside Balfour House Finchley, home to a number of Jewish groups. In all, 19 people were injured (none killed). In January 1995 the London police arrested four Palestinians, two of whom, Samar Alami and Jawed Botmeh, were convicted in December 1996 of conspiracy to cause explosions -– no one was tried or convicted for setting the bombs. The two men are currently serving a twenty-year prison sentence.

Machon’s account of the affair suggests that the intelligence services and the judicial system, not to mention the media and the political echelon, effectively joined forces to convict the two Palestinians who were apparently set up by the Israeli secret service. It seems that the Mossad targeted the two men, both engineers, because they were using their expertise to test components and delivery methods of bombs to be used against the Israelis in the Occupied Territories. Machon presents persuasive evidence indicating that the two Palestinians had no knowledge of the London bombings.

Central to Machon’s argument are two important documents that were withheld from the trial judge as well as the defendants. The first relates to Shayler’s discovery that MI5 had received prior warnings of the attack but didn’t act on them. The second was a memo written by MI5 senior manager Andrew Knight who “assessed that the Israelis themselves were responsible for the bomb in order to persuade the British authorities to increase the security around the Embassy.” (p. 226; 229-30)

Shayler’s exposures of the critical documents in Punch and in the Mail on Sunday, forced a government response and led to appeals. Nevertheless, senior British judges in the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords allowed the convictions to stand. (p. 227) Machon doesn’t speculate, but some readers might hazard the guess that sensitivities in connection with Israeli involvement might very well be the reason that to this day the two men are still in jail.

Is Reform Possible?

In the Mail on Sunday story of August 1997 that was inspired by his revelations, Shayler stressed the “inflexible management” and the “dangerous intransigence” of the bureaucracy and the MI5 mindset. Shayler’s underlying assumption is that reform of the services is a realistic possibility. However such a view is at odds with the evidence that he and Machon present throughout Spies, Lies that tends to show that the problem is much deeper and more intractable than they both seem to have imagined when they fled England. They came to find and that the entire political system effectively collaborates to destroy whistleblowers and silence potential reformers.


How do we explain Tony Blair’s reversal with regard to a public service defense once he took office? How do we explain his lack of interest in documentary evidence of widespread corruption and illegality by MI5 and MI6? Was Blair cynical while in opposition, adopting a position that he understood would be popular? It may be that once he attained high office, Blair was forced to come to grips with the realities of power and came to understand that in order to survive he would have to accommodate the services and other centers of influence.

The Machon book points to a world in which the intelligence and security services purposefully work against the public interest in order to advance their ideological agenda of militarism and endless war. Without war, without terror, their mission would evaporate and they would be exposed as superfluous and a danger to civil society.

Perhaps the most depressing section of the book when it comes to reform going forward is Machon’s description of an expensive in-depth independent study of the practices and procedures at MI5 undertaken during her term of service. For a brief moment it seemed as if effective reforms might be implemented and a significant morale boost among rank and file officers was evident. But in the end the reforms were blocked leading to the departure of another crop of energetic MI5 recruits.

Reading between the lines

There exists a tension in the Machon-Shayler narrative between the more hopeful assumption that the problem with the services is merely one of bungling and mismanagement, and the tougher, often implicit recognition that the services have become an independent power center, more dominant at times than any other British institution. Did Machon and Shayler feel that they had to soften their views at certain points in order to have their book pass MI5 censorship? Some readers will wonder if their chapter on the Lockerbie disaster supporting the official story is such an example.

In any event, they create the space to speculate on the death of Princess Diana and they provide several pages of not unpersuasive evidence pointing to the services’ involvement (pp. 211-216) as well as a brief note boldly stating that the services hastened Margaret Thatcher’s downfall when she pushed the 1989 Security Service Act through Parliament. (p. 367)


One might rationalize the current state of affairs whereby the intelligence and security services exist as an independent and unaccountable power center, if it were clear that they operated wholly or even largely in the national interest. In that case one might imagine that critical government agencies would be staffed by able idealists like Shayler and Machon, dedicated to preventing terrorism and to the civil and constitutional rights of the public.

The End

NOTES
[1]Annie Machon, Spies, Lies, and Whistleblowers: MI5, MI6 And the Shayler Affair, The Book Guild Ltd: Sussex, England, 2005. All page references are to this edition.

[2] Plans to pin the blame for the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 on Islamic extremists were apparently derailed due to the intervention of loose cannon Timothy McVeigh who seemed to go out of his way to get arrested. His getaway car had no license and he neglected to remove his sidearm from his belt when he was pulled over by a state trooper.

[3] The Guardian newspaper offers the alternate spelling, Stevens. See “Operation Banner, 1969-2007,” available online.

The Nation: Bush's Iran/Argentina Terror Frame-Up

Thanks to Xymphora for finding this. It was always dubious that the Iranians did this. So who did? I hate to sound like a naif, but while the the Mossad has done some wicked things, did they actually go this far? --RB

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080204/porter
Bush's Iran/Argentina Terror Frame-Up

by GARETH PORTER

[posted online on January 18, 2008]

Research for this article was supported by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute.

Although nukes and Iraq have been the main focus of the Bush Administration's pressure campaign against Iran, US officials also seek to tar Iran as the world's leading sponsor of terrorism. And Team Bush's latest tactic is to play up a thirteen-year-old accusation that Iran was responsible for the notorious Buenos Aires bombing that destroyed the city's Jewish Community Center, known as AMIA, killing eighty-six and injuring 300, in 1994. Unnamed senior Administration officials told the Wall Street Journal January 15 that the bombing in Argentina "serves as a model for how Tehran has used its overseas embassies and relationship with foreign militant groups, in particular Hezbollah, to strike at its enemies."

This propaganda campaign depends heavily on a decision last November by the General Assembly of Interpol, which voted to put five former Iranian officials and a Hezbollah leader on the international police organization's "red list" for allegedly having planned the July 1994 bombing. But the Wall Street Journal reports that it was pressure from the Bush Administration, along with Israeli and Argentine diplomats, that secured the Interpol vote. In fact, the Bush Administration's manipulation of the Argentine bombing case is perfectly in line with its long practice of using distorting and manufactured evidence to build a case against its geopolitical enemies.

After spending several months interviewing officials at the US Embassy in Buenos Aires familiar with the Argentine investigation, the head of the FBI team that assisted it and the most knowledgeable independent Argentine investigator of the case, I found that no real evidence has ever been found to implicate Iran in the bombing. Based on these interviews and the documentary record of the investigation, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the case against Iran over the AMIA bombing has been driven from the beginning by US enmity toward Iran, not by a desire to find the real perpetrators.

A 'Wall of Assumptions'

US policy toward the bombing was skewed from the beginning by a Clinton Administration strategy of isolating Iran, adopted in 1993 as part of an understanding with Israel on peace negotiations with the Palestinians. On the very day of the crime, before anything could have been known about who was responsible, Secretary of State Warren Christopher blamed "those who want to stop the peace process in the Middle East"--an obvious reference to Iran.

William Brencick, then chief of the political section at the US Embassy in Buenos Aires and the primary Embassy contact for the investigation, recalled in an interview with me last June that a "wall of assumptions" guided the US approach to the case. The primary assumptions, Brencick said, were that the explosion was a suicide bombing and that use of a suicide bomb was prima facie evidence of involvement by Hezbollah--and therefore Iran.

But the suicide-bomber thesis quickly encountered serious problems. In the wake of the explosion, the Menem government asked the United States to send a team to assist in the investigation, and two days after the bombing, experts from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms arrived in Buenos Aires along with three FBI agents. According to an interview the head of the team, ATF explosives expert Charles Hunter, gave to a team of independent investigators headed by US journalist Joe Goldman and Argentine investigative journalist Jorge Lanata, as soon as the team arrived the federal police put forward a thesis that a white Renault Trafic van had carried the bomb that destroyed the AMIA.

Hunter quickly identified major discrepancies between the car-bomb thesis and the blast pattern recorded in photos. He wrote a report two weeks later noting that in the wake of the bombing, merchandise in a store immediately to the right of the AMIA was tightly packed against its front windows and merchandise in another shop had been blown out onto the street--suggesting that the blast came from inside rather than outside. Hunter also said he did not understand how the building across the street could still be standing if the bomb had exploded in front of the AMIA, as suggested by the car-bomb thesis.

The lack of eyewitness evidence supporting the thesis was just as striking. Of some 200 witnesses on the scene, only one claimed to have seen a white Renault Trafic. Several testified they were looking at the spot where the Trafic should have been when the explosion occurred and saw nothing. Nicolasa Romero, the wife of a Buenos Aires policeman, was that lone witness. She said she saw a white Renault Trafic approach the corner where she was standing with her sister and her 4-year-old son. But Romero's sister testified that the vehicle that passed them was not a white Trafic but rather a black-and-yellow taxi. Other witnesses reported seeing a black-and-yellow taxi seconds before the explosion.

Argentine prosecutors argued that pieces of a white Trafic imbedded in the flesh of many of the victims of the explosion proved their case for a suicide bomb. But that evidence was discredited by Gabriel Levinas, a researcher for AMIA's own legal team. Levinas is a member of a leading Jewish family in Buenos Aires who had published a human rights magazine during the dictatorship (his uncle's car was used to kidnap war criminal Adolf Eichmann and spirit him off to Israel for trial in 1961.)

He discovered that the manufacturer of the white Trafic had been sent fragments of the vehicle recovered by the police for analysis and had found that none of the pieces had ever been put under high temperature. That meant that these car fragments could not have come from the particular white Trafic that police had identified as the suicide bomb car--since that vehicle was known to have once caught fire before having been recycled and repaired.

Yet despite the lack of eyewitness testimony and the weakness of the forensic evidence, the State Department publicly embraced the suicide-bomb story in 1994 and 1995.

The Problem of Motive

Independent investigators have also long puzzled over why Iran would have carried out an action against Argentine Jews while its Hezbollah allies were embroiled in armed struggle with the Israeli military in Lebanon. In their 2006 indictment of several Iranian nationals in the bombing, Argentine prosecutors argued that Iran planned the AMIA attack because Carlos Menem's administration had abruptly canceled two contracts for the transfer of nuclear technology to Iran.

But the indictment actually provides excerpts from key documents that undermine that conclusion. According to a February 10, 1992, cable from Argentina's ambassador in Iran, the director of the American Department of Iran's foreign ministry had "emphasized the need to reach a solution to the problem [of nuclear technology transfer] that would avoid damage to other contracts." Iran thus clearly signaled its hope of finding a negotiated solution that could reactivate the suspended contracts and maintain other deals with Argentina as well.

On March 17, 1992, a bomb blast destroyed the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires--an incident for which the Argentine prosecutors also held Iran responsible. The indictment, however, quotes a top official of INVAP, an Argentine nuclear firm that dominated the National Commission on Atomic Energy, as saying that during 1992 there were "contacts" between INVAP and the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran "in the expectation that the decision of the national government would be revised, allowing the tasks in the contracts to be resumed." The same official confirmed that negotiations surrounding the two canceled projects continued from 1993 to 1995--before and after the AMIA explosion. Those revelations suggest that the Iranian attitude toward Argentina at the time of the bombing was exactly the opposite of the one claimed in the indictment.

The Hezbollah motive for involvement in the AMIA bombing, according to the indictment, was revenge against the Israeli bombing of a Hezbollah training camp in the Bekaa Valley in early 1994 and the Israeli kidnapping of Shiite leader Mustapha Dirani in May. That theory fails to explain, however, why Hezbollah would choose to retaliate against Jews in Argentina. It was already at war with the Israeli forces in Lebanon, where the group was employing suicide bomb attacks in an effort to pressure Israel to end its occupation. Hezbollah had a second easy retaliatory option available, which was to launch Katyusha rockets across the border into Israeli territory.

That is exactly what Hezbollah did to retaliate for the Israeli killing of some 100 Lebanese civilians in the town of Qana in 1996. That episode inspired greater anger toward Israel among Hezbollah militants than any other event in the 1990s, according to Boston University Hezbollah specialist Augustus Richard Norton. If Hezbollah responded to this Israeli provocation with Katyusha rockets on Israeli territory, it hardly makes sense that it would have responded to a lesser Israeli offense by designing an ambitious international attack on Argentine Jews with no connection to the Israeli occupation.

The Frame-up

The keystone of the Argentine case was Carlos Alberto Telleldin, a used-car salesman with a record of shady dealings with both criminals and the police--and a Shiite last name. On July 10, 1994, Telleldin sold the white Trafic the police claimed was the suicide car to a man he described as having a Central American accent. Nine days after the bombing Telleldin was arrested on suspicion of being an accomplice to the crime.

The police claimed they were led to Telleldin by the serial number on the van's engine block, which was found in the rubble. But it would have been a remarkable lapse for the organizers of what was otherwise a very professional bombing to have left intact such a visible identification mark, one that any car thief knows how to erase. That should have been a clue that the attack was likely not orchestrated by Hezbollah, whose bomb experts were well-known by US intelligence analysts to have been clever enough, in blowing up the American Embassy in Beirut in 1983, to avoid leaving behind any forensic evidence that would lead back to them. It should also have raised questions about whether that evidence was planted by the police themselves.

It is now clear that the Menem government's real purpose in arresting Telleldin was to get him to finger those they wanted to blame for the bombing. In January 1995, Telleldin was visited by retired army Capt. Hector Pedro Vergez, a part-time agent for SIDE, the Argentine intelligence agency, who offered him $1 million and his freedom if he would identify one of five Lebanese nationals detained in Paraguay in September 2004--men the CIA said might be Hezbollah militants--as the person to whom he had sold the van. After Telleldin refused to go along with the scheme, an Argentine judge found that there was no evidence on which to detain the alleged militants.

The Buenos Aires court, which threw out the case against Telleldin in 2004, determined that a federal judge, Luisa Riva Aramayo, met with Telleldin in 1995 to discuss another possibility--paying him to testify that he had sold the van to several high-ranking figures in the Buenos Aires provincial police who were allies of Menem's political rival, Eduardo Duhalde. In July 1996, Judge Juan Jose Galeano, who was overseeing the investigation, offered Telleldin $400,000 to implicate those police officers as accomplices in the bombing. (A videotape made secretly by SIDE agents and aired on television in April 1997 showed Galeano negotiating the bribe.) A month after making the offer to Telleldin, Galeano charged three senior Buenos Aires police officials with having involvement in the bombing, based on Telleldin's testimony.

"The Whole Iran Thing Seemed Kind of Flimsy"

In an interview last May James Cheek, Clinton's Ambassador to Argentina at the time of the bombing, told me, "To my knowledge, there was never any real evidence [of Iranian responsibility]. They never came up with anything." The hottest lead in the case, he recalled, was an Iranian defector named Manoucher Moatamer, who "supposedly had all this information." But Moatamer turned out to be only a dissatisfied low-ranking official without the knowledge of government decision-making that he had claimed. "We finally decided that he wasn't credible," Cheek recalled. Ron Goddard, then deputy chief of the US Mission in Buenos Aires, confirmed Cheek's account. He recalled that investigators found nothing linking Iran to the bombing. "The whole Iran thing seemed kind of flimsy," Goddard said.

James Bernazzani, then the head of the FBI's Hezbollah office, was directed in October 1997 to assemble a team of specialists to go to Buenos Aires and put the AMIA case to rest. Bernazzani, now head of the agency's New Orleans office, recalled in a November 2006 interview how he arrived to find that the Argentine investigation of the AMIA bombing had found no real evidence of Iranian or Hezbollah involvement. The only clues suggesting an Iranian link to the bombing at that time, according to Bernazzani, were a surveillance tape of Iranian cultural attache Mohsen Rabbani shopping for a white Trafic van and an analysis of telephone calls made in the weeks before the bombing.

Shortly after the bombing, the biggest Buenos Aires daily newspaper, Clarin, published a story, leaked to it by Judge Galeano, that Argentine intelligence had taped Rabbani shopping for a white Trafic "months" before the bombing. A summary of the warrants for the arrest of Rabbani and six other Iranians in 2006 continued to refer to "indisputable documents" proving that Rabbani had visited car dealers to look for a van like the one allegedly used in the bombing. In fact, the intelligence report on the surveillance of Rabbani submitted to Galeano ten days after the bombing shows that the day Rabbani looked at a car dealer's white Trafic was May 1, 1993--fifteen months before the bombing and long before Argentine prosecutors have claimed Iran decided to target AMIA.

In the absence of any concrete evidence, SIDE turned to "link analysis" of telephone records to make a circumstantial case for Iranian guilt. The SIDE analysts argued that a series of telephone calls made between July 1 and July 18, 1994, to a mobile phone in the Brazilian border city of Foz de Iguazu must have been made by the "operational group" for the bombing--and that a call allegedly made on a cellphone belonging to Rabbani could be connected to this same group. The FBI's Bernazzani told me he was appalled by SIDE's use of link analysis to establish responsibility. "It can be very dangerous," he told me. "Using that analysis, you could link my telephone to bin Laden's." Bernazzani said the conclusions reached by the Argentine investigators were merely "speculation" and said that neither he nor officials in Washington had taken it seriously as evidence pointing to Iran.

Then, in 2000, one more defector surfaced with a new tale of Iranian responsibility. Abdolghassem Mesbahi, who claimed he was once the third-ranking man in Iran's intelligence services, told Galeano the decision to bomb the AMIA had been made at a meeting of senior Iranian officials, including President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, on August 14, 1993. But Mesbahi was soon discredited. Bernazzani told me American intelligence officials believed that by 2000, Mesbahi had long since lost his access to Iranian intelligence, that he was "poor, even broke" and ready to "provide testimony to any country on any case involving Iran."

A Questionable Informant

Bernazzani admitted to me that until 2003, the case against Iran was merely "circumstantial." But he claimed a breakthrough came that year, with the identification of the alleged suicide bomber as Ibrahim Hussein Berro, a Lebanese Hezbollah militant, who, according to a Lebanese radio broadcast, was killed in a military operation against Israeli forces in southern Lebanon in September 1984, two months after the AMIA bombing. "We are satisfied that we have identified the bomber based on the totality of the data streams," Bernazzani told me, citing "a combination of physical and witness evidence." But the Berro identification, too, was marked by evidence of fabrication and manipulation.

The official story is that Berro's name was passed on to SIDE and the CIA by a Lebanese informant in June 2001. The informant claimed he had befriended a former Hezbollah chauffeur and assistant to top Hezbollah leaders named Abu Mohamad Yassin, who told him that a Hezbollah militant named "Brru" was the suicide bomber. That story is suspicious on several counts, the most obvious being that intelligence agencies almost never reveal the name, or even the former position, of an actual informant.

The September 2003 court testimony of Patricio Pfinnen, the SIDE official in charge of the AMIA bombing investigation until he was fired in January 2002, casts serious doubt on the informant's credibility. Pfinnen testified that when he and his colleagues went back to the informant with more questions, "something went wrong with the information, or they were lying to us." Pfinnen said his team ultimately discarded the Berro theory because the sources in Lebanon had "failed and were not certain." He concluded, "I have my doubts about [Berro] being the person who was immolated."

After Pfinnen was fired in a power struggle within the intelligence agency, SIDE named Berro as the suicide bomber in a secret report. In March 2003, just after that report was completed, Ha'aretz reported that the Mossad had not only identified the bomber as Berro but possessed a transcript of Berro's farewell telephone call to Lebanon before the bombing, during which he told his parents that he was going to "join" his brother, who had been killed in a suicide bombing in Lebanon. When the 2006 indictment was released, however, it became clear that no evidence of such a call existed.

In September 2004, a Buenos Aires court acquitted Telleldin and the police officials who had been jailed years earlier, and in August 2005 Judge Galeano was impeached and removed from office. But Galeano's successors, prosecutors Alberto Nisman and Marcelo Martinez Burgos, pressed on, hoping to convince the world that they could identify Berro as the bomber. They visited Detroit, Michigan, where they interviewed two brothers of Berro and obtained photos of Berro from them. They then turned to the only witness who claimed she had seen the white Trafic at the scene of the crime--Nicolasa Romero.

In November 2005, Nisman and Burgos announced that Romero had identified Berro from the Detroit photos as the same person she had seen just before the bombing. Romero, on the other hand, said she "could not be completely certain" that Berro was the man at the scene. In court testimony, in fact, she had said she had not recognized Berro from the first set of set of four photographs she had been shown or even from a second set. She finally saw some "similarity in the face" in one of the Berro photographs, but only after she was shown a police sketch based on her description after the bombing.

Bernazzani told me that the FBI team in Buenos Aires had discovered DNA evidence that was assumed to have come from the suicide bomber in an evidence locker, and Nisman took a DNA sample from one of Berro's brothers during his visit in September 2005. "I would assume, though I don't know, that once we got the brother's DNA, they compared them," he said. But Nisman claimed to a reporter in 2006 that samples had been contaminated. Significantly, the Argentine indictment of the Iranians makes no mention of the DNA evidence.

Despite a case against Iran that lacked credible forensic or eyewitness evidence and relied heavily on dubious intelligence and a discredited defector's testimony, Nisman and Burgos drafted their indictment against six former Iranian officials in 2006. However, the government of Néstor Kirchner displayed doubts about going forward with a legal case. According to the Forward newspaper, when American Jewish groups pressed Kirchner's wife, Christina, about the indictments at a UN General Assembly in New York in September 2006, she indicated that there was no firm date for any further judicial action against Iran. Yet the indictment was released the following month.

Both the main lawyer representing the AMIA, Miguel Bronfman, and Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral, who later issued the arrest warrants for the Iranians, told the BBC last May that pressure from Washington was instrumental in the sudden decision to issue the indictments the following month. Corral indicated that he had no doubt that the Argentine authorities had been urged to "join in international attempts to isolate the regime in Tehran."

A senior White House official just called the AMIA case a "very clear definition of what Iranian state sponsorship of terrorism means." In fact, the US insistence on pinning that crime on Iran in order to isolate the Tehran regime, even though it had no evidence to support that accusation, is a perfect definition of cynical creation of an accusation in the service of power interests.