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US Customs & Border Chief:
No Evidence of
Iranian Sleeper Cells in U.S.
By Jeff Stein
"If Iran has sleeper cells here, "we'd be doing something about it," says the head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, contradicting frequent assertions that the
Islamic regime has secret agents in the U.S. poised to attack domestic targets in retaliation for American or Israeli air strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities.
U.S. intelligence officials have said that Iran-backed
Hezbollah
"retains the capability to strike in the U.S." as FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III told Congress in 2005, or that it might launch attacks on U.S. targets "if it feels its Iranian patron is threatened," as John D. Negroponte put it when he was Director of National Intelligence in 2006.
But evidence that Iran has anything more than fundraising efforts remains scant.
The Iranian sleeper agents idea got another bounce this month with the publication of The Secret War With Iran, by the respected
Israeli investigative reporter Ronen Bergman, who says that Iran has deployed underground cells in New York and elsewhere.
But in a little noticed interview with WTOP radio national security correspondent J.J. Green,
CPB chief W. Ralph Basham threw cool, if not cold water on the idea.
"I don't think we can sit here and give you a definition of exactly where the threat would come, what the assets are," said Basham, a 28-year
veteran of the U.S. Secret Service.
"If you're asking me, 'Do they have people here in the United States ready to take action?' If we knew the answer to that question, we'd be doing something about it."
Former CIA operative Robert Baer, a specialist in Iranian terrorism, has also called evidence that Iran has sleeper agents here "as thin as that of an Iranian hand in the JFK plot."
In the mid-'80s there was a suspicion that Lebanese Hezballah, on Iranian orders, was trying to establish cells in the U.S., particularly in the Detroit area. But no cell was found. Some terrorist analysts still believe that Iran tried to kill William Rogers, the commander of the U.S.S. Vincennes, when a pipe bomb went off under his minivan in 1989. The Vincennes shot down an Iranian civilian airliner over the Gulf in 1988, and the attack on Rogers was presumably in retaliation. The FBI officially dismisses the Iranian hypotheses. A Hezballah-associated group in North Carolina cheating on cigarette taxes was tried and convicted. Otherwise that's it.
With Bashem's comment, a definitive portrait on Iranian subversion is bound to remain murky, until an Iranian cell is caught re-handed -- or carries out an attack here.
"They've made a long-term strategic
decision not to attack us," an anonymous U.S. counterterrorism official told the New York Daily News in 2006. "But if they felt under threat by the U.S. or were ordered to by Iran - you can't rule it out."
The same was said of al Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks, carried out by nearly two dozen secret agents, all but two Sunni extremists from Saudi Arabia, who had been in the U.S. for months, or in some cases, years.
Bergman, meanwhile, told an interviewer that he didn't think Iran will use a bomb against Israel.
"That's the last thing they want. They may support suicide terrorism. But not for themselves, they like to be in
control," Bergman told the Israeli newspaper Harretz on Sept. 13.
Asked why it was "so important to them to have nuclear weapons, Bergman said, "They want to make sure they can continue exporting
revolution, without fearing that the U.S. will do to them what it did to Iraq."
The project is their insurance policy. And their involvement in international terrorism is, in turn, their insurance policy against attack on their nuclear sites. They want any country that may be planning to strike their sites to know that they can be victims of terror attacks
Bergman, a lawyer who holds a PhD in international relations, is the intelligence correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.
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