Iran's Deadly Ambition (17 page)

Practical considerations also abounded. By the mid-2000s, Western economic sanctions—levied against the Islamic Republic by the United States and its allies in Europe—had begun to bite. The economic dislocation caused by this pressure prompted the Iranian regime to pursue a peripheral strategy and engage potential allies beyond its immediate geopolitical neighborhood in a bid to rally international support and blunt the impact of sanctions. And Latin America, with its sympathetic leftist governments and vast ungoverned spaces, seemed like a target of opportunity.

The result was an ideological meeting of the minds. As Chávez himself described it in 2006, “two revolutions are now joining hands.” The two sides, according to the Venezuelan strongman, were “the Persian people, warriors of the Middle East” and “the sons of Simon Bolivar, warriors of the Caribbean.”
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A year later, in a public affirmation of their alignment, Chávez and Ahmadinejad jointly declared the formation of an “axis of unity” between Venezuela and Iran. The goal of this partnership was clear: “to defeat the imperialism of North America.”
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The synergy was more than simply rhetorical. By the late 2000s, the two had forged a formidable strategic partnership—one that included cooperation on an array of licit and illicit ventures.

Venezuela, for instance, assumed a key role in Iran’s efforts to circumvent the international sanctions levied against it over its nuclear activities. In 2009, the two sides inaugurated a binational investment bank to facilitate their economic cooperation. This was followed by the establishment of a wholly Iranian-owned financial institution, the Banco Internacional de Desarrollo, in Venezuela, where it operated
largely beyond the reach of U.S. sanctions. Through this vehicle, Tehran could “circumvent financial sanctions imposed by the United States, the European Union and the United Nations through the use of the Venezuelan financial system,” according to one expert.
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The Chávez regime likewise became a military partner for the Islamic Republic. Pursuant to an April 2008 Memorandum of Understanding on military cooperation, the two established numerous joint defense-industrial projects on Venezuelan soil. These efforts included collaboration between Venezuela’s official weapons maker, the Compañía Anónima Venezolana de Industrias Militares (CAVIM), and various Iranian entities.
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Caracas and Tehran joined hands and helped other rogues as well. In 2008, Western intelligence sources determined that Venezuela helped Iran supply missile components to the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
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Iran, for its part, became an exporter of drone technology to Venezuela, boosting Chávez’s efforts to create an indigenous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) program.
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It also expanded its paramilitary presence in Venezuela: the Pentagon’s 2010 report on Iranian military power noted that the IRGC’s Quds Force exhibited “an increased presence in Latin America, particularly Venezuela.”
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This took the form of Iranian military advisors, who were embedded with the Venezuelan military, and a training camp run by the IRGC near Venezuela’s border with Colombia, which served as a platform to train assorted Mideast radicals.
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Iran’s influence, in turn, rubbed off on Venezuela’s military, which was restructured along asymmetric lines.
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As a corollary, Venezuela also became a major hub for Iran’s chief terrorist proxy, Hezbollah. In 2008, the Bush administration directly accused the Chávez regime of serving as a safe haven for and financial supporter of the Lebanese militia. That year, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign
Assets Control (OFAC) formally listed two people, one of them a Venezuelan diplomat, as Specially Designated Individuals for assisting the group. In making the designations, Adam Szubin, OFAC’s director of political affairs, specifically referred to “the government of Venezuela employing and providing safe harbor for Hezbollah facilitators and fundraisers.”
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Indeed, Hezbollah is known to use Venezuela’s free trade zone of Margarita Island as a major financing and fund-raising center and to base support cells there.
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The organization has also been accused of training Venezuelan militants in south Lebanon for possible attacks on American soil and operating training camps inside Venezuela itself, with the collusion of sympathetic government officials.
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Economic ties also ballooned, underpinned by hundreds of bilateral cooperation accords and joint projects. Many of these ventures were bizarre, wasteful, or downright suspicious, ranging from tractor plants to bicycle factories to milk-processing facilities—leading many analysts in the West to conclude, with some merit, that they were simply cover for more covert and nefarious strategic cooperation.

But perhaps Venezuela’s most significant contribution to the Iranian cause was its role as a gateway, providing the Islamic Republic with both legitimacy and entry into the Americas.

BEYOND CARACAS

On March 5, 2013, Hugo Chávez finally succumbed to an aggressive form of cancer. Chávez had been sick for years, and Latin America watchers in Washington and elsewhere had closely watched his deteriorating health and medical care, complete with treatments in foreign locales such as Havana, Cuba. But the extent of Chávez’s illness, and its impact on the Venezuelan strongman’s ability to govern, was a closely guarded secret in Caracas, known only to his inner circle and to a select few allies of his “Bolivarian revolution.”

Iran was among them. Almost certainly, the Islamic Republic had a better awareness and understanding of the health of Venezuela’s leader than did Western intelligence agencies. And as a result, Iran moved early and robustly to broaden its footprint in Latin America.

Practically from the start of contacts between Caracas and Tehran, Iran viewed its relationship with Venezuela as a vehicle by which to expand its geopolitical presence in the Americas. And, thanks to active assistance from Chávez, Iran succeeded in creating “an extensive regional network of economic, diplomatic, industrial and commercial activities” in Central and South America before Chávez’s death.
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To date, the Iranian regime is estimated to have signed approximately 500 cooperative agreements with regional governments, many of them economic in nature. But, with the notable exception of those concluded with Venezuela, the vast majority of these commitments have yet to materialize. Nevertheless, Iran’s overall trade with the region has grown considerably. Between 2000 and 2005, it averaged approximately $1.33 billion annually. As of 2012, the figure had more than doubled, to $3.67 billion.
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Today, that figure is estimated to be significantly lower, owing to Venezuela’s economic implosion under the reign of Nicolás Maduro, but Iran’s trade is expected to rebound as Venezuela’s fortunes improve.

Politically, in the past decade, Iran’s diplomatic footprint in the Americas has significantly broadened. In 2005, Iran had only five embassies in all of Central and South America. By 2012, that number had more than doubled, to eleven.
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Today, Iran boasts an official diplomatic presence in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

Iran has also launched a major public diplomacy offensive designed to win the “hearts and minds” of the regional populace. In early 2012, on the heels of what became
known as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s “tour of tyrants,” during which the Iranian firebrand visited Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Ecuador, the Islamic Republic launched a dedicated Spanish-language television channel known as HispanTV.
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Funded by the Iranian government’s official corporation Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), it broadcasts out of Tehran to fourteen countries in the region.
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The goal, according to Iranian officials, is to broaden the Iranian regime’s “ideological legitimacy” among friendly governments in the region—and to diminish the influence of “dominance seekers,” a thinly veiled reference to the United States.
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Perhaps most significantly, Iran has engaged in extensive cultural contacts throughout the region. It has done so via more than a dozen formal cultural centers throughout South and Central America, as well as through outreach to the various indigenous populations that represent important bases of political support for regional leaders, such as Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, and Peru’s Ollanta Humala.
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These contacts, and concurrent proselytization activities (known as
dawah
), are carried out through a network of informal ambassadors operating in the region—a network that was trained and nurtured by Mohsen Rabbani, a former Iranian cultural attaché to Argentina who is known to have masterminded the 1994 attack by the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA).
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This activity was mapped out in detail by the Pentagon in its 2010 report to Congress on Iran’s military power, which noted that the Quds Force, the elite paramilitary unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, was now deeply involved in the Americas, stationing “operatives in foreign embassies, charities and religious/cultural institutions to foster relationships with people, often building on existing socio-economic ties with the well-established Shia Diaspora,” and even carrying out “paramilitary
operations to support extremists and destabilize unfriendly regimes.”
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Yet it is with two of Venezuela’s fellow “Bolivarian” nations that Tehran has made the most substantial inroads.

COURTING LA PAZ AND QUITO

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made his inaugural trek to Bolivia’s remote capital, La Paz, in September 2007, activating contacts made possible by Venezuela’s patronage. On that occasion, Ahmadinejad and Bolivian president Evo Morales signed a cooperation agreement worth an estimated $1.1 billion, under which Iran pledged a half-decade of investment in Bolivian natural gas facilities, agriculture, and humanitarian programs.
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This was followed, a year later, by Iran’s formal opening of an embassy in La Paz and Bolivia’s highly symbolic transfer of its Middle Eastern diplomatic mission from Egypt to Iran.
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Since that time, contacts between Tehran and La Paz have deepened dramatically. Bolivia appears to be a significant source of strategic resources for the Islamic Republic. As of 2012, Iran was believed to have begun uranium exploration in no fewer than eleven locations in the east of the country.
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Iran has also become a partner in developing Bolivia’s reserves of lithium, a key strategic mineral with applications for nuclear weapons development, pursuant to a formal agreement signed with the Morales government in 2010.
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Iran is seeking at least two other minerals utilized in nuclear work and the production of ballistic missiles: tantalum and thorium.
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In September 2012, for example, Bolivian police seized two tons of what was suspected to be uranium ore destined for Iran’s nuclear program.
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The shipment was later ascertained to be tantalite, the primary source of tantalum.

Iran likewise is exploiting Bolivia’s largely unregulated political climate, leveraging quiet official support from the government
of Evo Morales, to establish a significant asymmetric presence in the country. The ALBA regional defense school outside Santa Cruz, Bolivia, may be the most striking example of this paramilitary presence, but it is hardly the only one. Indeed, as of 2012, regional officials were estimating between 50 and 300 Iranian trainers were present in Bolivia alone.
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Commercially, Iran’s interest in Bolivia is reflected by surging bilateral trade. Iran has also offered hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to the Bolivian government
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and potential sales of warplanes and helicopters to the Bolivian military.
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And while none of these ventures have yet materialized, it is clear that Tehran sees Bolivia and its populist leader, Evo Morales, as an indispensable regional partner and ally against the injustice of “colonial governments,” chief among them, the United States.
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In tandem with its outreach to Bolivia, Tehran has also set its sights on Ecuador. Like its contacts with the government of Evo Morales, Iran’s ties to the Ecuadorian government are comparatively new, dating back only to the election of Rafael Correa to the Ecuadorian presidency in 2007. However, in the short time since, Correa’s regime has begun to emerge as an important regional partner for the Islamic Republic, and for good reason. Ecuador’s membership in OPEC, participation in the ALBA bloc, dollarized economy, and lax immigration controls all make it an attractive partner. So, too, does the prominent role Correa hopes to play in the region—particularly in the wake of Chávez’s passing.

Cooperation between the two countries remains largely aspirational, however. Despite warm diplomatic ties and a slew of bilateral agreements signed in recent years, Tehran and Quito have not meaningfully expanded their formal relationship over the past ten years. Trade, too, remains minimal.
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Yet, political interest in a broader partnership is clearly present.

Such cooperation is likely to be buoyed by the state of political debate in Ecuador itself. Correa, who handily won reelection in the spring of 2013, enjoys tremendous domestic popularity because of his efforts to alleviate poverty and improve the standard of living, particularly among the poor, through subsidies and social programs. These initiatives have earned him both the goodwill of the Ecuadorian masses and a great deal of latitude on the foreign-policy front—freedom that could allow Correa to rapidly operationalize his country’s relationship with Iran, using the legal infrastructure that already is being laid via bilateral agreements in various sectors, particularly banking and mining.