When President-elect
Joe Biden finally starts getting intelligence briefings, he may want to pay special attention to
Israel's successful operation against
Abu Muhammad al-Masri,
al-Qaida's second in command.
The significance of that operation, which took place in August and saw al-Masri shot dead in the street, is its location:
Iran. According to the center-left conventional wisdom, this sort of thing should be impossible. While many analysts acknowledge
that senior
al-Qaida leaders fled to
Iran after the fall of the
Taliban in
Afghanistan, they have insisted that there was no significant relationship between the Shiite majority regime in
Tehran and the Sunni-jihadist terrorist group.
In fact,
al-Qaida's No. 2, who was wanted by the FBI for his role in planning the 1998 attacks on
U.S. embassies in
Africa, was living freely in an Iranian suburb. It should be obvious by now that
Iran is willing to cooperate with
al-Qaida when their interests converge.
Iran and
al-Qaida have cooperated for decades against
U.S. targets in the
Middle East. "There is ample evidence going back to the 1990s that
Iran is willing to work with
al-Qaida at times," said
Thomas Joscelyn, a founding editor of the
Long War Journal. "Sometimes their interests are opposed and sometimes they converge."
This came to the public's attention in 2017, after the CIA released a batch of documents recovered at the compound of
Osama bin Laden in
Pakistan. One of those documents is a 19-page memo laying out the quarter-century history of
al-Qaida's relationship with
Iran. It says Iranian intelligence offered
al-Qaida money, arms and training and facilitated the travel of some operatives, while providing safe haven for others. Indeed, after
the fall of the
Taliban, the wives and children of
bin Laden and his deputy fled to
Iran.
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All of this is relevant to Biden as he navigates how to achieve his own stated goal of rejoining the
Iran nuclear bargain from which the
U.S. withdrew in 2018. If Biden proceeds with his current plan of lifting nuclear sanctions on
Iran in exchange its return to compliance with the nuclear agreement, what will his administration do to deter
Iran from supporting terrorism? The current administration has sanctioned
Iran's central bank and military for sponsoring terror.
Will Biden keep those sanctions in place?
Another question for Biden is whether he will encourage
Israel to continue its daring intelligence operations inside
Iran. When Biden was vice president, the
U.S. discouraged
Israel from assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists, particularly as it conducted the diplomacy that led to the 2015 nuclear deal.
In the past four years, however, Israeli operations have been successful. The killing of al-Masri occurred during a summer
in which a number of strategic sites inside
Iran exploded as a result of what appears to be Israeli sabotage.
Will Biden urge
Israel to cool its jets?
Ten years ago, it was understandable that America would want to restrain
Israel while it negotiated with
Iran. The Obama administration tried but failed to reach a much stronger and more durable deal that restricted
Iran's nuclear ambitions. Now Biden should consider whether pursuit of that flawed deal is worth the effort. In the next two months,
he and his transition team will have to decide whether constraining
Israel helps or hinders the goal of containing
Iran.
(COMMENT, BELOW)
Eli Lake is a Bloomberg View columnist who writes about politics and foreign affairs. He was previously the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast. Lake also covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI, and was a contributing editor at the New Republic.