Yesterday the State Department site posted a “Question Taken” at last Friday’s Daily Press Briefing– that is, a question that spokesperson Victoria Nuland said she would get an answer to later.
Question: Did Ambassador Ford brief Syrian officials on the alleged Iranian plot?
Answer: No. We did not expect a constructive response from the Syrian regime. In fact, the government-controlled media publicly dismissed the Iranian plot as a U.S. fabrication.
Real Question: Are Russian and Chinese officials being briefed on the Iranian terrot plot?
Real Answer: No, and they have told the US our story is a fabrication – through the Syrian media.
Gary Sick an old Iran hand has this to say about the plot.
Did Iran launch a plot against the US?
At the link is the text of an affidavit accusing Iran of organizing a hit on the Saudi Ambassador in Washington. I find this very hard to believe. 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 US and Israel. And the king of Saudi Arabia is reliably reported to have called for the US 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.
Iran has never conducted — or apparently even attempted — an assassination or a bombing inside the US. 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 US 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 US. Yet that is what happened here.
Perhaps this operation is just as it appears. But at a minimum both the public and the Congress should demand more detailed evidence before taking any rash or irreversible action.
If Iran is really as stupid and as incompetent as this case implies, then perhaps they are their own worst enemy and not the clever and determined adversary that they are made out to be.”
October 12, 2011, 7:30 PM
Some Experts Question Iran’s Role in Bungled Plot
By ROBERT MACKEY
Updated | Thursday | 9:34 a.m. 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.
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.
But if Iran’s Quds Force was not, as the U.S. government case suggests, behind the plot, then who was?
Soon Syria will enter those ranks of “liberated” countries, you know, the type that will lose all of their benefits – health, education, etc. in order to be “free,” like Libya (will soon have). Than they will hunt the educators, doctors, journalists, that had anything to do with the previous regime like target practice. What? You did not know that this is what is transpiring, and what Syria is being prepared for?
THE NEW WESTERN COLONIALISM
“The war against Syria, planned by the United States, France and the United Kingdom for mid-November 2011, has been blocked in extremis by the Russian and Chinese vetoes at the Security Council. According to Nicolas Sarkozy, who informed the Maronite Patriarch of the matter during a stormy meeting at the Elysée Palace on 5 September 2011, the plan contemplates the expulsion of Middle East Christians by the Western powers. In this context a press campaign is underway in Europe to accuse the Christians of the Orient of collusion with the dictatorships. Mother Agnès-Mariam of the Cross, mother superior of the monastery of James the Mutilated in Qara (Syria) responds to this war propaganda.”
Iran is citing Interpol that Shakuri is a member of MEK and has travelled to Camp Ashraf. This thing is unraveling.