Hard-liners want evidence that Iran is up to no good.

The Front
Hard-liners want evidence that Iran is up to no good. And they’re turning to strange sources to get it.

By Laura Rozen and Jeet Heer
Issue Date: 04.08.05

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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.