US tripped up over Iranian
captives By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - The George W Bush
administration's campaign to seize and detain
Iranian Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC)
officials in Iraq, presented by Bush himself in
January as a move to break up an alleged Iranian
arms smuggling operation in Iraq, appears to have
run its course without having been able to link a
single Iranian to any such operation.
Despite administration rhetoric suggesting
that the US military had solid intelligence on
which to base a campaign to break up
Iranian-sponsored networks
supplying armor-piercing weapons, what is now
known about the kidnapping operations indicates
that the actual purpose was to obtain some
evidence from interrogations that would support
the administration's line that the IRGC's elite
Quds Force is involved in assisting Shi'ite forces
militarily.
None of the remaining six
Iranians now held by the US military, however, has
provided any evidence for the administration's
case, despite many months of very tough
interrogation usually employed on "high-value"
detainees.
Wayne White, former deputy
director of the US Bureau of Intelligence and
Research Office of Analysis for the Near East and
South Asia, told Inter Press Service he believes
the administration badly wanted to get information
from the Iranian detainees that they could use to
make their case, but it has been unable to do so.
"I'm convinced that they haven't gotten
anything out of them," he said in an interview.
"They haven't come up with anything they can shop
around."
The program has also been a
political embarrassment in relations with US
allies in Iraq. US military seizures of Iranians
whom the US military claimed were IRGC Quds Force
officers have been condemned not only by the
Shi'ite government of Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki, but also by Kurdish leaders. The US
military apologized in August for "a regrettable
incident" in which eight Iranians were arrested in
Baghdad, and soon freed after Iraqi protests.
And the US quietly released nine Iranian
detainees last week, two of whom were seized in
the Kurdish city of Irbil in January, saying they
were "of no continuing intelligence value".
What was later learned about the US raids
on Iranian officials in Kurdistan in January and
again in September and in Baghdad last December
shows that the US military was targeting Iranians
merely on the basis of their affiliation with the
IRGC, while claiming publicly to have intelligence
of their involvement in weapons trafficking.
The January 10 raid was on an Iranian
liaison office that had been operating in the
Kurdistan capital of Irbil for 10 years with
official Iraqi government approval. The US
military issued only a vaguely worded rationale
for kidnapping the five Iranians, saying they were
"suspected of being closely tied to activities
targeting Iraqi and coalition forces ..." That was
a thinly veiled allusion to their suspected
membership in the IRGC.
Iraq's Kurdish
foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, who demanded the
release of the five Iranians, explained that they
were not part of a "clandestine network" but were
working on visas and other paperwork for travel by
Iraqis to Iran. Zebari pointed out that the men
were working for the IRGC because that institution
has the responsibility for controlling Iran's
borders.
It is also common for IRGC
officers to be given positions in a wide range of
non-military Iranian government agencies. That was
the case with Mahmoud Farhadi, the Iranian
official kidnapped by the US military from a hotel
in Soleimanieh, Kurdistan, on September 20.
US military spokesman Rear Admiral Mark
Fox told reporters that Farhadi was a member of
the "Ramadan Corps" of the IRGC command
responsible for all Iranian operations inside Iraq
and the "linchpin" behind the smuggling of
"sophisticated weapons" into Iraq by the Quds
Force.
But officials of the Kurdistan
Regional Government and the Kurdish president of
Iraq, Jalal Talabani, publicly confirmed the
Iranian government's assertion that Farhadi was a
civilian official of the Kermanshah (a province in
Iran) governor-general's office on a "commercial
mission with the knowledge of the federal
government in Baghdad and the government of
Kurdistan".
Again, Kurdish authorities did
not contest the fact that Farhadi had been in the
IRGC. The governor of Iraq's Suleymaniye city,
Dana Majeed, acknowledged Farhadi's IRGC
membership a week after the US kidnapping, but
insisted that his job was to expedite trade and
transit across the border.
The US military
was apparently operating on the basis of
information from the Iranian armed opposition
group Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) that was badly out
of date. The political arm of the MEK, the
National Council or Resistance of Iran, which had
been providing information to US intelligence on
the Iranian nuclear program and on Iranian
officials operating in Iraq, published a detailed
article on Farhadi on September 25 which claimed
that he was the commander of the Quds Force Zafar
Base and said nothing about his working for
Kermanshah on cross-border trade.
But an
article in an Iraqi Kurdish-language daily on
September 24 reported that an "informed source"
belonging to an unnamed "Iranian opposition group"
- obviously the MEK - had used the past tense in
regard to Farhadi's role as a Quds Force commander
and acknowledged that Farhadi was now working in a
commercial delegation.
In December 2006,
two accredited Iranian diplomats were kidnapped
from their embassy car on the way from praying at
a mosque in Baghdad and later had to be released.
But four other Iranian officials were kidnapped in
the compound of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of
the Shi'ite political party the Supreme Iraqi
Islamic Council (SIIC), who had visited Bush three
weeks earlier. They were in the home of the
chairman of the Iraqi parliamentary security
committee and head of the Badr Organization, the
military wing of the SIIC.
The official
explanation was that the Iranians were being
detained on "suspicion of carrying out or planning
attacks against Iraqi security forces". But their
Iraqi interlocutors are part of the Iraqi
government which supports the occupation and
opposes the Madhi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr. If the
Iranian officials detained were actually plotting
with their hosts to attack Iraqi security forces,
it would have meant that the SIIC and the Badr
Organization were planning to attack their own
government.
US military officials claimed
to the Washington Post that they had captured maps
of Baghdad delineating Sunni, Shi'ite and mixed
neighborhoods that would be useful for militias,
lists of weapons systems and "information about
importing modern, specially shaped explosive
charges into Iran".
But Laura Rozen of the
National Journal quoted a US official as saying
that the evidence was far less conclusive than was
claimed. "They are trying to walk this back," said
the official. "There are no smoking guns about
Iran in Iraq."
None of the allegedly
damning evidence was mentioned in the February 11
military briefing to the US media on the alleged
weapons smuggling of the Quds Force, indicating
that these claims were vastly exaggerated.
Gareth Porter is a historian and
national security policy analyst. His latest book,
Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and
the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in
June 2005.
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