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U.S. charges prompt debate over Iran threat

Fri, 3 Feb 2012 22:06 GMT

Source: reuters // Reuters

* Focus on alleged attempt to kill Saudi ambassador

* Questions about what Iran's leaders knew

* Links studied with alleged plots in Thailand, Azerbaijan

By Susan Cornwell

WASHINGTON, Feb 3 (Reuters) - Renewed charges by the Obama administration this week that a more aggressive Iran is willing to strike targets inside the United States and U.S. interests abroad has experts split over just how worrisome and imminent the threat is.

U.S. spy chiefs including Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress they believed Iran's leaders - supreme religious leader Ali Khamenei among them - are now more willing to attack the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten their government.

"We are also concerned about Iran plotting against U.S. or allied interests overseas," Clapper said.

Some U.S. lawmakers, including the head of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, seconded Clapper's remarks.

But several U.S. and European government sources familiar with official assessments of Iran's behavior said they knew of no imminent threat.

And they said Iranian attacks against U.S. or allied interests would most likely go into motion in retaliation for any outside strike on Iran's nuclear facilities.

The administration's calculation that Iran is more willing to strike U.S. targets appears to be based largely on an alleged Iranian plot foiled last year to assassinate Saudi Arabia's ambassador in Washington.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, a Republican who hosted the Thursday hearing with Clapper, CIA Director David Petraeus and other top U.S. intelligence officials, indicated he did not think the Iran threat they described was exaggerated.

"I have a high degree of confidence that Iranian leadership was aware of the plot" against the Saudi ambassador, Rogers said in an interview with Reuters. As chairman of the intelligence committee, Rogers receives frequent classified briefings from the administration.

As for recent investigations of alleged plots with links to Iran in Thailand and Azerbaijan, "a reasonable person could deduce that there is some connection" between them, Rogers said.

Petraeus mentioned the events in Thailand in testimony to Rogers' committee as he discussed Iranian proxies he said had been active in a variety of plots.

Thai police last month detained a Lebanese man suspected of planning a possible bomb attack. They said he was linked to the Shi'ite Islamist group Hezbollah, which was founded with Iranian help.

A U.S. official told Reuters that the government was examining possible links between that plot and one in Azerbaijan's capital Baku, where two men were arrested last month suspected of plotting to attack prominent foreigners including Israel's ambassador.

Azerbaijani officials said the men were connected to an Iranian citizen who had links with Iran's intelligence.

It is unclear if the U.S. Embassy in Baku was a target, the official said.

A "STRETCH"

Some U.S. and European government sources said that many government experts believe that neither Iran nor its proxies presently pose a grave or even serious threat to attack either the United States or U.S. and allied interests overseas, including Europe.

These sources said they were unaware of any information surfacing in recent months suggesting attacks were more imminent or likely. But due to disorganization and feuding among Iranian leaders such developments could not be ruled out definitively, they cautioned.

Analysts outside the government are divided on just how seriously to take the administration warnings of attacks within the United States and its conclusion that Khamenei himself has a role in a more aggressive Iranian approach.

It would be a "stretch" to conclude that Iran is looking to commit acts of terror in the United States based only on the alleged plot to kill the Saudi ambassador, said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"The alleged plot to kill the Saudi ambassador remains a puzzle. It's difficult to comprehend why the regime would entrust a whiskey drinking, pot-smoking, unemployed car salesman, together with a Mexican drug cartel, to carry out their first major attack on U.S. soil," he said.

The chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Democrat Dianne Feinstein, acknowledged this week that the alleged plot was "so unusual and amateurish that many initially doubted that Iran was responsible."

"Well, let me state for the record, I have no such a doubt," she said in Tuesday's hearing.

U.S. charges say an Iranian-American man, Monssor Arbabsiar, tried to hire a Mexican drug cartel figure to kill the Saudi ambassador. Arbabsiar is alleged to have confessed that he had acted for men he thought were part of the covert, operational arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

"I don't know how you jump to the conclusion that the supreme leader (of Iran) was involved," said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former CIA and White House official.

"If they have evidence, that's important, but we certainly haven't seen any evidence of that," Riedel told Reuters.

But Michael Singh, managing director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said, "My own view is that we should take it seriously, because Iran has a track record of conducting these sorts of attacks, both through proxies and directly."

Singh noted that Iran's current defense minister is among senior Iranian officials accused by Argentine prosecutors of being behind the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people.

Officials and analysts appear to agree that the risks of Iranian attacks would likely become much higher if an outside party such as Israel launches military strikes against installations linked to Iran's nuclear development program.

Such attacks would likely involve various forms of asymmetrical, unconventional warfare, ranging from possible sea-borne guerrilla-type attacks on shipping in or near the Strait of Hormuz to possible larger-scale attacks on U.S. or Israeli targets in the Middle East, Europe and even possibly the U.S. or elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere.

Riedel said that as far as the Iranians are concerned, they already have a long list of grievances that they could consider grounds for retaliation.

"Somebody is killing Iranian scientists. And somebody is blowing up installations. From the Iranian perspective, the war is already well underway. In that sense, we should be aware that they sooner or later will retaliate," he said. (Additional reporting by Mark Hosenball and Warren Strobel; Editing by Xavier Briand)