BEIRUT, Lebanon, March 31 (UPI) -- The Americans are bumping off al-Qaida and Taliban chieftains like ninepins with their relentless airstrikes in Pakistan because of a sharp improvement in their intelligence, thanks in large part to Pakistan's security services.
But the Pakistanis seem to be working the other side of the street as well by helping Iran conduct intelligence operations from which the Tehran regime of firebrand President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad draws great prestige in the mercurial region.
The successes and failures of the U.S. and Iranian intelligence services have a strong resonance in a region where perception of power and strength are often more important than the labyrinthine geopolitical realities. Pakistan's actions underline the strategic importance of this murky war.
No sooner had Iran announced Tuesday that its agents had rescued -- after "a complicated intelligence operation" -- an Iranian diplomat kidnapped in Pakistan in November 2008 than Washington leaked a report that Iranian nuclear physicist Shahram Amiri who disappeared in Saudi Arabia in May had, in fact, defected to the United States, the latest in a long line of such moves.
Iranian Intelligence Minister Heidar Moslehi, a hard-liner like Ahmadinejad and who served with him in the Revolutionary Guards during the 1980-88 war with Iraq, wasted no time in boasting: "We have a high intelligence capability in the region.
"We have a good intelligence dominance over all other secret agencies active in the region."
He accused the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Israeli's foreign intelligence service, the Mossad, of aiding those who kidnapped the diplomat, Heshmatollah Attarzardeh.
He disappeared Nov. 13, 2008, in Peshawar, capital of Pakistan's North-West Frontier province and a hotbed of intrigue because al-Qaida and Taliban operate there.
Attarzadeh, commercial attache at the Iranian consulate, was seized by unidentified gunmen as he drove through the city. They killed his Pakistani guard.
Moslehi gave few details of the rescue operation but it was probably carried out by Intelligence Ministry and the Revolutionary Guards' elite Qods Force, which operates clandestinely outside Iran.
Pakistani security officials insisted they helped the Iranians carry out the rescue but gave no details.
That indicated that Pakistan's principal intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, is working closely with the Iranians, despite religious differences. Iran is overwhelmingly Shiite Muslim, Pakistan is dominated by Sunni Muslims.
The rescue of the diplomat marked the second coup for Iranian intelligence in little more than a month. Pakistan played a role in the earlier episode as well.
That involved the Feb. 23 capture of the Islamic republic's most wanted fugitives, Abdulmalik Rigi, leader of a Sunni militant group called Jundallah, or Soldiers of God, waging an insurgency against Tehran.
The group, which has some 1,000 activists, has been active since 2005 in the southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan on the Afghan border and had bases in Pakistan. Tehran says it is backed by the CIA.
Iranian intelligence, apparently aided by captured Jundallah activists, tracked Rigi to the United Arab Emirates and learned he planned to fly to Krygyzstan. Iranian fighter jets reportedly intercepted the Kyrgyz airliner carrying Rigi and one of his top lieutenants and forced it down in Bandar Abbas in southern Iran.
The Attarzadeh and Rigi episodes demonstrated that Iranian intelligence and its political masters are increasingly prepared to mount operations beyond Iran's borders -- a development that could have worrying consequences for the Americans and Israelis.
Moslehi boasted that the two operations, apparently carried out with flawless perfection, "out-performed" the CIA and the Mossad.
The Rigi capture was certainly a major coup for Tehran, the more so because it followed the fiasco of the Jan. 19 assassination, allegedly by Israeli agents, of Hamas chieftain Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who worked closely with Iran, in Dubai. Although Mabhouh's assassins escaped, Dubai police were able to produce a highly detailed account of the killing and the team that did it.
As intelligence operations go, it was a major blunder that put the secretive Mossad under intense international scrutiny at a time when Israel was being denounced for brutality and intransigence in making peace with the Palestinians.
Capturing Rigi was of vital importance to Tehran. Jundallah's operations had become a major problem, particularly after its suicide bombers killed seven Revolutionary Guard generals Oct. 18, 2009.
