Lessons From the Iran-al Qaeda Connection
By Douglas Farah
My CTB colleague Andrew Cochran has written about the Treasury Department's designations of various al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden's son, Sa'ad. The designation order ties several of those identified, including Sa'ad, to Iran.
The designation, taken literally, has little meaning. None of those named have any assets in the United States than can be frozen, and likely do not do business under their own names abroad, nor are they likely to have bank accounts.
But as a symbolic measure it is important because it highlights he history of the Iran-al Qaeda relationship, and how wrong the conventional wisdom in the intelligence community was in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. There still exists a strong resistance to seeing how thing work, rather than how we like to imagine they might work.
The thinking (which I ran up against repeatedly in the hostility to my al Qaeda-diamonds reporting) was that Shi'ia and Sunni groups cannot and do not collaborate. Therefore, Hezbollah supporters in Liberia smuggling diamonds would never help al Qaeda operatives move their stones. And Iran would not help al Qaeda on a broader level.
Yet Iran, as the Treasury statement notes, provided vital logistical support for senior al Qaeda leaders and the families of the very senior leadership (Osama bin Laden, Zawahiri) to escape from Afghanistan. They kept some senior leaders under "house arrest" but allowed them to remain operational.
It took the European intelligence services a considerable amount of time and effort to convince most of their U.S. counterparts that this was the case. My full blog is here.