Iosi, the Remorseful Spy review: ‘it all ends badly’ - The Jewish Chronicle

The bombings in Buenos Aires of the Israeli embassy in 1992 and a Jewish community centre, the AMIA, two years later are still shrouded in mystery.

A series of investigations over the years ended in charges of corruption and cover-ups but a senior court last year finally decreed that the attacks, in which a total of 114 people were killed, were directed by Iran and carried out by Hezbollah. No individual, however, has ever been convicted in connection with the outrages.

One man, though, believes he may have unwittingly played a key role in the attacks and has lived with the guilt ever since. He is Iosi Perez, who from 1985 successfully infiltrated a string of Jewish community organisations in Buenos Aires on behalf of the Federal Police Intelligence Service. Passing himself as Jewish, he did this work for 15 years with great professionalism but ended up a wreck of a man and a fugitive from his own former colleagues in Argentina’s witness protection programme.

You might well ask why the police intelligence service was going to such lengths to find out what was going on in the Jewish community, South America’s largest. Perez’s main objective, or so he was told, was to investigate an alleged Jewish plot to take over a large plot of land in Patagonia and create a new Jewish state there – a risible proposition. A likelier motive was that the police and security services were riddled with far-right sympathisers who unjustly associated Argentina’s Jews with unpatriotic leanings.

At any rate, Perez did his homework on Jewish life, rituals, holidays and history, even learning Hebrew, and provided his handlers with a mass of mostly useless data. Mostly but not quite all: for having become a familiar figure in the AMIA building, among many other Jewish institutions, he handed over a detailed plan of the six-storey building to his bosses as well as information about the Israeli embassy building. Ever since the bombings he has been assailed with guilt at the thought that his dossiers might have been helpful to the perpetrators.

This is understandable even though he provides no evidence to back his misgivings. Both attacks appear to have been carried out by suicide bombers in lorries who wouldn’t have needed floorplans to be effective. This book does not address this obvious fact but it is not the only problem with it. Structurally, it is a mess. It is written in three voices: those of Perez himself, and two journalists, Miriam Lewin and Horacio Lutzky, to whom Perez confided his story.

It would have been far better to tell it all in Perez’s words. Instead, all three contribute separate chapters, often covering the same ground, which leads to a confusing narrative, although Perez does supply an important insider’s account of a terrible period in Argentina’s troubled history.

But its subsequent detailed descriptions of the inner workings of Argentina’s Jewish institutions is of limited interest to the general reader outside the country. One wouldn’t imagine an account of the goings-on at the Board of Deputies of British Jews, say, selling too many copies in Buenos Aires (or even Boreham Wood, come to that).

It’s hard not to escape the conclusion that Perez’s remorse is more to do with his betrayal of the Jewish community, to which he became more and more attached the longer he lived undercover within it; he even started the process of conversion. But he confesses that his main weakness is that he was a womaniser and he beds a series of attractive Jewish girls before marrying one whom he falls in love with.

It all ends badly, alas, along with Perez’s intelligence career, evidence of the awful damage a double life can inflict. He clearly believes some of his own colleagues and fellow officers may have been implicated in the bombings but that Argentina’s labyrinthine justice system has no real interest in finding out the truth.

Iosi, The Remorseful Spy

By Miriam Lewin and Horacio Lutzky, translated by Frances Riddle

Seven Stories Press

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