Iran's Deadly Ambition (19 page)

The goal of this multipronged outreach is clear. Iran seeks to improve its regional position and do so at the expense of the United States. It is an objective that remains in effect today, despite the fact that Latin America, and therefore Iran’s standing in the region, is in a state of profound political flux. The April 2013 death of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez removed one half of the Iranian regime’s most-vibrant personal relationship in the region, and ensuing domestic instability has called into question whether his successor, Nicolás Maduro, can be a serious regional partner for Iran in the near future. The end of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s tenure as Iran’s president in June 2013 removed the other half of the favorable
relationship. But it did not spell an end to Iran’s activities and presence in the Americas.

Ahmadinejad’s successor, Hassan Rouhani, has declared his government’s commitment to expanding ties to Latin America.
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And, increasingly, Iranian officials are putting their money where their mouths are. In May 2014, a high-level parliamentary delegation from Iran embarked upon a Latin American tour—an exercise that involved public affirmations of the close bonds and continued strategic convergence between Iran and the ALBA bloc of nations.
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That same month, the Rouhani government announced a plan to nearly triple the number of its commercial attachés abroad—including those in Latin America.
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The message to Latin America’s political leaders was unmistakable: the Islamic Republic isn’t going away.

GATHERING THREAT, LAGGING RESPONSE

For years, and despite mounting evidence to the contrary, policy experts within the Washington Beltway have minimized the importance of Iran’s infiltration into the Americas. Such a view is distinctly shortsighted, because the Islamic Republic has directly targeted the United States from Latin America on at least three occasions in the past decade.

The first was an unsuccessful 2007 plot involving a Guyanese national to blow up fuel tanks underneath New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport. According to the late Argentine state prosecutor Alberto Nisman, the perpetrator, Abdul Kadir, was a disciple and agent of Iranian cleric Mohsen Rabbani, the alleged mastermind of the 1994 terrorist attack on the AMIA cultural center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and had previously “carried out the Iranian infiltration in Guyana” under Rabbani’s direction.
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Kadir was sentenced in 2010 to life in prison in the Eastern District of New York for his role in the plot. Had it succeeded, the attempt would have caused
“extensive damage to the airport and to the New York economy, as well as the loss of numerous lives,” the FBI assessed.
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The second was an elaborate October 2011 attempt by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, at a Washington, D.C., restaurant, using members of Mexico’s notorious Los Zetas drug cartel to carry out the hit. The plot also involved plans to bankroll cartel bombings at the Israeli embassy in Washington and the Israeli and Saudi embassies in Buenos Aires. In a press conference divulging details of the failed scheme, Attorney General Eric Holder noted that it was “directed and approved by elements of the Iranian government and, specifically, senior members of the Quds Force,” the IRGC’s elite paramilitary unit.
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The third was a plan by Venezuelan and Iranian diplomats to use Mexican hackers to penetrate U.S. defense and intelligence facilities and launch widespread cyber attacks in the United States. The effort was described in a December 2011 investigative documentary by the Spanish-language television network Univision, which featured secret recordings of the plotters.
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In the wake of the documentary’s airing, Venezuela’s consul general to Miami was declared persona non grata and expelled from the country.
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But the U.S. government has been slow to wake up to the Iranian threat south of the border. It was not until the October 2011 attempt on the life of Saudi envoy Adel al-Jubeir became public knowledge that lawmakers finally began to focus in earnest on the intrusion of the Islamic Republic into the Western Hemisphere.

Revelations surrounding the foiled plot sparked a flurry of activity in Congress, culminating in the passage of the Countering Iran in the Western Hemisphere Act of 2012.
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Introduced in January 2012 by South Carolina congressman Jeff Duncan (R-SC-3), the bill was intended to compel
the U.S. government to formulate a strategic response to Iranian activity in Central and South America. Its central provision was the requirement that the U.S. Department of State draft “an assessment of the threats posed to the United States by Iran’s growing presence and activity in the Western Hemisphere.”
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In a rare instance of bipartisan consensus, the act passed both houses of Congress easily and was signed into law by President Obama in December 2012. But, when it finally materialized in the summer of 2013, the resulting “comprehensive strategy” left a great deal to be desired. Much to the chagrin of congressional lawmakers, the State Department’s assessment systematically downplayed Iran’s presence in the Americas and offered little by way of serious strategic guidance on the issue. A September 2014 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office concluded as much when it found the State Department’s strategy woefully deficient on a number of fronts, including fully mapping Iran’s soft-power initiatives in the region, exploring connections between the Iranian regime and its proxies and transnational criminal groups in the Americas, and laying out a plan to partner with regional nations to better isolate Iran and its agents.
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In the face of pressure from Congress, the State Department committed to a reevaluation of its findings.
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But no such revision has been forthcoming, and in the meantime, momentum toward a real, comprehensive assessment of, and response to, Iran’s activities in the Americas has faltered. As a result, the U.S. government remains woefully behind the curve in identifying, contesting, and weakening Iran’s regional influence.

Iran, meanwhile, is forging ahead with its activities in the Americas, irrespective of its unfolding rapprochement with the United States and Europe.

“Iran is now encountering a new Latin America, one that
is increasingly anti-U.S. and anti-Israel in its composition, and one that provides Tehran with numerous opportunities to expand its influence,” notes Joseph Humire of the Center for a Secure Free Society, a Latin America and counterterrorism policy think tank in Washington.
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It is an arena where Iran may soon gain additional local partners and even greater geopolitical freedom of action.

CHAPTER

VIII

Inroads in Africa

L
ate on the evening of October 23, 2012, the Sudanese capital of Khartoum was rocked by a spectacular blast. The cause was not a military clash, although the war-torn city had seen its share of fighting during Sudan’s multiple, protracted civil wars, which had raged from 1955 to 1972, and again from 1983 until 2005. Rather, it was the product of a very different kind of conflict: a shadow war between Iran and Israel.

The blast took place at the city’s Yarmouk Industrial Complex, a military depot that had been flagged by Western governments for its involvement in Iran’s weapons-of-mass-destruction programs.
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Within days, Sudan’s information minister, Ahmed Belal Osman, confirmed that the explosion was the result of an Israeli airstrike aimed at destroying stockpiles of Iranian arms.
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Sudanese opposition groups drew an even more direct connection to the Islamic Republic, identifying the facility as belonging to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
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Israeli officials, for their part, tacitly acknowledged their involvement in what they described as an effort to dislodge the terrorist infrastructure constructed by enemies of the Jewish state.
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Weeks later, the context became clearer still. In mid-November, Israel launched Pillar of Defense, a major military operation aimed at degrading the strategic capabilities of the Hamas terrorist group that dominated the Gaza Strip. Hamas was a major client and proxy of the Islamic Republic, and the armaments destroyed at the Yarmouk facility were of precisely the type that Israel was seeking to prevent the group from possessing. The Yarmouk attack had another purpose as well; according to Israeli analysts and intelligence sources, Sudan had been identified as a critical node in the pipeline Iran used to transfer armaments to Hamas and other militants and the place “where the parts for Iranian weapons are assembled.”
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That Sudan figured so prominently in Israel’s calculus was a testament to the strategic bonds forged between Iran’s ayatollahs and the country’s corrupt and brutal dictatorship. Those ties date back to 1991, when Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani visited Khartoum to formally establish contacts with Sudanese strongman Omar al-Bashir, who had taken power in a coup two years earlier. Al-Bashir’s ascent to power had been fueled by Islamist fervor, and once in power he quickly imposed strict sharia law throughout the country, complete with mandated Islamic dress for women and harsh Quranic punishments for crimes.
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The Iranian regime came to see al-Bashir’s Sudan as a kindred spirit. “The Islamic Revolution of Sudan,” Rafsanjani announced during his inaugural visit to Khartoum, “alongside Iran’s pioneer revolution, can doubtless be the source of movement and revolution throughout the Islamic world.”
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In the years that followed, Iran translated this sentiment into concrete action. It established a beachhead for its Revolutionary Guards in Sudan, deploying a detachment of Guardsmen to create and then advise a militia for the country’s ruling National Islamic Front (NIF) and creating multiple
training camps for Islamic militants in the country’s south.
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Concomitantly, the IRGC’s Quds Force established a strategic alliance with the NIF and its spiritual head, Hassan al-Turabi.
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Iran’s government, meanwhile, made concrete investments in al-Bashir’s regime, and by the mid-1990s, it had extended hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Khartoum.
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Those investments were strategic, because Sudan’s location on the African continent made it a major prize. “Sudan at the time bordered nine nations, some of which were Muslim,” notes analyst Steven O’Hern, “making it ideally situated for use by the Revolutionary Guard as a base and transit point for other operations in Africa.”
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Moreover, Sudan’s protracted, multidecade civil strife made its ruling regime eager for international allies and dependent on foreign sources of weaponry, while its Islamist outlook made it a suitable—and pliable—partner for the Islamic Republic.

Over the past dozen years, Tehran has armed Sudan to the teeth, providing an estimated $12 billion in heavy weaponry to the al-Bashir regime between 2004 and 2006 alone.
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It has also run political interference for Sudan’s repressive rulers, opposing international efforts to indict al-Bashir
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and seeking a united economic front with Khartoum as a way of confronting sanctions on both governments levied by the West.
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In a demonstration of this solidarity, just days after the International Criminal Court charged the Sudanese leader with no fewer than five counts of crimes against humanity and two counts of war crimes for his role in the humanitarian disaster in Darfur, the head of the Iranian parliament and former nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, visited Sudan and publicly embraced al-Bashir.
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Sudan, meanwhile, has thrown its weight behind Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear capability, terming it a “great victory for the Islamic world.”
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And it has wagered heavily
on the strategic partnership built with Tehran. That was one of the major take-aways from the leaked minutes of an August 2014 closed-door meeting of Sudan’s top leadership. “We will not sacrifice our relations with the Islamists and Iran for a relationship with the Saudis and the Gulf states,” Sudan’s defense minister, Yehya Mohammed Kheir, declared at the gathering. “What is possible is a relationship that serves our mutual economic interests in terms of investment and employment.”
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Yet that partnership is just one part of a larger Iranian strategy in Africa—one designed to build influence, forge new political bonds, acquire strategic resources for its nuclear program, and establish a foothold for its terrorist networks. As in other parts of the third world (most prominently, Latin America), Iran has done so by exploiting the region’s vast ungoverned spaces, sympathetic regimes, and economic privation. And over the past decade, it has charted some notable successes. Although its African outreach remains relatively rudimentary and haphazard, observers say that the Islamic Republic has nonetheless succeeded in exploiting the region “to accumulate asymmetrical victories for its aggressive, anti-western agenda.”
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AFRICA’S ALLY

By the end of his tenure, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a man on the ropes. Political reversals abounded during the once-popular president’s second term, from 2009 through 2013. There was widespread and growing anger at the country’s deepening domestic economic malaise, something that was attributed nearly as much to Ahmadinejad’s flawed stewardship of the Iranian economy as it was to Western sanctions.
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Ahmadinejad’s political power, moreover, was unmistakably on the wane following an acrimonious political tug-of-war with his one-time protector, Iranian supreme leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—a contest that Iran’s chief cleric won handily.
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