Just 24 hours after American officials announced that they had disrupted an Iranian plot that sounded like a rejected Quentin Tarantino script — centering on an Iranian-American used-car salesman’s failed attempt to hire a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in Washington — a number of prominent American experts on Iran have suggested that Iran’s government might not have been behind the scheme at all.
Even before the experts spoke up, it was hard to escape suggestions that the plot was too good, or too bad, to be true. In a radio interview on Wednesday morning, my colleague David Sanger observed that the alleged plot “sounds a little bit B-movie clumsy.”
One day earlier, even as he described the plot as real and dangerous, Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, acknowledged that the government’s criminal complaint laying out the case “reads like the pages of a Hollywood script.”
Writing on his personal blog on Wednesday, Gary Sick, a scholar at Columbia University’s Middle East Institute who monitored Iran for the National Security Council during the Iranian revolution three decades ago, took the implication that the plot might be at least partly fictional seriously. “I find this very hard to believe,” Mr. Sick wrote.
In fact, this plot, if true, departs from all known Iranian policies and procedures.
To be sure, Iran has plenty of reasons to be angry at both the United States and Saudi Arabia. They attribute the recent wave of assassinations of physics professors and students, as well as the intrusion of the Stuxnet worm, to the U.S. and Israel. And the king of Saudi Arabia is reliably reported to have called for the U.S. to bomb Iran.
Iran has reportedly been involved in past assassinations in Europe and bombings in Argentina and elsewhere. But the assassinations were of Iranian counter-revolutionaries in the 1980s, and the bombings were always carried out by trusted proxies — normally a branch of Hezbollah. Iran’s fingerprints were always concealed beneath one or more layers of disguise…. And it is difficult to believe that they would rely on a non-Islamic criminal gang to carry out this most sensitive of all possible missions. In this instance, they allegedly relied on at least one amateur and a Mexican criminal drug gang that is known to be riddled with both Mexican and U.S. intelligence agents.
Whatever else may be Iran’s failings, they are not noted for utter disregard of the most basic intelligence tradecraft, e.g. discussing an ultra-covert operation on an open international line between Iran and the U.S. Yet that is what happened here.
Kenneth Katzman, a Middle East analyst at the Congressional Research Service in Washington, also said on Wednesday that he found the idea that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps would turn to a Mexican drug cartel for this sort of mission hard to accept. Writing to other Persian Gulf experts in an online forum moderated by Mr. Sick, Mr. Katzman explained:
As one who has never been particularly skittish or skeptical about accusations of Iranian involvement in international terrorism, I must cast my lot in with the skeptics on this one.
There is simply no precedent — or even reasonable rationale — for Iran working any plot, no matter where located, through a non-Muslim proxy such as Mexican drug gangs. No one high up in the Quds, the I.R.G.C. command, the Supreme National Security Committee, or anywhere else in the Iranian chain of command would possibly trust that such a plot could be kept secret or carried out properly by the Mexican drug people. They absolutely would not trust such a thing to them, given Iran’s undoubted assumption that the Mexicans are penetrated by the D.E.A. and F.B.I. and A.T.F., etc — and indeed this plot was revealed by just such a U.S. informant.
The Iranian modus operandi is only to trust sensitive plots to their own employees, or to trusted proxies such as Hezbollah, Saudi Hezbollah, Hamas, the Sadr faction in Iraq, Iran-friendly extremist Muslims in Afghanistan and other pro-Iranian Muslim groups.
Are we to believe that this Texas car seller was a Quds sleeper agent for many years resident in the U.S.? Ridiculous. They (the Iranian command system) never ever use such has-beens or loosely connected people for sensitive plots such as this.
Hamid Serri, an Iranian-American scholar at Florida International University who also contributes to Mr. Sick’s online forum, suggested that it was possible that some non-Iranian agency or organization with an interest in creating “a confrontation that involves the U.S., Iran and Saudi Arabia” could have set the plot in motion.
Referring to the fact that the only money that apparently changed hands before the alleged plot was exposed was $100,000 wired from what was said to be an Iranian-controlled bank account to a man posing as a member of the Mexican cartel Los Zetas (who turned out to be an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency), Mr. Serri observed that this would be a “cheap price” for an enemy of Iran to pay for the damning headlines that have appeared since the alleged plot was exposed.
Mr. Serri, who is originally from Iran, added that, given the lack of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Iran, it is perhaps too easy for anyone with an interest in stirring up trouble between the two countries to do so.
Once again this crisis shows the tremendous danger of lack of direct communication between Iran and the U.S. To the extent that someone with a telephone line in Iran and $100,000 cash in pocket can bring two countries so close to confrontation. A direct in person contact between the National Security Councils in Iran and the U.S. is a necessity. It’s time to grow up.
While these experts remain unconvinced of the plot’s authenticity, the Saudi satellite channel Al Arabiya reported that unnamed Saudi sources took it seriously and even claimed that Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was the “mastermind” behind the scheme to assassinate the country’s representative in Washington.
According to a Financial Times report:
Al Arabiya claimed that, with the co-operation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Mr Ahmadinejad had formed an assassination team to carrying out overseas killings of Arab politicians, Iranian opposition figures and journalists. In a report on its Web site, the station alleged that, in a recent meeting with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, Mr Ahmadinejad suggested Tehran would “resume its assassination policy against critics abroad to avoid the impact of the Arab spring on its own state.”
Although Iran’s government has been tied to terrorist attacks and assassinations outside its borders in the past, it has been 31 years since it last dispatched an assassin to kill in the Washington area. In 1980, as The Lede explained in a previous post, Dawud Salahuddin, an American convert to Islam, accepted an assignment from Iran’s revolutionary government to shoot a former member of the Shah’s regime living in exile in Bethesda, Md.