Donald Trump’s recent brush with death at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania has refocused attention on the vulnerability of current and former senior US government officials to assassination plots, including those by the Islamic Republic of Iran. While there is no evidence that the Pennsylvania shooter, Thomas Crooks, was acting on behalf of Iran or any other foreign government, the Biden administration stated in the aftermath of the failed assassination attempt that there had been an uptick in Iranian threats against the former president. At a House Committee on Oversight and Accountability hearing on Monday, U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle evaded questions about whether the Secret Service had repeatedly denied the Trump campaign additional security during that same time period. She resigned the next day.
Iran has repeatedly threatened former senior Trump administration officials, citing their supposed role in the 2020 strike that killed Iran’s Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, the number-two official in Iran. Posting on Twitter at the time, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed that those who had murdered General Soleimani and who had helped kill him would be punished: “This revenge will certainly happen at the right time.”
In January 2023, a social media account in Iran affiliated with the regime posted mock mugshots of 26 current and former U.S. officials, including National Security Council officials from the Trump administration Robert Greenway, Victoria Coates, and Matthew Pottinger, calling them “most wanted fugitives.” “There is no night that we sleep without thinking about you…,” the post stated. “Revenge is near. Very near!”
That same month, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) posted a video on a social media site explicitly threatening some 15 former Trump administration officials—including Greenway, Coates, and Pottinger—with imminent assassination “by drone, sniper fire, bomb, lethal injection, or stabbing.”
These former officials appealed for help to Attorney General Merrick Garland. Their letter to Garland, which they sent a full 18 months ago, remains unacknowledged, they confirmed. “We thought long and hard before writing that letter, and even longer before going public with the lack of a response,” said Pottinger, a former assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor. Pottinger was not added to Iran’s blacklist until 2022 after a Yahoo News article falsely claimed in 2021 that he had participated in the 2020 drone strike. (Pottinger tried hard to persuade Yahoo News to correct its false story, which the news outlet refused to do. Yahoo News’ former editor did not respond to an emailed request for comment.)
The 26 former US government officials are hardly the most senior officials who have been threatened by Iran. Topping what U.S. officials informally call Iran’s long-standing “kill list” is Donald Trump, along with several of his former senior officials—Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, Central Intelligence Agency Director Gina Haspel, Special Envoy for Iran Brian Hook, then U.S. Central Command Commander General (Retired) Frank McKenzie, who was in charge of the Soleimani operation, and National Security advisors John Bolton and Robert O’Brien.
Last week, The Wall Street Journal disclosed that Cheatle had ended government protection for O’Brien, despite continuing Iranian threats against him. Administration officials did not respond to emails asking why O’Brien’s security detail had been curtailed last August, or why they had not offered such protection to three other former officials targeted by Iran.
Pottinger said that he and his former colleagues had finally decided to go public about their security concerns only after it came out that the government had ended O’Brien’s protection.
Greenway, Coates, and Pottinger know all too well the murder and mayhem of which the Islamic Republic is capable. As of August 2022, the Islamic Republic has assassinated at least 20 opponents abroad and killed hundreds—Americans, Canadians, Europeans, Latin Americans, Israelis and Arabs, as well as Iranian opposition members abroad—in bombings of foreign military, diplomatic and cultural facilities. There have been at least 52 such attacks or plots since then, their letter states.
Iran, of course, was busy killing its enemies long before Soleimani’s death. Like other authoritarian, revolutionary governments, the Islamic Republic assembled a list of dissidents and other individuals deemed to be dangerous to the regime soon after coming to power in 1979. Iran’s first documented overseas assassination took place just outside Washington D.C. In July 1980, Iranian agents recruited David Belfield (aka Dawud Salahuddin), an American convert to Shiite Islam, to kill former Iranian diplomat Ali Akbar Tabatabai, an Iranian exile and former press attache to the Iranian embassy in Washington during the reign of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. In July, 1980, Tabatabai was shot and killed in front of his home in Bethesda, Maryland.
Iranian plots have become more daring over time. In October 2011, Iran tried to assassinate Saudi ambassador Adel al-Jubeir at the Café Milano restaurant in Washington and then bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies. U.S. officials uncovered the plot they called “Operation Red Coalition” and subsequently charged two Iranian nationals with recruiting narco-trafficking criminals to do the job. After the plot was foiled, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress it showed that “some Iranian officials—probably including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei”—had “changed their calculus” and were now “more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime.”
In an interview, Greenway, an assistant to former president Trump for the Middle East and now at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said that while Iran usually tied its vows for revenge to the Soleimani strike, he doubted that the death of the number-two official of Iran was what motivated the regime. Under Trump, he said, Iran had struggled under the toughest economic sanctions ever implemented. “There were 492 different discreet measures and quarterly evaluations to test their effectiveness,” he said. “Nothing like it had ever been attempted in our history.”
The regime stepped up assassination efforts overseas after Soleimani’s assassination in 2020 and especially after Trump left office.
Tehran’s enhanced aggression was hardly a secret. Citing the killing of Soleimani, Iran asked Interpol in January 2021, to issue a “red notice” ordering its members to arrest President Trump and 47 other U.S. officials. Among them were Coates and Greenway, who later wrote the letter appealing for protection.
While Justice Department officials told NBC, which first disclosed the existence of the officials’ letter, that they had referred it to another unspecified agency, they did not explain why they had never notified them or personally responded to the letter.
Pottinger said that he had not received what the FBI called a “duty to warn” briefing about any new threats to him in the wake of the latest threat to President Trump. But he said he and his former colleagues remained concerned about possible danger to themselves and their families since Iran has never rescinded its threats. Salman Rushdie, he noted, was nearly stabbed to death in New York more than 30 years after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei issued his infamous fatwa calling for his death.
Greenway, too, expressed concern, noting that his email was hacked by Iranian actors in late 2022. The FBI had helped him resolve the hack, he said, which was aimed at obtaining digital information Iran could use to track his movements and location.
Greenway said he thought that the administration had not responded to their letter because the officials negotiating with Iran to renew the nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, (JCPOA) had not wanted to call greater attention to Tehran’s ongoing assassination plots and disruption efforts.
The Biden administration’s efforts to negotiate a revival of the 2015 nuclear deal that Trump abandoned ultimately failed. But the administration nevertheless relaxed the enforcement of sanctions, allowing China to buy millions of barrels of oil and replenish its coffers with an estimated $80 billion. Iran has also supplied drones to Russia to use against Ukraine.
The administration’s efforts to persuade Iran to reenter the nuclear deal were briefly sidetracked last year by a Justice Department investigation of its chief envoy to Tehran. Robert Malley, whom Biden had tasked with reviving the nuclear talks, quietly had his security clearance revoked last year before ultimately being suspended. The FBI is currently investigating him for mishandling classified information. As Tablet reported last year, Malley may have also helped fund, support, and direct an Iranian intelligence operation aimed at influencing the U.S. and allied governments.
Greenway said the Biden administration’s efforts to enhance ties with Iran were doomed from the start, and that Tehran’s efforts to kill and intimidate former Trump officials were not simply revenge for Soleimani or the economic punishment it had endured. “It’s way beyond Soleimani now,” he said. “It’s about the prospect of Trump’s return to the White House.”
Concerned by Iran’s growing aggression, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan vowed in January 2022 that the US “protect and defend its citizens” after Iran purported to impose unspecified “sanctions” on 52 Americans, increased its proxy militias’ attacks on American troops in the Middle East, and threatened to carry out terror operations “inside the United States and elsewhere around the world.”
Yet the fact that Iran had assassination teams in the U.S. going after former officials (as well as Iranian-American critics of the regime) was not enough for the Biden administration to walk away from its ongoing negotiations with the Islamic Republic. By continuing to engage in talks, the administration effectively signaled that targeting former Trump security officials was behavior that it was willing to tolerate.
Source » tabletmag