The quiet arrest of a former Iranian diplomat is raising new questions about whether Washington should try to involve Tehran in U.S. plans on Iraq.
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek – The arrest of a former Iranian diplomat in Britain is the latest reminder of complications that could arise if the Bush administration turns to Iran to help solve the escalating violence in Iraq. In a development that so far has received no press coverage in the United States, Nosratollah Tajik, who served as Iranian ambassador to Jordan and has been previously linked to terror attacks in Israel, was arrested by British authorities last month at the request of U.S. Justice Department, a spokesman for Scotland Yard said this week.
Two U.S. law-enforcement officials, who asked not to be identified talking about nonpublic matters, confirmed to NEWSWEEK that a sealed indictment filed by federal prosecutors in Chicago charges Tajik with seeking to purchase night-vision goggles for delivery to Iran from U.S. companies, in violation of U.S. export-control laws. A former top FBI counterterror official said it is likely that the equipment was ultimately destined for Hizbullahââ¬âthe Lebanon-based group that is heavily financed and armed by the Iranian government.
“Hizbullah has been trying to buy these things for years,” said Chris Hamilton, who until last year oversaw FBI intelligence investigations into Palestinian-linked terror groups. “They have an unlimited need for NVGs [night-vision goggles].”
The news about Tajik’s alleged efforts to acquire sensitive U.S. technology comes as some members of the Iraq Study Group, a panel advising President Bush on possible strategy changes, are reportedly pressing for the United States to reach out both to Iran and Syria for help in curbing violence in Iraq. So far, the Bush administration has resisted any engagement with Iran or Syria because of their alleged support for terror groups and because of Iran’s stated determination to proceed with a uranium enrichment program that U.S. and Israeli hard-liners, among others, see as see as a cover for developing nuclear weapons.
The Tajik case could bolster hard-liners’ arguments that the Iranian governmentââ¬âwhich the State Department has labeled “the most active state sponsor of terrorism”ââ¬âcannot be trusted and will continue its backing of terrorist groups and clandestine weapons procurement regardless of what its leaders and diplomats might say publicly. The incident is all the more sensitive because Tajik, who holds an honorary fellowship at England’s University of Durham, has been previously accused by Israeli security officials of being involved in the recruitment and financing of Palestinian terrorist operations in Israel.
Tajik served as Iran’s ambassador to Jordan at least until 2002. At one point, after the U.S. media reported that Jordan’s King Abdullah had agreed with President George W. Bush that Iran was part of an “Axis of Evil,” Tajik denounced the news reports, saying that they emanated from “satanic Zionist media circles,” according to a report in the Jordan Times.
A lawyer for Tajik could not be located, but the Newcastle Evening Chronicle in Britain quoted “sources close to” Tajik as saying this week that the Iranian believes he is being made a scapegoat for U.S. antagonism toward the Tehran regime. Tajik himself, whom the newspaper says lives in a “luxury home” on the outskirts of Durham in the north of England, declined to comment to the newspaper beyond saying, “I am waiting to see my solicitor and I am on bail. I hope it will get sorted out.”
The charges against Tajik became public in Britain this past weekend with a story published by The Mail on Sunday, a tabloid newspaper. The newspaper has recently been conducting a campaign criticizing stringent new post-9/11 U.K. laws that speed up extraditions of indicted criminals from the U.K. to the United States, arguing that a law designed to combat terrorists is being misused against British suspects accused by U.S. prosecutors of less serious, nonviolent offenses.
The Mail said that the former Iranian diplomat had been accused by U.S. prosecutors of “conspiring to sell military equipment to Iranian extremists.” According to the newspaper, the U.S. indictment of Tajik was the result of a sting operation in which U.S. Department of Homeland Security agents, posing as arms dealers, held a series of secretly filmed meetings with the suspect in London hotels. The U.S. agents supposedly offered to sell Tajik around $90,000 worth of night-vision goggles for eventual delivery to Iran, in violation of U.S. sanctions on that country.
A spokesman for the Homeland Security Department’s Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whose agents are believed to have initiated the case, said the agency would have no comment on the case.
The officials, who asked not to be identified talking about a nonpublic matter, said that Tajik had been a target of a “sting” operation by British Customs authorities after U.S. officials discovered he was trying to buy the night-vision goggles from U.S.-based companies. However, the two U.S. law-enforcement officials familiar with the case said that the U.S. government opened its investigation of Tajik after he got in touch with American companies that manufacture sophisticated night-vision devices.
The officials said Tajik had e-mail contact with the American companies and was quite persistent. Instead of engaging in serious business dealings with the Iranian, however, the American companies contacted Homeland Security investigators. The U.S. investigators then informed their counterparts in British Customs, who carried out the undercover “sting” to try to catch the Iranian.
The U.S. sources familiar with the investigation also said that officials on both sides of the Atlantic were still working on the possibility that others were involved in either this or similar schemes to acquire sensitive U.S. technology and ship it to the Iranians. However, the sources said that they could provide no further information on continuing investigations.
In a hearing last year before the House International Relations Subcommittee on International Terrorism and Nonproliferation, entitled “Iran: A Quarter Century of State-Sponsored Terror,” Matthew Levitt, then a policy analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and now a senior U.S. Treasury Department counterterrorism official, named Tajik as being involved in an Iranian government drive to find “potential terrorist recruits” among Palestinians wounded during the Palestinian intifada in 2002.
U.S. officials said they did not know the purpose for which Tajik was allegedly trying to buy the night-vision goggles beyond providing them to the Iranian government. But further complicating the picture, and providing a possible clue, a Western diplomatic source told NEWSWEEK that during the recent Lebanon war, the Israeli government found Iranian-supplied night-vision goggles in Hizbullah bunkers. The goggles had apparently originated in the United Kingdom after being purchased through European front companies, the source said. A British government source noted that several years ago the British government had authorized the sale of relatively low-tech night-vision devices to Iran for use in combating drug smuggling along Iran’s border with Afghanistan.
