Foiled Paris bomb plot raises fears that Iran is planning attacks in
Europe
In this file photo taken on July
11, 2018, activists of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) in
Berlin hold placards reading 'Deliver the Iranian diplomat - terrorist to
Belgium' during a demonstration calling for the extradition of an Iranian
diplomat linked to a bomb plot targeting an Iranian oppostion rally in Paris.
(Tobias Schwarz/AFP/Getty Images)
By Shane Harris , Souad
Mekhennet and Joby Warrick
October 12 at 7:00 AM
On the evening of July
1, police in Bavaria surrounded the rented van of an Iranian diplomat
after he pulled over at a gas station on the autobahn. Fearing he might
be transporting explosives, the authorities summoned the bomb squad.
The diplomat, based at Iran’s
embassy in Vienna, had been under surveillance for some time and was suspected
of involvement in a plot to bomb a rally of Iranian dissidents in Paris.
Despite his diplomatic status, he was arrested and extradited to Belgium, where
two others, suspected of planning to carry out the attack in France, were detained.
The foiled plot has sparked
growing anxiety in France, Germany and several other countries, including
the United States and Israel, that Iran is planning audacious terrorist attacks
and has stepped up its intelligence operations around the world.
Iranian leaders, under pressure
from domestic protesters, Israeli intelligence operatives, and the Trump
administration, which is reimposing economic sanctions lifted under President
Barack Obama, are making contingency plans to strike at the country’s adversaries
in the event of open conflict, according to American, European, Middle Eastern
and Israeli officials and analysts who spoke on the condition of anonymity
to discuss sensitive intelligence.
Iran has assigned different
units and organizations to conduct surveillance of opposition figures, as well
as Jewish and Israeli organizations, in the United States and Europe, the
officials said. The Iranians are preparing what one Israeli official
called “target files” of
specific people or groups that Iran could attack.
France seizes Iranian assets in
response to foiled bomb plot
France’s government said Oct. 2
it seized assets from Iran's intelligence services and two Iranian nationals
over a June plot to attack a rally in Paris. (Reuters)
One Middle Eastern intelligence
official, speaking on the condition that his name and nationality be withheld,
cited a “definite uptick” in the level of activity by Iranian operatives in
recent months, adding that the Iranians are “preparing themselves for the
possibility of conflict.”
Iran’s reach extends to the
United States. In August, the Justice Department arrested two Iranian
men, one a dual national with U.S. and Iranian citizenship and the other
an Iranian who is a legal U.S. resident, for allegedly spying on behalf of
Iran. The pair are accused of conducting surveillance on a Jewish organization
in Chicago and rallies in New York and Washington that were organized by
the Mujahideen-e Khalq, or MEK, a dissident group that seeks regime change in
Iran.
But the case of the Iranian
diplomat is the most alarming, officials and analysts said, and has
strained Iran’s diplomatic relations with Germany and France. Both countries
are trying to hold together a landmark 2015 agreement meant to curb Iran’s
nuclear weapons program, which the Trump administration has abandoned.
The diplomat, Assadollah Assadi,
has been a high-ranking official in Iran’s embassy in Vienna since 2014, but is
also suspected of being the station chief of the Ministry of Intelligence, or
MOIS, according to multiple officials from the United States and Europe.
In late June, European
intelligence services tracked Assadi as he met with a married couple of
Iranian descent living in Belgium and — according to the couple, who spoke
to police after their arrest — gave them about a pound of explosive material
and a detonator, the officials said.
The many times Trump and Rouhani
attacked each other at the U.N.
With insults like
“Nazi-disposition” and “brutal,” President Trump and Iran’s President Hassan
Rouhani traded criticisms at the 2018 U.N. General Assembly.(Joyce Lee/The
Washington Post)
The couple, Nasimeh Naami
and Amir Saadouni, who were both born in Iran, allegedly planned to bomb a
huge MEK rally in Paris, attended by thousands of people,
including Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer and
a vocal defender of the group, according to French, German and Belgian
officials.
European officials said that the
couple, who are cooperating with authorities, identified Assadi as their
longtime handler. Assadi professes not to know them, according to German
officials, who said Iranian authorities have claimed that he was set
up. The Iranian government has said publicly that the plot was fabricated to
falsely implicate the regime in terrorism.
A spokesman for the Iranian
mission to the United Nations denied that Iran had planned to attack the rally
in Paris, calling the allegations “categorically false. And he accused the MEK
and Israel of staging the plot “to sabotage Iran-EU relations.”
“The MEK had long been listed as
a terrorist group by the E.U. and the U.S.; it also has a long history of
propaganda and false flag operations,” said the spokesman, Alireza Miryousefi.
The U.S. State Department
removed the MEK from a list of designated terrorist organizations in 2012. The
group has publicly denied any involvement in the attempted attack in Paris.
Authorities said that Belgium
would take the lead in the case for now, since the couple were arrested and
have citizenship there.
French officials have publicly
accused Iran’s Intelligence Ministry of planning the attack and have
frozen the assets of two suspected intelligence operatives. “This extremely
serious act envisaged on our territory could not go without a response,”
France’s interior, foreign and economy ministers said in a joint statement. “In
taking this decision, France underlines its determination to fight against
terrorism in all its forms, particularly on its own territory.”
French police also raided the
headquarters of one of the largest Shiite Muslim centers in France, which has
links to Iran, according to European officials, and arrested three
people.
Belgian officials contend that
Assadi, who was surrounded at the gas station while traveling with his wife and
two sons, is not protected by diplomatic immunity from prosecution because he
was arrested outside Austria.
The case has been closely
watched by the Trump administration. Assadi’s arrest “tells you, I think,
everything you need to know about how the government of Iran views its
responsibilities in connection with diplomatic relations,” White House national
security adviser John Bolton told reporters last week. Bolton, a prominent Iran
hawk, has been leading Trump administration efforts to place new sanctions on
Iran, which he called “the central banker of international terrorism.”
The MOIS has a long history of
conducting surveillance operations in Europe, but an attack at a major
public gathering in Paris, attended by Trump’s lawyer, would
invite massive retaliation from the French and the Americans, prompting
some experts to wonder why Iran would take such a risk.
Iran has in the past targeted
Iranian dissidents abroad, and Tehran has previously been linked to numerous
plots involving Israeli, Jewish and Arab interests in the West. The level of
Iranian activity ebbs and flows, sometimes without a discernible reason,
according to former U.S. officials and Iran experts.
In the first 15 years after
ruler Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power, Iranian agents assassinated at
least 60 people in four European countries. The most notorious single attack
was the 1992 assassination of a Kurdish Iranian dissident leader and three of
his colleagues, all shot inside a Berlin restaurant.
Some experts now fear a return
to those kinds of bloody operations.
In Germany last year, a
Pakistani man was sentenced to four years in prison for scouting out potential
targets with links to Israel and Jewish organizations on behalf of the Quds
Force, the external operations arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. According
to court documents, he had been in touch with his Iranian handlers since at
least since 2011. But the “contact intensified” in the middle of 2015, around
the same time that authorities believe the couple planning to attack the MEK
rally were first contacted by Assadi.
Officials said that Iran has
recruited people from Pakistan, as well as from Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey,
North Africa and Afghanistan, in order to obscure the country’s role in
overseas spying.
A high-level German official
said Iran’s aggression inside Europe calls for a tougher response.
“There are clear indications for
calling this a case of state terrorism,” the official said of the thwarted
Paris attack. But leaders in Germany and France, the official said, “would
rather play the danger and level of interference down,” in order to hold
together the nuclear deal.
Norman Roule, who served 34
years in the CIA and retired last year as the national intelligence manager for
Iran, said the lack of a tougher European response, especially in the wake of
Iran’s support of terrorism on the continent, has likely sent a message to
Tehran: “You can get away with pretty much anything.”
Roule said that Iran has been
testing the limits of European and American resolve for decades. The regime has
launched cyberattacks, supported terrorist groups, and, in 2013, plotted to
kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States at a fashionable restaurant in
Washington — an attack Roule said would likely have inflicted civilian
casualties. All those events saw little tangible response, he said.
“My fear is that Iran may well
believe they have yet to reach our red line, and this is a recipe for further
attacks,” Roule said.
While U.S. officials have
accused Iran’s top leaders of being behind the biggest plots, Iranian intelligence
factions have sometimes acted in competition with one another, with little
apparent coordination with the country’s ruling clerics, former U.S.
officials said. Some think that pattern may be repeating now.
“It is not always the case that
a senior [Iranian] official says, ‘Go and do this,’ ” said Matthew Levitt, a
former counterterrorism official with the Treasury Department and FBI.
“Sometimes initiative — even stupid initiative, even initiative that fails — is
smiled upon within this system.”
In light of the operations in
Europe and the United States, it’s not clear that the Iranian leadership is in
control of its own operatives, said intelligence officials in multiple
countries.
One German official said that
based on his government’s discussions with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and
Foreign Minister Mohammad JavadZarif, Iran’s leaders understand that an attack
in the heart of Europe could do irreparable damage to their country’s
relationship with the remaining signatories to the nuclear deal.
But there is also a parallel
power structure in Iran, and as domestic unrest grows and more Iranians die
fighting in Iraq and Syria, Iranian hard-liners elsewhere in the government
could push for a show of force against the West, the German official said.
The regime has also been
humiliated by recent Israeli spying operations that laid bare huge troves of
documents about Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu has publicly crowed about his spies’ prowess and has pressed for a
tougher international response to Iran.
In a speech last month at the
United Nations General Assembly, Netanyahu cited the arrest of the two U.S.
operatives and the foiled Paris attack as evidence of Iran’s continued support
of terrorism in the West, despite the election of more moderate leaders and the
nuclear deal.
“If you think that Iran’s
aggression has been confined to the Middle East, think again,” Netanyahu said.
An Israeli official said that
there is a directive from the top levels of the Iranian government to quickly
develop targets, and that the Intelligence Ministry has pushed its operatives
to work too fast, leading to mistakes and arrests.
The two Iranian men arrested for
spying inside the United States were under surveillance by the FBI for an
extended period of time, with their travel inside and outside the country
tracked, according to a criminal complaint filed in the case.
The two men also appeared to be
pressed for time. The alleged agent with dual Iranian and American citizenship
urged his associate, who lived in California, to hand over photographs and
other material he’d been gathering for target packages. But the California man
“expressed some frustration,” according to the complaint, because he wanted
more time to get the materials in order.
“I don’t like to do it this
way . . . I like to have a complete package, meaning that there is no gap
in information,” he said.
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