Report: Tehran has spies, weapons, attackers in Iraq

By: Mohamed Ali

WASHINGTON: A US News magazine reported Sunday that according to intelligence reports Iran has spies, weapons and attackers in Iraq, and may have a $500 bounty on the head of each American soldier there.

“Iran ... poses the greatest long-term threat to US efforts in Iraq,” wrote an analyst with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations in December, 2003, according to a report published in the Monday edition of US News and World Report.

“Iranian intelligence agents are conducting operations in every major city with a significant Shia (Muslim) population,” a US Army’s V Corps analyst wrote in a 2003 document examined by the news weekly.

The V Corps analyst wrote: “The counterintelligence threat from Iran is assessed to be high, as locally employed people, former military officers, politicians, and young men are recruited, hired, and trained by Iranian intelligence to collect (intelligence) on coalition forces.”

The magazine said that “raw” intelligence indicated that Iran may have a 500 dollar bounty on each US soldier, and the repeated interception of such information, from various sources, led analysts to believe it may be true.

US News also reported that Iran appeared to be behind a plan to kill Paul Bremer, then the top US administrator in Iraq, as a grim two-year anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The plan was quite well along, according to intelligence documents, and detailed down to the make of taxi, a Toyota Corona, to be used in a bombing and the name of a planner, Himin Bani Shari, a top member of Ansar Al-Islam and known to associate with Iranian spies, the magazine said.

An assessment by the US Army’s V Corps, which then directed all Army activity in Iraq, said, “Iranian intelligence continues to prod and facilitate the infiltration of Iraq with their subversive elements while providing them support once they are in country,” according to the Washington-based newsmagazine.

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