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Keeping An Eye On Iran

Tehran's Stepped-Up Assasination Campaign Is A Warning

By Christopher Ogden/Washington

(TIME, July 22) -- Whether it's chest pains before a cardiac attack or phone warnings that a bomb is about to go off, trouble often tips its hand. Problems can mount quickly, though, as any patient and now the Pentagon should understand, when warnings are ignored.

In the case of the U.S. Defense Department, which is still reeling from the aftershock of the June 25 barracks bombing in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, that killed 19 airmen and injured scores more, threats of added violence had been pouring in since last November, when a smaller bomb killed seven people in Riyadh. Last week U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry told the Senate Armed Services Committee that intelligence about the warnings before the Dhahran blast had been "fragmentary and inconclusive." General J.H. Binford Peay, the American commander in the Gulf, could not tell the committee which Saudi officials stalled on a pre-blast request by U.S. personnel that security be improved at the ill-fated Khobar Towers by enlarging the perimeter, or say whether the issue had been taken up with Washington.

Inevitably, hindsight is 20/20, but heeding tip-offs can do wonders for foresight. That's why it is so important for the industrialized allies and their partners in the Middle East to keep a closer eye on Iran, even though Tehran has not been implicated in the Saudi blasts. Indeed, most analysts believe the attacks were the work of indigenous Saudi extremists angry at the continued U.S. presence in the kingdom after the 1991 Gulf War against Saddam Hussein.

But Iran--which the State Department claims hands out $100 million annually to Islamic groups to carry out terrorist attacks--is flashing warning signals even as the mullahs' regime tempers its rhetoric in hopes of gaining trust and foreign trade. The alert comes in the form of a dramatically stepped-up overseas campaign to eliminate dissidents.

A June report by Britain's parliamentary Human Rights Group says Iranian assassins traveled abroad to kill 11 critics of the regime in the first five months of this year, more than in all 1995. Since the Shah's overthrow in 1979, 215 overseas attacks have killed or wounded more than 350 critics in 21 countries, and nearly two-thirds of the assaults have come in the past seven years. That has been while the so-called pragmatist President, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, has been in charge, not the founding "radical," Ayatullah Khomeini, usually considered the more lawless of the pair. This year's casualties include four Iranian Kurds shot in Iraq; two Sunni clergymen killed in Pakistan; a former minister of the Shah's government assassinated at home in Paris; and Zahra Rajabi, a member of the dissident Iranian National Council of Resistance, killed in Turkey, where she headed a delegation investigating the plight of Iranian refugees.

The toll might be far higher but for alert Belgian customs officials. In March, while checking the Iranian freighter Kohladooz in Antwerp, they discovered a high-caliber mortar launcher and shells with payloads of 125 kilos of explosives packed in food containers marked as gherkins and pickled garlic. The mortar had a range of 700 meters, the shells, proximity fuses that would have enabled them to detonate more lethally above their targets. According to National Council of Resistance officials, Belgian and French security forces concluded that the probable target for bombardment by the giant mortar was the Paris headquarters of the Iranian resistance group and Maryam Rajavi, the organization's president-elect.

With this record, not to mention Tehran's praise for the Hamas suicide bombers who killed 62 Israelis earlier this year, the regime's relentless pursuit of nuclear weapons and its extensive military maneuvers this summer in the Gulf, why should Iran be rewarded with Western investment? It should not. Why should the European Union accept Iran's hint this month that it will not assassinate British writer Salman Rushdie even though Tehran will not formally lift the fatwa, or death sentence, imposed on him in 1989, because it was levied by Khomeini himself, nor remove the $2 million bounty on Rushdie's head? This is not a trick question, but many in the E.U., though not Britain and the Netherlands, are warming up to Iran.

For all its shortcomings in any number of policy areas, the Clinton Administration has been clear-headed about the threat posed by Tehran. Europe, particularly Germany, would disagree. With sanctions bills approved in the U.S. Congress that would penalize foreign companies for investing more than $40 million a year in Iran, tension is building between Washington's effort to isolate Tehran and Bonn's determination to keep open a critical dialogue.

Isolation can work. Witness South Africa. On the other hand, too much dialogue and not enough criticism can be appeasement. When that warning was ignored 60 years ago, after Hitler invaded the Rhineland, the price paid was far too high to endure again.

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