Excerpt from "Squeeze Iran" By Kenneth R. Timmerman
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 9, 2007

When he announced the troop surge in Iraq, Bush also put Iran and Syria on notice. “Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops,” he said. “We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We'll interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.”

Those weren’t idle words. That very night, U.S. forces raided an Iranian intelligence headquarters in the Kurdish town of Irbil, capturing six Iranians. The Iranian government screamed that they were diplomats, but apparently only one had any sort of diplomatic credentials. My sources tell me this was Hassan Abbassi, a well-known strategist who is close to president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The other five turned out to be Revolutionary Guards officers. My sources identified three of them by name, and told me they were providing a treasure trove of intelligence to their U.S. interrogators (who appear to be receiving help from an intelligence expert from the opposition Mujahedin-e Khalq).

“They are key people in the Sepah Quds,” the overseas terrorist arm of the Revolutionary Guards, a former Iranian intelligence officer told me.

Iranian exiles and Kurdish sources identified another captive as Brig. Gen. Mohammad Djafari Sahraroudi, a Kurdish affairs expert who is wanted by Interpol for his involvement in the 1989 murder in Vienna of Iranian Kurdish dissident Abdulrahman Qassemlou.

Also among those detained was Mohammad Jaafari, an aid to National Security advisor Ali Larijani, the sources said.

The raid in Irbil was in fact the second U.S. backed raid that captured senior Iranian revolutionary guards officials recently. Shortly before Christmas, coalition forces raided the headquarters of Shiite political leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, just three weeks after he was in the Oval Office meeting with President Bush.

During that raid, they captured documents which American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Ledeen called “a wiring diagram” of Iran’s terror networks in Iraq.

Iran is believed to be operating a number of intelligence offices in Iraq similar to the one in Irbil, to plan terrorist attacks against U.S. forces and supply money and equipment to insurgents.