Reflections on the Arbabsiar Case
On Oct. 11, the U.S. Department of Justice [link ]announced that two men had been charged in New York for allegedly 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.
ManssorArbabsiar and GholamShakuri face numerous charges, including conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction (explosives), conspiracy to commit an act of international terrorism transcending national borders and conspiracy to murder a foreign official. Arbabsiar, who was arrested Sept. 29 at JFK airport in New York, is a U.S. citizen with both Iranian and U.S. passports, and Shakuri, who remains at large, allegedly is a senior officer in Iran’s Quds Force, a special unit of the [link ]Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)responsible for military and terrorist activities abroad.
Arbabsiar, who lived in the U.S., allegedly traveled to Mexico several times between May and July. In Mexico, he met with a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) confidential informant who was apparently posing as an associate of the [link ]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 of the ambassador (the agreed-upon total price was $1.5 million).
Certainly a lot has been written on the Arbabsiar case, both from those who believe the U.S. Government’s case to be valid and those who doubt the facts laid out in the criminal complaint. However, as we have watched this case unfold, as well as the media coverage surrounding it, there are two aspects of the case that we thought merited a bit more discussion. The first point is that past history has demonstrated that is not really unusual for the Iranians to employ unconventional assassins in plots inside the U.S. Secondly, while the DEA informant was allegedly posing as a member of Los Zetas, we do not believe that this case serves as proof of any sort of increase of the terrorist threat emanating from the U.S. southern border.
Unconventional Assassin
One of the primary arguments that has appeared in the press coverage of the case and that casts doubt upon the validity of the U.S. Government’s charges is the fact that in this case the Iranian Quds Force is alleged to have used 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 the Spring of 2011, and then handled by Shakuri, who is Shahlai’s deputy. The complaint also alleges that initially Arbabsiar was tasked to find someone to kidnap al-Jubair, but that at some unspecified point the objective of plot turned from kidnapping to murder. After his arrest, Arbabsiar told the agents who interviewed him that he was chosen for this mission because of his business interests and contacts in the U.S. 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 are 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 press, Arbabsiar had reportedly decided to leave the U.S. and return permanently to Iran, but as a naturalized U.S. citizen, his ability to freely travel to the U.S. could be seen as useful by Quds Force. The money Arbabsiar could make working for Quds Force, could also have been useful in helping him reestablish himself in Iran, and therefore he was likely [link ]enticed by the money. If he was motivated by money rather than ideology, it could explain whey he flipped so easily after being arrested by U.S. authorities.
Now, while the Iranian government has shown the ability to conduct sophisticated operations within it areas of influence such as Lebanon and Iraq, the use of such sub-optimal agents to orchestrate an assassination plot in the U.S. 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 convictoin of [link ]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 JamshidSharmahd, who made radio broadcasts for the Iranian opposition group Tondar while 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. His guilty plea, international travel, the fact that he conducted surveillance on two high-profile Iranian dissidents on two separate continents, was convicted for soliciting someone to murder one of them and then returned to Tehran while on supervised release, would seem to support the claims that even though he was fairly inept, he was working as an agent of the Iranian government.
Sadeghnia’s profile of an unemployed housepainter from Iran who lived in the United States for many years is very similar to that of Arbabsiar, a failed used car salesman. Sadeghnia pled guilty for planning to use a third man (also and Iranian American) as a hit man and for the hit man to employ a used van purchased by Sadeghnia to run over and murder Sharmahd. Like the alleged Arbabsiar plot, the Sadeghnia casedisplayed a lack of sophisticated assassination methodology in an Iranian-linked plot inside the U.S.
This does raise the question of why Iran chose to use another unsophisticated assassination operation after the Sadeghniafailure, but on the flip side, the Iranians experienced no meaningfulrepercussions from that plot, and not even much negative press.
For Iranian operatives to be so obvious while operating inside the U.S. is not a new thing, as illustrated by the case of David Belfield, also known as DawudSalahuddin, 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, DC. He was paid $5,000 to shoot Tabatabaei and then fled the U.S. 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, [link ] 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 have also been numerous assassinations and failed assassination attempts directed against Iranian dissidents in Europe and elsewhere that were conducted in a rudimentary fashion and by operatives easily linked to Iran. Such cases include the 1991 assassination of ShapourBakhtiar in Paris, the 1989 murder of Abdul RahmanGhassemlou in Vienna and the 1992 killing of three Iranian-Kurdish opposition leaders at the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin, among others.
All that said, there has been a lengthy break between the Iranian assassinations in the west in the 1980’s and 1990’s 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 [link ]a sustained covert intelligence war against the U.S. 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 [link ]assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists in Iran.
South Of The Border
One other result of the Arbabsiar case is that it has served to re-energize the long-held fears of foreign entities using the porous U.S./Mexico border in order to execute terrorist attacks inside the U.S. and of Mexican cartels partnering with foreign entities to conduct terrorist attacks in the U.S.
Firstly, it is important to remember that the purported Iranian operative in this case who traveled to the U.S., Arbabsiar, is a naturalized U.S. citizen. He is not an Iranian who traveled into the U.S. from Mexico illegally. Arbabsiar used his U.S. passport to travel between the U.S. and Mexico.
Secondly, while Arbabsiar, and purportedly Shahlai, believed that the Los Zetas cartel would undertake kidnapping or assassination in the U.S. in exchange for money, that assumption may be flawed. Certainly Mexican cartel groups do indeed kidnap and murder people inside the U.S. (often for financial gain) they also have a long history of being [link ]very careful about they types of operations they conduct inside the U.S. This is because the cartels do not want to incur the full wrath of the U.S. government. Kidnapping an illegal immigrant in Phoenix, or shooting a drug dealer in Laredo who loses a load of dope is one thing, going after the Saudi Ambassador in Washington DC is quite another. While the payoff for this operation seems pretty large at $1.5 million, there is no way that a Mexican cartel group is going to jeopardize their billion-dollar business for such a small one-time paymentand for an act that had no cartel-related interest.
While the cartels can be quite violent, their violence is for the most part calculated, and for the most part they tend to refrain from activities that can jeopardize their long-term business plans.
One danger for the security of the U.S. mainland is that this 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 true that it is relatively easy to illegally enter the U.S. via the southern border, and that the U.S. 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 [link ]before, there has also been a long history of terrorist plots that have originated from Canada – far more plots than have had any sort of nexus to Mexico. Such as that involving Ghazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, a Palestinian who was convicted of plotting a suicide bombing against the New York subway system in 1997, Ahmed Ressam who was arrested attempting to enter the U.S. with explosives in Dec. 1999, and the so-called Toronto 18 cell that was arrested in 2006 and later convicted for planning a string of attacks in Canada and the U.S.
Furthermore, the majority of terrorist operatives who have traveled to the U.S. intending to participate in terrorist attacks have flown directly into the U.S. from overseas. Such operatives include the 19 involved in the 9/11 attacks, the foreigners involved in the 1993 World Trade bombing and the follow-on new York Landmarks bomb plot, as well as failed bombers NajibulahZazi,and Faisal Shahzad. Even the would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid and the would-be underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to fly directly into the U.S.
So, while there is concern over security at the U.S. southern border, past plots involving foreign terrorist operatives traveling to the U.S. have either involved direct travel to the U.S. 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.