November 11, 1996


Iran's State of Terror
A Berlin murder trial provides details of how top-ranking Iranian leaders administer a bloody international terror network
By THOMAS SANCTON

On the evening of Sept. 17, 1992, eight men gathered in the back room of Berlin's Mykonos Restaurant to discuss strategy in their struggle against the Iranian government. The diners, Kurdish activists in town for a convention of the Socialist International, were finishing up a feast of lamb and stuffed grape leaves at 11 p.m. when two men burst in wielding an automatic pistol and an Uzi machine gun. They shouted, "You sons of whores!" in Farsi, then sprayed the men, tables and walls with bullets and sped away in a blue BMW, leaving a horrific scene of sprawled bodies, spilled food and oozing blood. Iranian Kurd leader Sadegh Sharafkandi, 54, and two other men lay dead, and a third man died shortly afterward in the hospital.

The massacre bore all the hallmarks of a made-in-Tehran hit. When German police rounded up five suspects, the alleged ringleader, Kazem Darabi, turned out to be an Iranian agent. Darabi, 36, and four Lebanese co-defendants have been on trial in Berlin since October 1993. Marked by heated outbursts from the accused, sensational charges against the mullahs from a former Iranian President, and damning closed-door testimony from a mystery witness known only as "C," the trial is now heading into its final phases. Convictions and long jail terms are expected. But there is far more at stake: the evidence points directly to high-level Iranian government involvement.

Mykonos fits a pattern of Tehran-backed political violence that, according to the State Department and the CIA, has left more than 1,000 dead in 200 terrorist strikes since Islamic fundamentalists toppled the Shah in 1979. In addition to nearly 80 assassinations of Iranian dissidents abroad, the mullahs or their surrogates, like Hizballah and Hamas, are believed to have been behind dozens of major terrorist attacks around the world. Among them: the suicide bombings of U.S. and French military barracks in Beirut in 1983 (299 dead); a string of Paris bombings in September 1986 (12 dead); and attacks on the Israeli embassy and a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994 (125 dead). In the past two and a half years alone, 134 people in Israel and the Palestinian territories have died in suicide bombings carried out by Iranian-supported groups. According to U.S. and Saudi sources, Saudi officials are holding 40 suspects for the bombing that killed 19 Americans in Dhahran last June and say they have evidence implicating Iran as the instigator of the attack.

The Saudi charges, if confirmed, coincide with other recent Iranian attempts to destabilize moderate Arab states. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak claims Iran was behind a foiled assassination attempt against him last year. Last June, authorities in Bahrain announced a Tehran-backed plot to topple the Khalifa monarchy and replace it with a pro-Iranian Islamic Republic. Moreover, Tehran's adamant opposition to the Middle East peace process, its efforts to acquire nuclear arms technology, and the recent buildup of its chemical and conventional arsenals, all add up to a capacity for international troublemaking unrivaled by any other country.

Iran scoffs at the litany of charges against it. In an interview with TIME, Deputy Foreign Minister Javad Zarif called Germany's Mykonos trial a "sham" and accused the Clinton Administration of rehashing old allegations simply to boost the president's re-election chances. Iran itself is a victim of terrorism, Zarif countered, citing a CIA plan disclosed this year to destabilize the Islamic Republic, as well as bombing and assassinations laid to Iranian opposition groups.

Where terrorism is concerned, however, Iran's actions speak louder than its words. The number of Iran-backed assassinations is actually on the rise--14 so far this year, compared with five for all of 1995. Moreover, U.S. intelligence agencies and dissident groups believe that Iranian agents may be preparing to increase their firepower in future hits. Last March, Belgian authorities searched the Iranian ship Kolahdooz in the port of Antwerp. Packed in crates shipped by an Iranian food company was a specially-designed high-calibre mortar launcher with a range of more than 630 meters. The shells, containing 125 kg of TNT, had a special fuse made to detonate in mid-air and spread deadly shrapnel for hundreds of meters to maximize casualties.

If Tehran's reputation as a terrorist state is already well established, the Mykonos case provides some of the most compelling evidence to date of high-level government involvement in political assassinations. The German prosecutor's report identifies defendant Darabi as "an agent of the Iranian intelligence service VEVAK" whose assignment was to "liquidate" Sharafkandi as part of a government "persecution strategy...against the Iranian opposition." A secret report by the Bundesamt fur Verfassungsschutz, Germany's counterintelligence agency, flatly states that "a branch of the extra-territorial operations directorate in the Ministry of Intelligence of Iran was directly involved" in the Mykonos murders.

German judicial authorities are so convinced of Iranian government responsibility that the Federal Supreme Court last March took the unprecedented step of issuing an international arrest warrant for Intelligence Minister Ali Fallahian. "There is strong suspicion," states the warrant, "that the murders were directed by the Iranian Ministry for Intelligence and Security."

Fallahian, a black-bearded, 47-year-old mullah, is one of the most powerful and feared officials of the Islamic Republic. As a religious magistrate in Abadan after the 1979 revolution, his instant death sentences won him a reputation as a "hanging judge." Named Iran's Minister of Intelligence and Security in 1988, he is the man charged with eliminating the regime's enemies at home and abroad--a fact he has bragged about on Iranian TV.

Long before the German court indicted him in the Mykonos murders, Fallahian had shown a strong personal interest in the case. He lobbied to get it quashed during an October 1993 visit to Bonn for talks with German intelligence chief Bernd Schmidbauer. Schmidbauer claims that he only discussed "humanitarian" issues with his Iranian counterpart. But according to an official transcript of their talks, Fallahian specifically asked "the German side to influence the Mykonos proceedings." Schmidbauer rejected the request, saying he had no control over the judiciary.

Adamantly denying that he kow-towed to Fallahian, Schmidbauer claims that his contacts with the Iranian minister enabled him to broker an exchange of prisoners and bodies between Israel and Hizballah last July. "Nobody has done more to fight terrorism than Germany," Schmidbauer told TIME. "If we had not arrested the Mykonos people, there would have been no trial, no court revelations."

True, but those revelations may have gone further than the Bonn government bargained for. In three dramatic days of testimony in late August and early September, former Iranian President Abolhassan Banisadr took the stand in Berlin's heavily-guarded courtroom and charged that the Mykonos murder had been personally ordered "in writing" by Ayatullah Ali Khamanei, Iran's chief religious leader, and President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Banisadr said his information came from a source within the Tehran government and from two ex-Iranian intelligence officials, identified respectively as "A," "B," and "C."

Testifying behind closed doors in Berlin, the witness designated "C"--known to French and U.S. secret services as a co-founder of VEVAK--confirmed Banisadr's charges. Tehran responded with a mixture of contempt for the ex-President, and intimidation attempts aimed at the Germans. In a recent interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati sharply warned Bonn not to try to implicate the Tehran government in the murders. Anticipating possible reprisals, German intelligence has pulled at least two operatives out of Tehran and several German companies are telling their Iran-based employees to pack their bags.

A guilty verdict implicating Tehran, says a senior French diplomat, would undoubtedly have "consequences" for Franco-Iranian relations. But the French should not need a German court to persuade them that Iran engages in terrorism. A lot of it has taken place on French soil, including at least nine dissident assassinations. Iran's hand also appears to have been behind a murderous Paris bombing wave that left 12 dead and some 300 wounded in 1986. Iran's role in the bombings was never proven in a court of law, says a French Justice Ministry official, "but the organization that did it definitely had a green light from Tehran."

French courts have established Iran's link to other terrorist acts. Two years ago, six conspirators were found guilty in the 1991 assassination of former Iranian Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar in a Paris suburb. Among them was an Iranian government official convicted in absentia. "The Bakhtiar affair totally implicates Tehran," says a French judicial source familiar with the case.

Further proof emerged from the September trial of Modjtaba Mashhady and Hossein Yazdenseta, charged with plotting to kill Iranian dissidents in France. French counter-intelligence determined that Mashhady, described as "an agent of the Iranian secret services," had enlisted a hired killer to take "terrorist action against the regime's opponents." The main target was Manouchehr Ganji, a former Education Minister under the Shah who now heads an opposition group known as the Flag of Freedom.

According to the indictment, the instructions to kill the ex-minister had been handed down directly from Fallahian, who reportedly told Mashhady during a November 1989 meeting in Tehran that "Ganji had been condemned to death by an Islamic court and Rafsanjani had personally ordered the execution." Ganji received a warning from Western intelligence services and left Paris, so the killers turned to a back-up target: Cyrus Elahi, a senior official of the Flag of Freedom organization and a close friend of Ganji's. On the night of Oct. 23, 1990, Elahi was shot six times in the head in the hallway of his Paris apartment.

After a lengthy investigation by Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, Mashhady and Yazdenseta were convicted on Sept. 26 of "conspiracy to commit terrorist acts." Sentenced to seven and three years respectively (both men have appealed), they may now be tried directly in connection with Elahi's murder. "It is clear that Tehran was implicated," says a source close to the investigation. "The trail goes all the way to the Tehran Intelligence Ministry, to the close entourage of Fallahian."

Ganji, 65, who transformed a ragtag monarchist association into a democratic opposition group in the late '80s, remains a prime assassination target. Several years ago, Ganji related in an account in Der Spiegel, a Bonn-based Iranian named Ahmed Jayhooni began writing to him and offering his services in combating the Tehran regime. The suspicious Ganji refused, so Jayhooni shifted his attention to Reza Mazlouman, founder of an opposition newspaper. For three years, Jayhooni ingratiated himself with Mazlouman, providing his office with answering machines and computers. "This man is going to kill you," Ganji warned his friend. To no avail.

At 5 p.m. on May 27, 1996, Jayhooni and another Iranian knocked on Mazlouman's door in the Paris suburb of Creteil. Mazlouman was having tea with a French woman, so the two men said they would return in a couple of hours. The next morning, Mazlouman was found dead with two bullets in his chest and a shattering coup de grace under one eye. Jayhooni, a video-shop owner described by investigators as "closely linked" to the Iranian Embassy in Bonn, was arrested in Germany and extradited to France on Oct. 24. He is currently awaiting trial.

Tehran's use of its embassies to facilitate terrorist operations is illustrated by a hit that took place last February in Istanbul. The target was Zahra Rajabi, 37, a senior official of the National Council of Resistance. With its 30,000-strong Iraq-based army, fully equipped with tanks and artillery, the N.C.R. is by far the largest, most formidable Iranian opposition group and a key source of documentation on Iranian terrorism. Though still clouded by allegations about past Marxist leanings and acts of violence within Iran, the N.C.R. now claims to be committed to pluralism and democratic change. Its members are the main targets of Tehran's death squads.

In early February, shortly after Rajabi's arrival from Paris, two Iranian intelligence agents slipped into Istanbul and checked into room 506 of the Berr Hotel. They were soon joined there by diplomats from the Iranian embassy and carefully rehearsed the operation. On Feb. 20, the assassination team, using embassy-provided cellular phones to coordinate their movements, positioned themselves outside Rajabi's apartment. A three-man hit squad, led by the embassy's deputy counsel, Moshen Kargar Azad, took an elevator to the fifth floor. They then burst into the apartment where Rajabi and a fellow dissident, Abdul Ali Moradi, were staying; methodically, the killers pumped five bullets into Rajabi and then killed Moradi. Six members of the hit team were eventually arrested by Turkish police, but the Iranian planners managed to slip out of town and return safely to Tehran.

If no one can seriously doubt Tehran's responsibility for such dissident rubouts, it is more difficult to prove its direct role in other terrorist attacks. This is because most of them are farmed out to surrogate groups, like the Lebanese-based Hizballah guerrilla movement. "Hizballah is the child of Iran," says Kenneth Katzman, an Iran expert with Washington's Congressional Research Service. Iran has regularly been funding Hizballah at a level of about $100 million a year, though the stipend dropped to $60 million last year.

The radical Palestinian movement Hamas has a more complicated relationship with Iran, although it does get money (estimates range from Israel's $3 million to U.S. figures of some $20 million a year) and training from Tehran. Islamic Jihad, a radical offshoot of Hamas based in the West Bank and Gaza strip, receives a similar amount of annual funding from Tehran.

A nationalistic Sunni Muslim organization, Hamas does not take direct orders from Shi'ite Iran. But many of its more radical members are based there. According to Israeli intelligence, approximately 100 Hamas fighters have received military and terrorist instruction at Iranian bases. Example: Hamas activist Hassan Salameh, who recruited suicide bombers and built the devices used in three bus bombings in Israel last February and March, confessed to Israeli authorities that he had learned his craft during a three-month training course in Iran.

"Iran's message for Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Hizballah is the same: make terror and lots of it," says an Israeli military officer. Israeli analysts attribute a rise in terrorist activity, and an increasing tendency for Iran to become directly involved, to Tehran's determination to scuttle the Middle East peace process. Which is why the rest of the world must take the threat of Iranian terrorism very seriously--and unite against it. The failure to do so will only invite more anti-Western radicalism, more instability and more bloodshed.

With reporting by Lisa Beyer/Jerusalem, Bruce van Voorst/Bonn, Douglas Waller/Washington, with other bureaus