America’s Secret War Against Iran

Arrests and abductions, just like a spy novel thriller. Now Iran has arrested three border violators.

At the beginning of the week, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki announced that three Americans who illegally crossed Iran’s northwest border last June would be tried on espionage charges. They are identified as Shane Bauer, Sarah Shroud and John Fattal. In a worst-case scenario, they could face the death penalty if convicted. U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton immediately rejected the Iranian charges as “completely unfounded,” maintaining that the three Americans had strayed across the border while on an “innocent” hiking trip (in the violence-plagued northeastern region of Iraq), and had mistakenly ended up in Iran.

In arresting the three Americans, Tehran was handed a trump card in their game of demanding the return of three high-ranking Iranians kidnapped by U.S. intelligence agents. Additionally, the Iranian government might find Mrs. Clinton’s defense of the Americans a bit hard to swallow since not even Washington denies the whole panoply of dangerous American-led secret missions currently being waged against Iran. They run the gamut from supporting violent ethnic minority separatists, now receiving financial and military training support from the United States, to fomenting dissent within Iran and on to the recruiting of agents who are supposed to provide intelligence for renewed American and Israeli air attacks against various Iranian targets. The key to the success of such clandestine missions lies in small groups of American and Israeli intelligence agents who illegally enter Iran and carry out their occasional terrorist activities under innocent pretenses.

The CIA-led kidnapping of Ali-Reza Asgari from a Turkish hotel is also reminiscent of a spy thriller from the Cold War. Asgari was not only a former Iranian Deputy Minister of Defense, but was also Iran’s liaison with the Lebanese Revolutionary Guard in the 1980s when civil war loomed in Lebanon and the Marine barracks in Beirut was bombed, killing 250 Americans. In a similar incident, Iranian nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri disappeared while on a pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi-Arabia. In October of this year, the Iranian Foreign Minister Mottaki announced that Iran had “proof that the United States had played a role in the disappearance of an Iranian citizen in Saudi-Arabia.” And Amir Hussein Ardebili, who appeared on U.S. intelligence wanted lists due to his involvement in seeking western electronics for Iranian missiles, now sits in a U.S. prison after disappearing two years ago during a visit to the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.

The CIA and the U.S. State Department deny any involvement in these incidents. Instead, the story being disseminated in the U.S. media, citing unnamed intelligence sources, is that all three high-ranking Iranians defected to the West and are willingly cooperating with the CIA. Despite this, the Iranians insist the three Americans be released because they have had experience with the United States: American intelligence agents previously kidnapped five Iranian diplomats and held them for two years before releasing them, during which time Washington had assured everyone that it had no knowledge of the kidnappings.