BUENOS AIRES — Intercepted conversations between representatives of the Iranian and Argentine governments point to a long pattern of secret negotiations to reach a deal in which Argentina would receive oil in exchange for shielding Iranian officials from charges that they orchestrated the bombing of a Jewish community center in 1994.
The transcripts were made public by an Argentine judge on Tuesday night, as part of a 289-page criminal complaint written by Alberto Nisman, the special prosecutor investigating the attack. Mr. Nisman was found dead in his luxury apartment on Sunday, the night before he was to present his findings to Congress.
But the intercepted telephone conversations, if proved accurate, would describe an elaborate effort to reward Argentina for shipping food to Iran — and for seeking to derail the investigation into a terrorist attack in the Argentine capital that killed 85 people.
The deal never materialized, the complaint says, in part because Argentine officials failed to persuade Interpol to lift the arrest warrants against Iranian officials wanted in Argentina in connection with the attack.
The phone conversations are believed to have been intercepted by Argentine intelligence officials. The transcripts show a concerted effort by representatives of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s government to shift suspicions away from Iran in order to gain access to Iranian markets and to ease Argentina’s energy troubles.
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“We’re doing very well,” Ramón Héctor Bogado, who is identified in the complaint as an Argentine intelligence operative, said about the signing of the 2013 memorandum on a joint investigation into the bombing.
“We have to work calmly,” Mr. Bogado told a man identified in the complaint as go-between on the Iranian side. “We have a job to do for the next 10 years.”
But in the space of just a few months, the transcripts suggested, the mood had changed as it became clear that Interpol would not lift the arrest warrants on the Iranians.
“It looks like” Argentina’s foreign minister “messed up,” the go-between for Iran is quoted as saying in the complaint after returning from Tehran in May 2013, when it was becoming clear that Interpol would not remove the warrants.
Jonathan Gilbert reported from Buenos Aires, and Simon Romero from Rio de Janeiro. Rick Gladstone contributing reporting from New York.
