Accomplice to an Assassination?

On July 13, 1989, three Iranian Kurds were shot to death gangland-style in Vienna. Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, the exiled leader of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), and his colleagues, Abdullah Ghaderi Azar and Fadhil Rassoul, were lured into an ambush by agents of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Iranian government had agreed to enter into negotiations with the PDKI on autonomy for Iranian Kurdistan. A team of “negotiators” had been dispatched to Vienna to meet with the Kurds and a private residence had been chosen as meeting place. It was during one of the ostensible negotiating sessions that the three men would be killed. The gunmen appear to have been let into the apartment by one of the Iranian “negotiators.”

Sixteen years later, in May 2005, an Iranian exile would meet with the Austrian Green Party MP Peter Pilz at the home of former Iranian President Abolhassan Banisadr in Versailles, France. The exile – known to this day simply as “witness D” – would come forward with a startling claim: one of the members of the commando that carried out the hit on Ghassemlou and his colleagues in 1989 was a young Pasdaran by the name of… Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. At the time, in May 2005, Ahmadinejad was a candidate for the Iranian Presidency. He would be elected President for the first time the following month. According to witness D, Ahmadinejad had been part of a three-person Pasdaran “hit squad” that coordinated the operation with the three “negotiators.” Ahmadinejad’s role had been to obtain the weapons and to serve as a “back-up.” He is supposed to have been at the scene of the crime at the time of the murders and, according to some reconstructions, he may have helped one of the killers to escape on a motorcycle purchased by the Iranians especially for the occasion. (For further details and an interview with “witness D,” see below.)

How seriously can witness D’s account be taken? Well, it should be noted that the witness is not only anonymous, but his claims are strictly based on hearsay. He says that he was told about the Vienna operation by one Nasser Taghipoor: another member of the hit squad, who, according to D, would go on to become a high-ranking officer in the Pasdaran. The Iranian Foreign Ministry, in any case, would dismiss the reports as “ridiculous and unfounded,” attributing them to the influence of “Zionist circles.”

Now, however, Peter Pilz has published what he claims is evidence corroborating D’s accusations against Ahmadinejad. The evidence consists of the transcript of a deposition given by a German arms-trafficker to Italian prosecutor Francesco Mandoi and three Austrian officials in the prison of Trieste in April 2006. The arms-trafficker’s full name has been redacted. Only the first initial, S, is visible. He begins his deposition thus:

I would like to cooperate with the investigation.

I am prepared to make my contribution to justice and I would like to respond to the questions that you will ask me concerning the murder in Vienna, about which I already spoke to you in a previous interview.

S claims that he cooperated with the Iranian secret service (presumably, the VEVAK) from 1989 to 1993. He says that he provided the weapons for the 1989 Vienna hit via an Iranian agent by the name of Borhan, to whom he had been introduced by an Austrian business associate. What follows is an abridged translation of S’s account of his dealings with “Borhan” and Borhan’s colleagues, including a certain “Mohamed [sic], who would later become President of the Iranian Republic.” (The full version is available here in German on the website of Peter Pilz.)

The suggestion to meet the Iranian [Borhan] was made during a dinner. As a German – the Germans being, as is well known, close to the Iranians – I was asked if I would be prepared to supply weapons to the Bosnians, the brothers of the Iranian Muslims.

…I was given an appointment with Mr. Borhan…and the meeting took place in the Hilton Hotel in Vienna.

Borhan said he was a representative of the Iranian secret services. He assured me that the Iranians paid punctually and in cash, and he asked me to supply weapons for the brothers in the Middle East, as well as for the Bosnian brothers. He wanted light weaponry, tanks, rocket-launchers…

Toward the end of the meeting, Borhan made a precise request: he said that he needed 260-270 T80 tanks for their [the Iranians’] three armies. The job was of great interest to me, since I had learned from [a] Belorussian friend that a large quantity of practically new tanks was available at half price….

At the same time, Borhan requested weapons for the Middle East and indicated that help had to be arranged for the Bosnian Muslims.

Since I had good contacts in Yugoslavia, I assured him of my readiness to supply the tanks and to help the Muslim population of Bosnia by way of covert shipments [Decklieferungen].

…As we were leaving, he asked if I would be prepared to supply a friend of his, who likewise was a member of the secret services, with 5-10 pieces of light weaponry on short notice.

I assured him that this was no problem.

Following this meeting, I contacted various friends and at the end of June I met again with Borhan and was able to tell him the following:

a. I could deliver the weapons that they needed to Bosnia by way of the Croats. The price was that 20% of the weapons would remain in Croatia.

b. I could supply 250 almost new tanks at a discount of 30% on the original price…

c. I asked him for further information on possible shipments to the Middle East.

Borhan was very impressed by my declarations and said that he wanted to meet me again two weeks later, this time along with two of his colleagues who, he said, were more influential and important than himself.

At this second meeting, we had lunch together at the restaurant of the Hilton.

On this occasion, I assured him that I was able to supply the light weapons about which they had asked within 8 days of the order.

The third meeting took place at the Iranian embassy in the first week of July 1989. Borhan, a certain Mohamed, who would later become President of the Iranian Republic, and a certain Sahidi were present at this third meeting.

S goes on to explain that Borhan placed the order for the light weapons a few days after the second meeting and that he, S, delivered these weapons to Borhan, Sahidi, and “Mohamed” at the third meeting, which took place at the Iranian Embassy. Sahidi and “Mohamed,” he says, were “particularly interested, even thrilled or enthralled by the weapons.” S also claims that he has a photocopy of Sahidi’s diplomatic passport in his possession.

As discussed in my earlier FF report “How Holbrooke Invited Iran into Europe”, Iran did in fact provide covert arms shipments to the Bosnian Muslims and those shipments were in fact routed via Croatia, which latter retained a portion of each shipment as a “transit tax.” The obvious problem with S’s allusion to such shipments, however, is that the Bosnian War only began in 1992, three years after his alleged meetings with Borhan and Borhan’s colleagues. In light of this anomaly, S’s claims ought probably to be taken with a large grain of salt.

One thing, in any case, appears certain. The Iranian regime was behind the murder of the three Kurds in Vienna. It has indeed made a regular practice of assassinating Iranian opposition politicians in exile. In September 1992, four other members of the Iranian Kurdish opposition, including Ghassemlou’s successor, were shot dead at the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin. German investigations in connection with the Mykonos murders would conclude that no less than 33 opponents of the Iranian regime had been liquidated in Europe.

The timing of Peter Pilz’s latest revelations is presumably not accidental. The accusations against Ahmadinejad obviously take on added significance in the context of the current post-election unrest in Iran. Thus Pilz concludes his detailed exposé of the Vienna murders as follows:

The declarations of both witness D and the convicted arms-trafficker incriminate Ahmadinejad. Their statements complement one another without any contradictions. Mohamed Ahmadinejad was a member of the hit squad and as such he was directly involved in the murders.

I do not know if he fired a gun himself. All I know is that the Iranian President was there: he obtained the weapons in the Embassy and he brought them to the scene of the crime.

The political lessons are clear. We must:

• restart the investigations [into the murders]
• investigate the role of the Iranian Embassy as a terror hub
• prepare new indictments
• and above all: [we must] support the opposition against the murderous regime of Ahmadinejad.

But, regrettably, the political lessons of the 1989 Vienna murders are by no means as clear as Peter Pilz suggests. It should be recalled that if Ahmadinejad was in fact somehow involved in carrying out the hit on the three Kurds, he will have been so as a relatively low-level Pasdaran operative at the time. The order to liquidate the three men, as Pilz himself has maintained, must have come from the political leadership in Tehran. As it happens, the Prime Minister of Iran at the time was none other than Mir-Hossein Mousavi. (According to Pilz, the order was issued already in fall 1988. The post of prime minister would be eliminated one month after the murders, in August 1989, as the result of a constitutional reform.) Indeed, according to Pilz citing “witness D,” the order to liquidate the men was given more precisely by Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani: the then Chairman of the Iranian Majlis and the current sponsor of Mir-Hossein Mousavi and his “green revolution.”

*   *   *   *   *   *   *

SUPPLEMENT

AN INTERVIEW WITH “WITNESS D”

BY GEORG HOFFMANN-OSTENHOF

On July 13, 1989, a frantic get-away is taking place out front an apartment house at 5 Linke Bahngasse in Vienna. In an article for the Austrian weekly profil, the journalists Sibylle Hamann und Martin Staudinger reconstruct the scene:

A secret agent has been shot and he is dragged by two other men between two parked cars. He is bleeding from multiple wounds. A man on a motorcycle pulls up beside them. All four are members of an Iranian terror commando that has left behind a blood bath in a two-room apartment on the fourth floor of the building and is now making its get-away. After a brief exchange of words, the man on the motorcycle steps on the gas, speeding away with one of the perpetrators.

Three men lie dead in the apartment: Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, leader of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), and his two associates Abdullah Ghaderi Azar and Fadhil Rassoul. The three had been lured into an ambush under the pretense of conducting negotiations with representatives of the Iranian government.

Some sixteen years later in summer 2005, one “witness D,” an Iranian in exile in France, would charge that the man on the motorcycle that day was none other than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In July 2005, Georg Hoffmann-Ostenhof of profil spoke with witness D by telephone.

- John Rosenthal

The Iranian journalist D is standing in a telephone booth someplace in France when profil calls. D has recently fled Iran and he does not want to give away his identity. He is scared. Shortly before dying under mysterious circumstances, an officer of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, or Pasdaran, by the name of Nasser Taghipoor made an explosive revelation to him: Taghipoor is supposed to have admitted that he was himself a member of the terror commando that in July 1989 shot to death the Iranian Kurdish leader, Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, and two other Kurds in Vienna. The recently elected Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Taghipoor is supposed to have told D, was also a member of the commando. On May 20 [2005], the Green member of the Austrian parliament, Peter Pilz, had a long talk with D. At this point, Ahmadinejad was already a candidate for the Iranian Presidency, but he hardly figured among the favorites. His name, according to Pilz, turned up “only on the margins” of the conversation. How credible is D? How plausible are his claims? This is what profil wanted to find out in speaking with him.

profil: How did it come to pass that Nasser Taghipoor spoke to you about the hit-team’s action in Vienna?

D: I knew Taghipoor since the mid-1990s. He was a friend of the family. He followed my career: where I studied, how I became a journalist. We were genuinely close. We met casually once or twice a month and discussed all sorts of current subjects.

profil: Did you already discuss controversial topics?

D: For a very long time, Taghipoor was loyal to the government. We often had disagreements. He was very active in the Revolutionary Guard, the Pasdaran, from the time of their founding. The values that led to the Revolution were extremely important for him.

profil: What was Taghipoor’s position?

D: When the Pasdaran were founded, they did not yet have any definite organizational structure. They came into being in the revolution against the Shah. The people took up arms. At the beginning, there was no such thing as a career as an officer. When the organization was formalized, he became a colonel and he was active in the Al-Quds unit, which was responsible for obtaining and securing intelligence and other activities.

profil: What was his rank when he related to you the story about the murder of the Kurds?

D: He was a Sardar. That is an Islamic rank: something like a general.

profil: Did he have contact with the country’s political leadership?

D: He was a good friend of the son of former President Hashemi Rafsanjani.

profil: What was the son’s name?

D: Jazer Rafsanjani.

profil: What was his position?

D: He did not have any particular rank. He worked in his father’s office when the latter was President.

profil: When did Taghipoor tell you about the murder in Vienna?

D: In 1380 by the Iranian calendar – so, about three and a half years ago.

profil: Why do you think he told specifically you, rather than someone else, about it?

D: I asked him precisely this question at the time and he gave me two reasons: “Firstly, since I know you from childhood. I trust you. Secondly, because you are a journalist. If the information should ever be published, you will know when and where, since you know the field.”

profil: Where did the conversation take place and under what circumstances?

D: I lived near his place of work. He called me. He wanted to speak to me. I asked him if I should come directly to his office. He said no, that I should come instead to his parents’ house. So, it was there that we met, after ten PM. At first, he talked about all sorts of subjects for over an hour. I noticed that he was somewhat tense. Then I asked him what he wanted to tell me: he surely did not invite me over just to have a chat. That’s right, he said, he wanted to make a sort of deposition to me: “I’m expecting an assignment and I’ll have to go on a trip. If I come back, then you have to promise to forget everything that you are going to hear. But if anything happens to me, then you may publish the information.” And then he said: “If you do what I tell you, then you’ll have no problems.”

profil: And then he told you the story about the murder. Why? Did he want to hurt somebody? Did he want to get it off his chest?

D: I didn’t know myself why he told me. It was only later that I understood what he was aiming at. I think he had come to the conclusion that the regime was instrumentalizing the Pasdaran and the Al-Quds special unit for which he was responsible. He felt somehow that he had been fooled.

profil: How?

D: The chief purpose of Al Quds was originally to support liberation movements throughout the world. But the unit had moved further and further away from its original aims and had become an instrument used to eliminate opponents of the regime.

profil: And he played along.

D: The leadership had begun to enrich itself. They had money at their disposal, which they diverted for personal ends.

profil: At the time of your conversation, was Taghipoor convinced that it had been right to commit the murder in Vienna.

D: I don’t think so. He certainly felt remorse. Otherwise, he would not have told me about it.

profil: What was the assignment about which he was worried?

D: The Pasdaran also participated in development projects: out of a kind of populism. In light of his qualifications, he was extremely surprised that he would be deployed for such a development project. And he was clearly afraid. A short while later, what he was afraid of in fact occurred. He was found drowned in the south of Iran: after having gone diving in the Karun River, it was said.

profil: Did he explicitly say that Ahmadinejad participated in the commando action in Vienna?

D: He mentioned him several times.

profil: You submitted a written report to the former Iranian President [Abolhassan] Bani Sadr, who now lives in exile in Paris as an opponent of the regime. But Ahmadinejad did not appear in it?

D: That was a general report and I had agreed with Bani Sadr not to name names.

profil: But there are names named in the report.

D: Only those that were already known. There were other persons whom I did not mention, in order to avoid giving my identity away.

profil: When did you write the report?

D: The first report I wrote when I was still in Iran, not here in France. It was on the hard drive of my computer and it was then seized by the government. The report on the hard drive was encoded.

profil: After your home was searched in Tehran, you fled Iran. When was that?

D: I do not want to give you an exact date. Let’s say: less than a year ago.

profil: And how did you then come in contact with Bani Sadr?

D: Before I came to Paris, I did not know him personally. But I knew some things about him. And at first I did not tell him anything about the Vienna affair. It was only after there had developed a certain trust between us that I gave him my report.

profil: As you were writing your report, did you know that Ahmadinejad was a candidate for the Presidency?

D: When I wrote the report on my computer in Iran, I did not yet know that. Later, when I was with Bani Sadr, I did.

profil: What role did Ahmadinejad play in Vienna?

D: He was a kind of backup. If something should happen to one of the commando members, he would have been the replacement. But he was not needed.

profil: But he was there at the scene.

D: He waited in front of the building.

profil: In 1989, what position did Ahmadinejad have in the Pasdaran?

D: At the time, there were no ranks in the Pasdaran or in Al Quds. They were only introduced later. I’m not exactly sure when. Please hurry. I have to hang up soon.

profil: Just a couple of more questions. The commando in Vienna consisted of how many people?

D: There was a team of negotiators and a hit squad. Ahmadinejad was the link between the Iranian Embassy in Vienna and the hit squad. It was also his job to supply the weapons. He brought them from the Embassy to the house where the murders took place.

profil: How many people were there in the hit squad? Various sources now claim that in addition to this group and the negotiating team, there was also a third unit.

D: Counting Ahmadinejad as the backup, there were three people in the hit squad. One cannot speak of a third unit. There were other people – who supplemented the hit squad. If the latter had failed, they would have jumped in.

profil: In your report, you write that the two who pulled the triggers had traveled to Austria from Abu Dhabi under assumed names. How did Ahmadinejad enter the country?

D: With a diplomatic passport.

profil: Using his real name?

D: I don’t know.

profil: A personal question: you don’t want to reveal your identity. Why not?

D: I do not want to put my family in Iran in danger. And I have an uneasy feeling. I am also living in danger. I have gotten support here in France. But I have to watch out that nothing happens to me.

profil: Are you prepared to give a deposition to Austrian investigators?

D: Yes, on the condition that my identity not be revealed.

profil: Have you already been contacted by Austrian officials.

D: Yes, by the Ministry of the Interior.

Georg Hoffmann-Ostenhof’s interview with “witness D” first appeared in the Austrian weekly profil in July 2005. The original German version can be consulted here. The English translation is by John Rosenthal.