A Dangerous Tit for Tat

Haaretz.com / Haggai Carmon

Iranian officials are accusing the United States of trying to encourage a "velvet revolution" in Iran. That term was first used in 1989 to describe the nonviolent revolution in Czechoslovakia that overthrew the communist government. And indeed, as part of its velvet war against Iran, the United States is broadcasting cultural programs in Farsi in support of democracy and human rights, so as to influence Iranian public opinion in favor of regime change. But all is not velvet: In the shadows, there is another ongoing conflict between the United States and its allies and Iran - a clandestine intelligence war where velvet tactics are hardly employed. Most "shadow" events are muffled or mislabeled by Iran. In early March 2007, retired Iranian general Ali Reza Asgari disappeared from his hotel in Turkey after traveling to Syria to visit sites holy to Shi'ite Muslims. Subsequently, conflicting accounts appeared in the media suggesting that Asgari had defected to the United States. Iran accused the CIA and Israel's Mossad of abducting him. A few days later, his name disappeared from the media's radar. In late May 2009, another top Iranian nuclear scientist, Dr. Shahram Amiri, vanished while participating in an Umrah Hajj pilgrimage to Medina, Saudi Arabia, with a group of Iranians.

Asgari and Amiri are not small fish. They are leviathans in terms of the information they have, and can share, with the free world. Asgari is a former deputy defense minister of his country. When he was forced out by archrival Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Asgari became a disgruntled walking encyclopedia on Iran's military and nuclear secrets, with enough rage to motivate their disclosure. Amiri was described by Iranian news agencies as a prize-winning Iranian nuclear physicist who conducted research for the country's atomic energy organization and worked at the Malek-e-Ashtar University of Technology, which is affiliated with the Iranian defense ministry. In what seems to be a response, Tehran is stepping up the arrest of Westerners and accusing them of espionage. Several of them are being held on charges related to violating U.S. export-control laws - essentially arms dealing. Concurrently, Iran is demanding the release of its citizens in "illegal" U.S. custody. Iranian authorities are thus effectively trying to engineer a person swap. In late July 2009, Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd and Joshua Fattal - all young Americans and former University of California, Berkeley, students - were hiking through Iraq's Kurdistan autonomous region when they apparently accidently crossed the unmarked border into Iran. On December 13, Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, said at a press conference that the three would be tried, presumably for espionage. (Read more...)