IRAN BEHIND ALLEGED TERRORIST PLOT, U.S. SAYS

[Iran and Saudi Arabia are bitter political enemies in a long-running Middle Eastern conflict fueled largely by sectarian rivalries. Saudi Arabia, a monarchy with a predominantly Sunni Muslim population, has felt threatened by the Shiite leadership of Iran ever since the 1979 revolution toppled Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and replaced him with a theocratic government.]

By Jerry Markon

U.S. officials on Tuesday said that they had foiled an elaborate terrorist plot backed by factions of the Iranian government aimed at assassinating the Saudi ambassador to Washington.

At a news conference, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said two Iranians have been charged with conspiracy to murder a foreign official and conspiracy to commit an act of international terrorism, among other charges. One of the suspects, an Iranian with U.S. citizenship, was arrested in New York last month; the other, an Iranian, remains at large.

“The United States is committed to holding Iran accountable for its actions,” Holder said.

The suspects were identified as Manssor Arbabsiar, a 56-year-old from Texas, and Gholam Shakuri, an Iran-based member of Iran’s Quds Force, an elite division of that country’s Revolutionary Guard Corps responsible for foreign operations.

In addition to killing the Saudi ambassador, Adel al-Jubeir, officials said, the plot envisioned later striking other targets. The officials said that the plan to kill the ambassador was directed by Tehran, and that Arbabsiar has acknowledged that he was recruited and funded by men he understood to be senior officers in the Quds Force.

Shortly after the announcement, the Obama administration said it was imposing financial sanctions on five Iranians, including the two suspects, connected to the plot. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the administration would consider more actions to further isolate the Islamic Republic.

The Iranian government immediately denied the accusations, calling them a new round of “American propaganda,” according to state news agency IRNA.

“The U.S. government and the CIA have very good experience in making up film scripts,” Ali Akbar Javanfekr, a spokesman for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said in Tehran. “It appears that this new scenario is for diverting the U.S. public opinion from internal crises.

Officials described the details of the plot as chilling, saying that the conspirators considered blowing up a restaurant frequented by the ambassador.

According to a criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday, Arbabsiar met with a DEA informant — who was posing as a representative of a Mexican drug cartel — to arrange the killing. At one point, the complaint says, the informant told Arbabsiar that the operation would require four men and would cost $1.5 million, and Arbabsiar agreed to the terms.

As a down payment, Arbabsiar allegedly later arranged for $100,000 to be wired to an account that was secretly overseen by the FBI.

“Though it reads like the pages of a Hollywood script, the impact would have been very real and many lives would have been lost,” said FBI Director Robert Mueller.

According to the Justice Department, Arbabsiar was arrested by federal agents Sept. 29 after he had been under surveillance or investigation for more than four months. His arrest came eight days after two U.S. hikers who had spent more than two years in Iranian custody on suspicion of spying were released from prison and allowed to leave the country.

A spokesman for the National Security Council said President Obama had been briefed on the case in June.

The United States has listed Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism since 1984. The government in Tehran has long denied accusations that it backs terrorism.

Iran and Saudi Arabia are bitter political enemies in a long-running Middle Eastern conflict fueled largely by sectarian rivalries. Saudi Arabia, a monarchy with a predominantly Sunni Muslim population, has felt threatened by the Shiite leadership of Iran ever since the 1979 revolution toppled Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and replaced him with a theocratic government.

Jubeir, 49, is one of the best-known Saudi figures in the West and among the most powerful foreign policymakers outside the royal family. The son of a Saudi diplomat, he speaks fluent German and virtually unaccented American English. A political science and economic graduate from the University of North Texas, he also holds a master’s degree in international relations from Georgetown University.

He first appeared as a spokesman for the Saudi government during the 1991 Persian Gulf war, and quickly became known as a foreign policy adviser to then-Crown Prince Abdullah, with particular influence on policy toward the United States. When it became known that the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks were carried out by Saudi citizens, Jubeir was dispatched to Washington to represent the kingdom’s interests before the American public and policymakers. He became ambassador the the United States in 2007.

His extensive contacts within the administration and among lawmakers, policy experts and journalists — and his closeness to the most senior figures of the Saudi government — have helped Jubeir work to strengthen U.S.-Saudi ties.

Staff writers Jerry Markon, William Branigin, Craig Whitlock, Karen DeYoung and Scott Wilson, correspondent Thomas Erdbrink in Tehran and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

© The Washington Post 

FOR IRAN AND SAUDI ARABIA, SIMMERING FEUD IS ROOTED IN HISTORY

[The Saudi Embassy in Washington said the plot is “a despicable violation of international norms, standards and conventions and is not in accord with the principles of humanity.” Meantime, a spokesman for the Iranian foreign ministry denied any government involvement, calling the criminal accusations the fruits of a U.S.-Israeli “conspiracy” to isolate Tehran.]

By Craig Whitlock and Liz Sly

The allegations of a plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington are the latest and perhaps most audacious eruption in the simmering feud between Iran and Saudi Arabia, two regional powers that have long waged proxy battles for influence in the Muslim world.

The two countries have been locked in a Cold War for decades, especially since the 1979 Iranian revolution established a theocracy in Tehran that has openly challenged the legitimacy of the royal House of Saud. The rivalry has been fueled by sectarian tensions — Iran has a predominantly Shiite Muslim population, while Saudi Arabia is mostly Sunni — but also centers on their respective ambitions to exercise political and economic power throughout the Middle East.

The conflict has waxed and waned over the years but flared up with renewed intensity during the Arab Spring, which ignited popular uprisings that have toppled or threatened to unseat longtime allies of both countries.

Officials from both countries wasted no time in flinging acrimonious insults in the aftermath of the Justice Department’s announcement that it had charged two Iranians with conspiring to murder Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi ambassador to the United States and a confidant of Saudi King Abdullah.

The Saudi Embassy in Washington said the plot is “a despicable violation of international norms, standards and conventions and is not in accord with the principles of humanity.” Meantime, a spokesman for the Iranian foreign ministry denied any government involvement, calling the criminal accusations the fruits of a U.S.-Israeli “conspiracy” to isolate Tehran.

“Hell will break loose,” said Hilal Khashan, professor of political science at the American University of Beirut. “I don’t expect war to break out tomorrow, but if there was any hope that Saudi-Iranian relations would improve, this will be the end of it.”

A rivalry intensifies

Tensions have been high since March, when the Saudis sent troops into neighboring Bahrain to prop up the Sunni royal family there amid fears that Shiite demonstrators might ally themselves with Iran. Meantime, Tehran has sweated over a popular challenge to the rule of the Assad family in Syria, Iran’s closest Arab ally.

One possible outcome of the reported plot is that the Saudis will retaliate by boosting overt support for the protest movement in Syria. “The Saudis were reluctant to commit themselves against the Syrian regime,” Khashan said. “But now they will become more audacious.”

Saudi Arabia and Iran have also vied for influence in Iraq ever since 2003, when the U.S.-led invasion ousted Saddam Hussein but also ignited a sectarian civil war. The two rivals have likewise jousted for influence in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.

“The gloves are off, I think,” said Frederic Wehrey, a Rand Corp. analyst who has studied Saudi-Iranian relations. “We were already at this low point, and this will only make things worse.”

Iran’s ruling clerics see the Saudi royals as corrupt custodians of Islam’s holiest shrines. In turn, Saudi Arabia is convinced that Iran harbors unchecked ambitions to dominate the region, a fear manifested in suspicions that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons.

Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich monarchy has felt especially threatened by Tehran since the 1979 Iranian revolution toppled Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and replaced him with a theocratic government. But those Arab fears are rooted in history, dating to the days of Persian empires.

“They believe that there’s a Persian impulse for regional hegemony that they’ve been struggling against not just for the last 30 years, but for hundreds of years,” saidJon B. Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

At the same time, Alterman and other analysts predicted that officials in Riyadh would stop short of severing diplomatic relations with Tehran.

“The Saudi instinct is never to cut people completely off,” Alterman said. “Will there be repercussions? Yes. But Saudi Arabia is not going to close the door on rapprochement in the future.”

Memories of a past plot

The charges announced by the Justice Department Tuesday revived memories of another plot to kill Saudi diplomats two decades ago.

In 1990, three Saudi diplomats posted to Thailand were gunned down in Bangkok on the same day. A year earlier, a Saudi business executive in Bangkok was also shot to death.

A Shiite group in Beirut with links to Iran claimed responsibility for the businessman’s slaying. Some U.S. and Thai officials have asserted that the killing of the diplomats was the result of a Saudi feud with Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that draws support from Iran.

Iran was accused of orchestrating a series of terrorist attacks against diplomatic and political targets in the ensuing decade, including the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires and a 1996 truck bombing in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, that killed 17 U.S. troops at the Khobar Towers housing complex.

In recent years, however, Iran has shifted such attacks to traditional battlefields, supplying weapons and explosives to insurgents battling U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In that regard, if the allegations are true, the contours of an amateurishly brazen plot to kill the Saudi ambassador with a bomb at a restaurant in Washington mark a change in tactics for Iran, analysts said.

“It is sort of out of keeping with normal standards of Iranian subtlety,” said Simon Henderson, a Saudi specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

@ The Washington Post