Al Qaeda Relationship With Iran Is Debated

Before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Al Qaeda operatives traveled through Iran to and from their training camps in Afghanistan because it was convenient and was considered free from Western surveillance, unlike the traditional route in neighboring Pakistan, according to court records, intelligence officials and interviews with Al Qaeda recruits.

The final report of the Sept. 11 commission to be released Thursday is expected to state that at least eight of the 19 hijackers transited through Iran in the months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean has said that the use of Iran as a transit route raises the possibility that Iran and the Al Qaeda terrorist network had an operating relationship, although the report apparently offers no further details of such a link.

Opponents of the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq have seized upon the Iran information as evidence that the administration was misguided in its fixation on Iraq. Iran, they say, appears to have ties to terrorists at least as close.

Intelligence officials, however, downplay the significance of the travel route. One senior U.S. intelligence official who has seen the commission report, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Islamic jihadists, particularly Saudis, “routinely were allowed to transit Iran without being impeded or without being questioned carefully or without having their documents marked in any way.”

The official stressed that “this was not unique to Al Qaeda” and that the travel was not evidence of special Iranian collaboration with the terrorist network.

U.S. communications intercepts revealed the use of Iran routes months after the Sept. 11 attacks. This information was bolstered by data from wiretaps of an Al Qaeda cell in Milan in early 2001. Tunisians in the cell discussed the Iranian route during a conversation wiretapped by Italian police, according to court papers. The Tunisians, who have since been convicted on terrorism-related charges, said their contacts in Iran ensured quick and safe passage, but the wiretaps did not suggest the involvement of Iranian officials, Italian authorities said.

Later it was also determined that Ramzi Binalshibh, identified as a coordinator of the Sept. 11 attacks, had flown to Tehran en route to Afghanistan in 2000.

Not everyone thinks the Iran-Al Qaeda relationship was benign. Alireza Jafarzadeh, the former leader of an Iranian exile group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, said the indication that Iranian border guards apparently had been instructed to allow Al Qaeda members passage was important.

“It is very clear to me that this was not a low-level, local decision to facilitate the passage of the Al Qaeda members. This was clearly a decision made at the highest level,” he said. “This fits right into the pattern of state sponsorship of terrorism that Iran has been pursuing for more than two decades.”

Philip Zelikow, executive director of the Sept. 11 commission, said the U.S. intelligence community had been too quick to dismiss the possibility of Al Qaeda ties with Iran. He said the panel’s report would challenge long-standing assumptions that the Shiite Muslim regime in Tehran would be an unlikely partner for the Sunni-dominated terrorist network.

“You can’t say, ‘We know Iran wouldn’t cooperate with Al Qaeda because, because, because,” Zelikow said in an interview Tuesday. “Sorry. There’s a lot of evidence here people have to come to grips with.

“We think a little humility is in order [on the part of the U.S. intelligence community] and that there is enough evidence out there to suggest the need for acknowledging some level of uncertainty,” he said.

Time magazine disclosed Friday that the commission’s report would give credence to the possibility of an Iran-Al Qaeda collaboration. That report said Iranian border guards had been instructed to allow Al Qaeda members passage without interference or even the stamping of passports.

An interim report issued by the commission in June noted that there had been sporadic meetings between Al Qaeda and representatives of Hezbollah, an Iranian-funded Lebanese militant group. Little is known what, if anything, resulted from those meetings. The report cited possible Al Qaeda involvement in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers military housing complex in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. Air Force personnel -- for which Hezbollah is believed responsible -- but offered no specific evidence.

The American intelligence official who has read the final commission report, referring to both the Saudi bombing and the Iranian travel information, said: “If that’s the best they got, it’s pretty weak.”

One senior CIA official said the agency had previously examined the information the commission cites. The official said that there was evidence that suggested Al Qaeda might have been involved in the Saudi blast, but that the information was inconclusive and overshadowed by more powerful evidence tying the attacks to the Tehran government and Hezbollah.

The official said there were ample reasons to be skeptical that Al Qaeda and Iran would forge a cooperative relationship. The two were on opposite sides of the civil war in Afghanistan, with Iran backing the Northern Alliance in its fight against the Taliban.

“The Shia-Sunni dimension is part of it,” the official said. “It’s not an impenetrable boundary. But it’s important to those people. And Tehran is not out to do a global jihad in the [Osama] bin Laden sense. They are trying to secure their own strength and stability and position of prominence in the Persian Gulf. Their interests are not all that parallel.

“Once you get beyond the fact that Al Qaeda and Iran share a common enemy in the United States, the differences outweigh the similarities,” the official said.

The intelligence officials’ evaluations of the Iran travel route bolster descriptions given by Al Qaeda recruits in interviews last year. The recruits from Persian Gulf states and Pakistan were transported to Pakistan and urged to travel through Iran to the Afghan camps. The men identified one of their recruiters as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, thought to be the principal planner of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The recruits said Mohammed told them to travel through Iran because of his concerns that the traditional route through Peshawar, Pakistan, and the Khyber Pass was closely watched by Western intelligence services.

For most of the 1990s, Mohammed operated mainly out of Karachi, Pakistan, but recruits said he spent weeks at a time in the north, in the rugged terrain of Baluchistan province near the Iranian border. Court documents in Germany indicate that Al Qaeda recruits were often routed through Baluchistan’s capital, Quetta.

What the alternative routes in and out of Afghanistan had in common was Baluchistan, a rough desert territory that stretches across the boundaries of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is one of the oldest inhabited places on Earth and has little arable land. Its main economic activity for generations has been smuggling. Travel within the territory often occurs with little acknowledgment of national borders.

Persian Gulf state security officials said Mohammed had a long familiarity with Baluchistan. His father was born in Iranian Baluchistan, his mother across the Pakistani border. He had a network of relatives throughout the region and employed several of them in Al Qaeda’s cause, the officials said.

There is general agreement in the intelligence community that Iran’s relationship with Al Qaeda has grown more complicated since Sept. 11. The Iranian government condemned the attacks and was largely silent about the subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. But dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Al Qaeda operatives used Iran as a safe harbor after the Afghanistan war began. Iran announced arrests of some Al Qaeda members but has largely resisted requests to extradite the most important of them to other countries for trial.

As European anti-terrorist investigators tracked the reconfiguration of Al Qaeda in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and the U.S. military operation in Afghanistan, their inquiries have revealed the presence of the network’s operatives in Iran.

European investigators said they detected signs that Iran served as a refuge for figures such as Abu Musab Zarqawi, an Al Qaeda associate who U.S. officials say is a leader of the insurgency in Iraq; one of Bin Laden’s sons; and a veteran Syrian-Spanish ideologue whom Spanish police suspect of being the mastermind of this year’s train bombings in Madrid.

Before Sept. 11, Zarqawi is believed to have operated a terrorist camp outside the Afghan city of Herat, near the Iranian border. German court documents indicate that he moved his operations to Iran shortly after the American attacks on Afghanistan.

In late 2002, as the U.S. confrontation with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein grew near, Al Qaeda activity in Iran increased, intelligence officials said. Since then, Iran’s western borderlands have been key staging and transit areas for operations against American troops in Iraq. Some captured fighters in northern Iraq carried Iranian travel papers and receipts from Iranian shops and hotels.

There are questions and differences of opinion among investigators about whether the emergence of Iran as a new base of operations for Al Qaeda has been encouraged or tolerated by Tehran. Some accept Tehran’s insistence that it has cracked down on Bin Laden’s followers. Other European experts cite evidence that hard-line elements in the Iranian security apparatus have provided occasional support for Al Qaeda affiliates, especially members of Ansar al Islam and others involved in anti-U.S. attacks in Iraq.

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Times staff writers Douglas Frantz in Istanbul, Turkey; Greg Miller in Washington; Jeffrey Fleishman in Berlin; and Sebastian Rotella in Zurich, Switzerland, contributed to this report.