The Front

This article is reprinted from The American Prospect.

For Iranians in exile – and the Americans who become embroiled in their intrigues – Paris has long been the city of shadows. This is where the Ayatollah Khomenei awaited the ominous victory of his Islamic revolution; and where the deposed ministers and brutal spies from the late shah's government washed up in the 1979 revolution's bloody aftermath.

For well over two decades now, dreamers and schemers who hope to overthrow the mullahs have been lurking along the banks of the Seine, passing secrets and lies through proxies, back channels, and middlemen. Among the Persian plotters marooned in the French capital is a former minister of commerce in the shah's government, who has recently acquired the code name of "Ali."

To the influential U.S. congressman who bestowed that somewhat unoriginal alias on him, the elderly bureaucrat is actually an oracle who passes along invaluable intelligence about terrorist conspiracies emanating from Tehran, and an important asset who should be cultivated by the CIA.

Yet "Ali" is actually a cipher for Manucher Ghorbanifar, the notorious Iranian arms dealer and accused intelligence fabricator – and the potential instrument of another potentially dangerous manipulation of American policy in the Persian Gulf region.

"Ali's" fervent advocate on Capitol Hill is Rep. Curt Weldon, the conservative Pennsylvania Republican who serves as vice chair of the House Armed Services Committee. The nine-term congressman has long nurtured a penchant for the dramatic. With a degree in Russian studies from West Chester University in his home state, Weldon has often displayed his language skills on official trips to Moscow to discuss Russia's "loose nukes" and the urgent need for a missile-defense system. Since the end of the Cold War, he has carved out a niche as an expert on such truly frightening topics as nuclear proliferation and high-tech terrorism.

As chairman of the House Subcommittee on Military Research and Development, Weldon has held numerous hearings on the threat of Russian suitcase bombs being infiltrated into American cities and similar cataclysmic scenarios. He often shows up in the press as a Cassandra warning against elaborate foreign plots, from terrorist hackers destroying the Pentagon's Internet capacity to North Korean nuclear weapons exploding in the atmosphere of the United States, creating an electromagnetic pulse that would cripple the nation's electrical utilities and electronic systems. He possesses a genuine gift for elaborating these nightmare visions, which he may have sharpened while reading the works of Tom Clancy. Indeed, he sometimes cites catastrophic attack scenarios devised by the suspense novelist, an acquaintance of his who has occasionally helped to raise money for Pennsylvania Republicans.

Unlike the stock characters in Clancy's novels, however, the source Weldon calls "Ali" is a real person; in fact, he's a former Iranian government official. And so convinced is Weldon of the man's veracity that he has not only tried to persuade the CIA to pay Ali, he is also shopping a book based on the startling information that the Iranian exile has passed along to him. According to a report last December in The New York Sun, Weldon hopes to soon publish an expose of Iranian terrorist conspiracies, including an alleged 2003 plot to crash a plane into New Hampshire's Seabrook nuclear-power plant that the congressman claims was later confirmed in the press.

"Ali" first mentioned the Iranian threat to the Seabrook reactor at a Paris meeting with Weldon on May 17, 2003, according to the Sun article. Three months later, on Aug. 22, The Toronto Star reported the arrest of 19 men in Canada for immigration violations; mostly Pakistanis (and one Indian), they were suspected of being involved in a terrorist conspiracy. One of the men in the suspected cell was reported to have been taking flight lessons, and to have flown an airplane directly over an Ontario nuclear-power plant, according to the Star.