All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, introducing the great Gareth Porter, now writing for the Grayzone Project.
That's the grayzone.com, and this one is called Washington's Tall Tale of Iranian Al Qaeda Alliance based on a questionably sourced book, The Exile.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
Thanks.
Glad to be back again, Scott.
So the Ayatollah Khamenei and Ayman al-Zawahiri, best friends forever or what?
Well, this, of course, is the concept that the propagandists working night and day in Washington and elsewhere are trying to propound.
It's of the essence, as you know very well, for the people who run U.S. national security policy to besmirch Iran for decades past as terrorists.
That's been the, I think, the single biggest selling point that they've used over the years.
And this article does address, as you've suggested, the latest installment, if you will, of this theme, that Iranian leaders, in this case, General Soleimani, Qasem Soleimani, the late, the assassinated top general of Iran, was indeed a conspirator, co-conspirator with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq.
That's the game that was played in this particular instance.
You know, after the assassination, there was a whole uptick, a major uptick in the propaganda output about Soleimani as terrorist.
And most of it was about Iraq, the Iraq war, and various other places in the Middle East since then that supposedly involved Soleimani in plots to carry out terrorist actions.
But in this case, it really is particularly outrageous because it suggests that Soleimani was indeed partnering with Zarqawi back in 2001, 2002, to carry out his campaign of terrorism against Shiites in Iraq, which on the surface, on the face of it, is simply absurd to suggest that the IRGC was slavering after Zarqawi as a partner to carry out a terrorism against their own colleagues, their own fellow Shiites in Iraq, which, in fact, were their main allies against the former regime, which they were supporting an armed movement to get rid of.
And so this is a starting point for my article, basically.
Colin Powell, call your office.
What a huge development.
Of course, for people who remember the lead up to the war, in January of 2003, Colin Powell gave his big presentation to the United Nations.
He said Zarqawi was the link between Osama and Saddam.
That's right.
Exactly.
Yes.
Yes.
Now they're saying, if only Dick Cheney had known.
That's right.
Apparently he's the link to the Ayatollah, too.
And so, OK, but here's the thing of it now, is that from what I understand, he was in Afghanistan at the time of the American invasion in late 2001, and then he ended up making it to Iraq.
So he must have traveled through Iran.
So that must have been Soleimani's doing.
Right.
Well, so far, you know, that's that's an accurate statement that he was in Afghanistan, that he fled from Afghanistan at the end of the American war of deposing the Taliban regime to Iran and did in fact reside there for some months in late 2001, 2002, up to 2002 at some point.
But that's where the truth ends and the fiction begins, because this particular tale, as you have nicely put it in your title, you know, really tells us that that Soleimani as head of the IRGC at that point was was eager to collaborate with Zarqawi in killing Shiites and therefore helped him out somehow to to get to Iraq from Iran and supplied him with various, I don't know, weapons and some some other sort of encouragement along the way.
And that's this is the tale that is based all entirely on the book The Exile by Adrian Levy and Kathy Scott Clark, published in 2017, which has been treated as somehow a masterpiece of reportage by by people who should know better, but in fact, are using this as the basis for sort of pushing their political point of view about Iran, because what the authors do is is to is to suggest this thesis that, in fact, the Iranians were helping Zarqawi and his colleagues who were in Iran at the time to prepare their campaign of terror in Iraq.
And the the evidence for that is to call it thin is really to do them really a service.
It's to get them off the hook, because it's not just that the evidence is thin.
The only evidence they have really is a story that is is, I guess it's essentially from this, this guy who was a Mauritanian leader of Al Qaeda, senior Al Qaeda leader, who was also in Iran at the time, but had, you know, was was one of those who entered legally.
And here's where I want to try to distinguish between the tale that that these co authors tell in their book, The Exile, and and the reality that we now know from various documentary sources, because what they're trying to suggest is that the Iranians knew all along that Zarqawi and other military leaders of Al Qaeda were residing in Iran, and, and that they must have known that because they, they helped them, because they must have known they were there.
And that, that provides some evidence of some sort that they that they were were allies of Zarqawi.
So what what actually happened was that these people, Zarqawi and other military leaders, as well as troops entered Iran illegally, clandestinely, the Iranians knew that it was happening, but they could not stop them because there were so many points of entry that they could get into Iran, through which they could get into Iran, that they could not cover them entirely.
So they they were not aware precisely of the of the location of these troops and, and officers of Al Qaeda's military forces under Zarqawi.
And so there were two sets of Al Qaeda people, one set did enter legally with passports, and the Iranians allowed them to stay under very strict agreement that they would not do anything political, that they would not use their cell phones.
And that this was only temporary, as a humanitarian gesture.
And of course, what happened was that they did use their cell phones.
And the Iranians knew pretty much that they probably would.
But they used that they tracked them very closely, they kept very close track of them.
And they were hoping that they would help lead them to the clandestine Al Qaeda people who were in Iran at the time.
And and this probably was the case that they were that they got some clues from some of the legally present people to the clandestinely present people in Iran.
And within a matter of months, they began to crack down on some of the troops that they that Al Qaeda had brought into Iran into early 2002.
And then in the spring of 2003, in March of 2003, they did, in fact, round up the majority of the troops, and some of the political leaders who were with them, including Saif al-Adl, who later provided some evidence about what happened.
But they did not capture, as far as we can tell, they did not capture Zarqawi himself.
And we know that, particularly from Saif al-Adl, this senior Al Qaeda leader who was captured in March of 2003, because he talks about having met Zarqawi.
Before he left, he said Zarqawi was leaving.
And this was the last meeting before Zarqawi took off.
He met with him in the spring of 2003, in March of 2003.
So before Saif al-Adl was arrested, he met with Zarqawi and he was on his way out of the country.
And so, so I come back now to the only story that they have, the only evidence that they have to support the idea that the Iranians and Soleimani were somehow in league with Zarqawi.
And that story is that the prisoners who were being held by the Iranians, these are the legal prisoners that were being held, were being held in a kind of prison-like structure.
And they were held in separate cells.
And this guy, al-Maritani, who was a political type, tells the story, although they do not quote him ever, they tell the story, the co-authors tell the story, that he heard tapping on his pipes, and that he figured out that there were messages being tapped, and somebody tapped out that Zarqawi's troops had arrived at the prison, or at this prison-like structure.
And then a few moments later, there was more tapping, and the tapping suggested that Zarqawi himself was there.
And then later, a week later, so they said he was gone.
So that's all we have.
And strangely enough, when this story was told by Kathy Clark, this was on BBC this past spring, the BBC radio documentary, which was about 36 or 39 minutes, she tells the story.
But this time, it's whispering in the hallway, not tapping on the pipes.
It's whispering in the hallway, supposedly with Zarqawi himself, saying, oh, it's okay for you to go to Iraq and do what you want to do.
Well, I mean, it's an absurd story to begin with, right?
But the fact that she tells a completely different story in this BBC documentary from the one that's told in the book is very suspicious, to say the least.
So anyway, that's the essence of, I think, the propaganda that's being put out, and why it really doesn't hold up.
But there's more to the story, and we can talk about it if you want to.
Yeah, sure.
Let's get into that in a second there.
But of course, you know, for the narrative's purposes, it doesn't matter what's in the book.
All that matters is there's a book that says this, and so now it can be cited on Fox News and whatever, you know, Iran hawks need to invoke there.
But importantly, as everybody already knows, Zarqawi was not a member of al-Qaeda in 2001, 2, 3.
He didn't declare his loyalty to bin Laden until the fall of 2004, a year and a half after America invaded Iraq.
And so that was why Colin Powell was wrong that he was the tie between Saddam and Osama, was he had told Osama bin Laden no, he didn't want to join al-Qaeda.
And also Saddam Hussein had all points bulletin out for his arrest, rather than had provided him medical care and all this stuff like in Jalabi and the INC's claims back then.
But so there's no reason.
I mean, at this point, the guy was, you know, a kind of mid level Mujahideen type who was focused on trying to attack the King of Jordan.
What interest would the Iranians have?
Why would they even know that, hey, two and a half years from now, this guy's going to be a real problem for the Americans in Iraq?
Well, I, you know, I'm not going to base the case on on sort of any assumption one way or another about what the Iranians knew about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi at that moment.
But I think the point I want to make is that, you know, he was Zarqawi apparently was working with this leading al-Qaeda figure, one of the people who was a member of the al-Qaeda Shura Council who was present in Iran.
And, you know, they had been working on, you know, various plans for the region and not just in Iraq, but throughout the region, while they were in Iran.
And of course, the Defense Department under Rumsfeld with his neoconservative allies there were eager to portray Iran at that moment in April, March, April, May, let's put it in May of 2003, as knowledgeable about al-Qaeda plots.
And so they were blaming Iran for a terrorist plot that was carried out in Saudi Arabia in May of 2003.
But all the evidence indicates and, you know, CIA people who have since left have testified themselves that no, there was no real evidence that Iran knew about these plots that were being hatched by the al-Qaeda who were, you know, in Iran, but they were clandestinely there.
And they were there working with other Sunnis who were certainly not loyal to the Iranian government.
They had their own confederates, their own allies, who were really anti-Iran at that point.
And you wrote in your book that, your most recent one, that that attack in Saudi, the hawks blamed on Iran and said that they cooperated with al-Qaeda in doing it.
And that had been the background to a decision that Bush made then to cut off all cooperation with them against al-Qaeda, which at that point had been ongoing, right, to some degree.
That's correct.
It was a neocon maneuver to stop a process of diplomatic negotiations between the United States and Iran, which were really quite promising because they were talking about making some kind of deal that involved the United States giving them information on the MEK.
And they're giving United States information on al-Qaeda people that they held.
And this would have been in April and May of 2003.
So, you know, the neocons intervened very strongly there to prevent it by using a pretty clearly dishonest maneuver of blaming Iran and saying that they had intelligence to that effect.
Well, they didn't have any intelligence at all.
They had no knowledge to support that whatsoever.
That's very clear.
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So now in 2003, right around the same time, this was when they delivered the golden offer, as it's called, the burnt offering, as you called it in the prospect back when, through the Swiss ambassador offering to make peace with America on virtually all issues, but emphasizing our joint interest in fighting al-Qaeda.
And in fact, they also said, oh, you want to get rid of Saddam?
We'll help you.
Oh, this was right after they got rid of Saddam.
You want to install the Shia in power in Iraq?
We'll help you with that, they offered.
Sure, sure.
Yeah, there were various elements of this proposal that were given to the United States, which hoped to play on some reasonably common interest between the United States and Iran.
They were willing, I mean, one of the key things in the proposal was that they were willing to go farther than ever before to offer peace with Israel, you know, live and let live with Israel.
And I think that that was probably a serious offer at that point, that in 2003, it was a time when they were considering their options in terms of how are we going to get along with Israel here?
How do we avoid being targeted by Israel, being threatened by Israel to attack us in the future?
And this was one of the ways they hoped to do that.
And they had said before, hey, if two states is good enough for the Palestinians, who are we to second guess that, which is a huge signal that they're backing off.
That was part of the signal, you're right.
Exactly.
They were taking the same position that the Saudis had taken in their proposal, which was endorsed by essentially by the Arab world in 2003, to try to bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
Yeah.
And now, so it's important now in terms of the Iraq war, that in that golden offer, this is just sort of part of the background to it.
In that golden offer, they said, hey, we'll cooperate with you on your war against the Hussein regime and your war for the guys who've been living inside Iran for the last 30 years, who work for us.
Let's work together.
And as you and I have talked about the irony of Iraq war two, that all along America was fighting, not just for the Shiites, but for Iran's two favorite groups, Dawah and Skiri, the Supreme Islamic Council.
Right.
Right.
And yet refused 99% of the time to talk with the Iranians or literally work with them at all.
It was sort of a competition for who's going to have most influence with these two groups that we're both supporting.
The contest that America lost, right?
Right.
It's a very nice illustration of the problem that we have with the US.
Well, at that point, particularly in the Bush administration, the sort of extreme right wing pro-Israeli types who were essentially running the show on the Middle East policy, because they were so arrogant that they could not see that they did not have the ability to manipulate or to maneuver with the Shiites in Iraq.
And they really did believe that somehow they could use these people for their own ends.
So it's really a lesson that goes pretty deep into the nature of the problem that we face with the national security elite in general, and that aspect, that particular contingent of the elite in particular.
All right.
Now, I remember Iraq war two, and I remember there was never any evidence for this in the first place that Iran would have been supplying bombs, not to, as we already know is unproven, to the Shiite resistance, but to the Sunni insurgency against the Americans and the Shiites that America was putting in power there.
Bush claimed it about a year before the real narrative about the EFP started in 2007.
Bush had begun to try to put out, you know, trial balloons on that narrative, and they never really went anywhere.
But on the other hand, two things.
Elijah Magnier, who's a pretty good reporter on Syria anyway, one time he said on my show, yeah, no, they did.
Iran did arm up the Sunnis, because all just to make more trouble for the Americans, as long as the Americans are stuck there, even at the cost of Shiite lives.
Yes.
And then secondly, so I wonder what you think of that.
And secondly, your logic in the article that there's no way they would have done that, because that would have meant killing Shiites.
Well, it actually does seem to fit with the logic that after all, Zarqawi was killing Shiite civilians with the direct purpose of provoking them into killing more Sunni civilians, so as to drive the Sunnis into his group, right?
That's how terrorism works.
The action is in the reaction.
And so, if the Iranians had a strong federalism plan, which we know they did, then it would make sense in a way that, you know, whatever they could do to sharpen the contradictions between the major Sunni and Shiite factions, as long as America's fighting on the Shiite side, that they would have an interest to do that.
So what about that?
Well, first of all, I mean, of course, the fundamental point is that the Iranians and Zarqawi had precisely the opposite interests in Iraq.
Zarqawi wanting to turn the Sunnis against the Shiites.
That was his point.
You know, he was hoping that this would, you know, his terror program would engage the Sunnis against Shiites, and against Iran, whereas Iran, of course, had the exact opposite interest.
But more fundamentally, I mean, the Iranians...
Well, but a parallel interest, right?
Obviously, the opposite was, they are Iran, they're not trying to fight themselves.
But in terms of separating the two groups and hardening the lines between Iraqis, they had an interest in that.
They just didn't want to lose the contest.
That's all.
Well, I mean, it wasn't, you know, the situation was already one where the Shiites were resisting the Sunni, you know, the Sunni resistance, if you will.
In other words, the very ones that you're talking about, the allies of Iran were the ones who signed up, you know, initially in 2005, 2004, excuse me, 2004, for service in the US, you know, counterinsurgency war against the Sunnis.
They were the ones the Americans ended up relying on in 2004.
And, you know, the Iranians understood from the beginning that al Qaeda was their enemy.
They had no illusions about al Qaeda in 2001, 2002.
After 9-11, they understood that this was an outfit that they could not trust.
I don't think there's any evidence to support the idea that they believed that they could work with al Qaeda, either, you know, around 9-11 itself or after 9-11.
Because they had already been attacked by the Taliban, you know, in the border area between Afghanistan and Iran.
They knew that al Qaeda and Taliban were working together during that period from the late 90s on.
They understood the intention of al Qaeda to be anti-Shia.
And, you know, there's just no basis for talking about the idea that Iran could have any strategy that was based on something other than that.
I mean, I just don't see it.
All right.
Well, so, in your article, you talk about the papers that they found in Abbottabad, Pakistan, when they killed bin Laden.
Right.
We want to talk about that because it's very important to understand that those documents have now been studied pretty carefully, particularly by a woman named Nellie LaHood.
She was a researcher for the West Point Center on Counterterrorism, and then went to the New America Foundation and has been a researcher there, a fellow there.
And in that regard, she has read some 300, more than 300 of the thousands of documents that were found in bin Laden's home after the assassination of bin Laden.
And what she has found in reading those documents is that they provide no support whatsoever, no evidence whatsoever, for the idea that the Iranians were even aware of the locations of the al Qaeda people who were there illegally, clandestinely.
They knew that there were some there, but they didn't know, they didn't have the precise information until they began to step up their surveillance and eventually were able to locate them and to arrest them.
But there was no evidence whatsoever in those papers that they worked with any of those people who were there clandestinely, that they supported them in any way, shape or form.
And indeed, she makes one point, which is devastating to that whole thesis.
She said there was one document that had to do with the al Qaeda folks telling their military cadre or their illegal cadre, clandestine cadre there, how to commit suicide if they were discovered by the Iranians.
In other words, there was no deal of any kind, no arrangement of any kind between the Iranians and the al Qaeda in Iran, the clandestine al Qaeda in Iran.
And now, so can you talk a little bit about, and we're skipping around here, but I guess, can we end with the beginning here, where right after September 11, they were working with the leaders in the White House on not just helping America target the Taliban and even helping with supply into the initial invasion of Afghanistan, but in helping with the rendition, as they called it, of, I don't know how many, al Qaeda fighters who had fled from Afghanistan into Iran.
And they were doing this all essentially to impress George Bush that, see, we hate these guys as much as you and here's a chance for us to get along.
Right.
And they did.
In fact, we know there was a Washington Post report during that period that the Iranians sent a list of al Qaeda who they were holding.
Now, these were not the high level people.
They didn't reveal the names of the high level al Qaeda that they had, like Saif al-Adl.
And they didn't do that because that was a bargaining chip with the Americans.
So they sent them a list of low level al Qaeda to show that they did hold them.
And they were offering this deal that I mentioned earlier, which was that they would exchange information with them about the high level al Qaeda people that they held in return for their information about the MEK people that the United States had a relationship with in Iraq.
So that was the beginning.
I mean, I think that they were probably angling ultimately for a deal where they would turn over al Qaeda to the United States because the United States wanted that.
They wanted high level al Qaeda to be turned over the United States.
And in return for that, they would have expected some significant US concessions.
We don't know exactly what they wanted, but definitely they would have expected some concessions from the US for that.
But of course, we know that the neocons next to that deal prevented any such consideration as we've just talked about a few minutes ago.
Well, it's important to note, too, that the hawks have blamed Iran for releasing al-Adl and saying, aha, see, they had him all along and they released him.
But that was like 10 or 15 years later, something and only after some Taliban had abducted an Iranian diplomat in Pakistan.
And so they traded him.
But that was years and years and years after the Americans could have had their hands on him.
Yeah.
Now, this point that you've just made takes us into very interesting reality that it's not just Adrian Levy and Kathy Scott Clark who are pushing this line of the Iranians helping al Qaeda carry out terrorism.
We know, of course, that the Israelis have been pushing that line and people who are supporting the Israelis have been pushing that line for many years.
And one of the places in Washington where that's been going on has been the Treasury Department's Office of Terrorist Intelligence Research.
And they have been putting out propaganda essentially along this line, one of which I've written about.
One of the storylines that they put out was indeed to suggest that the Iranians had made a secret deal with al Qaeda, which involved this one guy that they named, who was supposedly the person who had been working inside Iran for many years and who they were using to make their deal with al Qaeda.
And they were just repeating this line that there was a secret deal between Iran and al Qaeda.
Well, again, people who were involved within the CIA on following this, including Paul Pillar, have said there was no evidence whatsoever of that.
And indeed, it turns out that this guy was simply a courier.
Nellie LaHood has pointed out that the person who was mentioned by the Treasury Department as this sort of al Qaeda collaborator with the Iranians, somebody the Iranians were collaborating with, was simply a courier who was used to arrange the prisoner release on both sides.
So, you know, there's just so much dishonesty surrounding this whole subject that people just have to assume that anything that comes out along these lines is going to be essentially dishonest propaganda, false stories.
Well, and, you know, again, just like you're kind of saying here in the overall, it just doesn't make any sense on the face of it.
Obviously, Ayman al-Zawahiri would love to see the Ayatollah beheaded and all of Persia plunged into chaos.
And, you know, an end to the Shiite Islamist dictatorship there, as much as Netanyahu or Sheldon Adelson would like to see that.
Of course, that's in their interest.
And al Qaeda and ISIS have waged devastating attacks inside Iran over these last years as well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is this is part of the picture.
Absolutely.
That, you know, there is definitely a strong contingent that wants to use the al Qaeda issue to get at Iran.
I mean, this is this is central to the overall strategy.
And by the way, when Zarqawi's group took over all of Western Iraq, Iran sent troops immediately.
Obama, not that I'm favoring his intervention, but I'm saying all other things being equal.
Obama waited two months to go and start bailing out the Iraqis after the rise of Islamic State there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, this, of course, is the later the later version is Zarqawi, you know, point two or three, whatever you want to call it, you know, after after Zarqawi was killed.
But definitely, you know, they're trying to pin Islamic State somehow on Iran.
And as you say, Iran was the leading factor in the Iraqi forces being able to defeat the Islamic State when the Iraqi army had failed to do so.
It was the pro-Iran militias and some who were not pro-Iran, but but a combination of pro-Iran and other militias aided by the Iranian military presence, with Soleimani being the single most important figure there inside Iraq, who helped that to happen, who made that possible for that to happen.
The Iranians provided arms, they provided training and they provided tactical and strategic advice.
And and the Iraqis know very widely that this is the case.
And so the propaganda that the US has tried to put out suggesting otherwise is worse than useless in Iraq.
Yeah.
Well, it's good for them in DC, though.
Yeah, exactly.
It works there.
No, no question about it.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for your time again, Gareth.
Appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Thanks so much, Scott.
All right, you guys, that's the great Gareth Porter.
He's writing at The Gray Zone, thegrayzone.com and his latest book with John Kiriakou is called The CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis.
Kiriakou is the CIA, not Porter, you know that.
I hate for people to think you were CIA, man.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APS radio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org and libertarianinstitute.org.
