The Vanishing Iranian
General: Did He Leave or Was He Taken?
DEBKAfile
March 2, 2007
Iran’s dep. defense minister
for eight years up until 2005 - and before that a prominent Revolutionary Guards
General, Alireza Asquari, 63, has not been seen since his disappearance in
mysterious circumstances in Istanbul on Feb. 7.
The missing general has been
identified as the officer in charge of Iranian undercover operations in central
Iraq, according to DEBKAfile’s intelligence and Iranian sources.
He is believed to have been linked to – or participated in - the armed group
which stormed the US-Iraqi command center in Karbala south of Baghdad Jan. 20
and snatched five American officers. They were shot outside the Shiite city.
An Middle East intelligence
source told DEBKAfile that the Americans could not let this
premeditated outrage go unanswered and had been hunting the Iranian general ever
since.
The BAZTAB Web site reported
that Feb. 6, two non-Turkish citizens made a reservation for Gen Asquari for
three nights at the Istanbul Ceylan Hotel paying cash. He arrived the next day
from Damascus and immediately disappeared.
The Turkish foreign ministry
said only: “It is a very sensitive intelligence matter and the Interior Ministry
is dealing with this issue.”
BAZTAB speaks for the faction
associated with Mohsein Rezai, former Revolutionary Guards commander, deputy
head of Iran’s most powerful governing council and a man very close to top
intelligence circles in Tehran
The Iranian general’s arrival
at Ataturk international airport on a flight from Damascus is recorded at border
control, but he never reached the hotel.
Instead, he booked himself into
the more modest and cheaper Hotel Ghilan. He left his luggage in the room,
walked out of the hotel – and vanished.
A police official in Istanbul
said: “We are trying to find out whether he left or was taken. Clearly the
reservation made for him at the luxurious Ceylan Hotel was made to mislead.
Tehran’s application to Interpol, which has issued a yellow bulletin, means that
the Iranians are not treating Asquari’s disappearance as a defection but as
involuntary.
DEBKAfile adds:
Tehran sees the hand of US undercover agencies or contract gunmen and believes
Washington has stepped up its war against Iranian officers running Tehran’s
clandestine operations in Iraq. The kidnapping of an Iranian general outside
Iraq would expand President Bush’s permission for the capture or killing of
Iranian agents helping Iraqi insurgents and al Qaeda murder Americans in Iraq.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly 288
reported on Feb. 2 that the gunmen who abducted the American soldiers in Karbala
- and then shot them dead execution-style – belonged to a special commando team
of the Iranian Intelligence Ministry, which was sent to Iraq especially for this
mission.
The team was made up of
intelligence officers who speak American English and were trained to masquerade
as US troops, kidnap US soldiers and hold them as hostages for bargaining.
These officers are from Iran,
Iraq, Lebanon and other Arab countries, who studied in the US and can talk like
Americans - even in the idiom of US troops. Teams of these masqueraders roam at
large in Iraq, clad in American uniforms, armed with US weapons and driving
stolen American vehicles.
Tehran’s plan was to snatch a
group of US soldiers and hold them hostage against the release of the 8
Revolutionary Guards paratroops in American custody. However, according to our
intelligence sources, the plan went awry for some unknown reason and the Iranian
commandos decided to execute their captives before making a fast getaway from
the Karbala region.
Tehran views this operation as
a fiasco because it did not achieve its goal. At the same time, Iranian
intelligence has not been put off its plan to take American soldiers hostage in
Iraq. Its chiefs are determined to do whatever it takes to obtain the release of
the third top man of the Revolutionary Guards al Quds division, Col. Fars
Hassami, who DEBKA-Net-Weekly reports is not the only high-profile
Iranian officer in American hands. Another is Mohammad Jaafari Sahra-Rudi, who
was the kingpin of Iran’s terrorist operations in large parts of Iraq. His long
record includes leading the Iranian death squad which assassinated Iran’s
Kurdish Democratic Party leader Dr. Abdol-Rahman Qasemlou in Vienna in 1989.
Austrian security services
caught the assassin but sent him back to Iran as part of a secret transaction
between the two countries.
Qasemlou operated in Iraq under
his real identity and even met with Iraqi president Jalal Talabani just a few
days before he was captured in the American raid of the Iranian “liaison office”
in Irbil Jan 11.
The Iranians have explored
every channel they can think of to break the agents out of American custody.
When they realized that the United States was adamant about holding on to them,
the heads of the Revolutionary Guards decided to go ahead with their campaign of
abductions against US troops in Iraq. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad approved.
