The Iranian general vanishes
by George Jonas
National Post
November 18, 2009
People say life imitates art, but it's not necessarily Shakespeare. Sometimes it's a spy thriller, at other times a canard (the French word meaning false news). Telling thrillers from canards is what investigative journalists, intelligence officers and (eventually) historians get paid for. If they end up giving us value for money, it's only because they don't get paid very much.
Separating the wheat from the chaff is a challenge even in ordinary affairs, as any city hall reporter can tell you. Trying to disentangle international intrigue is something else again. Consider the case of the Iranian general, Ali-Reza Asgari.
Having vanished about three years ago, Iran's former deputy defence minister came back into the news this week. According to the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz: While monitoring the Iranian investigative news website Alef, Israel's Army Radio came upon the claim that Asgari had been kidnapped during a visit to Turkey by a cabal of German, British and Israeli intelligence agencies.
"On the basis of a two-year investigation carried out by concerned bodies, Asgari was abducted by foreign intelligence services and is being held in a Zionist prison," Ha'aretz quotes the Iranian news source reporting. The Iranians say Asgari was kidnapped to get information on Iran's nuclear program as well as on an Israeli Air Force airman missing since 1986. The website claims that, after interrogation, Asgari was secretly transferred to a prison facility in Israel, where he is currently being held.
Hmm. Have the theocrats of Tehran been watching too many Hollywood movies? Or could the Asgari saga, rather than a tall tale for the silver screen, really be an example of life imitating art?
With nothing confirmed, let's see what, if anything, is undisputed. Everyone agrees that Asgari did go missing in Turkey. It happened sometime between December 2006 and February 2007, depending on whether one relies on Ha'aretz's sources or the Farsi News Agency's. Asgari, a onetime commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, age reported as 57 (International Herald Tribune) or 63 (New York Post) might have gone into the olive oil business after his retirement from Iran's defence establishment the previous year. While in Turkey to peddle his wares, he could have aroused the curiosity of Mossad agents. They might have wondered if an Iranian, known as having played a role in setting up Hezbollah in Lebanon, had any information about Ron Arad, the Israeli airman captured by Hezbollah when his plane went down in the vicinity of Sidon, Lebanon, 20-plus years earlier.
But would the Mossad-men have been curious enough to kidnap Asgari and interrogate him? Then -- since what the hell, he was there, anyway -- ask him about Iran's nuclear program? One of Asgari's two wives, Ziba Ahmadi, certainly thought so. But then, she would have had reason to prefer it to the alternative.
The alternative was that after being pushed out from Mohammad Khatami's cabinet by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, Asgari did decide to go into business for himself, except not the olive oil but the olive branch business. This was the merchandize he extended to his Western and Israeli counterparts during a trip to Turkey. In other words, he defected, as some students of cloak-and-dagger, such as Hans Ruehle, former planning chief of the German Defence Ministry, suggested.
Any intelligence source may turn out to be the horse's mouth or a horse's ass. Asgari seems to have been the oracular orifice at the happy end of the equine equation. On Sept. 6, 2007, about seven months after his disappearance in Turkey, a squadron of Israeli Air Force warplanes struck a target in Syria. It had to be an important target, because instead of screaming bloody murder over Israel's violation of their airspace, the Syrians initially denied that there was any intrusion at all.
The reason for the subdued Syrian response became evident as more details emerged. Though official Damascus continued to deny it, the target was an Iranian-financed nuclear reactor, built and operated with North Korean assistance. Reportedly ten North Korean advisors lost their lives during the attack. Later several news and intelligence sources agreed that "Operation Orchard" wouldn't have happened without information supplied by Ali-Reza Asgari. If so, whether he was 57 or 63, and whether his disappearance, either in December 2006 or in February 2007, was due to an olive oil trip going sour or an olive branch trip unfolding as designed, Asgari's story was taking its place among the three-star entries in the annals of hush-hush.
Could there be a reason for Iranian news sources choosing to revisit Asgari's defection or abduction last week? In the world of clandestine affairs few things are entirely due to chance. The kidnap-story is almost certainly a canard, but why float it nearly three years after the event?
The answer may be diplomacy, Persian Gulf-style. If this doesn't immediately make sense, consider the title of the Seventh Annual Isaiah Berlin Lecture, delivered recently by a former head of the Mossad, Efraim Halevy. "Diplomacy and Intelligence in the Middle East: How and Why Are The Two Inexorably Intertwined?"
Stay tuned.