The United States would love to get its hands on the suspects, but relations with Iran have been fractured since the 1979 hostage crisis. U.S. officials are now working quietly with allies on deals to transfer suspects to third countries and then eventually into American hands. In early July Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, the head of Iran’s judiciary, visited Saudi Arabia, where he met with the king and crown prince. Around the same time, according to some sources, authorities in Riyadh decided to strip Saad bin Laden of his Saudi citizenship, making it easier for the Iranians not to turn him over to his native country. Meanwhile, Kuwait announced that it had declined an Iranian offer to turn over Abu Ghaith, who was stripped of his Kuwaiti citizenship after 9/11. These moves could pave the way for Iranians to expel the suspects to countries other than their homelands.
Any hush-hush diplomatic arrangements regarding the terror suspects could be sabotaged by hard-liners in either the United States or Iran. Some Washington activists with ties to administration conservatives last week alleged that Iranian officials may have been caught by authorities in Belgium and Germany trying to obtain nuclear material from the Congo. State Department officials say that because Iran is partly democratic, they don’t want to write off possible negotiations over terrorists. But hard-liners want the Bush administration to support political movements in Tehran that seek to overthrow the fundamentalists who control Iran’s security and intelligence agencies.
