Carrying out intelligence prior to an attack or other attack or sabotage action implies using means and people who do not appear to be conducting intelligence prior to an attack or other attack or sabotage action.
In an urban setting, intelligence operators tend to camouflage themselves as taxi drivers, street vendors or bartenders from a neighboring bar of the place being observed. By the same tactical logic, if it is intended to send shipments of weapons or explosives to combatants in a conflict, they can use clandestine entry routes traced in inhospitable areas, or official access routes can be used. In this second case, the entry vehicle must be reliable because it is dedicated to cargo transportation and because it is fulfilling that function.
For example, if the Tehran-Caracas axis decided that, in its strategy of spreading conflicts to generate destabilization, it should enable a separatist rebellion by the Chilean and Argentine Mapuches, it could use a cargo plane that can carry weapons, but on a flight that officially has as its mission the transport of a legal cargo for a company that has legally contracted this service.
That is precisely why they are called covert operations. It is a no-brainer. No one would transport weapons without properly concealing them, for example, behind legal shipments, or do prior intelligence without camouflaging spies in other activities that allow for good observation posts. The Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, the military arm of the Iranian religious leadership, know this well. Through its elite body dedicated to actions abroad, the Quds Force, it has carried out hundreds of operations of this type in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Yemen, European countries and also possibly Latin American.
That is why its strategists will have smiled when listening to high-ranking Argentine officials assuming that the shipment of auto parts transported by the Boeing 747 explained, clearly and unquestionably, the totality of its arrival in Argentina.
That may be the truth about the flight. But neither that nor the conflicting version are conclusions that can be reached immediately, by simple assumption.
In any case, the Venezuelan cargo airline will have to admit that it was not a good idea to send a plane bought from Mahan Air, a company that belongs to the Revolutionary Guard, to a country that suffered two bloody attacks possibly decided on Iran, and that There were five Iranian crew members on the flight.
The fact, in itself, should set off alarms because it imposes doing it both the relationship of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard with this type of airlines and covert operations, as well as the nature and depth of the link between the Chavista regime and the Persian theocracy. A link whose intensity varies depending on whether a moderate or a member of the hard wing of the regime is in the presidency of Iran.
The beginning was lukewarm because, between 1997 and 2005, the Iranian president was the reformist Mohamed Khatami. It grew abruptly and reached its greatest intensity when the fanatical Mahmud Ahmadinejad became head of government. It dimmed again when the moderate Hasan Rouhani became president, but has intensified again since the current president, Ebrahim Raisi, another exponent of the hard-line Shia theocracy, took office.
With moderates like Khatami and Rohani in the presidency, the link did not end because the connection channel is between the Chavista regime and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, which does not depend on the government but on the highest ayatollah, and can maintain its internal and external policies. But when the Tehran-Caracas relationship has the support of the head of the government of the Asian country, the bond is strengthened. In fact, the great forger of such an intimate relationship between the two regimes was President Ahmadinejad, who on his first trip, in 2006, created the Bilateral Strategic Alliance with Hugo Chávez, which was born with some thirty cooperation agreements in different areas.
In 2009, the second trip to Caracas of that fundamentalist and anti-Semitic leader of marked anti-Western belligerence, multiplied the agreements exceeding one hundred, while in the visit he made in 2011, in addition to the fact that both leaders broke records of personal meetings, the cooperation agreements numbered several hundred. And that was just the visible part of a relationship that also has a hidden side.
On the hidden side of the link, it is possible to assume that the illegal exploitation of the mining arch plays a role. In that part of the Orinoco Basin, local and foreign mafias, in addition to Colombian guerrillas such as the ELN and some tentacles of the FARC, carry out illegal mining, contributing money to the clandestine coffers of the regime that also collect from drug trafficking.
In the mining arc, in addition to gold and coltan, thorium is extracted, a radioactive chemical element of the actinide series, which could supplant uranium in the production of nuclear energy. In fact, China built a nuclear reactor in Wuwei, which runs on molten thorium salts. The first of its kind in the world.
With these collections, the regime would finance the good life of the Chavista nomenclature, so that no one takes their feet off the plate, in addition to buying loyalties and complicities at the regional level. And according to the CIA and Mossad, it also funds Revolutionary Guard intelligence operations and Hezbollah activities in Latin America.
If this party-militia of radical Shiism in Lebanon has cells scattered throughout the world, including South America, it is because it is part of Iran’s instruments on the international board.
As the arm of action of the Revolutionary Guard abroad, the Quds Force, whose previous commander was General Qassem Soleimani, assassinated by a US drone at the Baghdad airport in January 2020, would have designed and organized this dispersion of Hezbollah cells. , using them as instruments of Iranian positioning and influence in the points of the world where they operate.
One of those points is the Triple Frontier, next to Ciudad del Este, where the Boeing 747 was before landing in Argentina.
