By Larry Rohter New York Times Service July 22, 2002

BUENOS AIRES – The Iranian government organized and carried out the bombing of a Jewish community center here eight years ago that killed 85 people, and then paid Argentina’s president at the time, Carlos Saul Menem, $10 million to cover it up, a witness in the case says in sealed testimony.

A 100-page transcript of the secret deposition, provided to The New York Times by Argentine officials frustrated that the case remains unsolved, supports long-held suspicions of Iranian involvement and adds to the questions surrounding the conduct of an inquiry that from the start has been rife with irregularities.

Evidence has disappeared, leads have been ignored and witnesses have been threatened and apparently bribed.

Through intermediaries, Menem declined a request for an interview to discuss the case.

According to the witness, a high-level defector from Iran’s intelligence agency who gave his name as Abdolghassem Mesbahi, Menem benefited for years from his ties to Iranian intelligence officials.

They courted him as a valuable contact, he said, for his combination of rising political power, Muslim ancestry and connections to Argentina’s small but influential Syrian-Lebanese community.

Menem, who was president from 1989 to 1999 and who is once again a leading candidate for president, already has been tainted by political corruption scandals and spent six months under house arrest last year on charges that he had overseen an illegal arms smuggling operation while in office.

But the bombing of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Association on July 18, 1994, the worst terror attack ever carried out here, continues to haunt him and all levels of the Argentine government as a symbol of the absence of accountability that in recent months has brought this country to the brink of collapse.

Alberto Kohan, Menem’s former chief of staff and now an important campaign advisor, suggested that the accusations were politically motivated and denied any official cover-up.

”Every intelligence agency in the world had free passage in Argentina to investigate this case,” Kohan said. “We did everything that the courts asked for. There are people in custody, there is a trial and there is an inquiry under way. We would all like to know who did it. President Menem was totally clear about that at the time.”

Iranian officials in Tehran have denied involvement in the bombing. Officials at the Iranian Embassy here declined to discuss the case by telephone and did not respond to a faxed request for comment.

Mesbahi, the Iranian defector who provided the testimony, met with Argentine investigators in Germany in 1998 and again in Mexico in 2000, speaking at various times in Persian, English, German and French, with a Spanish-language translator present. Argentine officials say that they are not sure of his whereabouts, except that he remains under Germany’s protection and that they do not know if the name he gave is his real name.

Argentine and German officials describe him as a senior operative who provided valuable information about Iranian terrorist operations in Europe and Asia through the mid-1990s. He defected to Germany in 1996, reportedly because he was upset at his agency’s involvement in the killing of dissident intellectuals in Iran and abroad.

Mesbahi said planning for the attack began in 1992, led by Mohsen Rabbani, cultural attaché at the Iranian Embassy at the time, and supervised by Hamid Naghashan, a senior official of the Iranian intelligence agency.

One cell focused on ”cooperating with members of the Argentine police, corrupting them or threatening them to collaborate with the attack,” Mesbahi said, according to the transcript. ”Another devoted itself to obtaining the explosives” in Brazil, he said.

Nilda Garré, who led the Argentine government’s anti-terrorism unit in 2000 and 2001, and other Argentine officials said Mesbahi’s account had been confirmed by another Iranian who visited the Argentine Embassy in Tehran twice.

Immigration and Foreign Ministry records here confirm, the officials said, that several Iranians who were said to have been involved in the plot visited Argentina in the months preceding the bomb attack.

Mesbahi said that after the attack, negotiations took place in Tehran with an emissary, a bearded man of about 50, sent by Menem.

The result was that ”$10 million was deposited into a numbered account that Menem had indicated,” Mesbahi said, paid from a $200 million Swiss account controlled by Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was Iran’s president at the time and a son of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

In return, Mesbahi said, Menem agreed to “make declarations that there was no evidence against Iran that it was responsible.”

The Menem government initially blamed Iran, but the cumulative effect of later statements, arguing that there was insufficient proof, has been to sow uncertainty about responsibility for the bombing.

Early this year the Swiss government acknowledged that it had been asked to look into information supplied by the Iranian informant. Eamon Mullen, the Argentine government’s chief prosecutor in the case, said in an interview that investigators had confirmed that a deposit had been made into an account controlled by Menem at the bank named by Mesbahi and in the amount he had specified.

”But it is not known who made the deposit or on what date,” Mullen said, leaving open the possibility that the payment had been for other acts of corruption of which Menem has been accused or from some other source.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 24th, 2002 and is filed under history.