What Happened to Alberto Nisman?
By
Jonathan Blitzer
Activists attend the departure of the funeral
cortege carrying the remains of the Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman. Credit
PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEJANDRO PAGNI/AFP/GETTY
On January 18th, just before midnight, an
Argentine state prosecutor named Alberto Nisman
turned up dead in his apartment. The cause of death was a
shot to the head, fired from a .22-calibre pistol that the prosecutor had
borrowed from his assistant the day before. Nisman told his assistant that an
Argentine spy had warned him that his life was in danger. The two main doors to
the apartment were locked, and several bodyguards had been standing watch
outside. Analysis of a third passageway, a small nook used to gain access to
the apartment’s air-conditioning unit, revealed a footprint and a smudge, but
nothing more. The door to the bathroom, where Nisman was found, was locked from
the inside. It looked like he had killed himself, but could someone else have
made him do it?
Four days before Nisman died, he had accused
President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her Foreign Minister, Héctor
Timerman, of a spectacular crime. The two were the “authors and accomplices of
an aggravated cover-up and obstruction of justice,” Nisman told a Buenos Aires
court. They had allegedly protected the perpetrators of the bombing, in 1994,
of a Jewish community center, the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA). The
attack, which left eighty-five people dead and hundreds injured, was the worst
in the country’s recent history. Nisman had spent more than ten years
investigating the case, and he had long believed that the Iranian government
and agents of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, were behind it. In recent
years, he had also become concerned that Kirchner’s government had conspired to
shield them from justice. (The case is still unresolved and the attack’s
perpetrators remain unpunished.)
Nisman had produced a
two-hundred-and-eighty-nine-page report that, drawing on wiretapped
conversations between a union leader aligned with Kirchner and an Iranian
official, claimed that Kirchner and Timerman had secretly met in 2013 with the
Iranians to broker a deal. According to Nisman, the Argentines had agreed to
give up their hunt for the terrorists in exchange for Iranian oil. The
government immediately dismissed the accusations as baseless, but opposition
legislators seized on Nisman’s pronouncement and called on him to testify
before Congress. He died the night before he was supposed to deliver that
testimony. In his final hours, he tried and failed to insure that the
congressional hearings were closed to the public. “I might get out of this dead,” he said.
Hours after news of Nisman’s death broke,
protesters took to the streets with signs that read, “Yo soy Nisman,” to express their anger over his death; many
accused the government of orchestrating it. The government, meanwhile, did
little to dispel the suspicion. The next day, Kirchner posted a rambling
message on Facebook, which read, in part, “Suicide provokes … first:
stupefaction, and then questions. What is it that brought a person to the
terrible decision to end his life?” Four days later, she was less
philosophical, and more portentous. Nisman’s death “was not a suicide,”
Kirchner wrote on her Web site. “They used [Nisman] while he was alive, then
they needed him dead.” The “they” in this case could have included government
critics who wanted to frame the President; a rogue faction of the Argentine
intelligence apparatus; the Central Intelligence Agency; or the Mossad, the
Israeli intelligence agency. The President’s public pronouncements are often
soaked in paranoia. But in this case, the government’s line—that Nisman was
manipulated, then discarded, by elements of the intelligence community intent
on discrediting Kirchner—traded on widely held doubts about Nisman’s
independence as an investigator.
Nisman never had the institutional means to
determine, on his own, whether the Iranian government had a role in the AMIA bombing.
Instead, his information came largely from the former Argentine director of
counterintelligence Antonio (Jaime) Stiusso. Stiusso’s information, which
steadily implicated the President in some nefarious détente with Iran, is
widely thought to have come from U.S. and Israeli intelligence services. One
theory that has gained ground since Nisman’s killing turns on Stiusso and his
agenda in feeding Nisman damning evidence against the government. “Stiusso had
two faces,” the Argentine journalist Santiago O’Donnell told me. “The good
Stiusso had the face of the prosecutor Nisman. The bad Stiusso did not have a
face and was a shady and powerful person who instilled great fear.” Back in
2004, the Justice Minister held up a photograph of Stiusso on television and
accused him of presiding over a “kind of Gestapo” that intimidated and
blackmailed politicians. The President ousted Stiusso last year, and his
departure posed problems for Nisman and the investigation. At the moment,
Stiusso’s whereabouts are unknown.
This theory that Stiusso was somehow
directing Nisman’s investigation is riddled with conjecture. But the notion
that Nisman was a kind of cipher for Argentine and foreign-intelligence
operatives has its roots in certain demonstrable facts. Diplomatic cables
released by Wikileaks reveal that Nisman obsessively consulted with the
American Embassy. He went to the Embassy with advance tips on his
investigation, he shared knowledge about judges’ leanings, and he showed
Embassy officials drafts of his arrest orders and made revisions based on their
comments. In October, 2006, Nisman formally accused Iranian officials and a Hezbollah
operative of orchestrating the AMIA attack.
U.S. Embassy representatives told Nisman that they were “convinced” his case
was solid, and “congratulated” the Argentine prosecutors for their
“dedication.” Some of the same cables refer to U.S. efforts to impose
international sanctions against Iran for its nuclear program, a campaign that
the Argentine government joined at the United Nations.
This enthusiasm for the
case against Iran is particularly noteworthy because Iran and Hezbollah were
never the only suspected culprits in the bombing. Since the start of the
investigation, there’s also been the so-called Syrian track, which suggests
that Syrian agents may have underwritten the attack. The Argentine President at
the time, Carlos Menem, was born in Argentina to Syrian immigrants, and had
personal and political ties to the country. In 2008, in federal court, Nisman
requested an arrest warrant for Menem and his brother because they’d allegedly
impeded the investigation into a Syrian man thought to have been involved in
the bombing. One federal investigator went so far as to testify under oath that
the case against the Syrian suspect was never pursued because Menem’s brother
called the judge and quashed the inquiry. (Menem denied any malfeasance, saying
that the charges amounted to “political persecution.”) Nisman eventually
dropped this line of investigation and apologized to American authorities for
introducing it without warning. The Syrian theory may never have been entirely
solid, but its swift abandonment was suggestive. “Today, the Syrian track is
more of a political debate than a legal one,” the Argentine political scientist
Juan Gabriel Tokatlian told me earlier this week.
The AMIA
investigation has lasted twenty years and spanned more than three Presidential
administrations. During that time, the original investigating judge, the former
head of the Argentine intelligence services, some of the prosecutors, police
officers, and the former head of an AMIA-affiliated
organization have all been charged with wrongdoing. Four Buenos Aires police
officers were arrested for overseeing a stolen-car ring that included the
vehicle thought to have been used in the AMIA bombing,
but they were acquitted in 2004, when it emerged that the investigating judge
had paid a four-hundred-thousand-peso bribe to a key witness for the
prosecution. The money for the bribe came from the state secretary of
intelligence.
The AMIA case
confirmed the public’s worst fears about the courts. Since the years of the
military dictatorship, they have been under the thumb of the intelligence
service, which has routinely made use of its telephone-surveillance arm to
coddle and control judges. Because of the welter of procedural irregularities,
Interpol, at one point, lifted its red notices, or international arrest
warrants, for the twelve Iranian nationals initially alleged to have been
responsible for the bombing. Nisman was part of the original investigation
team, but was never directly implicated in the impropriety. In 2004, President
Néstor Kirchner, who called the botched investigation a “national disgrace,”
appointed Nisman to head up a new investigation. His findings, released two
years later, renewed the claims of the earlier investigation against Iran and
Hezbollah.
In 2012, President Cristina Kirchner began
charting a new foreign-policy course that set her and Nisman at odds. “There
was a broader shift in foreign policy away from the U.S. and Europe,” Daniel
Kerner, the head of the Latin American division at Eurasia Group, told me. Some
of this was owing to the U.S. recession and the European debt crisis, some of
it to Argentina’s continued trouble with U.S. courts over debt owed to American
hedge funds. The Argentine government felt less beholden to Western powers, and
softened its position on Iran. “There were always doubts about the accusations
against Iran,” Kerner said. “At some point, the Kirchner government may have
just recognized that these accusations were a function of our closeness to the
U.S.” In 2013, Cristina Kirchner’s government signed a memorandum of
understanding with Iran, in which the two countries sought to create a truth
commission to investigate the bombing. Critics lambasted her for aligning the
government with the primary suspect.
In his report, Nisman alleged that the
memorandum of understanding grew out of a trade deal for Iranian oil. As part
of that deal, Argentina would request that Interpol withdraw its red notices on
Iranian suspects. The former head of Interpol, Roland Noble, said that he was
shocked to hear about this aspect of the alleged deal, and categorically denied
any knowledge of it. (He even went so far as to produce earlier correspondence
with Timerman, in which the two clearly agreed that the red notices had to
remain in place.) State news agencies batted away the accusation that Argentina
would barter for Iranian oil; the country needed refined, not crude, oil, which
Iran couldn’t provide. There were other questions about the legitimacy of
Nisman’s charges. He did not have the support of the local Jewish community,
and he had circumvented the judge who had long presided over the AMIA case.
Horacio Verbitsky, the president of the country’s leading human-rights group,
the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales, pointed out to me that only two
pages of Nisman’s nearly three-hundred-page report concern the legal basis of
the criminal charges against the President, which is striking considering the
magnitude of the accusations.
The government’s erratic
response to Nisman’s death created further confusion. The journalist who first
reported the death, Damian Pachter, left Argentina for Israel last Saturday,
claiming that his life was in danger. Inscrutably, the government posted
Pachter’s flight information to its Twitter account, and said that it was
trying to protect the journalist. At this point, it’s an open question whether
this behavior is a sign of guilt or mere haplessness. Cristina Kirchner has
since accused Nisman’s assistant of being an opponent of the government, with
seemingly little basis; part of her evidence is that his brother works for a
law firm with connections to a media conglomerate that has been critical of her
administration.
More substantially, the
Kirchner government announced the dissolution of the country’s notoriously
corrupt intelligence secretariat. It’s unclear how, exactly, Kirchner intends
to reform the intelligence apparatus, when, over the past couple of years, she
has staffed its agencies with younger and more loyal officials. Eurasia Group’s
Kerner, among others, described this as a common practice for presidents
nearing the end of their terms; it’s possible that a raft of corruption cases awaits Kirchner when she
leaves office, in December. Kirchner’s move has at least temporarily assuaged
the longstanding concerns of Argentine human-rights activists about the
intelligence secretariat’s interference in the justice system. But for now, it
seems fitting that Kirchner, who’s been nursing a fractured foot, has been
making her announcements from a wheelchair.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/happened-alberto-nisman?intcid=mod-yml
