Iran said willing to attack U.S. soil

WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 (UPI) -- Iran is increasingly likely to launch terrorist attacks inside the United States and against U.S. and allied targets around the world, the U.S. spy chief said.

Evidence of such readiness can be found in an alleged Iranian plot last fall to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. told the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The alleged plot "shows that some Iranian officials -- probably including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei -- have changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime," he said in prepared testimony.

Clapper said Washington was concerned as well about Iran plotting against U.S. or allied interests overseas, saying "Iran's willingness to sponsor future attacks in the United States or against our interests abroad probably will be shaped by Tehran's evaluation of the costs it bears for the plot against the ambassador as well as Iranian leaders' perceptions of U.S. threats against the regime."

Clapper's statement did not provide any details on what types of attacks he thought were possible, and senators did not ask him about it Tuesday during the panel's annual session to review global threats to the United States.

U.S. officials accused Iran Oct. 11, 2011, of being behind the disrupted plot to assassinate Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir. The scheme was to rely on Mexican drug-cartel assassins to kill Jubeir with a bomb at a Washington restaurant and then to bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies, U.S. officials alleged.

But the alleged plot was foiled when its reputed mastermind, an Iranian American named Manssor Arbabsiar, mistakenly hired a paid informant of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in Mexico to carry it out, U.S. officials said.

Arbabsiar and Iranian officials have denied any role in the plot.

Clapper said Iran was "keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons, in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that better position it to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so."

"We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons," he added, noting "Iran's nuclear decision making is guided by a cost-benefit approach, which offers the international community opportunities to influence Tehran."

President Barack Obama, in his State of the Union address last week, raised the possibility of military intervention to halt Iran's alleged pursuit of an atomic bomb, saying he would "take no options off the table to achieve that goal."

Tehran insists its nuclear program is for civilian uses only.

Washington plans to send a third aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf region next month.

Iran's military has threatened to block the region's strategically important Strait of Hormuz, the only sea passage to the open ocean for large areas of the petroleum-exporting gulf, and said it would hold naval exercises in the strait in the next few weeks involving a host of new weapons.

Separately, Iran inaugurated a Spanish-language TV channel for Latin America Tuesday called HispanTV to counter Western news coverage and reinforce Iran's ties to "justice-seeking" Latin American countries -- including Mexico, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru -- that "have experienced colonialism and injustice in the past," Iran's semi-official Fars News Agency reported.