July 18: Voting Rights Activists for Voter Suppression

Milei vows justice on AMIA anniversary; The Biden coup; Day Three of RNC

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The Big Story

In a short item in our June 25 edition, we mentioned a political ad by a Democratic-aligned PAC called Pennsylvania Values. Designed to look like a Trump campaign ad, the TV spot urged “MAGA Patriots” to “stand strong with President Trump against mail-in voting”—even though, in this campaign cycle, Trump has dropped his previous opposition to absentee voting and is urging his supporters to mail in their ballots. 

Yesterday, Chuck Ross of The Washington Free Beacon published a story about the PAC behind the deceptive voter-suppression ad. And—surprise of all surprises—the money behind the ad appears to come from a left-wing dark-money group. The punch line, in this case, is that this particular dark-money group is dedicated to funding “voter rights” initiatives to “activat[e] all voices in the United States.” 

As Ross reports, Pennsylvania Values, which has in the past received donations from labor unions and the relatives of Democratic politicians, entered this campaign cycle with an empty bank account, according to financial disclosures. On June 14, however, the PAC received a $50,000 donation from the Global Impact Social Welfare Fund (GISWF), a dark-money 501(c)(4) subsidiary of Global Impact, a 501(c)(3) “philanthropy advisors” organization. Two days after receiving the donation, Pennsylvania Values cut a $48,000 check for the ad in question. Trump’s lawyers have accused Pennsylvania Values of violating the same federal law—18 U.S.C. Section 241, or “conspiracy against rights”—that Trump supporter Douglass Mackey was convicted of violating for posting Twitter memes urging Hillary Clinton supporters to vote by text. 

So what is GISWF? Good question—we don’t know. Here’s what it says on the fund’s website:

But because GISWF is a 501(c)(4), the group’s donors are a total mystery. The only traceable contribution to GISWF in 2023 was $8.9 million from Global Impact, its parent nonprofit, which is also something of a black box, despite controlling more than $100 million in assets. As Ross notes, moreover, GISWF/GI’s shell corporate structure means that the donors who paid for the Pennsylvania ad might have received tax breaks, if the money was first donated to GI and then regranted to GISWF. 

It’s just one campaign ad, but it stands as a stark reminder that for all of the establishment’s rhetoric about defending “our democracy,” actual democracy is ruthlessly subordinated to partisan imperatives when necessary. As we reported in April, influential Democratic data scientist Aaron Strauss circulated a memo in January warning Democrats against funding “nonpartisan” voter-registration nonprofits. Although progressive donors have long seen such nonprofits as de facto arms of Democratic campaigns, Strauss argued that efforts to register nonvoters, including younger and non-Black people of color, could backfire, due to Democrats’ eroding advantage in these demographics. Instead, Strauss suggested focusing registration efforts on “specific, heavily pro-Biden” populations like Black Americans. He also urged donors to give to 501(c)(4)s and other political groups that can weed out potential Trump supporters from their registration efforts without falling afoul of IRS or Federal Election Commission rules. 

Read the report here. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Argentine journalist Martin Spivak profiles José Pérez, an Argentine policeman and spy who holds the secrets of the 1994 AMIA bombing

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The Rest

→Today is the 30th anniversary of the 1994 Iran-backed suicide bombing of Argentina’s largest Jewish community center, the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 and wounded more than 300. While successive Argentine governments sought to cover up Iranian involvement in the attacks, including by (likely) ordering the murder of prosecutor Alberto Nisman in 2015, earlier this year the Argentine Court of Cassation issued a ruling that Iran had planned the attack and Hezbollah had carried it out. Speaking at a memorial in Buenos Aires on Wednesday night, Argentine President Javier Milei vowed to pursue those responsible for the bombing and try them in absentia if necessary. Last week, Milei, who is deeply influenced by Judaism but has not yet converted, formally designated Hamas a terrorist group. 

→In the 24 hours since yesterday’s Big Story, the Democratic effort to force Biden to resign has picked up steam. Here’s a screenshot from a Thursday Axios article collecting the recent news:

The same article claims that “several top Democrats” are “privately” predicting that Biden will bow out, perhaps as soon as this weekend. And a Thursday article in NBC reported that even some of Biden’s “most defiant internal backers” believe the writing is on the wall. According to the report, the campaign now expects to raise only 25% of the big-donor money it had projected to raise in July. One “person close to Biden” said, “We’re close to the end.”

Maybe. While several outlets have reported that Biden has become less defensive in his conversations with the would-be coup leaders, his campaign has remained publicly defiant, and his opponents have no way to force him out if he doesn’t want to go. Plus, the details of his conversations with Pelosi and Schumer are presumably being leaked by Pelosi and Schumer’s people because Biden wouldn’t agree to go quietly. Commenting on the Axios story, one GOP congressional source told The Scroll, “Media pressure campaign. Nobody of importance on record.”

On Thursday, however, The Washington Post reported that Barack Obama had been telling allies—presumably with the intention of them leaking his remarks—that Biden’s “path to victory has greatly diminished” and that he needs to “seriously consider the viability of his candidacy.” It’s a major blow, to be sure, but the old Irishman has demonstrated an admirable ability to dig in his heels over the past few weeks, so we’ll have to wait and see whether Obama’s curse is enough to show him the door.

→On that note … regular readers will know we’ve been critical of Biden, but the plot to oust him strikes us as slightly sinister. Despite being visibly impaired four years ago, Biden was elected in 2020 with the most votes of any presidential candidate in history. The party and its media allies spent the better part of four years hyping Biden’s capabilities, dismissing concerns about his age as a product of GOP (or Russian) “disinformation,” and colluding with the administration’s efforts to threaten and blackball journalists who sought to report on this issue, which was already a major voter concern even before the debate. The party then altered its 2024 primary calendar to make the Biden stronghold of South Carolina go first in order to discourage any potential challengers. The only thing that’s changed is that party elites are now panicking about their polling numbers, so they’re subjecting the duly elected president to the same sort of hostile information operation we’ve previously seen run against Trump and Israel. But Biden is right: He’s the president, and the American people elected him—not Obama, Pelosi, or Democratic megadonors. 

→On Wednesday, the U.S. Secret Service held a call briefing senators on what law enforcement has learned so far about the Saturday assassination attempt against Donald Trump. Here are the highlights from the call, per Punchbowl News reporter Andrew Desiderio on X:

• The shooter visited the rally site days in advance to scope it out.

• 62 minutes passed between the time a law-enforcement sniper photographed the shooter for acting suspicious and when the first shots were fired.

• 20 minutes elapsed between when the shooter was spotted by U.S.S.S. snipers and when he opened fire.

As for the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, the FBI has gained access to his phone (using technology from the Israeli company Cellebrite), but has released precious little about the shooter or his motives. What the bureau has said so far is that Crooks had photos of Trump, Biden, and Attorney General Merrick Garland on his phone; that he made an online search for “major depressive disorder”; and that he searched for the dates of the Trump rally and the Democratic National Convention. Despite initial reports that Crooks was a registered Republican, a former classmate told Fox News that Crooks had mocked him for supporting Trump and “did not like politicians.” The same former classmate said that Crooks had a small group of friends who would “make threats to shoot up our school.” 

On Thursday, Susan Crabtree of RealClearPolitics reported that the Secret Service had settled on a new theory: Crooks was “planning to take out people in the crowd in a mass Vegas-style shooting and wasn’t initially planning to attempt to assassinate Trump,” but changed his mind “after he was scrambling to escape police and climbed onto the roof.” So, you see, what looks like a tale of stunning incompetence nearly leading to a world-historical political murder that would have plunged the country into chaos is actually a story of how U.S.S.S. bravery narrowly averted a Las Vegas-style mass shooting. Got it. 

→Several Republican senators, however, were frustrated with U.S.S.S. Director Kimberly Cheatle’s “stonewalling” on the Wednesday call and confronted her at the Republican National Convention last night: 

Cheatle has said she accepts “full responsibility” for Saturday’s debacle, but her office has thus far maintained that she will not step down, citing the need for “continuity of operations.” As X user @feelsdesperate observed: 

That story about the teenager saying the N-word, by the way, was not only real, but the subject of a major investigation in The New York Times in 2020. Mimi Groves, who said “I can drive, n***a” in a private Snapchat to friends when she was 15 (not 16) years old, was booted from the University of Tennessee cheerleading team and then forced to withdraw from the university when the video came to light four years later. 

→Last night was Day Three of the RNC. The headliner was vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance, who delivered a speech leaning heavily into economic populism and promises that the GOP can become the party of the working man. Another featured speaker was Tablet contributor Shabbos Kestenbaum, who said he’d been convinced to vote for Trump over the Democratic Party’s response to Oct. 7 and the wave of elite left-wing antisemitism that ensued. And, while we try to be hard-hearted about politics, two moments from last night stood out to us as particularly powerful. The first came when when Herman and Alicia Lopez, the parents of Corporal Hunter Lopez, read out the names of the 13 U.S. servicemembers, including their son, who were killed in the Abbey Gate suicide bombing during the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. The crowd spontaneously repeated each name as it was read aloud (at about 8:26 in the following video):

The second came when the crowd erupted in a chant of “Bring them home!” as Ronen and Orna Neutra, the parents of the Israeli American hostage Omer Neutra, took the stage:

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

The French Election, by Marc Weitzmann

Whoever wins, loses. French Jews, meanwhile, are already losers.

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Unforgiven

José Pérez, a Federal Police spy who infiltrated the Argentine Jewish community, holds the secrets of Iranian terrorist attacks in Buenos Aires. This is his story.

By Martin Spivak

Buenos Aires, Argentine autumn of 1994. In his office at the Argentina Zionist Organization (AZO), director Itzik Horn left two copies of the blueprint of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) Jewish community center where he would be moving his offices. José Pérez, secretary of the AZO, and also an infiltrated intelligence agent of the Federal Police, discreetly took one of the copies.

In the first week of July, Pérez and Horn visited the AMIA building, in the heart of Once, the city’s Jewish neighborhood, to oversee construction on the AZO’s new offices. Pérez then traveled to Basabilvaso, a town in the central Entre Rios province. On July 18, by chance, he saw on the Crónica news channel one of its catastrophe headlines: “AMIA Bombed.” In what was then the worst attack on a Jewish site since the end of the Shoah, 85 people died and 300 were wounded.

Pérez was immediately afraid. First, for the life of his wife, a Hebrew teacher and community activist, who was supposed to be at AMIA to collect some teaching materials; luckily, he reached her at home, having not yet left. After blowing through the 300 kilometers separating Basabilvaso from the Argentine capital, Pérez saw the victims’ mangled bodies in the morgue. Two days later, he enlisted in an elite group created to defend Jews from another attack in the country with the largest Jewish population in Latin America.

Pérez had nine years of active community life at this point, almost the same amount of time he had served as an infiltrated agent. He had passed information on people and institutions in the Jewish community, building plans and blueprints, and all the information he had collected about the country’s main Jewish association, according to his own legal testimony, which I consulted for this article.

From the AMIA bombing on, according to his version of events, he has felt an unbearable guilt for having funneled material that might have served in planning the attack or in the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in March 1992, which resulted in 22 people killed and more than 240 wounded. In both cases—the embassy and the AMIA bombings—Pérez delivered building characteristics, access points, hours, schedules, security systems, weak points, and methods for entering and exiting without detection. He himself entered both buildings several times before and after the attacks.

Given his particular circumstance of being a Catholic in the process of converting to Judaism and a salaried employee of the Federal Police, he began to contemplate testifying about his infiltration and the information he provided. He waited for 20 years, he said, because of his distrust of the Argentine justice system and the judicial authorities who carried out the investigation.

In July 2014, journalist Gabriel Levinas revealed Pérez’s identity, against his wishes. The spy was then deposed by the prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who was investigating the AMIA attack, and was immediately entered into a witness protection program for nearly a decade. In that new life, Pérez saw the Amazon Prime Video series that carries his name—Iosi: The Regretful Spy—which is a liberally fictionalized interpretation of his personal and professional journey.

In December 2023, Pérez decided to exit the witness protection program, a fact confirmed by sources in the Ministry of Justice. Pérez maintained that with the rise of Javier Milei, a U.S.-aligned anarcho-capitalist, security policies have allowed for the return of bad people, namely advisers of Security Minister Patricia Bullrich and others who had pressured him to keep quiet and not testify.

Today, Pérez considers himself both a Jew and a Zionist. But in reality, he belongs to no world: excommunicated from the Federal Police for his accusations of a coverup of the attacks, and rejected by the Jewish community for having been an infiltrated agent. He is a pariah without protection. His family and personal life, says one person who has his full trust, has completely collapsed: He lives totally isolated, consumed by paranoia and fear that he will be executed.

***

Founded in 1880, the Buenos Aires Municipal Police changed its name to the Federal Police in 1943, and over the course of the 20th century it has had episodes of antisemitism common to all the security forces in Argentina. Jewish representation in leadership positions continues to be less than its representation in the country’s political, social, and cultural life. During the period of greatest repression, under the military dictatorship (1976-83), Argentina gained international attention for the systematic disappearing of individuals, which human rights organizations have estimated at 30,000 people.

Although the illegal repression was principally done by the Army and Marines, there was participation by the Federal Police. The viciousness of the campaign against Jewish detainees or disappeared is recorded in the book Never Again, a summary of the investigation by the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons that was fundamental to the trial of the military junta in 1985. One of the Jews detained by the regime was the famous editor and journalist Jacobo Timerman, who later went into exile in New York and Tel Aviv. In his canonical book Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, he recounts how his torturers and interrogators would ask him about the “Andinia plan,” an antisemitic legend about a supposed Jewish plan to take over the vast territory of Patagonia in the south, in order to found a new nation.

A few months after the end of the military dictatorship, 23-year-old Pérez, the son of a sailor and housewife from a middle-class Buenos Aires family, joined the police. There he learned that the Andinia plan was part of the coursework taught in intelligence training school, where he studied for five years. “The Intelligence division modeled itself on the intelligence services of Nazi Germany,” he wrote in The Repentant Spy, the working title of the book by journalists Horacio Lutzky and Miriam Lewin (with some chapters written by Pérez in the first person) that was the basis for the Amazon series, and which is scheduled to be published in the United States in early 2025.

Pérez lived with the antisemitism of his professors and even that of his colleagues. Two of them asked him if his name wasn’t Peres instead of Pérez, in reference to Israel’s then-president, Shimon Peres. His first alias was Jorge Polak.

At the beginning of his career, his handler asked him if he would be up for infiltrating Zionist university groups. Pérez thought that his physical traits might help him. He saw in his own skin the Sephardi archetype and imagined that his nose and thick-lipped mouth might make others believe he had been born in Israel. He set out to study Jewish religion, culture, and traditions, and over time learned Hebrew.

Many years later, he recalled in The Repentant Spy, he would obtain in writing the precise instructions of his superiors: “All the activities of the groups and leaders should be reported … the essence is to discover how the Jews organized to advance their goal of conquering Argentinian land and converting Patagonia in one more of its domains, according to the Andinia Plan.”

Pérez started by infiltrating Hebraica, a secular Jewish club, to which he gained access without difficulty. He kept his name Pérez, saying that his mother was Jewish, last name Jacob, which figured in the lists of the Zionist Organization of Argentina. Then he joined Jativa, a right-wing Jewish youth group. In one of Jativa’s activities, in which youth and Zionist groups from Latin America participated, Pérez got ahold of a key to the AMIA building. That was eight years before the attack. The key allowed him to enter the community center, including at night, without anyone knowing about it. “My superiors would jealously guard that information,” he noted.

After Jativa he moved on to a group further on the right, Tagar (“challenge,” in Hebrew). In Tagar he undertook his first street action, painting “Palestinos Asesinos” (Palestinian Killers) in the vicinity of a pro-Palestinian event in a central neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Infiltration required acting skills and convincing explanations for any doubts that might have arisen about his invented biography. While in Tagar, he was asked for the name of the veterinarian in the town in Entre Rios he had said he was from and he couldn’t answer, which worried him. He decided to move on to another group to avoid any further suspicion.

Pérez then joined a group of progressive Jews that met in the Once neighborhood. Since the group had only two or three activists, he moved on to another progressive group, Tzavta (“joining together," in Hebrew). Since that group was also about to dissolve for lack of members, he set out to build it up through calls and persuasion. In a few months he had done so. One of its members, Andy Faur, was an active community leader of progressive organizations from 1988 to 1992, until he made aliyah with his family a year later. Faur spoke to me via Zoom from his house in Jerusalem where he works as a sociologist and educator.

“Iosi was a good person: reserved, dedicated, agreeable, sociable. He knew quite a bit about Israel, about Jewish people and institutions in Argentina, and he could sustain a conversation about those topics. He wanted to be part of the community. We would see each other in Tzavta and he would say that he worked in the bakery Los Dos Chinos as an administrator, but I never visited him at work. We both attended the weekly meeting of the AZO.”

On the day of the attack on the Israeli Embassy, Faur came running to the site and found Pérez there. “We saved wounded people and, especially, we collected papers into bags to take them to the embassy’s security people,” he recalled.

After that, Pérez got stricter with security in Tzavta. He asked to have the façade of the building changed because he thought there were too many windows. “He became someone that everyone trusted,” Faur said.

As his standing in the community grew, Pérez began to feel that he was being watched by the Federal Police. He wondered if they saw him as a double agent. Shortly after, the Informador Publico, a publication rife with information from the intelligence services, published his report on a meeting in the Israeli Embassy in which they had decided to take greater security measures. The leak put him in danger, and for this reason, according to him, he asked to resign from the police. They did not accept his resignation.

His relations with his superiors would continue to deteriorate, especially after the AMIA attack and after Pérez joined the community’s self-defense groups. “My bosses started getting suspicious when they would ask me for names and training places and I would reply evasively. They demoted me, gave me bureaucratic tasks, and I began to fear they would kill me,” he wrote in The Repentant Spy. He recorded a video in which he blamed the Federal Police in case he should end up assassinated, and he collected evidence of his work: documents, credentials, and anything that proved his connection to the institution.

At the beginning of 2024 I put in a formal request with the Federal Police to get their version of the case. They directed me to the Institutional Image Division. Some of the questions I had: Is it true that Pérez was a member of Argentina’s Federal Police? Is it true that his superiors asked him to infiltrate the Jewish community and that since then, 1985, for 15 years he sent regular reports up the chain? Is it true that he provided a blueprint of the AMIA building to his superiors weeks before the terrorist attack of 1994?

Four weeks later, after following up, the Institutional Image Division sent this answer: “We regret to inform you that on this occasion it will not be possible to provide information and/or answer, since it is sensitive information.”

***

Horacio Lutzky, a lawyer and journalist, was running Nueva Sión (New Zion)—a progressive weekly founded in 1948 and closed during the military dictatorship—when AMIA was bombed. He wrote a harsh editorial in which he pointed the finger at the murky world of Argentine intelligence. In subsequent months, Lutzky began to challenge the way some Jewish communal leaders had been complicit in official attempts to divert the investigation and cover the tracks of the police.

Lutzky has studied the judicial cases as a lawyer and representative of AMIA and he has published two books. Based on the files, he says that on the day of the attack, the police in charge of security at the Israeli Embassy left their post before the arrival of the next shift, which arrived late. Also, he claims that prosecutors and judges ignored the police helicopter that flew over AMIA the night before the attack. Lutzky concluded that the zone around AMIA had been deliberately cleared by Federal Police; that is, they had stopped controlling and watching so that others could act.

In February 2000, Lutzky’s assistant told him that her ex-husband wanted to meet with him.

“I’m not who you think I am,” Pérez told him in that first encounter, according to the then-director of New Zion. “I’m an intelligence officer, infiltrated into various community institutions, collecting information over many years.”

At first, Lutzky and Pérez would meet in secret, and Pérez would recount some of the details of his work, but without ever wanting to come clean before the law. And not without reason.

From the outset, the handling of the AMIA case was mired by scandal and charges of corruption. The judge in charge of the case, Juan José Galeano, followed the theory that a van was used in the bombing, which implicated Carlos Telleldin, a stolen-car chop-shop guy and son of an antisemitic policeman, who had allegedly delivered the vehicle to the attackers. However, Galeano’s chief aide, Claudio Lifschitz, testified that the judge mishandled the case and offered a $400,000 bribe to Telleldin for him to accuse the Buenos Aires Provincial Police of having brought in the van, in addition to other scandalous irregularities.

Argentina’s courts have ruled on Iran’s responsibility in the attack, but the state has never arrested nor tried the attackers. The only people to go to jail were Galeano and the prosecutors involved in that first trial. Sent by AMIA, Lutzky attended these trials and followed the details of the case. He concluded that Pérez “was the living, secret proof of the security and intelligence forces’ spying on Jewish institutions before the attack on AMIA.”

***

In August 2002, Pérez asked for a meeting with Miriam Lewin, then a journalist for the TV program Telenoche Investiga. He told her that his regrets were torturing him.

“I think that, without realizing it, I might have contributed to the attacks,” he said, breaking down in tears, as Lewin recalled.

They would meet again over several months in different locations. Pérez would change his appearance: at times shaven, at others wearing a beard, sunglasses, longer sideburns, a mustache, dyed hair.

Pérez decided to introduce Lewin to Lutzky, and they started to work together. At some point in 2004 Lutzky and Lewin met with Senator Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who at the time was also first lady of Argentina and would go on to be the country’s two-term president (2007-15). She suggested, according to the journalists, that they testify before the prosecutor Alberto Nisman, whom she had given political and financial support to push forward with the investigation. But Pérez didn’t trust Nisman, so Fernández de Kirchner sent them to speak with Jaime Stiuso, the controversial strongman of the state intelligence service (the Secretariat of Intelligence, commonly known by the Spanish acronym SIDE). State intelligence found Pérez’s account not credible.

With no other way to testify before Argentine justice, the trio started to think about telling the story through a documentary in another country, which might allow Pérez to live elsewhere for a period of time. Lewin contacted her close friend, the journalist Gabriel Isaías Levinas, who had written a book about the AMIA attack and had been hired by the Delegation of Israelite Associations in Argentina (Spanish acronym DAIA), the main Jewish entity, to assess the judicial investigation. Levinas had contacts in the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and could help facilitate Pérez’s testimony overseas and his eventual move. In 2008, Levinas and Lewin, according to their account, met in Buenos Aires with a representative of the AJC in charge of Latin American affairs, Dina Siegel, and the AJC’s lawyer, along with two Argentine businessmen who would be underwriting the $30,000 needed to finance Pérez’s semester abroad. Ultimately the AJC never approved the project.

There are two versions of what happened next. According to Pérez, Lewin, and Lutzky, the spy agreed to a recorded interview with Levinas that was not to be made public. Levinas then broke that agreement.

Levinas gives the opposite version. He invited me into his apartment in Once, three blocks from the AMIA, on a Saturday in April, when the neighborhood’s many businesses—textile, mostly—and the noise of the bustling Corrientes Avenue are quiet. He was wearing black shorts and sneakers and was smoking a cigar. “Like with all intelligence agents I didn’t know if Pérez wanted to give me information, or get some out of me. He was playing the victim, but turning back: He would say go ahead and then not. For years it went on like that,” he told me.

“According to Pérez, Lewin, and Lutzky, that video was for keepsake and not to be published,” I responded.

“I’m a reporter, and I recorded that interview with a camera this big”—and made a gesture like he was holding up a cat in his hands. “It’s my word against theirs. I decided to include it in my new book because of Iosi’s delays and because enough time had passed. He also might have been saying that to cover himself. It was a crime: infiltrating the Jewish community and passing AMIA plans. He is potentially an accomplice in the attack.”

Levinas took out a thumb drive and opened his laptop. His walls were covered with paintings; besides being a journalist, he is also an art dealer. I realized that I was sitting at the same table where Pérez had sat to record the video.

In the video, Pérez, appearing slight and wearing a checkered shirt, speaks about his youthful interest in planes and his wish to join the Air Force. But chance, geographic proximity, and a policeman relative made it so that he ended up in the Federal Police. He speaks about his years of infiltration while smoking a cigarette. In the new edition of his book, Levinas admits to having “decided unilaterally to publish” fragments of that interview that he would later use to promote the book.

Before the book launch, Lutzky met with the undersecretary for criminal policy, Juan Martín Mena, to alert him about the case and ask him to put Pérez in the witness protection program once the story came out. According to Mena, he agreed on the condition that Pérez testify in Nisman’s AMIA case, even if he was skeptical of the story.

On the first Friday in July 2014, after some excerpts from the book were published in La Nacion newspaper, Pérez urgently presented himself to Nisman’s prosecutorial office. After an hour and a half—too short of a time given the relevance of the testimony—they sent him home.

That afternoon, Pérez entered the witness protection program at Nisman’s request that he be protected. Dario Diaz, who headed the program at the time, alerted Mena to the seriousness and importance of the testimony. Late that night, Mena got the number of the head of Police Intelligence and called him. When he asked if José Pérez was a member of the Federal Police, the official didn’t answer. Mena interpreted his silence as confirmation.

Pérez stayed in the government office until 6 a.m. He would testify, cry, testify some more, cry some more, and plead that Levinas’ video should not be made public, and then cry again. He had to abandon his past life without any chance to say his goodbyes to anyone. He put what he could into a suitcase and bag and turned in the rest, including his washing machine, TV, and freezer. Mena waited for the news of the interview to set off an international conflict given the implications of the Federal Police having spied on the Jewish community for 15 years. But nothing happened.

Nisman never called him back to testify again. Instead, his investigation was focused on the Iranian trail, and in denouncing the government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner for covering up Iran’s involvement in the attack. Six months later, he denounced Kirchner for treason. The weekend before Nisman was set to testify about his findings before the Argentine Congress he was found dead in his apartment. The ensuing scandal was so large that it was featured on 60 Minutes. Although the court ruled Nisman’s death a homicide, neither those responsible nor any key clues were ever found.

Read the rest of the essay here.