Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, September 8, 1994 TAG: 9409090035
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Newsday
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
According to those sources, who have access to government intelligence, the Iranian officials and their embassies in Latin America, Europe and the Middle East have bombed Jewish interests, assassinated Tehran opponents living abroad and recruited Arab terrorists.
Their global designs include spreading Islamic fundamentalism among South Asia's Muslims and terror bombings in New York.
One of those officials, Hosein Sheikh-ol-Eslam, is described as a ``key leader'' in the U.S. Embassy takeover. Now, according to administration officials, Sheikh-ol-Eslam is Iran's deputy foreign minister for Afro-Arab affairs and vice director-general of its foreign service.
``He is the kingpin, the patron of the radicals and former hostage-holders, the man who assigns them to their jobs overseas, in embassies and elsewhere,'' said Kenneth Katzman, a former intelligence analyst who is now an Iran specialist for the Congressional Research Service.
Former hostage Moorhead Kennedy Jr., then the embassy's third-ranking diplomat, bitterly remembers Sheikh-ol-Eslam as the chief interrogator of the Americans, the captor whom they derisively called ``Tooth'' because of his gap-toothed smile.
Barry Rosen, the embassy's press officer, now a teacher at Brooklyn College in New York, recalls him as a practitioner of psychological warfare, bringing good news and mail to the Americans one day, cracking down on them the next.
Katzman, author of ``Warriors of Islam,'' a book on the Revolutionary Guard Corps, said that under Sheikh-ol-Eslam's guidance, the former hostage-holders - as well as other Iranian officials - have used embassies to finance, arm and provide logistics and cover for acts of terrorism and the spread of their brand of Islamic fundamentalism, controlling government and society.
He rejects the notion that they are merely former revolutionaries who went on to serve in the government they helped create.
``The difference,'' Katzman said, ``is that these men have taken their ideologies and their terrorist tactics abroad.''
For example, one of Sheikh-ol-Eslam's colleagues among the hostage-takers, Ali Reza Deyhim, has been Iran's ambassador to Mexico since 1993 and is serving concurrently as Tehran's envoy to Belize. The Iranian government has said it is interested in expanding its relations with all of Latin America.
Terrorism expert Vince Cannistraro, a former director of the CIA's counterterrorism center who served as a staff member of the National Security Council during the Reagan administration, said U.S. intelligence sources ``are worried because the Iranians are building up an infrastructure in Latin America.''
Mexico is especially important, he added, because ``it is strategically placed and is as close to the U.S. as Iran can get.''
Cannistraro said intelligence sources here believe that the July 19 bombing of a Panama commuter plane that killed 23 people, most of them Jews, ``was directed out of Mexico.''
U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, relying on U.S. intelligence agencies, has blamed the bombing on Hezbollah, the radical Islamic group Party of God, which, he said, is financed and largely controlled by Iran.
Christopher also has blamed Hezbollah and Iran for the July 18 bombing of a Buenos Aires, Argentina, building housing Jewish agencies, in which nearly 100 people were killed. He charged it was part of an effort to undermine the Middle East peace process.
After Argentinian investigators charged that the bombing was the work of Iranian agents, Tehran lodged a denial and pulled out its ambassador, Hadi Soleimanpur. Cannistraro and Katzman say Soleimanpur was one of the 1979 hostage-holders, although intelligence sources have been unable to confirm that.
``The operation [bombing] in Buenos Aires may not have been directed by the ambassador,'' said Cannistraro, ``but the embassies supply support, logistics, passports, visas, even weapons, and the ambassador is usually aware of what's going on.''
The CIA and State Department have followed the careers of some of the hostage-holders as they have gone on to key posts, mostly in Iran's foreign ministry, and have tracked their continued involvement in terrorist activities. Since 1979, the CIA has written three classified reports on the issue.
The State Department, in its latest annual report on ``Patterns of Global Terrorism,'' calls Iran ``the most active state sponsor of terrorism,'' and ``implicated in terrorist attacks in Italy, Turkey and Pakistan.''
``Iranian intelligence continues to stalk members of the Iranian opposition in the United States, Europe, Asia and the Middle East,'' the report said.
The report also added another nation to its list of states that sponsor terrorism - Sudan. And it notes that Majid Kamal, Iran's ambassador in Khartoum until July, was largely responsible for helping to organize, finance and equip terrorist groups operating in and from Sudan. Several Sudanese were arrested last summer as part of a plot to bomb prominent sites in New York.
The State Department calls Kamal a leader in the 1979 takeover, which ended 444 days later when 52 Americans were flown out of Iran as Ronald Reagan was being inaugurated as president. Former hostage Rosen, who was held in a Tehran prison, recalls that one of his captors, who was called Majid, played Western classical music on the piano while Iranian dissidents screamed under torture in nearby rooms.
Before his assignment to Sudan in 1990, Kamal served as Tehran's top diplomat in Lebanon, where, according to the State Department, he ``guided Iranian efforts in developing the Lebanese Hezbollah group,'' which was responsible for holding Americans and other Westerners hostage for several years.
by CNB