Both CNN and the Washington Post reported yesterday that the Iranian regime is plotting to kill President Trump. Jewish World Review has posted the Washington Post story in accessible form here. Intelligence concerning the plot derives from a human source and is apparently unrelated to the attempted assassination of Trump over the weekend.
NRO’s Jimmy Quinn quotes Rich Goldberg’s tweet on the rationale for such an operation: “Donald Trump is an existential threat to the Islamic Republic of Iran. The regime knows maximum pressure will return.”
The incompetence of the Secret Service presents something of a national security crisis. The Post drily puts it this way:
After providing the warning, the Secret Service surged resources and assets for the protection of Trump, said a national security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss security decisions. Whatever adjustments may have been made to the security detail, however, did not prevent 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks from ascending a rooftop near a Trump rally and firing at the former president.
By contrast with Trump, the Biden administration has applied maximum appeasement. Goldberg commented yesterday on Biden’s continuing appeasement of Iran in the tweet below.
Iran’s acting foreign minister said last week that Biden is conducting indirect talks with Tehran via Oman. Biden gave him a visa to come to America this week. While this is happening.
— Richard Goldberg (@rich_goldberg) July 17, 2024
While we’re at it, let’s note this.
Security Detail for Ex-Top Trump Official Denied by Biden Administration https://t.co/NH3jso2wd8
— Richard Goldberg (@rich_goldberg) July 16, 2024
Biden’s appeasement of Iran dates to the first year of the administration. In July 2021, for example, the State Department informed Congress that it would waive sanctions on Iran’s illicit oil trade so that the regime could access frozen funds from South Korea and Japan. The Washington Free Beacon story on the waiver is here and it is worth reading.
At the same time four Iranian intelligence officials were indicted on charges of conspiring to kidnap an unnamed Brooklyn-based journalist. The charges were set forth in a just-unsealed 38-page superseding indictment and the related Department of Justice press release. The journalist has since been identified as Masih Alinejad, an American citizen of Iranian origin.
The Iranian government directed the officials to plot the kidnapping and conduct surveillance on American soil with the intention of kidnapping Alinejad and removing her to Iran. The press release summarizes the charge that these four defendants planned to kidnap Alinejad “for mobilizing public opinion in Iran and around the world to bring about changes to the regime’s laws and practices.” A fifth defendant lives in California and is alleged to have provided financial services supporting the plot.
Here is Politico’s summary:
Alireza Shavaroghi Farahani, Mahmoud Khazein, Kiya Sadeghi and Omid Noori are each charged with conspiring to kidnap, conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and sanctions against the government of Iran, conspiring to commit bank and wire fraud, and conspiring to launder money.
Farahani is an intelligence official who lives in Iran, and whom the other three defendants work under. His intelligence network has been plotting to kidnap the U.S. journalist since at least June 2020 in an attempt to further the Iranian government’s efforts to silence the journalist’s criticisms of it, the release states.
Farahani and his network are accused of employing private investigators to surveil their intended victim and the victim’s household members, procuring days’ worth of surveillance of the journalist’s home and surrounding area. The network procured services from the private investigators by misrepresenting their identities and the purpose of the surveillance, and laundering money to the U.S. to pay for the services, according to the Justice Department.
The Politico story is here. Reuters had more here.
Various Iranian plots were of course uncovered during the Obama administration. Take, for example, the planned assassination of the Saudi ambassador to the United States in Washington, D.C. The case was charged in 2011. A Texas used car salesman with dual Iranian/American citizenship pleaded guilty the following year.
Jay Solomon’s 2016 book The Iran Wars: Spy Games, Bank Battles, and the Secret Deals That Reshaped the Middle East remains a most useful guide to the underlying story. Solomon’s book was reviewed in the Jewish Review of Books. Jordan Chandler Hirsch opened his review:
In April 2009, a young Iranian, Shahram Amiri, disappeared in Medina, Saudi Arabia. Ostensibly there to perform the hajj, Amiri had in fact brokered a deal with the CIA to provide information on Iran’s nuclear program. Leaving his wife and child behind in Iran and a shaving kit in an empty Saudi hotel room, Amiri fled to America, received asylum, pocketed $5 million, and resettled in Arizona. Formerly a scientist at Malek Ashtar University, one of several institutes harboring Iran’s nuclear endeavors, Amiri conveyed the structure of the program and intelligence about a number of key research sites, including the secret facility at Fordow.
The story might have ended there. But according to Jay Solomon, [then] chief foreign affairs correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and author of The Iran Wars, what happened next “emerged as one of the strangest episodes in modern American espionage.” A year after Amiri defected, he appeared on YouTube, claiming that the CIA had drugged and kidnapped him. In fact, Iranian intelligence had begun threatening his family through their intelligence assets in the United States [Ed. note: Solomon reports in the book that Iranian threats against Amiri’s wife and son left in Iran had been conveyed to Amiri through “a sophisticated network of assets maintained in the” United States]. Buckling under that pressure, Amiri demanded to re-defect. In July 2010, he returned to a raucous welcome in Tehran, claimed he had been working for Iran all along, and reunited with his son. Of course this was not the end of the story. Amiri soon disappeared, and in August 2016, shortly after Solomon’s book was published, he was hanged.
Solomon reported on Amiri for the Journal in a 2010 article that is accessible online here. David Sanger reported on Amiri’s execution for the New York Times in “How an Iranian’s spy saga ends, 6 years later: He’s executed.”