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The Los Angeles
Times
They say intelligence suggests that the regime lets key figures plot. But
the picture is cloudy.
By Josh Meyer
Times Staff Writer
 WASHINGTON
U.S. intelligence officials, already focused on Iran's potential for
building nuclear weapons, are struggling to solve a more immediate mystery:
the murky relationship between the new Tehran leadership and the contingent
of Al Qaeda leaders residing in the country.
Some officials, citing evidence from highly classified satellite feeds and
electronic eavesdropping, believe the Iranian regime is playing host to much
of Al Qaeda's remaining brain trust and allowing the senior operatives
freedom to communicate and help plan the terrorist network's operations.
And they suggest that recently elected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be
forging an alliance with Al Qaeda operatives as a way to expand Iran's
influence or, at a minimum, that he is looking the other way as Al Qaeda
leaders in his country collaborate with their counterparts elsewhere.
"Iran is becoming more and more radicalized and more willing to turn a
blind eye to the Al Qaeda presence there," a U.S. counter-terrorism
official said.
The accusations from U.S. officials about Iranian nuclear ambitions and ties
to Al Qaeda echo charges that Bush administration figures made about Iraq in
the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion three years ago.
Those charges about Iraq have been discredited. And in the case of Iran, some
intelligence officials and analysts are unconvinced that Al Qaeda operatives
are being allowed to plot terrorist acts. If anything, they suggest, the
escalating tensions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims in Iraq would logically
cause Iran's Shiite government to crack down on Al Qaeda, whose Sunni
leadership has denounced Shiites as infidels.
A U.S. intelligence official said he did not see any relaxation in Iran's
restrictions on Al Qaeda members.
"I'm not getting the sense that these people are free to roam, free to
plot," the official said.
Still, the official acknowledged that the relationship between Tehran and Al
Qaeda officials within Iran was largely unknown to U.S. and allied
intelligence, especially since Ahmadinejad's election last summer.
To some U.S. intelligence officials, what worries them most is what they
don't know.
"I don't need to exaggerate the difficulty in determining what these
people are up to at any given moment," the intelligence official said.
The U.S. counter-terrorism official was more blunt. "We don't have any
intelligence going on in Iran. No people on the ground," he said. "It blows me away
the lack of intelligence that's out there."
U.S., European and Arab intelligence officials spoke on condition of
anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issues publicly.
Ties between Iran and Al Qaeda were highlighted by the Sept. 11 commission,
which disclosed a wealth of details about such connections in its final
report. The commission said Iran and Al Qaeda had worked together
sporadically throughout the 1990s, trading secrets, including some related to
making explosives.
Iranian representatives to the United Nations did not return repeated phone
calls seeking comment.
In November, the State Department's third-ranking official, Undersecretary R.
Nicholas Burns, said the U.S. believed "that some Al Qaeda members and
those from like-minded extremist groups continue to use Iran as a safe haven
and as a hub to facilitate their operations."
A year ago, Iranian delegates to a global counter-terrorism conference
circulated a document describing Iran as "a major victim of
terrorism." The document blamed links between drug trafficking and
terrorism for "thousands of security problems," especially along
Iran's eastern border with Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Al Qaeda operatives and family members have lived in Iran for years, many
since late 2001, when they fled the U.S.-led bombing of Afghanistan. Many
other Al Qaeda figures fled to Pakistan a U.S. ally and are believed to
be there still.
Four months ago, Iran declared that no Al Qaeda members remained in the
country, but U.S. officials reject the claim. At other times, Iranian
officials said that Al Qaeda members were kept under house arrest and their
activities monitored.
In Tehran, analysts said American officials were misreading Iran's
intentions. The fact that the government has not heeded U.S. demands to turn
over Al Qaeda suspects should come as no surprise given the state of relations
between the two countries, said Nasser Hadian, a political analyst at Tehran
University.
"They won't. Why should they" without receiving something in
return? he said.
Some of the suspects have been indicted in the United States in connection
with terrorist attacks, including the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in
East Africa, but Iran has refused to extradite them.
Among them is Saif Adel, believed to be one of the highest-ranking members of
Al Qaeda, behind Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri. Whatever restrictions
might be placed on the network's activities within Iran, Adel who has a
$5-million U.S. bounty on his head was able last year to post a lengthy
dispatch about Al Qaeda activities in Iran and Iraq that was widely
circulated on the Internet. U.S. intelligence officials consider the posting
authentic.
In the dispatch, Adel said he had used hide-outs in Iran to plot with Abu
Musab Zarqawi to make Iraq the new battleground in the group's war against
the United States. Iran had detained many of Zarqawi's men, Adel wrote, but
they ultimately slipped into Iraq and began attacking U.S. forces.
U.S. officials say intelligence suggests that Al Qaeda operatives have
engaged in at least some terrorist planning from Iran, including Adel's alleged
orchestration of suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia in May 2003 and the
masterminding of several attacks in Europe.
For several years, the U.S. counter-terrorism official said, satellite feeds
have helped officials monitor some of the day-to-day activities and movements
of Adel and other senior Al Qaeda operatives in Iran. The intelligence
suggests that the Al Qaeda leaders have been monitored by Iranian authorities
but could move and communicate somewhat, the official said.
U.S. officials also said that other senior Al Qaeda figures including
Zarqawi, now the group's point man in Iraq had moved in and out of Iran
with the possible knowledge or complicity of Iranian officials.
The Al Qaeda members in Iran include three of Bin Laden's sons. Some of his
wives and other relatives are suspected of being there as well, as is Al
Qaeda spokesman Sulaiman abu Ghaith, U.S. officials say.
Of special concern, they said, is the number of Al Qaeda operatives in Iran
who are of Egyptian descent and loyal to Zawahiri, the Cairo-born physician
who merged his Egyptian Islamic Jihad with Al Qaeda in the years before the
Sept. 11 attacks.
Adel is a former Egyptian police official. In addition, U.S. officials
confirmed intelligence showing that three other Al Qaeda operatives with
Egyptian roots Abdallah Mohammed Rajab Masri, also known as Abu Khayer;
Abdel Aziz Masri; and Abu Mohamed Masri are in Iran. Authorities believe
them to be, respectively, the head of Al Qaeda's leadership council, a
biological weapons expert who heads the network's effort to develop weapons
of mass destruction; and its top explosives expert and training camp chief.
The U.S. counter-terrorism official said the Egyptians' presence was
troubling because Tehran for more than a decade has supported Egypt's two
largest militant groups Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Gamaa al Islamiya in
their violent campaign to topple the Cairo government.
Though the Sunni-Shiite divide has prompted Tehran in the past to say it had
"no affinity" with Al Qaeda, U.S. officials believe there is a
history of cooperation between Iran and some Sunni militant groups, including
Al Qaeda. Iran nurtures such ties, they say, to enhance its regional
influence and punish Arab political foes through intimidation and violence.
Bin Laden sent Adel and others to Iran and Lebanon in the early 1990s to
learn bomb making from Iranian intelligence and Hezbollah, the
Iran-affiliated militant group, U.S. officials say. They fear he and other
Egyptians may still have ties with Iran's military and intelligence services.
The Sept. 11 commission concluded that Iran had harbored Al Qaeda operatives
wanted in the U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa and other terrorist
attacks.
It quoted one top Al Qaeda official as saying Iran had made a "concerted
effort to strengthen relations with Al Qaeda" after the 2000 attack on
the U.S. warship Cole in Yemen.
Imprisoned top Al Qaeda operatives also have told U.S. officials that Iran
let Islamic militants traveling to and from Afghanistan and Pakistan pass
freely across its borders without passport stamps including at least eight
of the 19 future Sept. 11 hijackers, the nowdisbanded commission said.
The panel strongly urged the Bush administration and Congress to investigate
the ties between Iran and Al Qaeda. Recently, commission member Timothy
Roemer said in an interview that Washington still had not adequately
addressed those ties.
U.S. and allied intelligence agencies say that, more recently, they have
picked up indications of closer cooperation. The intelligence includes
European wiretaps of militants discussing how Iranian officials would help
them or look the other way.
U.S. officials fear Ahmadinejad may be strengthening ties with Al Qaeda with
the help of Iranian intelligence and military agencies, particularly the
Revolutionary Guards.
The intelligence official and others noted that Ahmadinejad himself rose
through the ranks of the guards, an elite military unit. U.S. government
officials have accused the guards of financing and orchestrating terrorist
acts in the region by groups including Hezbollah, which is suspected of
blowing up U.S. military facilities and embassies in the 1980s and killing
hundreds of Americans.
Rep. Brad Sherman of Sherman Oaks, the ranking Democrat on the House
International Relations subcommittee on terrorism and nuclear proliferation,
who receives classified briefings on Iran, said U.S. intelligence indicated
that Tehran was engaged in some kind of collaboration with Al Qaeda leaders.
"The cooperation is substantial," Sherman said. "Key
operatives of the most successful terrorist organization in history are
spending their time in the No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism
. That is of
massive concern."
U.S. officials fear that an Iranian hard-line faction or even a rogue
official could conspire with Al Qaeda or provide access to the country's
military arsenal.
Despite the mutual antipathy between Sunnis and Shiites, some U.S. officials
argue that the Iranian regime and Al Qaeda share a common enemy the United
States and that both oppose the establishment of a pro-Western democracy in
Iraq.
John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, told Congress on
Feb. 2 that Iran was engaged in a broad campaign "to disrupt the
operations and reinforcement of United States forces based in the region,
potentially intimidating regional allies into withholding support for United
States policy toward Iran and raising the costs of our regional
presence" for the U.S. and its allies.
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