A year and a half ago, I talked to Alberto Nisman, the Argentine special prosecutor whose mysterious death has made international headlines.
I didn’t know Nisman, but I knew the case he was investigating: the terrorist bombing that killed 85 people at a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994.
As a foreign correspondent, I had done a lot of reporting on the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in the history of the hemisphere. I interviewed survivors, investigators, diplomats, spies and shady characters from Latin America, the U.S. and the Middle East about an investigation plagued by corruption and cover-ups. Years later, I had watched from afar when Nisman succeeded in indicting Iranian officials and Hezbollah terrorists and securing Interpol warrants for them.
Nisman’s startling death last month left Argentina, a country for which I have great fondness, in turmoil. Sadly, that’s not unusual. The history of Argentina, and much of Latin America, is a chronicle of skullduggery: assassinations, massacres, scandals, frame-ups, convenient “accidents,” staged “suicides.” The Nisman case grows out of a labyrinth of lies and intrigue where almost everything seems possible except establishing facts, and almost nothing is what it seems.
Describing the elusive, chaotic reality of a South American nation, a U.S. law enforcement chief once told me: “The lights are going out in the house of mirrors.”
Although he wasn’t talking about Argentina, the image applies.
In the summer of 2013, I interviewed Nisman by phone and email. I agreed to meet him in Washington, D.C., where a congressional committee had invited him to testify about Iran’s spy network in Latin America and its alleged role in a plot to bomb John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. At the last minute, though, the Argentine government blocked his trip. President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner had agreed months earlier with Iranian leaders to set up a joint “truth commission” about the case, part of a geopolitical shift toward Iran and Venezuela.
Nisman and many others feared his own government intended to scuttle his prosecution.In an email to me on July 10, 2013, he wrote:”I followed the [Congressional] hearing on the web and I was very sorry I couldn’t be there.”
His troubles got worse. Last December, the government fired a powerful spy chief who was Nisman’s lead investigator. The prosecutor retaliated with a bombshell: He accused the president, her foreign minister and other political figures of conspiring to absolve the accused Iranians in exchange for commercial deals. Iranian diplomat Mohsen Rabbani, a top suspect in the 1994 attack, participated in secret talks, according to Nisman’s criminal complaint.
Argentine spies “negotiated with Mohsen Rabbani,” an indignant Nisman said in a television interview on Jan. 14. “Not just with the state that protects the terrorists, but also with the terrorists.”
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Dos Santos wore sunglasses propped on his head and acted skittish. He stuck to his new story. He said he wasn’t a spy and didn’t know any terrorists. The timing of his visit to the consulates was pure luck 2013 a “bingo.”
“I’m a fool,” he said. “If I were smart, I wouldn’t have made up this story.”
As he talked, I remembered the anguish of Luis Czyzewski, the father of an AMIA victim. Paula Czyzewski, a diminutive 21-year-old, was in the lobby when the explosion destroyed the community center and killed her at close range. Her mother survived because, at the moment of the blast, she had walked to the far end of the building to send a fax.
Czyzewski was a gentle, dignified man with combed-back gray hair and haunted blue eyes. In 1998, he had traveled to Brazil to see Dos Santos testify before Argentine prosecutors at a special hearing. As Czyzewski watched, he broke down in tears.
“For the first time, I had the sensation that I was seeing a person who could have participated in my daughter’s death,” he told me. “More than an interrogation, it was like a circus act. He overwhelmed himself with his own lies.”
The Nisman case inspires a similar mix of sadness, disgust and frustration. Argentines have been overwhelmed by lies over the years. No matter what the investigation of his death concludes, a lot of people probably won’t believe it.
The prosecutor has become another victim of a massacre that remains shamefully unsolved. Another victim of a labyrinth that leads not to justice, but to new labyrinths.
Related coverage: Read Sebastian Rotella’s investigation with PBS Frontline and The New York Times into failed intelligence before the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks.
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