Washington and the media have paid attention to Iran’s nuclear program and its belligerence within the Middle Eastern region. However, its threatening activities within the American Hemisphere have received comparatively little notice.
According to the General Accounting Office (GAO) “Iranian government elements—including the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its Qods Force, and Iran’s close ally Lebanese Hizballah—have played a role in terrorist operations in the Western Hemisphere over the past two decades. This includes the 1994 bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that killed 85 people. In October 2011, the United States announced charging two men with conspiracy to assassinate the Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the United States. The alleged plot was directed by elements of the Iranian government to murder the Ambassador with explosives while the Ambassador was in the United States, according to the announcement.”
Far more serious are recent revelations that Iran has considered launching an EMP assault on the United States, which could shut down all electrical capacity within a substantial portion of the nation and result in massive numbers of deaths. (See our report of May 29.)
The Washington Institute has noted:
“As Iran presses on in its efforts to become a nuclear power, the regime in Tehran also employs an aggressive foreign policy that relies heavily on the deployment of clandestine assets abroad to collect intelligence and support foreign operations, all of which are aimed at furthering Iranian foreign policy interests. From a U.S. perspective, Iran’s massive diplomatic presence in the Western Hemisphere presents a particularly acute problem. In response to Iran’s abuse of the diplomatic system, the international community should collectively press our friends and allies in Latin America to severely restrict the size of Iran’s diplomatic missions to the minimum needed to conduct official business.”
The National Interest reports:
“… one aspect of the Iranian challenge has received remarkably short shrift: its expanding presence and activities in our own hemisphere. This is surprising, given the fact that the Islamic Republic’s capacity to threaten the U.S. homeland is comparatively well known. Back in October of 2011, U.S. law-enforcement agencies foiled a plot orchestrated by elements of Iran’s feared clerical army, the Revolutionary Guards, to kill Saudi Arabia’s envoy to the United States in a DC restaurant, using Mexico’s notorious Los Zetas cartel as a proxy.
“The event jolted Congress awake to Iran’s growing presence in our own hemisphere. The result was theCountering Iran in the Western Hemisphere Act of 2012, which required the White House to formulate a strategy aimed at neutralizing Iran’s activities south of the U.S. border.
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“That, however, simply isn’t the case. Objectively, Iran’s presence in Central and South America is as significant today as it was nearly a decade ago, when the Islamic Republic made common cause with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in his efforts to erect an anti-American axis in our hemisphere. Although Chavez is now gone, Iran’s partnerships with other “Bolivarian” regimes (most notably Bolivia and Ecuador) remain very much in force. Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, has taken pains to reiterate that the Americas remain at the top of his government’s foreign-policy agenda. And a building wave of leftist politics in the region—from Peru to Honduras to El Salvador to Colombia—may soon net Iran new local partners, and even greater freedom of action.”
The Americas Report, published by the Menges Hemispheric Security Project, has reviewed new research by Emilio Blasco, Washington correspondent for the newspaper, ABC Spain. His book, “Boomerang Chavez” confirms many points about Iran’s penetration into the Western Hemisphere., which include involvement in drug dealing and election fraud.
“More worrisome is the information the author obtained from Rafael Isea, a former deputy minister of Finance and president of the Bank of Economic and Social Development. According to Mr. Isea, it was Maduro, then Venezuela’s foreign minister, who travelled to Damascus in 2007 to meet with Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in order to negotiate the installation of Hezbollah cells in Venezuela. This agreement protected Hezbollah’s drug trafficking and money laundering activities as well as their arms supplies and provision of passports. These passports and visas were prepared by Ghazi Nassereddine, a counselor in the Venezuelan embassy in Syria (he was born in Lebanon and became a Venezuelan citizen), and later was blacklisted by the FBI…Their role, according to the former Venezuelan high officer, was to participate in drug trafficking and money-laundering in order to secure funding for Hezbollah.
“Besides Hezbollah’s ‘financial’activities, it is clear that Hezbollah’s very presence in Latin America is, in itself, a security problem. Let us remember that a Hezbollah member stationed in Guyana went to New York in 2007 to carry out a terrorist attack at the the JFK airport. By the same token, it is reported that U.S. agencies also discovered attempts by Hezbollah to establish contacts with Mexican drug cartels to gain access to the border with the U.S. This, of course, is confirmed by the assassination attempt against the Saudi Ambassador in October 2011 carried out by Iran with the help of the “Zetas”, a notoriously violent Mexican drug cartel.
“Likewise, it has been reported that the sophisticated tunnels built on the U.S./Mexican border have been built exactly in the image of the tunnels built by Hezbollah on the Israeli/Lebanese border. These actions can place the U.S. at the mercy of terrorist attacks not just by Hezbollah but by any other terrorist group that establishes an alliance with Iran.”
The General Accounting Office notes that “Congress has expressed serious concerns about Iranian activities in the Western Hemisphere.”
It is evident that the White House and the State Department continue to downplay this very real and very significant threat in their ongoing pursuit of a nuclear deal with Iran, while the Department of Defense has been openly concerned about the threat. In 2013, Marine Corps Gen. John F. Kelly told the House Armed Services Committee that Iran “has been very, very active over the last few years” in cultivating diplomatic and cultural ties to the region.”