Something stinks about Iran's 'capture' of British troops

Apparently (and this is apparently, because al-Beeb is the messenger), Iran tried to attack some Aussies who were near Iranian territory, but they were "having none of it." Makes you wonder if the Brits really tried that hard to avoid capture. Maybe it was indeed all arranged? Sounds odd, but you never really know what's going on these days. And why did they only learn about it now, if it took place before the British 'kidnapping'?

Iranian naval forces in the Gulf tried to capture an Australian Navy boarding team but were vigorously repelled, the BBC has learned.

The incident took place before Iran successfully seized 15 British sailors and Marines in March.

The lessons from the earlier attempt do not appear to have been applied in time by British maritime patrols.

The 15 Britons were searching a cargo boat in the Gulf when they were captured over a boundary dispute.

Amazing - how Iran trains its terrorists in Iraq

Saw this short, but interesting, piece on Ledeen's blog:

From today’s Aerospace Daily & Defense Report, comes an interesting report:
IRANIAN GOTCHA:

U.S. reconnaissance spacecraft have spotted a training center in Iran that duplicates the layout of the governor’s compound in Karbala, Iraq, that was attacked in January by a special unit that killed American and Iraqi solders. The U.S. bel ieves the discovery indicates that Iran was heavily involved in the strike, which used a fake motorcade to gain entrance to the compound. The duplicate layout in Iran allowed the attackers to practice the exact procedures they would use at the real compound, the Defense Department believes.

This is SOP for bigtime terrorist operations. As far back as the assault on the Marine Barracks in Lebanon in the 1980s, we found (as, apparently, in this case, after the event) that the terrorists had built models of their targets, and practiced on them.

My guess is that we have human intelligence on this matter as well, coming from the Revolutionary Guards officers arrested in Irbil. The “reconaissance spacecraft” (I love that sort of description, don’t you? Shades of Flash Gordon…) probably confirmed it.

Iran has released former FBI agent

So says DEBKAfile...for those of you who've been following this story.

Recent articles by Ledeen

I'm...

Hi everyone. I'm back, so hopefully posting will resume as normal. To start off with, here are a few recent musings from Michael Ledeen. Enjoy.

1. Tenet Strikes Out: George Tenet may have made mistakes, but the real crime in his time at the CIA was the agency's unwillingness to accept and pursue good information about Iran...


2. Did Condoleezza Rice Try to Make a Secret Deal With the Mullahs?: The delusion that one can settle our little disagreements with the Islamic Republic, if only the right people sit around the right conference table, has seized every administration since Carter.

Amir Taheri adds his 2 cents to the Ali-Reza Askari case...

Saw this on the New York Post's website. Excerpts can be found below.

'A VERY big fish" - so Tehran sources de scribe former Deputy Defense Minister Ali-Reza Askari (sometimes called "Asghari" in the West), who disappeared in Istanbul on Sunday.

Askari's disappearance fits an emerging pattern. Since December, the United States and its allies appear to have moved onto the offensive against the Islamic Republic's networks of influence in the Middle East:

* Jordan has seized 17 Iranian agents, accused of trying to smuggle arms to Hamas, and deported them quietly after routine debriefing.

* A number of Islamic Republic agents have been identified and deported in Pakistan and Tunisia.

* At least six other Iranian agents have been picked up in Gaza, where they were helping Hamas set up armament factories.

* In the past three months, some 30 senior Iranian officials, including at least two generals of Revolutionary Guards, have been captured in Iraq....

...All this looks like a message to Tehran that its opponents may be moving on to the offensive in what looks like a revival of tactics used in the Cold War....

...Indeed, Iran is rife with rumors about the case: Askari has been transferred to Romania, where he is being debriefed by the Americans; he had documents with him, mostly related to Iran's military purchases abroad; Israeli efforts to see him (in connection with his years of running Hezballah) have so far failed to meet with success...

Whether he defected or was abducted, Askari is a big catch with a mine of information about the activities of the Revolutionary Guard and its elite arm, the Quds Corps, which controls Arab and Turkish radical groups financed by Tehran. Last month, the United States accused the Quds Corps of supplying special projectiles to terrorists in Iraq to kill GIs.

Update on ex-Iranian official

MSNBC reports - details below.

A former Iranian deputy defense minister who once commanded the Revolutionary Guard has left his country and is cooperating with Western intelligence agencies, providing information on Hezbollah and Iran's ties to the organization, according to a senior U.S. official.

Ali Rez Asgari disappeared last month during a visit to Turkey. Iranian officials suggested yesterday that he may have been kidnapped by Israel or the United States. The U.S. official said Asgari is willingly cooperating. He did not divulge Asgari's whereabouts or specify who is questioning him, but made clear that the information Asgari is offering is fully available to U.S. intelligence.

Russia signs major arms deal with Iran & Syria

Surprise, surprise. Help them make the nuke, then help them defend themselves from the US/Israel once they strike pre-emptively. The article is courtesy of MENL. This jives with Ledeen's recent comments (see post from yesterday)

The regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin has sought to keep secret its arms deals with Iran and Syria.

Russia's leading business daily Kommersant asserted that a reporter who had been investigating Moscow's defense exports to Iran and Syria was killed. Kommersant said the reporter, former Col. Ivan Safronov, who fell from his apartment window to his death, disclosed the Russian sale of advanced Su-30 fighter-jets to Syria and S-300PMU-1 anti-aircraft systems to Iran.

"From what we know already it is clear it was not suicide," Russian SJR journalist union secretary-general Igor Yakovenko said. "The chances that it was a murder linked to the exercise of his profession are very high."

On March 5, the Russian prosecutor's office launched an investigation into Safronov's death on March 2. In a statement, the office termed the probable cause of death "incitement to suicide." An autopsy did not find any drugs or alcohol in Safronov, scheduled to be buried on Wednesday.

Russian kournalist killed...because he knew too much about arms sales to Iran & Syria?

Ledeen captured this small snippet from Bloomberg on his blog today. Here it is:

Russian reporter Ivan Safronov was investigating state plans to sell advanced weapons to Iran and Syria when he fell to his death from a window in his Moscow apartment building March 2, his newspaper Kommersant said.

Safronov, a 51-year-old former colonel in the military, met with unidentified people at an international arms show in the United Arab Emirates last month and confirmed Russian plans to sell fighter jets and missile systems via neighboring Belarus to avoid being accused by the U.S. of arming rogue nations, Kommersant editors said in today’s edition.

I don’t know if he was murdered at all, or, if he was, if he was silenced because he knew too much about Russian arms sales to Iran and Syria via Belarus. But I do know that the story he was working on had a long tail; several journalists have been looking into the Russia-Belarus-Iran or Syria shipping route. Some time ago, for example, I was given End User Certificates for surface-to-air missiles from 2001 that clearly showed how Belarus was used as a cutout for Russian sales to Iran. That information is in the hands of American Government officials, as well as several reporters.

So if the idea was to silence Safronov and thereby smother the story, it wasn’t a very good idea. You’d have to kill a lot of people to do that.

Iran: Missing general likely kidnapped

This story has been floating around for a few days now in the press, but I thought I'd post an update just in case you hadn't seen it yet. The only rule to use in these situations is Rule #1: The Mullahs Will Always Lie.

- Noggr

Iran officially announced on Tuesday that its former deputy defense minister was missing while on a private trip to neighboring Turkey, and its top police chief accused Western intelligence services of possibly kidnapping the official.

Ali Reza Asghari, a retired general in the elite Revolutionary Guards and a former deputy defense minister, had arrived in Turkey on a private visit from Damascus, Syria, the official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported Tuesday.

Iran's top police chief, Gen. Esmaeil Ahmadi Moghaddam, said Iran was investigating the fate of Asghari through the Turkish police.

"It is likely that Asghari has been abducted by the Western intelligence services," IRNA quoted the Iranian police general as saying. The general did not elaborate.

Meanwhile, however, the London-based Arab daily Asharq alawsat said on Tuesday, quoting high-profile sources, that Asghari may have sought asylum in the US.

The newspaper reported that the Iranian official had left for the US shortly after arriving in the Turkish capital.