Did Iran Plot to Kill?

When Mexican border authorities refused to allow Manssor Arbabsiar to enter their country late last month and instead put him on a plane bound for New York City, the used-car salesman may have sensed something had gone very wrong. He had made multiple business trips to Mexico City before without incident, but this time–according to a complaint unsealed by the U.S. Justice Department on Oct. 11–he’d been on his way to meet a man he thought was a member of a drug cartel to plan the final stages of a bomb attack against the Saudi Arabian ambassador in Washington. Did someone tip off the Mexican border agents? And was it his imagination, or were those heavyset men in nearby rows watching him?

They were. When Arbabsiar disembarked the plane at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, U.S. law-enforcement agents arrested him and took him to downtown Manhattan. Within hours he had confessed to a plot, says FBI chief Robert Mueller, which “reads like the pages of a Hollywood script.” Not only did Arbabsiar admit to helping plan the most audacious assassination attempt in the U.S. in more than 30 years, as well as possible bomb attacks against the Israeli and Saudi embassies in Washington. He also revealed, the complaint alleges, something much more worrying: the plot had been hatched by top members of Iran’s elite special forces group, the terrorist-sponsoring Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.

The Islamic Republic has embraced terrorism from the moment of its creation, and Americans have often been the victims: at the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, at the Khobar Towers truck bombing in 1996 and in Iraq in 2007. Throughout the war in Afghanistan, Iran has exported ever-more-deadly roadside bombs, directly contributing to soaring U.S. casualties there. But launching an attack on the U.S. mainland is so risky that it has Iran watchers worrying that the country’s fractured leadership may be turning dangerously unpredictable. “It suggests a degree of boldness and brazen disregard for practicality that is new and different,” says Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. The plot, he adds, reveals “a regime that is beleaguered and thus increasingly even more indifferent to norms of behavior.”

It was partly luck that Arbabsiar’s alleged plot was foiled at all. A 56-year-old businessman from Texas, he was recruited into the bomb plot by his cousin Abdul Reza Shahlai, who he said was a high-ranking Tehran-based member of the Quds Force, say Justice Department officials. The Quds Force’s 15,000 members are believed by the U.S. government to arm and train militants at camps in the Middle East and Africa and to operate worldwide out of Iran’s embassies. Arbabsiar told Shahlai that he had met narcotics traffickers through his used-car business in Corpus Christi, about 145 miles (233 km) from the Mexican border. Shahlai arranged for Arbabsiar to meet in Tehran with two high-ranking Quds Force members, who told Arbabsiar to recruit one of the drug traffickers to plan kidnappings and other violent attacks in the U.S.

Arbabsiar chose his hit-man poorly, recruiting as a would-be assassin a longtime and trusted informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration whom he found through a network of mutual associates. That informant told the DEA what Arbabsiar was proposing last May, and soon the FBI was recording planning sessions between the two men, including discussion of the price tag for a hit on the Saudi ambassador: $1.5 million. Eventually, Arbabsiar arranged for a transfer of what Justice Department and White House officials say was nearly $100,000 of Iranian government funds into what was actually a covert FBI bank account, as a down payment on the assassination.

The Iranians’ prime target was not surprising. Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir, 49, is an urbane and high-profile member of the Washington diplomatic scene, popular with American officials and journalists for his Western education and his open mind about reform in the Arab world. More important, he has been a vocal critic of the Iranian regime, airing in public and private his country’s distrust of the Shi’ite revolutionaries across the Persian Gulf. In a much-cited U.S. State Department cable made public by WikiLeaks last year, al-Jubeir reminded the U.S. charg d’affaires in Riyadh of the Saudi King’s “frequent exhortations to the U.S. to attack Iran and so put an end to its [alleged] nuclear-weapons program.”

What Iranian interests would be served by killing al-Jubeir in Washington is harder to make out. Iran’s Arab neighbors would be even more inclined to push for a unified Western attack on Tehran if the plot had been traced back to its origin afterward. At the least, the U.S. might be able to rally hesitant countries like China and Russia to impose even more punitive sanctions on Iran. If the Quds plotters had followed through on the early ideas of embassy bombings as well, it would have heightened already dangerous tensions between Israel and Iran.

Persia watchers in the U.S. don’t know whether the plot was hatched at the top of the Tehran power structure, but believe its discovery may undermine whoever is behind it. They are looking anew at recent clashes in the Iranian hierarchy: for months, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been locked in a losing battle with the supreme theocratic leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, fading from power as his allies have been arrested and his backers among the Revolutionary Guards undermined.

Iran denied involvement, and the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations said the U.S. was “fabricating security threats to terrorize the public in order to advance their political agenda.” While White House aides refused to rule out a military response, the next steps are likely to be economic. On Oct. 11 the Treasury Department immediately moved to bar U.S. transactions with Arbabsiar, Abdul Reza Shahlai and three other members of the Quds Force and to freeze any of their assets they could find in the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised to work with allies to “send a strong message to Iran and further isolate it from the international community.”

For his part, Manssor Arbabsiar, the traveling used-car salesman, is cooperating with the feds. He faces life in federal prison.