When a convoy of four-wheel-drive vehicles rolled up to an Iraqi police
checkpoint outside the holy city of Karbala one day back in January, the
guards hardly gave it a second glance. The armour-plated GMC Suburbans are
commonly used by US military personnel to travel Iraq’s most dangerous
roads. The dozen or so passengers, who spoke in American-accented English,
were wearing the US military’s distinctive camouflaged fatigues beneath
regulation flak jackets, and carrying standard-issue automatic rifles. After
waving them through, the police radioed checkpoints further along the route
to let the vehicles pass.
Dusk was falling as the convoy arrived at the headquarters of the provincial
government, where senior Iraqi and US officials were discussing security
measures for an impending religious holiday. The moment the vehicles were
inside the heavily defended compound, their occupants launched a swift and
meticulously planned assault on the US command centre. “They clearly weren’t
interested in targeting Iraqis,” one shaken eyewitness recalled.
It was all over in 20 minutes: after showering the compound with grenades, the
attackers seized four US soldiers, bundled them into the Suburbans and raced
away. With the security forces now on high alert, the kidnappers shot their
way through the first checkpoint they encountered. Moments later, seemingly
fearing that they could not outrun the pursuit, they halted on a back road
and the killing began.
All four prisoners, two of them handcuffed together, were executed with a
bullet in the back of the head: three died instantly, the fourth on the way
to hospital. By the time police arrived, the gunmen had vanished, leaving
forged
US-military identity cards, weapons and walkie-talkies tuned to security-force
frequencies. The attack in Karbala caught the US military command badly off
balance. For several days, the official version of what happened was that the
soldiers had died repelling a raid by Iraqi insurgents. But in private both
American and Iraqi officials concluded that such a slick operation was
beyond any of the Shi’ite militia groups. “What went down in Karbala was way
out of their league,” said one US intelligence source. Like other
knowledgable insiders who spoke to The Sunday Times Magazine on condition of
anonymity, he saw the fingerprints of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps all over the raid.
“We know for sure those guys are backing up the Shias in Iraq. My best guess
is that they handled the planning and subcontracted the assault to local
fighters.” There could be little doubt, he concluded, that the objective of
the Karbala raid was to seize American hostages.
Six weeks later, in March, the Revolutionary Guard deployed the fast patrol
boats of its naval unit to swoop on a pair of inflatable dinghies carrying
15 Royal Navy sailors and marines in the Persian Gulf. Radar screens on the
crews’ mother ship, the frigate HMS Cornwall, showed the Iranian flotilla
swarming around them.
They surrendered and were escorted to an Iranian naval base, then transferred
to Tehran. For the next two weeks, the captured navy personnel were paraded
on Iranian television to praise the treatment they were receiving and
deliver profuse apologies for having violated Iran’s territorial waters (the
British government vehemently denied this). Rubbing in the humiliation of
the “Little Satan”, Iran’s hardline president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, staged
an exultant ceremony at which he pinned medals on the Revolutionary Guard
crews involved. Veteran Iran-watchers were quick to link the crisis, finally
resolved with the release of the hostages as “a gift to the British people”,
to the deep-rooted paranoia that has consumed every government in Tehran
since the Islamic uprising that overthrew the Shah in 1979.
“Almost every important event is viewed by the hardliners through the prism of
a plot by the West to undermine the Islamic Republic,” says an Israeli
expert on post-revolutionary Iran. At the time that the navy hostages were
seized, he points out, the regime was under intense pressure from the
international community to abandon its controversial nuclear-development
programme or face harsh UN sanctions.
Veiled threats by the Bush administration to take out Iran’s
uranium-enrichment facilities with air strikes, should diplomacy fail, only
reinforced Tehran’s sense of isolation. Behind the scenes, nerves were
jangling in the Revolutionary Guard command following the recent
disappearance of around a dozen Iranian undercover agents – mostly senior
intelligence officers – inside Iraq in the space of a month. It should
hardly have come as a surprise, the Israeli source suggests, when
Ahmadinejad’s embattled regime turned to hostage-taking to secure bargaining
chips for political leverage.
The same tactics, after all, had paid off in Lebanon in the 1980s, when scores
of foreigners were kidnapped on orders from Tehran during a terrorist
campaign aimed at ending western interference in the Lebanese civil war. The
message from the Revolutionary Guard’s weekly newspaper just before the
Royal Navy incident was hardly ambiguous, warning: “We’ve got the ability to
capture a nice bunch of blue-eyed, blond-haired officers and feed them to
our fighting cocks.”
It is getting on for 30 years since the green-uniformed Revolutionary Guard
was created to protect Iran’s fledging revolution in the event that the
regular army proved unreliable. Forged in the crucible of the protracted
Iran-Iraq war, it has evolved into a force fielding an estimated 125,000
well-equipped troops who control security at frontiers, ports, airports and
key strategic sites, including long-range missile silos. Answerable only to
the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, it aims to export its
brand of militant Islam throughout the Middle East. A special unit within
the force, the Al-Quds brigade, is responsible for backing terrorist
movements abroad. Initially deployed in Beirut in the early 1980s, it was
largely instrumental in founding Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shi’ite
paramilitary organisation.
“The Revolutionary Guard is emerging as the most prominent actor in Iran,”
says Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an
independent US think-tank. “They’re playing an increasingly active role on
the domestic political scene, have enormous economic assets, are a key
player in the nuclear programme and are essentially running Iranian
activities in Iraq and Lebanon.” Coalition commanders first became aware of
links between the Revolutionary Guard and the Shi’ite militias in 2004, when
a small number of Al-Quds officers were infiltrated into areas of Iraq where
the conflict was intensifying. Iranian support was originally limited to
providing basic training for the most effective militant groups, notably the
Mahdi Army under the firebrand Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
“There was never any shortage of volunteers to fight, but most were pretty raw
and undisciplined,” a US military insider recalls. Initially, US
intelligence did not rate the Iranian agents as a serious threat: American
troops would detain Iranians suspected of aiding insurgents, but their
“catch and release” policy – intended to avoid head-on confrontation with
Tehran – meant that few were held for long.
“It was only when the American body count began rising steadily that the Bush
administration began to understand what the Iranians were really up to,”
said a European security official. It was not until the end of last year
that the head of the CIA, General Michael Hayden, formally acknowledged to
Congress that “the Iranian hand is stoking violence in Iraq”. Around the
same time, US military sources began releasing formerly classified
information about Tehran’s deepening involvement to the media.
Journalists were told that several thousand Iranian-trained fighters from the
Mahdi Army and other Shi’ite militias were now in the field, supported
directly by Guard personnel with special expertise in explosives. There was
particular concern in the Pentagon, shared by British Army commanders in the
Basra region of southern Iraq, that Iran might have begun supplying its
militia allies with the money and technological know-how to develop a lethal
new type of IED (improvised explosive device). Known as an “explosively
formed projectile”, it was believed to be capable of penetrating the most
heavily armoured tanks and troop carriers deployed by coalition forces.
Detonated by remote control, the bombs could punch a jet of molten copper into
a target, with catastrophic results for crews inside. In early April, on the
same day that Iran freed the Royal Navy hostages, four British soldiers and
their civilian interpreter were killed when their Warrior fighting vehicle
was destroyed by an IED far more destructive than any previously used.
The decision not to send Prince Harry to serve in Iraq was undoubtedly
influenced by the fear that the lightly armoured Scorpion reconnaissance
vehicles his regiment uses would be highly vulnerable to such bombs. In a
carefully worded statement, Tony Blair warned that while it could not be
proved that Iran was implicated directly in the Warrior attack, “elements of
the Iranian regime” were known to be financing, arming and supporting
insurgents. British commanders in Iraq confided that besides supplying
weapons, ammunition and high-tech skills, Iran was offering bounties to
insurgent groups for every soldier they killed.
Late last year, under pressure from US military commanders to strike directly
at Iran’s operation inside Iraq, George Bush authorised the launch of a
covert operation to break the back of the Revolutionary Guard networks.
Revised rules of engagement were issued that permitted US forces to capture or
kill Iranians linked to the militias. A senior US counterterrorism source
told The Washington Post that the strategy was intended “to change the
dynamics with the Iranians”. The leadership in Tehran would be made to
understand the cost of supporting operations that took American lives.
The secret “intelligence war” began almost immediately with the abduction in
Baghdad of two senior Al-Quds officers who have never been seen again. One
of them, Major General Mohsen Shirazi, was described by the military as
Al-Quds’s third in command, the other as a colonel in intelligence.
Days later, gunmen snatched Jalal Sharafi in the centre of the capital.
Although Sharafi was officially accredited as second secretary at the
Iranian embassy, leaks to the US media identified him as the Al-Quds liaison
officer with Shi’ite militia chiefs. In January, US special forces mounted a
helicopter assault on the Iranian “liaison office” in the northern Iraqi
city of Irbil, smashing their way into the building; five men were hustled
off in blindfolds and stacks of files and computers were removed. Although
the Iranian authorities claimed the prisoners were all diplomats, a US
official stated that “the capture of the Quds members was essential for our
understanding of Iranian activity in Iraq”.
The material seized was said to include information linking the undercover
cells to Shi’ite death squads responsible for slaughtering thousands of
Sunni Muslims. Intelligence sources familiar with intercepts of Iranian
communications say that the raid in Irbil caused consternation in Tehran.
“There was mounting panic over what was happening to their people on the
ground,” said one western official. The disappearance of a former
Revolutionary Guard general in mysterious circumstances added to Tehran’s
worries.
Ali Reza Asghari, who had also served as Iran’s deputy defence minister, had
been missing for several weeks before the authorities admitted that he had
vanished during a visit to Istanbul. Analysts monitoring the “chatter” on
Iranian security-agency frequencies reported that a damage-limitation
exercise was under way as fears grew that Asghari, whose knowledge of
Revolutionary Guard operations would be invaluable to western
counterterrorism agencies, might also have been abducted.
When Asghari’s disappearance was finally announced in February, journalists
around the world went to town on what appeared to be a tale of espionage
worthy of John le Carré. What little hard information there was indicated
that Asghari had arrived in Istanbul on a flight from Damascus, and that two
foreign men had booked a room for him at the city’s luxurious Ceylan hotel,
though he didn’t stay there, and there was no record of him having left the
country. A car rented in his name was later found abandoned in the Turkish
countryside.
The initial media coverage focused on the theory that Asghari had defected to
the West. There was much speculation that he had been recruited as a spy
years earlier and was “extracted” from Iran after his cover was blown. A US
official hinted that he was being debriefed “somewhere in northern Europe”.
A former agent of Israel’s Mossad security service, Ram Igra, revealed that
Asghari had been among the Revolutionary Guard contingent sent to Lebanon
around 1982. He was known to have played a central role in the creation of
Hezbollah: “Asghari was, in effect, the man who built, promoted and funded
[it] in those years,” Igra said. “If he has something to give to the West,
it’s in this context of terrorism and Hezbollah’s network in Lebanon.”
Israeli intelligence also believed that Asghari could shed some light on the
fate of Ron
Arad, an air-force pilot who was shot down over south Lebanon in 1986 and
handed over to Hezbollah. Although presumed to have died inside Iran after
being passed on to the Revolutionary Guard, Arad is still listed as missing
in action. “If Asghari has gone over, then we would definitely want a piece
of him,” an Israeli official told The Sunday Times Magazine.
But about a month after Asghari vanished, the defection theory was cast into
doubt by a woman who said she was his wife. Speaking outside the Turkish
embassy in Tehran, Ziba Ahmadi explained that she had come to appeal for
information on her husband’s whereabouts. He was not a spy or a defector,
she claimed: just a retired soldier who had gone into the olive-oil business
and often visited Syria for work reasons. Ahmadi ridiculed reports that up
to a dozen members of his extended family had been smuggled out of the
country before he disappeared. A young woman who was with her said she was
Asghari’s daughter Elham, while an older man introduced himself as his
brother Davoud, insisting: “wife, children, grandchildren, in-laws, we’re
all still here”.
Unsurprisingly, the Asghari family’s belief that he had been kidnapped by
western intelligence was endorsed by the Iranian authorities. A senior
police officer hinted that he may have been a victim of the CIA’s notorious
programme of “extraordinary rendition” – the clandestine abduction of terror
suspects for interrogation in secret prisons dotted around the world. The US
had good reasons for wanting to lay hands on Asghari: he was suspected of
involvement in the planning of two suicide bombings in Beirut in 1983 that
killed 241 US marines in their barracks and 63 people at the US embassy.
Although different Shi’ite militant groups had claimed responsibility for
the attacks, Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer who was stationed in
Beirut at the time, has long believed that Iran masterminded the attacks. A
veteran Middle East hand whose experiences provided the background for the
Oscar-winning film Syriana – he was the weary but idealistic agent
played by George Clooney – Baer points out that the Revolutionary Guard has
a bloody history of violence against Iran’s enemies, the US above all. Now a
novelist and television-documentary maker, Baer wonders if the Bush
administration really understands the risks of trying to eliminate the
Al-Quds presence in Iraq. The Revolutionary Guard’s response to the
disappearance of one of its members posing as a diplomat in Lebanon in 1982
was a campaign of terror against the US and its western allies that
persisted for more than a decade. “There is nothing [it] likes better than
to fight a proxy war in another country,” Baer said.
“The US needs to remember what a serious spoiler it can be when provoked.”
Last month, as the “surge” of 20,000 additional US troops into Iraq was
completed, the first formal talks between Iran and the US for more than a
quarter of a century took place in Baghdad’s fortress-like Green Zone. Both
sides described the four-hour meeting as “positive”, though the Iranian
nuclear programme was not on the agenda and there were sharp exchanges over
Tehran’s support for the Shi’ite militia. Although Iran is keen on another
meeting, US officials made it clear that this would depend on “indications
of change of [Iranian] behaviour”.
The prospect of an eventual diplomatic breakthrough might be overshadowed by
growing evidence that Iran is also becoming involved in Afghanistan, where
US and Nato forces – including about 7,000 British troops – are facing a
renewed offensive by Taliban insurgents. While there is no natural bond
between Tehran’s Shi’ite-dominated regime and the Taliban’s Sunni Muslim
zealots, analysts believe hardliners in Iran want to stir up further trouble
for the US and its allies. According to western military intelligence, over
the past few months weapons from Iran have been flowing into Afghanistan.
British Army sources recently accused Tehran of smuggling anti-aircraft
missiles to the Taliban, which would pose a grave threat to the helicopters
that fly missions around the clock. Meanwhile, as the hunt continues for
five Britons abducted in Baghdad last month, the US commander in Iraq said
the kidnappers probably belonged to the same Iranian-backed Shi’ite militia
faction responsible for the raid on Karbala and the execution of the
American hostages
