By Dieter Bednarz, Hans Hoyng, Georg Mascolo and Bernhard Zand
Tehran also feels threatened by the disappearance of Ali Reza Asgari, a former deputy defense minister and general in the Revolutionary Guards. The Iranian leadership claims that Asgari, who was last seen in Istanbul in December, was kidnapped, and it suspects the United States. There are persistent rumors that he is in US custody, where he is being interrogated. Robert Baer, a former CIA agent, speculates that Asgari could be helping the Americans develop proof of the Revolutionary Guards' involvement in terrorist activities. Proof, says Baer, "that could be used to justify a war with Iran."
The Iranians are fighting back with barbs of their own, also intended to unsettle their adversaries, from Iran's reported efforts to capture American and Israeli spies to the Tehran government's claims that the Americans and British are behind attacks in southern Iran.
Despite CIA Director Michael Hayden's early warnings to the White House about the possibility of a dangerous escalation of the US's conflict with Iran, Bush opted for intimidation tactics. According to Vali Nasr, an Iranian-born political science professor and one of the foremost experts on Iran in the United States, the CIA believed it was winning the intimidation game, "but now the Iranians have shown that they can play the same game."
After the arrests in Arbil, Tehran's leadership used the Revolutionary Guards' weekly newspaper, Subhi Sadek, to threaten countermeasures. In retaliation, the paper wrote, the Revolutionary Guards, or Pasdaran, could "capture a nice bunch of blue-eyed, blond-haired officers and feed them to our fighting cocks." Those officers, as it has now turned out, are British.
Powerful Pasdaran
Tehran's Supreme Defense Council met in mid-March, apparently in response to pressure from the Pasdaran. The commander of the group's elite force, the Al-Quds Brigade, is said to have insisted that the Iranian leadership not take the Arbil arrests lying down. Given the Pasdaran's importance within the Tehran power structure, it was a demand the regime could not simply ignore.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the man behind the revolution that led to the Shah's ouster, established the Pasdaran because he distrusted the police and the regular army. The members of the Pasdaran were loyal followers of Khomeini, legendary for their fanaticism and willingness to make sacrifices.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former member the Al-Quds Brigade, has since made a career for himself in politics. Since the former Revolutionary Guard became president, the Pasdaran's force of 125,000 is widely seen as the fanatical leader's private army.
The Revolutionary Guards are said to have established their own shadow realm in the Shatt al-Arab region. Disappointed over the poor salaries they continue to earn despite their contributions to the revolution, while the Tehran mullahs have enriched themselves, many Pasdaran are said to have entered the smuggling business to bolster their incomes. In their eyes, the abduction of the British sailors is fair retribution for tightened ship inspections on the Shatt al-Arab that get in the way of the Pasdaran's profitable black-market trade in automobiles destined for Iraq.
The link between foreign policy and criminal acts such as kidnapping and blackmail is well established in Iran. It was most clearly demonstrated in the Iran hostage crisis, in which 52 American citizens were held hostage for 444 days after the storming of the US Embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979.
In that crisis, the Iranians paraded their bound and blindfolded prisoners before the world press to humiliate the United States, which they dubbed the "Great Satan," and demanded billions in US dollars in return for the release of the hostages.
In the end US President Jimmy Carter, humiliated and eventually voted out of office, had to pay a steep political and financial price for the release of the hostages: more than $10 billion from frozen Iranian bank accounts. But Carter was no longer president by the time the hostages were finally released. Only after his successor, Ronald Reagan, had taken the oath of office on Jan. 20, 1981 did Algerian aircraft take off from Tehran's Mehrabad Airport with the American hostages on board.
German victims
The case of German citizen and Hamburg native Helmut Hofer, now 65, was less spectacular. Hofer, a businessman, had been a dealer in rare auto parts, pistachios and leather goods in Iran until he was arrested by the regime's henchmen in September 1997, allegedly for having sexual relations with a 27-year-old female Iranian student.
It was a classic intelligence operation. To this day Hofer is not the only one who is convinced that revolutionary zealots from the judicial and intelligence community used him as a bargaining chip to apply pressure to the German government in the so-called "Mykonos" affair.
The Tehran regime had come under fire internationally for its alleged involvement in the assassination of four Iranian Kurdish dissidents at the Greek restaurant "Mykonos" in Berlin in 1992. In the ensuing court case, German prosecutors accused the mullahs of terrorism and provided proof of ties between the attackers and senior government officials in Tehran.
Hofer was arrested in Tehran nine months later, a move German intelligence officials now believe was an act of revenge. It took 18 months before an Iranian appeals court overturned the death sentence against the German businessman -- probably in return for Germany's agreement to revive trade relations with Tehran.
Another German went through a similar ordeal recently. Like the 15 British sailors, Donald Klein, a 53-year-old stonemason and amateur fisherman from central western Germany, ventured too close to Iranian waters in late 2005. The Pasdaran arrested Klein and his French skipper, who were only interested in fishing. Klein was not released until more than a year later.
Klein, like Hofer, also became a pawn in a political game. The intelligence community in Tehran wanted to tie his case to the fate of Iranian Kazem Darabi, who is serving a life sentence in Germany for the attack on the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin.
Tehran's hostage bazaar
It is difficult to tell who pulls the strings, who provides the goods and who sets the prices in Tehran's hostage bazaar. There are many competing groups in Tehran, from the secular to the religious, from pragmatists to hardliners. Whether cases like Hofer's or Klein's -- and the current hostage crisis between London and Tehran -- can be brought to a speedy end or will lead to a months-long tug-of-war depends on who ultimately prevails in the theocracy's opaque power structure.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair ought to have no trouble gaining allies against a country under as much international pressure as Iran and securing the prompt release of the prisoners. But this isn't the case, because the simple question the British face from enemies and, indirectly, from friends is this: Why exactly are you in the Gulf region in the first place?
Like an evil curse, the war George W. Bush and Blair launched against Iraq is heightening tensions throughout the region with each month that passes. Knowing that most countries question the legitimacy of the Western presence, Ahmadinejad can take full advantage of the crisis. That starts with no longer having to pay serious attention to threats from Bush or Blair, leaders generally regarded as too weak to engage in another showdown.
Under these circumstances, it was to be expected that Blair and Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett believed, in the first days after the kidnapping incident, that bilateral contacts would be the best way to gain the prisoners' release. "Softly, softly," was Whitehall's initial approach to the matter.
But by Tuesday, the fifth day of the hostage crisis, the climate at home in Britain had changed. The London Times clamored over the "pusillanimous timidity of British officials and politicians, who have failed disgracefully to confront Iran with the ultimatum this flagrant aggression demands."
Pressure on Blair
Blair was in a tight spot. He had warned the Iranians against parading their hostages on TV, as they had done in a comparable case in 2004, but his warning merely encouraged the Iranians to do just that. They released a video of the hostages eating and published a letter written by one of the sailors, Faye Turney, who admitted -- voluntarily or not -- that she and her fellow sailors had "apparently gone into Iranian waters."
On Friday footage of another sailor, Nathan Thomas Summers, was aired in which he said he wanted to "apologize" to the Iranian people. In a second letter, this one addressed to the British people, Turney purportedly wrote -- reflecting the style of Tehran's propaganda -- that she had been "sacrificed due to the intervening policies of the Bush and Blair governments."
By then the time to err on the side of caution had ended, at least for the British. London asked its European friends for their support, asked its Middle Eastern partners to mediate and even appealed to pro-Iranian groups Hezbollah and Hamas for their help. When the British asked the UN Security Council to condemn the kidnappings they were dealt their first painful defeat in the current crisis. Instead of complying with the British request, the Security Council merely voiced its "deep concern" over the affair. Russia, a veto power, suggested that the two parties to the conflict return to bilateral negotiations.
Nevertheless, at a meeting last Friday in Bremen, which had actually been convened to discuss tentative signs of improvement in the Middle East conflict, the EU foreign ministers lent their support to London and asked their chief diplomat Javier Solana to appeal to the Iranian president. However, no one in Bremen mentioned anything about other EU countries following in Britain's footsteps and putting their relations with Iran on ice until the prisoners are released.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
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