In its latest attempt at international terror, Iran had all the makings of a Hollywood spy thriller.
Shadowy operatives from Tehran, a Mexican hit squad and an elaborate plot to bomb embassies and assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador on U.S. soil — it was all part of a conspiracy that federal officials said yesterday they foiled.
The authorities laid out murder, terrorism and conspiracy charges against two mysterious men: Manssor Arbabsiar, 56, a naturalized U.S. citizen with American and Iranian passports who lived in Texas; and Gholam Shakuri, an Iran-based operative with the Quds Force, a special operations branch of the anti-American regime’s Revolutionary Guard.
The primary target was Adel al-Jubeir, a trusted adviser and confidant of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah who served as the Saudi government’s spokesman before becoming an ambassador in 2007.
Justice Department officials say the men tried to hire someone they believed was with a Mexican drug cartel to carry out the assassination with a bomb attack while Jubeir dined at his favorite Washington restaurant. They also allegedly discussed bombing the Saudi and Israeli embassies in D.C.
“This conspiracy was conceived, sponsored and directed from Iran and constitutes a flagrant violation of U.S. and international law,” Attorney General Eric Holder said at a news conference yesterday. “The United States is committed to holding Iran accountable for its actions.”
The feds say Shakuri masterminded the plot from afar, while Arbabsiar — who has a listed address in the Austin, Texas, suburb of Round Rock — handled details on the ground. According to a federal complaint filed yesterday, Arbabsiar’s principal task was finding someone to carry out the assassination.
The man he allegedly attempted to hire, whom the documents identify only as CS-1, was a paid informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration who posed as member of a Mexican drug cartel and secretly recorded Arbabsiar’s conversations.
“This is politics, OK,” Arbabsiar explains to the informant in the transcripts. “It’s not, like, personal.”
The federal complaint also details a series of meetings in Mexico, where Arbabsiar offered the informant $1.5 million to assemble a small group of assassins to place a bomb in crowded Washington restaurant known to be a regular haunt of the Saudi ambassador.
Arbabsiar allegedly said his Iranian handlers had little concern for the hundreds of other patrons who might have been killed.
“They want that guy done [killed], if the hundred go with him, f*** ’em,” he said, according to the complaint.
In the document, Arbabsiar allegedly used various code names for the plot, describing the operation variously as “Chevrolet,” and as a building that needed to be “painted.”
“I wanted to tell you the Chevrolet is ready,” Arbabsiar said in Oct. 5 call to Shakuri that was secretly recorded.
“So buy it, buy it,” Shakuri urged.
At one point, in a bit of comic relief, Arbabsiar expressed concern that the drug dealers he hired perhaps couldn’t be counted to carry out the plan.
“Well, I guaranteed it but they ... they’re not ordinary people,” Arbabsiar said. “They’re not law-abiding.”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the move against Jubeir would further isolate Iran, an Islamic republic that has been repeatedly accused of sponsoring terror attacks around the world.
“This really, in the minds of many diplomats and government officials, crosses a line that Iran needs to be held to account for,” Clinton said, even as she marveled the plot’s Hollywood-like elements.
“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?” Clinton said.
She said she and President Obama want to “enlist more countries in working together against what is becoming a clearer and clearer threat” from Iran.
Iran dismissed the charges as propaganda.
“We categorically reject these baseless allegations,” a spokesman for Iran’s United Nations mission in New York City said in a statement.
Since 1984, the the State Department has listed the country as a state sponsor of terror, and Argentine officials say Iran was behind a 1992 terror bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires that killed 29 people.
Also in 1992, three Iranian-Kurdish opposition leaders and their translator were killed in an attack on a restaurant in Berlin. German authorities alleged that the assassination had been ordered by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, commander of the Quds Force. The Iranian government was also linked to the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people.
Meanwhile, Shakuri is still at large, officials said, but Arbabsiar was arrested Sept. 29 and made an initial appearance yesterday in federal court in Manhattan where, dressed in jeans and blue checkered shirt, he entered no plea and waived a bail offering. He will be detained until a preliminary Oct. 25 hearing.
Arbabsiar’s Texas neighbors described the people who lived in his house as quiet, if slightly odd.
“He looked a little rough, long hair, long scraggly beard. He looked aged, weathered,” said one.
– With Sarah Ryley and M.L. Nestel in New York and Michael Brick in Round Rock, Texas
Erik.German@thedaily.com
Someone’s looking over your shoulder, Mahmoud
Two heads may be better than one when running a country like Iran, but only one wears the turban.
Iran basically has two leaders: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (foreground), who is more like the manager of economic and administrative aspects, and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (pictured behind the president) who runs the military and police forces.
The two went to head earlier this year when Ahmadinejad stepped on Khamenei’s toes by making policy changes and firing three cabinet ministers without Khamenei’s consultation.
However, Ahmadinejad’s plan backfired, according to Maziar Behrooz, an associate professor at San Francisco State University. He said the president had assumed Khamenei would support his decisions, but really, he had “miscalculated badly.”
In order to heal the tension, Ahmadinejad reinstated one minister upon Khamenei’s command and hired another one they both agreed on, said Behrooz, who teaches “Modernity and the Islamic World” and other history classes, “Basically, [Ahmadinejad] backed off,” he said. Khamenei “is in charge and has the final say.” – Kamala Kelkar
Shadowy operatives from Tehran, a Mexican hit squad and an elaborate plot to bomb embassies and assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador on U.S. soil — it was all part of a conspiracy that federal officials said yesterday they foiled.
The authorities laid out murder, terrorism and conspiracy charges against two mysterious men: Manssor Arbabsiar, 56, a naturalized U.S. citizen with American and Iranian passports who lived in Texas; and Gholam Shakuri, an Iran-based operative with the Quds Force, a special operations branch of the anti-American regime’s Revolutionary Guard.
The primary target was Adel al-Jubeir, a trusted adviser and confidant of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah who served as the Saudi government’s spokesman before becoming an ambassador in 2007.
Justice Department officials say the men tried to hire someone they believed was with a Mexican drug cartel to carry out the assassination with a bomb attack while Jubeir dined at his favorite Washington restaurant. They also allegedly discussed bombing the Saudi and Israeli embassies in D.C.
“This conspiracy was conceived, sponsored and directed from Iran and constitutes a flagrant violation of U.S. and international law,” Attorney General Eric Holder said at a news conference yesterday. “The United States is committed to holding Iran accountable for its actions.”
The feds say Shakuri masterminded the plot from afar, while Arbabsiar — who has a listed address in the Austin, Texas, suburb of Round Rock — handled details on the ground. According to a federal complaint filed yesterday, Arbabsiar’s principal task was finding someone to carry out the assassination.
The man he allegedly attempted to hire, whom the documents identify only as CS-1, was a paid informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration who posed as member of a Mexican drug cartel and secretly recorded Arbabsiar’s conversations.
“This is politics, OK,” Arbabsiar explains to the informant in the transcripts. “It’s not, like, personal.”
The federal complaint also details a series of meetings in Mexico, where Arbabsiar offered the informant $1.5 million to assemble a small group of assassins to place a bomb in crowded Washington restaurant known to be a regular haunt of the Saudi ambassador.
Arbabsiar allegedly said his Iranian handlers had little concern for the hundreds of other patrons who might have been killed.
“They want that guy done [killed], if the hundred go with him, f*** ’em,” he said, according to the complaint.
In the document, Arbabsiar allegedly used various code names for the plot, describing the operation variously as “Chevrolet,” and as a building that needed to be “painted.”
“I wanted to tell you the Chevrolet is ready,” Arbabsiar said in Oct. 5 call to Shakuri that was secretly recorded.
“So buy it, buy it,” Shakuri urged.
At one point, in a bit of comic relief, Arbabsiar expressed concern that the drug dealers he hired perhaps couldn’t be counted to carry out the plan.
“Well, I guaranteed it but they ... they’re not ordinary people,” Arbabsiar said. “They’re not law-abiding.”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the move against Jubeir would further isolate Iran, an Islamic republic that has been repeatedly accused of sponsoring terror attacks around the world.
“This really, in the minds of many diplomats and government officials, crosses a line that Iran needs to be held to account for,” Clinton said, even as she marveled the plot’s Hollywood-like elements.
“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?” Clinton said.
She said she and President Obama want to “enlist more countries in working together against what is becoming a clearer and clearer threat” from Iran.
Iran dismissed the charges as propaganda.
“We categorically reject these baseless allegations,” a spokesman for Iran’s United Nations mission in New York City said in a statement.
Since 1984, the the State Department has listed the country as a state sponsor of terror, and Argentine officials say Iran was behind a 1992 terror bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires that killed 29 people.
Also in 1992, three Iranian-Kurdish opposition leaders and their translator were killed in an attack on a restaurant in Berlin. German authorities alleged that the assassination had been ordered by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, commander of the Quds Force. The Iranian government was also linked to the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people.
Meanwhile, Shakuri is still at large, officials said, but Arbabsiar was arrested Sept. 29 and made an initial appearance yesterday in federal court in Manhattan where, dressed in jeans and blue checkered shirt, he entered no plea and waived a bail offering. He will be detained until a preliminary Oct. 25 hearing.
Arbabsiar’s Texas neighbors described the people who lived in his house as quiet, if slightly odd.
“He looked a little rough, long hair, long scraggly beard. He looked aged, weathered,” said one.
– With Sarah Ryley and M.L. Nestel in New York and Michael Brick in Round Rock, Texas
Erik.German@thedaily.com
Someone’s looking over your shoulder, Mahmoud
Two heads may be better than one when running a country like Iran, but only one wears the turban.
Iran basically has two leaders: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (foreground), who is more like the manager of economic and administrative aspects, and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (pictured behind the president) who runs the military and police forces.
The two went to head earlier this year when Ahmadinejad stepped on Khamenei’s toes by making policy changes and firing three cabinet ministers without Khamenei’s consultation.
However, Ahmadinejad’s plan backfired, according to Maziar Behrooz, an associate professor at San Francisco State University. He said the president had assumed Khamenei would support his decisions, but really, he had “miscalculated badly.”
In order to heal the tension, Ahmadinejad reinstated one minister upon Khamenei’s command and hired another one they both agreed on, said Behrooz, who teaches “Modernity and the Islamic World” and other history classes, “Basically, [Ahmadinejad] backed off,” he said. Khamenei “is in charge and has the final say.” – Kamala Kelkar
PHOTO: Morteza Nikoubazl/Reuters, Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, left, commander of the Quds Force, which targeted Adel al-Jubeir.
PHOTO: Shirley Shepard/AFP/Getty Images
Manssor Arbabsiar, second from right, is charged yesterday in New York with plotting to kill the Saudi ambassador.
