Obama’s Sanctions Gift to an Assassin for Iran By Hooman Bakhtiar
http://www.wsj.com/articles/obamas-sanctions-gift-to-an-assassin-for-iran-1439158939
The nuclear deal lifts sanctions on men like Anis Naccache, who tried to assassinate my great uncle.
Congress is debating whether the nuclear agreement between Iran and the great powers goes far enough to curb Tehran’s illicit activities. But equally deserving of scrutiny are the nefarious characters whose names would be removed under the deal from Western sanctions lists.
Consider Anis Naccache, the Lebanese hitman who attempted to assassinate my great uncle Shapour Bakhtiar, Iran’s last prime minister under the shah. On a sweltering July day in 1980, a hit squad of five Lebanese, Iranian and Palestinian assassins led by Mr. Naccache approached a building in the Paris suburb of Neuilly. They posed as journalists, ostensibly to interview Bakhtiar, who had arrived in Paris a year earlier to launch a political campaign against the Islamic Republic before Ayatollah Khomeini’s nascent regime could entrench itself.
Bakhtiar was renowned in Iran. A genuine liberal, he fought as a young man with the republicans in the Spanish Civil War as well as with the French Resistance against Nazi Germany before returning to his native Iran, where he emerged as a leading man of letters and an outspoken advocate of constitutional monarchy. By appointing a critic like Bakhtiar premier in the heady days of 1979, the shah had attempted to stave off the revolution that would soon sweep him from power.
After the shah was deposed, Bakhtiar called on Khomeini to return to the mosque and tend to his religious duties instead of creating a theocracy. Khomeini never forgave him, and my great uncle was soon forced into exile.
Anis Naccache’s name is synonymous with political violence. In 1975, as a lieutenant of the arch-terrorist Carlos the Jackal, he helped lead the hostage-taking of 11 OPEC oil ministers in Vienna. Four years later he put his skills at the service of Khomeini’s Islamic Republic.
But the attempt on Bakhtiar’s life went awry. Mr. Naccache and his team first killed a police officer posted in the building. But they got the wrong apartment door, shooting and killing an elderly French woman and wounding her sister. Unable to break down Bakhtiar’s door, they escaped and were confronted by more French police. In the ensuing firefight the terrorists shot another officer, paralyzing him for life. Mr. Naccache and three accomplices were convicted of murder and handed life sentences in 1982. A fifth team member received a 20-year sentence.
Iran didn’t throw in the towel. Paris was rocked by bombings in the mid-1980s, killing at least eight French citizens and injuring scores. An Iran-linked group called the Committee for Solidarity With Arab and Middle Eastern Political Prisoners claimed responsibility for many of the attacks and demanded the release of Mr. Naccache and other convicted terrorists. In Lebanon, Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, abducted 16 French nationals—mostly diplomats and journalists—in a bid to gain the release of Mr. Naccache and his accomplices.
France relented in July 1990, and Mr. Naccache and his fellow assassins were put on a plane to Tehran after a pardon by President François Mitterrand. The French hostages in Lebanon had been released in 1988, and to no one’s surprise French officials denied that any deal had been made. A different team of killers was dispatched to Paris to assassinate my great uncle in 1991, and this time they succeeded.
Today Anis Naccache describes himself as a businessman. According to a 2003 filing with Iran’s corporate registry, he serves as chairman of the board of the Bazargani Tejarat Tavanmand Saccal company. As a longtime friend of Hezbollah’s terror mastermind Imad Mughniyah—who was assassinated in 2008—Mr. Naccache also became a trusted conduit to Tehran’s terror outpost on the Mediterranean.
In 2008 the European Union determined that Mr. Naccache was linked to Iran’s nuclear-proliferation activities—identifying his association with the same Bazargani Tejarat Tavanmand Saccal firm in its designation. Brussels added him to a sanctions list due to his alleged role in Iran’s nuclear program, not his terrorist past.
Now Mr. Naccache is set to be removed from the EU sanctions list under the nuclear deal. Joining him will be numerous other Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders responsible for the deaths of many Iranian dissidents, U.S. servicemen in Iraq and civilians in Syria and elsewhere.
In their determination to cut a nuclear deal with Tehran, Washington and Brussels are rubbing salt into the wounds of the victims of Iranian terror. It is unclear how much, if any, due diligence has been conducted on the names that the mullahs insisted be removed from sanctions lists. An EU spokeswoman declined to comment on the delisting beyond confirming Mr. Naccache’s alleged illicit nuclear activities as the basis of the designation and his association with Bazargani Tejarat Tavanmand Saccal.
Mr. Naccache has remained unrepentant. Asked by Iran’s Fars News Agency in 2008 what he’d do differently, Mr. Naccache said: “There has been no change in my line of thinking. I stand by everything I have done in the past. If I had the experience I have now, I would have changed the planning of the plot to kill Bakhtiar. We were pressed for time, and we rushed to kill him, causing missteps along the way.”
There is a high price to be paid for the nuclear deal, and it includes the blood of innocents.
Mr. Bakhtiar is an Iranian-American writer in Washington, D.C.
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