U.S. Accuses Iranians of Plotting to Kill Saudi Envoy
New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
and SCOTT SHANE
October 11, 2011
WASHINGTON — The United States on Tuesday accused Iranian officials of plotting to murder Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States in a bizarre scheme involving an Iranian-American used-car salesman who believed he was hiring assassins from a Mexican drug cartel for $1.5 million.
The alleged plot also included plans to pay the cartel, Los Zetas, to bomb the Israeli Embassy in Washington and the Saudi and Israeli Embassies in Argentina, according to a law enforcement official.
The plotters also discussed a side deal between the Quds Force, part of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and Los Zetas to funnel tons of opium from the Middle East to Mexico, the official said. The plans never progressed, though, because the two suspects — the Iranian-American and an Iranian Quds Force officer — unwittingly were dealing with an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration, officials said.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who announced the murder plot at a news conference in Washington, said it was “directed and approved by elements of the Iranian government and, specifically, senior members of the Quds Force.” He added that “high-up officials in those agencies, which is an integral part of the Iranian government, were responsible for this plot.”
The charges heightened tensions in an already fraught relationship between Iran and the United States. An Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast, denied the claims and said they were “nothing but an American conspiracy” intended to distract from the United States’ failures at home and abroad, Iranian news agencies reported.
Saudi Arabia and Iran are locked in a bitter regional rivalry, one that has intensified as they have jockeyed for influence since the political upheavals of the Arab Spring. The Saudi Embassy in Washington denounced the plot against the ambassador, Adel al-Jubeir, as “a despicable violation of international norms, standards and conventions.”
Mr. Holder’s assertion and the F.B.I.’s account of official Iranian involvement in the plot, reportedly code-named “Chevrolet,” provoked puzzlement from specialists on Iran, who said it seemed unlikely that the Iranian government would back a brazen murder and bombing plan on American soil.
Investigators, too, were initially skeptical about ties to Iran, officials said. They said, though, that the F.B.I. monitored calls to Iran about the plot and found money had been wired from a Quds Force bank account. In addition, the Iranian-American accused in the scheme, Mansour J. Arbabsiar, correctly identified a known Quds Force officer from a photo array, and his cousin — who he said recruited him for the plot — is another Quds official.
It remained unclear, though, whether the plot was conceived by a rogue element or had approval from top officials of the Revolutionary Guards or the Iranian government.
“It’s so outside their normal track of activity,” said a senior law enforcement official who had been involved in the investigation and would speak only on condition of anonymity. “It’s a rogue plan or they’re using very different tactics. We just don’t know.”
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed her incredulity in an interview with The Associated Press.
“The idea that they would attempt to go to a Mexican drug cartel to solicit murder-for-hire to kill the Saudi ambassador, nobody could make that up, right?” she asked, also saying that the plot “crosses a line that Iran needs to be held to account for.”
Mr. Arbabsiar, 56, a naturalized American citizen who lives in Corpus Christi, Tex., was named in a federal criminal complaint in New York along with Gholam Shakuri, whom the Justice Department identified as a member of the Quds Force.
Mr. Arbabsiar, who one official said sold used cars for a living, was arrested Sept. 29 at Kennedy International Airport in New York; Mr. Shakuri remains at large and is believed to be in Iran.
Minutes after the Justice Department laid out the charges, the Treasury Department announced sanctions against five people — including four “senior” members of the Quds Force, which the United States designated as a terrorist group in 2007.
White House officials said President Obama called the Saudi ambassador on Tuesday to express solidarity, saying the president “underscored that the United States believes this plot to be a flagrant violation of U.S. and international law, and reiterated our commitment to meet our responsibilities to ensure the security of diplomats serving in our country.”
Mr. Arbabsiar, who has lived in Texas for many years, made a brief appearance in federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon, dressed in a blue checked shirt and with a pronounced scar on his left cheek. He did not enter a plea, but his lawyer, Sabrina Shroff, said after the hearing that “if he is indicted, he will plead not guilty.”
The case began in May, when a Drug Enforcement Administration informant with ties to high-level leaders of Los Zetas told agents of a bizarre conversation. He had been approached, he said, by an Iranian friend of his aunt’s in Corpus Christi — Mr. Arbabsiar — with a proposition to hire the cartel to carry out terrorist attacks inside the United States. Mr. Arbabsiar believed that the informant was an actual member of Los Zetas.
Over the next two months, Mr. Arbabsiar and the informant worked out a deal under which Mr. Arbabsiar would pay $1.5 million to Los Zetas to kill the Saudi ambassador at a restaurant in Washington, officials said.
The complaint quotes Mr. Arbabsiar as making conflicting statements about the possibility of bystander deaths; at one point he is said to say that killing the ambassador alone would be preferable, but on another occasion he said it would be “no big deal” if many others at the restaurant — possibly including United States senators — died in any bombing.
There was never any risk, officials said, because the informant was working for the drug agency, and their meetings in Mexico and telephone conversations, were being recorded by law enforcement authorities.
In early August, on a visit to Iran, Mr. Arbabsiar wired nearly $100,000 to the informant’s bank account as a down payment, according to court documents. In late September, he flew to Mexico City from Iran, intending to serve as human “collateral” to ensure that Los Zetas would be paid the rest of their money after killing the ambassador.
But the government of Mexico, at the request of the United States, denied entry to Mr. Arbabsiar and put him on a commercial flight with a stopover in New York, where he was arrested.
On Tuesday, the Justice Department released a letter to the court saying Mr. Arbabsiar had repeatedly waived his right to be quickly brought before a judge and to have a lawyer present during questioning. The letter said he had confessed to his role in the plot and had provided “extremely valuable intelligence.”
Mr. Holder said the United States “is committed to holding Iran accountable for its actions” but declined to answer a question about Iranian officials’ motivation for the alleged plot.
Experts on Iran expressed astonishment at both the apparently clumsy tradecraft and the uncertain goal of the intended mayhem on United States soil.
Rasool Nafisi, an Iranian-American scholar who studies the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, said he thought it unlikely that the plot was approved at a high level by Iranian officials.
“It’s not typical of the Quds Force or the I.R.G.C. to operate in the U.S., for fear of retaliation,” Mr. Nafisi said. Iran’s last lethal operation on American soil, he said, was in 1980, when a critic of the Islamic government was murdered at his Bethesda, Md., home.
Mr. Nafisi said it was conceivable that elements of the Revolutionary Guards might have concocted the plot without top-level approval, perhaps to prevent reconciliation between Iran and the United States.
But Iran’s Islamic government has a long history of attempts to eliminate enemies living overseas, said Roya Hakanian, author of “Assassins of the Turquoise Palace,” a book on the murder of four Iranians in a Berlin restaurant in 1992. A German court found that the murders were approved at the highest levels of the Iranian government.
The gunman in the Berlin killings was accused two years earlier by Swedish officials of plotting to kill the Saudi ambassador to Sweden, Ms. Hakanian said.
Reporting was contributed by Anthony Shadid from Beirut, Lebanon; Eric Schmitt and Mark Landler from Washington; J. David Goodman and Benjamin Weiser from New York; and Randal C. Archibold from Mexico City.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/12/us/us-accuses-iranians-of-plotting-to-kill-saudi-envoy.html
