Iran and a Suspicious Flight to Argentina

Iran and a Suspicious Flight to Argentina

Wall Street Journal-July 17th 2022

The Argentine treasury, strapped for cash, is lobbying hard in Washington for a new half-billion-dollar loan from the Inter-American Development Bank.

Argentina’s lousy debt-service record, as discussed in this space last week, is one reason not to turn over the money. A second, and perhaps greater, reason has to do with a Venezuelan-flagged plane parked on the tarmac at Buenos Aires’s Ezeiza International airport since June 8. The aircraft, whose Iranian operator is subject to U.S. sanctions, was allowed to land at Ezeiza by Argentine aviation authorities on June 6 with a crew of 14 Venezuelans and five Iranians, including at least one senior Tehran official.

The jet has since been seized by order of an Argentine federal judge, who also has ordered the passports of the crew withheld. But those developments came to pass only because some in Argentine law enforcement and the country’s Congress have resisted attempts by the Federal Intelligence Agency to sweep the episode under the rug.

A still-unfolding investigation by an independent Argentine prosecutor into the plane, its passengers and contents suggest that something suspicious was afoot. Gerardo Milman, a former head of criminal intelligence at the Ministry of Security and now an opposition congressman, filed the complaint that triggered the investigation.

Mr. Milman suspects, according to La Nación, that the flight “had the objective of supplying technological equipment to a ‘cyber-intelligence operations base’ to settle in [Argentina] with Venezuelan agents.”

That’s not surprising, since Venezuela, Cuba, Russia and Iran have been working to penetrate democracies in the region for decades. More unsettling are Mr. Milman’s questions about what the government of President Alberto Fernández and Vice President Cristina Kirchner may have known about the Venezuelans and Iranians on the plane.

The flight, carrying auto parts, originated in Mexico but stopped in Caracas, where it seems to have picked up two passengers. The plane stayed parked at Ezeiza for two days. But “unsure whether it was Venezuelan or Iranian, local jet fuel providers feared U.S. sanctions and refused to resupply it,” Emanuele Ottolenghi, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, explained in the Dispatch on July 6. An effort to refuel in Uruguay was thwarted when that country denied entry to its airspace. The aircraft returned to Ezeiza.