Death of a Pawn: A WMD Companion Short Story

Chapter One

Moments after the blast, residents all over Buenos Aires reported hearing a violent thunderstorm pass over the city. Except what they heard hitting their roofs wasn’t rain — it was bits of concrete and brick and glass from the Jewish Community Center, known to locals as AMIA.

Mixed in with the fragments of building materials, some residents even found tiny bits of flesh.

The blast wave caused the façade to buckle inward, making the concrete roof and floors collapse down on one another like pancakes. Those not crushed in the blast itself were buried under tons of debris. A few survivors were rescued; the rest succumbed to their injuries, suffocated, or died slowly from dehydration.

It took a full day before the smoke and dust cleared the area of the explosion and weeks before residents had cleaned their houses of the ultra-fine dust that settled on every horizontal surface as a tangible reminder of the bombing. When the official death toll was finally released, eighty-five citizens of Argentina were dead and another three hundred wounded.

The press quickly concluded that it was another terrorist bombing, with Argentina’s Jews once again the target, just like the Israeli embassy bombing two years prior. The authorities issued stern press statements about bringing the culprits behind this heinous crime to justice.

One year after the AMIA bombing, five arrests were finally made, all Argentinean nationals. In 2001, seven years after the bombing, the men were tried and found guilty.

In the trial, the prosecution hinted at a link between the men standing trial and the terrorist group Hezbollah, but every time the prosecution got close to a connection, the trail ran cold.

The Tri-Border Area was the most poorly kept secret in all of Buenos Aires. Named for the point of Argentina that thrusts up between Brazil and Paraguay, the Tri-Border Area — or TBA, as it was known — was a no-man’s land of loose laws and looser law enforcement. In this anything-goes climate, criminal organizations found safe haven, including Hezbollah.

But if the criminals in the TBA were good at anything, it was paying off politicians to enforce the status quo. And so, the investigation of the AMIA bombing went no further than the conviction of a few low-level Argentinean nationals, and the link to Hezbollah and its Iranian benefactors stayed hidden.

But one prosecutor refused to give up on the AMIA case. Alberto Nisman joined the investigation in 1997 and kept at it long after the 2001 trial. A well-respected professional, Nisman had served as a prosecuting attorney pursuing narco-trafficking, government corruption, money laundering, and international terrorism cases, and also as a law professor in both Buenos Aires and Belgrade. He came to know many survivors of the AMIA attack, and he pledged to them that he would not rest until he brought the real criminals behind the bombing to justice.

In 2004, Nisman was appointed Special Prosecutor in charge of the AMIA bombing investigation. In 2006, he formally accused the government of Iran of ordering the bombing in retaliation for Buenos Aires’s decision to suspend a nuclear technology contract with Tehran. Hezbollah, with their strong presence in the TBA, was accused of carrying out the bombing. Within a year, Interpol had placed six Iranian officials on their “red alert” list in response to Nisman’s accusations. Any of the named officials who traveled outside of Iran would be subject to arrest and extradition to Argentina for questioning in the AMIA bombing investigation.

Still, Nisman’s investigation continued — and drew closer to home, alarming many in the Buenos Aires political elite. By the end of 2014, it was rumored that Alberto Nisman was getting close to announcing a scandal that reached the highest office in the land, a level of corruption the likes of which Argentina had not seen in half a century.

A date was set for him to deliver his report to Congress: Monday, January 19, 2015.

Alberto Nisman, with his eyes set on the goal of rooting out the corruption in his own government, was blind to the fact that he was now a pawn in a game of geopolitical chess.

And he never could have guessed that his fate would be decided half a world away in a small teahouse in central Tehran.