Scott Stewart
On Oct. 11, the U.S.
Department of Justice announced that two men had been charged in New York with
taking part in a plot
directed by the Iranian Quds Force to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the
United States, Adel al-Jubeir, on U.S. soil.
Manssor Arbabsiar and Gholam
Shakuri face numerous charges, including conspiracy to use a weapon of mass
destruction (explosives), conspiracy to commit an act of terrorism transcending
national borders and conspiracy to murder a foreign official. Arbabsiar, who
was arrested Sept. 29 at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, is
a U.S. citizen with both Iranian and U.S. passports. Shakuri, who remains at
large, allegedly is a senior officer in Iran’s Quds Force, a special unit of
the Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) believed to promote military and
terrorist activities abroad.
Between May and July,
Arbabsiar, who lives in the United States, allegedly traveled several times to
Mexico, where he met with a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)
confidential informant who was posing as an associate of the Mexican Los
Zetas cartel. The criminal complaint charges that Arbabsiar attempted to
hire the DEA source and his purported accomplices to kill the ambassador.
Arbabsiar’s Iranian contacts allegedly wired two separate payments totaling
$100,000 in August into an FBI-controlled bank account in the United States,
with Shakuri’s approval, as a down payment to the DEA source for the killing
(the agreed-upon total price was $1.5 million).
Much has been written about the
Arbabsiar case, both by those who believe the U.S. government’s case is valid
and by those who doubt the facts laid out in the criminal complaint. However,
as we have watched this case unfold, along with the media coverage surrounding
it, it has occurred to us that there are two aspects of the case that we think
merit more discussion. The first is that, as history has shown, it is not
unusual for Iran to employ unconventional assassins in plots inside the United
States. Second, while the DEA informant was reportedly posing as a member of
Los Zetas, we do not believe the case proves any sort of increase in the
terrorist threat emanating from the United States’ southern border.
Unconventional Assassins
One argument that has appeared
in media coverage and has cast doubt on the validity of the U.S. government’s
case is the alleged use by the Quds Force of Arbabsiar, an unemployed used car
salesman, as its interlocutor. The criminal complaint states that Arbabsiar was
recruited by his cousin, Abdul Reza Shahlai, a senior Quds Force commander, in
spring 2011 and then handled by Shakuri, who is Shahlai’s deputy. The complaint
also alleges that, initially, Arbabsiar was tasked with finding someone to
kidnap al-Jubeir, but at some unspecified point the objective of the plot
turned from kidnapping to murder. After his arrest, Arbabsiar told the agents
who interviewed him that he was chosen for the mission because of his business
interests and contacts in the United States and Mexico and that he told his
cousin that he knew individuals involved in the narcotics trade. Shahlai then
allegedly tasked Arbabsiar to attempt to hire some of his narco contacts for
the kidnapping mission since Shahlai believed that people involved in the
narcotics trade would be willing to undertake illegal activities, such as
kidnapping, for money.
It is important to recognize
that Arbabsiar was not just a random used car salesman selected for this
mission. He is purportedly the cousin of a senior Quds Force officer and was in
Iran talking to his cousin when he was recruited. According to some interviews
appearing in the media, Arbabsiar had decided to leave the United States and
return permanently to Iran, but, as a naturalized U.S. citizen, he could have
been seen as useful by the Quds Force for his ability to freely travel to the
United States. Arbabsiar also was likely enticed
by the money he could make working for the Quds Force — money that could
have been useful in helping him re-establish himself in Iran. If he was
motivated by money rather than ideology, it could explain why he flipped so
easily after being arrested by U.S. authorities.
Now, while the Iranian
government has shown the ability to conduct sophisticated operations in
countries within its sphere of influence, such as Lebanon and Iraq, the use of
suboptimal agents to orchestrate an assassination plot in the United States is
not entirely without precedent.
For example, there appear to
be some very interesting parallels between the Arbabsiar case and two other
alleged Iranian plots to assassinate dissidents in Los Angeles and London. The
details of these cases were exposed in the prosecution and conviction of Mohammad
Reza Sadeghnia in California and in U.S. diplomatic cables released by
WikiLeaks pertaining to the Sadeghnia case.
Sadeghnia, who was arrested in
Los Angeles in July 2009, is a naturalized U.S. citizen of Iranian descent who
at one point ran a painting business in Michigan. Sadeghnia was apparently
recruited by the Iranian government and allegedly carried out preoperational
surveillance on Jamshid Sharmahd, who made radio broadcasts for the Iranian
opposition group Tondar from his residence in Glendora, Calif., and Ali Reza
Nourizadeh, who worked for Voice of America in London.
Sadeghnia’s clumsy
surveillance activities were a testament to his lack of tradecraft and were
noticed by his targets. But even though he was fairly inept, a number of other
factors seem to support claims that he was working as an agent for the Iranian
government. These include his guilty plea, his international travel, and the
facts that he conducted surveillance on two high-profile Iranian dissidents on
two continents, was convicted of soliciting someone to murder one of them and
then returned to Tehran while on supervised release.
Sadeghnia’s profile as an
unemployed housepainter from Iran who lived in the United States for many years
is similar to that of Arbabsiar, a failed used car salesman. Sadeghnia pleaded
guilty of planning to use a third man (also an Iranian-American) to run over
and murder Sharmahd with a used van Sadeghnia had purchased. Like the alleged
Arbabsiar plot, the Sadeghnia case displayed a lack of sophisticated
assassination methodology in an Iranian-linked plot inside the United States.
This does raise the question
of why Iran chose to use another unsophisticated assassination operation after
the Sadeghnia failure. On the other hand, the Iranians experienced no
meaningful repercussions from that plot or much negative press.
For Iranian operatives to be
so obvious while operating inside the United States is not a new thing, as
illustrated by the case of David Belfield, also known as Dawud Salahuddin, who
was hired by the Iranian government to assassinate high-profile Iranian
dissident Ali Akbar Tabatabaei in July 1980. Salahuddin is an African-American
convert to Islam who worked as a security guard at an Iranian diplomatic office
in Washington. He was paid $5,000 to shoot Tabatabaei and then fled the United
States for Iran, where he still resides. In a plot reminiscent of the movie
Three Days of the Condor, Salahuddin, who had stolen a U.S. Postal Service
jeep, walked up to Tabatabaei’s front door dressed in
a mail carrier’s uniform and shot the Iranian diplomat as he answered
the door. It was a simple plot in which the Iranian hand was readily visible.
There also have been numerous
assassinations and failed assassination attempts directed against Iranian
dissidents in Europe and elsewhere that were conducted in a rudimentary fashion
by operatives easily linked to Iran. Such cases include the 1991 assassination
of Shapour Bakhtiar in Paris, the 1989 murder of Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou in
Vienna and the 1992 killing of three Iranian-Kurdish opposition leaders at the
Mykonos restaurant in Berlin.
All that said, there was a
lengthy break between the Iranian assassinations in the West in the 1980s and
1990s and the Sadeghnia and Arbabsiar cases. We do not know for certain what
could have motivated Iran to resume such operations, but the Iranians have been
locked in a sustained
covert intelligence war with the United States and its allies for
several years now. It is possible these attacks are seen as an Iranian
escalation in that war, or as retaliation for the assassinations
of Iranian nuclear scientists in Iran, which the Iranians claim were
conducted by the United States and Israel.
South of the Border
One other result of the
Arbabsiar case is that it has re-energized the long-held U.S. fears of foreign
entities using the porous U.S.-Mexico border to conduct terrorist attacks
inside the United States and of Mexican cartels partnering with foreign
entities to carry out such attacks.
But there are reasons this
case does not substantiate such fears. First, it is important to remember that
the purported Iranian operative in this case who traveled to the United States,
Arbabsiar, is a naturalized U.S. citizen. He is not an Iranian who illegally
crossed the border from Mexico. Arbabsiar used his U.S. passport to travel between
the United States and Mexico.
Second, while Arbabsiar, and
purportedly Shahlai, believed that the Los Zetas cartel would undertake
kidnapping or assassination in the United States in exchange for money, that
assumption may be flawed. Certainly, while Mexican cartels do indeed kidnap and
murder people inside the United States (often for financial gain), they also
have a long history of being very careful
about the types of operations they conduct inside the United States. This
is because the cartels do not want to incur the full wrath of the U.S.
government. Shooting a drug dealer in Laredo who loses a load of dope is one
thing; going after the Saudi ambassador in Washington is quite another. While
the payoff for this operation seems substantial ($1.5 million), there is no way
that a Mexican cartel would jeopardize its billion-dollar enterprise for such a
small one-time payment and for an act that offered no other apparent business
benefit to the cartel. While Mexican cartels can be quite violent, their
violence is calculated for the most part, and they tend to refrain from
activities that could jeopardize their long-term business plans.
One potential danger in terms
of U.S. mainland security is that the Arbabsiar case might focus too much
additional attention on the U.S.-Mexico border and that this attention could
cause resources to be diverted from the northern border and other points of
entry, such as airports and seaports. While it is relatively easy to illegally
enter the United States over the southern border, and the United States has no
idea who many of the illegal immigrants really are, that does not mean that
resources should be taken from elsewhere.
As STRATFOR has noted before, many terrorist
plots have originated in Canada — far more than have had any sort of
nexus to Mexico. These include plots involving Ghazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, a
Palestinian who was convicted of planning a suicide bombing of the New York
subway system in 1997; Ahmed Ressam, who was arrested when he tried to enter
the United States with explosives in 1999; and the so-called Toronto 18 cell,
which was arrested in 2006 and later convicted of planning a string of attacks
in Canada and the United States.
Moreover, most terrorist
operatives who have traveled to the United States intending to participate in
terrorist attacks have flown directly into the country from overseas. Such
operatives include the 19 men involved in the 9/11 attacks, the foreigners
involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the follow-on New York
landmarks bomb plot, as well as failed New York subway bomber Najibulah
Zazi and would-be Times Square bomber Faisal
Shahzad. Even failed shoe bomber Richard Reid and would-be underwear bomber
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to fly directly into the United States.
While there is concern over
security on the southern U.S. border, past plots involving foreign terrorist
operatives traveling to the United States have either involved direct travel to
the United States or travel from Canada. There is simply no empirical evidence
to support the idea that the Mexican border is more likely to be used by
terrorist operatives than other points of entry.
Scott Stewart, october 20, 2011, Stratfor
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