Alberto Nisman Accused Iran and Argentina of Colluding to Bury a Terrorist Attack

For Immediate Release: July 13, 2015 Press Contacts: Natalie Raabe, (212) 286-6591 Molly Erman, (212) 286-7936 Adrea Piazza, (212) 286-4255 Alberto Nisman Accused Iran and Argentina of Colluding to Bury a Terrorist Attack. Did It Get Him Killed? In the July 20, 2015, issue of The New Yorker, in “Death of a Prosecutor” (p. 38), Dexter Filkins reports from Argentina and, through in- terviews with the country’s President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and government officials, investigates the mystery surrounding the death of the prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who died soon after accusing Kirchner of striking a secret deal with the government of Iran and orchestrating a plan to scuttle the investigation of the bloodiest terrorist attack in Argentina’s history. Filkins delves into the story’s dark- est corners in search of answers to questions that for months have captivated the country. Nisman was found dead on January 18th—less than twenty-four hours before he was due in Congress to testify that Kirchner had led a criminal conspiracy to bury the case surrounding the 1994 suicide bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, the country’s largest Jewish organization. In a trash can, police found a draft of a legal request, written by Nisman and never executed, clearing the way for Kirchner’s arrest. The official autopsy ruled it a suicide, though others—including Kirchner—called it murder. “Every Argentine seemed to have an opinion about how Nisman had died; the case became the Latin-American equivalent of the J.F.K. assassination, grist for conspiracy theories involving spies and foreign countries and conniving politicians,” Filkins writes. A nationwide poll commissioned the week after Nisman’s death indicated that sev- enty per cent of those surveyed believed that he had been murdered; half said they believed the government was involved. The mystery was still dominating the news when Filkins met Kirchner in her office in Buenos Aires, two months later. “When I talked with Kirchner, she seemed unnerved by questions about Nisman’s death,” Filkins writes. When he asked Kirchner whether she’d had him killed, she blurted, “No!” and then referred him to a printout of a written statement from her Web site. According to Filkins, she seemed mostly dis- turbed by what Nisman’s death was doing to her reputation—which, she suggested, only strengthened the case that she hadn’t been involved. “Tell me, who has suffered the most with the death of prosecutor Alberto Nisman? You tell me, Sherlock Holmes.” When Filkins suggested it was she, Kirchner nodded. “Exactly. This is one of the keys.” This view is widespread in Argentina, at least among Kirchner’s supporters. “Nisman’s case wasn’t that strong,” José Manuel Ugarte, a professor of law at the University of Buenos Aires, tells Filkins. “Kirch- ner would have survived it. I think the people who did this are people who wanted to destroy her government.” Pablo Jacoby, a lawyer for a group of AMIA survivors and victims’ families, says that the question of how Nisman died is moot: “Now, even if the truth is that he committed suicide, nobody will ever believe it.” Jacoby says that, with Nisman gone, the AMIA investigation—so complex, so divisive, so old—will probably die, too. “There is no replacement for Alberto,” Jacoby says. “The whole case is in his head.” A Former Marielito Positions Himself as an Entrepreneur in the New Cuba In “Opening for Business” (p. 22), Jon Lee Anderson takes an in-depth look at the changes coming to private enterprise in Cuba—and what opportunities they may hold for Cubans and Americans alike. “To a visitor, Havana appears much the same as it has for decades––people at loose ends, distressed buildings—but there has been an explosion of small private enterprises and, with them, pockets of encouraging prosperity,” Anderson writes. For the first time since the sixties, Cu- bans are being allowed to take charge of their material lives. “Officially, Cuba’s changes are intended to bring about ‘more socialism,’ but few Cubans seem to believe that,” Anderson writes. “We’re not only making peace with the Americans,” one senior Cuban official says. “We’re changing everything. But not even those of us involved in the process know what that means yet.” Anderson looks at the story of the Cuban-American businessman Hugo Cancio, the C.E.O. of a holding company called Fuego Enterprises. After spending years cultivating connections in both countries, Cancio has become an intermediary sought after by the increasing numbers of Americans—investors, politicians, celebrities—who are going to Cuba. When potential investors come to visit, Cancio intro- duces them to local residents, as well as to businesspeople. “If you want to do business here you have to know the people and the culture,” he says. The key introductions he provides are to government officials, some of whom wield considerable authority over the economy. “As a middleman, Cancio knows that his success depends on delivering results to both the U.S. and Cuba, without prejudice,” Anderson writes. Despite excitement, American investment in Cuba remains essentially notional. Cancio says it will likely take three to five years to see real change in Cuba. But Frank Mora, the di- rector of the Latin-American studies center at Florida International University, tells Anderson it J. SEMPÉ will likely take longer than Cancio hopes. Of Cuba, he says, “The regime is overwhelmed at the moment, and there’s an element of improvisa- tion—as always with the Cubans—so they are going to go very slowly.” The model is Vietnam, not China, he said. “They fear the speed of Chi- na’s transition, and Tiananmen Square is their nightmare.” An Earthquake Will Destroy a Sizable Portion of the Coastal Northwest. The Question Is When. In “The Really Big One” (p. 52), Kathryn Schulz investigates the looming, catastrophic threat posed by a little-known American fault line: the Cascadia subduction zone, which runs for seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest—a region that is drastically unprepared for such an unprecedented natural disaster. The Cascadia subduction zone is named for the Cascade Range, a chain of volcanic mountains, and refers to the region where an oceanic plate called Juan de Fuca, ninety thousand square miles in size, is steadily slipping beneath North Amer- ica. Most Americans know just one fault line by name: the San Andreas, which is perpetually rumored to be on the verge of unleashing “the big one.” But the San Andreas’s upper limit on the seismic scale is roughly 8.2. The Cascadia-subduction-zone fault line has the potential for a much greater quake. “That’s the big one.” Schulz writes. “If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2,” and will soon be followed by a tsunami. It would be the worst natural disaster in the history of North America. Chris Goldfinger, a paleo-seismologist at Oregon State University, is one of the world’s leading experts on the Casca- dian subduction zone. “Thanks to work done by him and his colleagues, we now know that the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happen- ing in the next fifty years are roughly one in three,” Schulz writes. “The odds of the very big one are roughly one in ten. Even those numbers do not fully reflect the danger—or, more to the point, how unprepared the Pacific Northwest is to face it.” Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, tells Schulz that in the event of a full-margin rupture, “Our op- erating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.” That area covers some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. “The time to save people from a tsunamis before it happens, but the region has not yet taken serious steps toward doing so,” Schulz writes. In Oregon, it has been illegal since 1995 to build hospitals, schools, firehouses, and police stations in the inundation zone, but those that are already in it can stay, and any other new construction is permissible: energy facilities, hotels, retirement homes. “These lax safety policies guarantee that many people inside the inundation zone will not get out,” Schulz writes. The devastation from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan in 2011 was the result of a discrepancy between what the best science predicted and what the region was prepared to withstand. The same would hold true in the Pacific Northwest—but here the discrepancy is enormous. “The gap between what we know and what we should do about it is get- ting bigger and bigger, and the action really needs to turn to responding,” Goldfinger says. “Otherwise, we’re going to be hammered.” A California Town and Its Name In “The Actual Hollister” (p. 30), Dave Eggers travels to Hollister, California, a town that has a fraught relationship with Abercrombie & Fitch—the parent company of the brand that shares its name. Most of Abercrombie & Fitch’s brands have had fictional backstories, which were conceived by Mike Jeffries, the company’s former C.E.O. The company claims to have pulled the name Hollister, which it gave to a family of adventurers who eventually settled in Laguna Beach, out of thin air, so any connection between the brand and the town of thirty-six thousand, located about two hours south of San Francisco, is just coincidental.

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