Steve Quayle News Alerts

September 26, 2002
By Jim Miklaszewski and Robert Windrem

U.S. intelligence has detected a suspected al-Qaida training camp in a remote area of eastern Iran along the border with Afghanistan, sources told NBC News. Overhead imagery shows what appears to be a training camp complete with a terrorist obstacle course and a rifle range, much like those al-Qaida used in Afghanistan to train for assassinations.

This would be the first evidence that al-Qaida is using Iran to resume terrorist training.
IT HAS been reported previously that a number of al-Qaida leaders had fled to eastern Iran, but this would be the first evidence that al-Qaida was actually using Iran to resume terrorist training.
Sources told NBC News that while Iran’s civilian government may not know the training camp is there, Iran’s military and intelligence certainly would.
There was no word Wednesday on possible U.S. efforts to deal with the suspected al-Qaida camp.

ILL WILL BETWEEN IRAN, AL-QAIDA
Iran’s relationship with al-Qaida appears to have been tenuous at best in the early 1990s, but by the late 1990s it was filled with ill will and even included an attempted assassination by Iran of the Taliban’s leader and al-Qaida’s protector, Mullah Mohammed Omar, in August 1999.
Moreover, it is hard to determine how much, if any, official cooperation there has ever been between al-Qaida and the Iranian government. Documents and testimony in the East Africa embassy bombing trials indicate that some in the Iranian government, among its clerics and in the terrorist organization Hizballah have had contacts with high-ranking members of al-Qaida, including at least one meeting involving Osama bin Laden.
However, U.S. officials said that while there had been contacts, they were believed to have been “peripheral.” There is also no evidence of any joint attacks, only some discussions and training, officials said.
As to the possibility of an Iranian link to Sept. 11, a senior intelligence official said: “We do not believe that. There is no such evidence.”

AMBASSADOR DENIES CONNECTION
In an interview with NBC last week, Iran’s U.N. ambassador, Mohammed Javad Zarif specifically denied any connection between his government and al-Qaida, citing al-Qaida’s role in killing Iranian diplomats.

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“None of that is correct. Iran, as records will show, considered al-Qaida and Taliban to be dangerous organizations and warned the international community of the fact,” said Zarif, who added that al-Qaida and the Taliban killed members of the Iranian diplomatic corps in August 1998.
“The one [attack] that can be specific and directly attributed to al-Qaida is an attack to our consulate general in Mazar-e-Sharif, where Taliban and al-Qaida killed 11 Iranians. But there are other incidents of cross-border attacks during the time the Taliban had the reign over Afghanistan. There were cross-border kidnappings of Iranian citizens and officials, and murder of Iranian citizens and officials by these two entities.”
In fact, said a Pentagon official, the United States had satellite photos of the aftermath of an attempted assassination of Omar later that year. A truck bomb exploded outside his compound — a complex built and paid for by bin Laden.
“I saw a satellite photo of the bomb crater,” said the official. “It was not a half-hearted attempt.”

DETERIORATION OF RELATIONSHIP
Historically, there appear to have been exploratory talks and some action involving Iranian officials and al-Qaida years ago, but there also is evidence of a deterioration and outright hostility between the two sides by the end of 1999.
Testimony in the East Africa embassy bombings trial, concluded last year, lays out connections between al-Qaida and the Iranian government, an unidentified senior Iranian religious leader and Iran’s most favored terrorist group, the Hizballah, during the early 1990s. But there is also significant evidence that al-Qaida worked with the Taliban in anti-Iran operations in the late 1990s and in at least one case, even before that.
Specifically, the transcript of the trial shows that as early as 1998 the United States was aware that on “various” occasions during the early to mid-1990s, high-ranking al-Qaida members met with Iranian officials and that bin Laden himself met with the leader of its terrorist surrogate, the Hizballah, to “cooperate against the perceived common enemy,” the United States.

WEAPONS FOR AL-QAIDA
Among the prosecutors’ revelations at the embassy bombing trials was that Iran and Hizballah provided weapons and weapons training to al-Qaida and its ally, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and that “Osama bin Laden and other ranking members of al-Qaida, stated privately ... al-Qaida should put aside its differences with Shiite Muslim terrorist organizations, including the government of Iran and its affiliated terrorist group Hizballah, to cooperate” against the United States. Moreover, there was testimony that bin Laden met with Imad Mugniyeh, the mastermind behind the terrorist attacks that took more than 300 American lives in Beirut during the 1980s.

The meetings between al-Qaida and the unidentified Iranian religious leader took place in Sudan with Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, bin Laden’s former financial manager, representing al-Qaida. They took place at “various times” between 1992 and 1996, according to prosecutors, and the bin Laden meeting with Mugniyeh, the military chief of Hizballah, was held in 1994. All the meetings apparently took place in Sudan.
According to U.S. prosecutors, “At various times between in or about 1992 and in or about 1996, the defendant Mamdouh Mahmud Salim met with an Iranian religious official in Khartoum as part of an overall effort to arrange a tripartite agreement between al-Qaida, the National Islamic Front of Sudan and elements of the government of Iran to work together against the United States, Israel and other Western countries.”
Salim goes on trial in New York early next year, and it is expected that details of those dealings will be made public.

‘AWARE OF CERTAIN CONTACTS’
Ali Mohammed, bin Laden’s security chief and a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst, stated during his guilty plea in the embassy bombings case in October 2000 that “I was aware of certain contacts between al-Qaida and [Egyptian Islamic] Jihad on one side and Iran and Hizballah on the other side. I arranged security for a meeting in the Sudan between Mugniyeh, Hizballah’s chief, and bin Laden.
“Hizballah provided explosives training for al-Qaida and [Egyptian] Islamic Jihad. Iran supplied Egyptian Jihad with weapons. Iran also used Hizballah to supply explosives that were disguised to look like rocks.”
Mohammed said the Hizballah chief (who reportedly is still active in directing attacks against Israel) had discussed how Hizballah had forced the United States out of Beirut by blowing up the Marine barracks, adding that al-Qaida planned to “use the same method to force the United States out from Saudi Arabia.”

Jim Miklaszewski is NBC’s correspondent at the Pentagon and Robert Windrem is an NBC investigative producer based in New York.

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