As their leader offers friendship, Iran's Revolutionary Guards keep a menacing watch over their backyard

By PAUL QUINN-JUDGE /MOSCOW

ran's new President, Mohammed Khatami, recently called for a "thoughtful dialogue" with the United States, but Iranian intelligence operatives in Central Asia apparently have not gotten that message. They continue to view the U.S. as the main enemy, the Great Satan. They are challenging their U.S. counterparts in a murky game of cloak and dagger in the region, which after half a century under Soviet repression is seen by the outside world as an area of vast economic and strategic significance. In the long-term, Iran is trying to counter a growing U.S. influence in Central Asia. In the shorter term, U.S. officials suspect, they are collecting information that could be useful in terrorist strikes.

Recent incidents in the former Soviet Republics of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan and their less endowed neighbor Tajikistan demonstrate a clear pattern of Iranian intelligence activity directed against U.S. installations and interests. These include what the State Department calls "very aggressive" counterintelligence operations against U.S. interests in the region. In most cases the main Iranian players are members of the Revolutionary Guard, the elite security and military force that was formed to protect the ideological purity of the Ayatullah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution and has since developed considerable expertise in covert actions overseas. The presence of Guard operatives in foreign countries, says one official who watches them, "is never good news," especially when they are operating under diplomatic or humanitarian cover. This is what they are reportedly doing in Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan, as well as in Armenia.

U.S. officials now say the Iranians are stepping up their activities in the Balkans. Citing what is described as sensitive intelligence, some officials assert that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard provides training for the Kosovo Liberation Army, which has recently stepped up its armed struggle against Serbia. Other Western officials in the region question the reports, describing them as rumors. But given Iranian support for the Sarajevo government during the war in Bosnia--tolerated if not encouraged by the U.S. at the time--Iranian involvement on the side of the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo would not be a surprising development.

If reports on Iranian activities in the Balkans are hazy, their footprints in the Caucasus and Central Asia are quite clear. In the Azerbaijani capital of Baku, the center of a Caspian oil boom, U.S. intelligence and State Department reports indicate that Iranian operatives are tracking U.S. embassy officials and have assembled data on the homes, cars and movements of U.S. diplomats and other embassy personnel there and elsewhere. In Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan, Kazakh state security officers in February arrested three Iranian officials on espionage charges. Though one of the arrests was actually filmed and shown on local TV, the government has said little about what the men were up to. By official accounts they were arrested while receiving economic and political information from a Kazakh citizen. Russian media suggested, however, that the Iranians had been caught with the help of a foreign intelligence organization--apparently the CIA, which is known to have a sizable presence in Almaty. The arrests, Russia's NTV network suggested, were another chapter in the struggle for control over the region's oil and natural gas resources. U.S. officials hinted that the Iranians may have had more sinister motives--collecting information for a possible terrorist attack against U.S. interests in the republic, for example.

The officials might well have been thinking about the Tajik capital of Dushanbe. Tajikistan, the region's least viable state in both political and economic terms, has close linguistic and historical links to Iran. Tehran views Tajikistan as its backyard, and does not appreciate the idea of the U.S. moving in. Iranian unhappiness with the U.S. appears to have been behind what was one of the most serious security scares in the past few years. In the latter part of 1997, U.S. intelligence received word of a plausible-sounding plan to attack the U.S. embassy in Dushanbe. Intelligence sources say the operation had been commissioned and planned by the Iranians, but would have been carried out by local guns for hire. It is unclear how the embassy would have been hit: it is located on the upper floor of a hotel, just above the Russian embassy, which in any attack could also have gone up in smoke in an unintended gesture of post-cold war solidarity. Cautious bureaucrats in Washington took the threat seriously enough, however, to send armed security teams from both the State Department and the CIA. Soon afterwards, the CIA station in Dushanbe was closed, apparently permanently. Last November, the State Department ordered the withdrawal of dependents and non-essential personnel, and they have not yet been allowed to return. State Department officials say the precautions were taken because of the general atmosphere of insecurity and danger reigning at the time in Tajikistan, and not because of any Iranian threat. A senior State Department official admitted, though, that "the Iranians in Dushanbe are bad actors." They are, he said, "something we watch very closely." Intelligence sources insist that the main cause of the cutback was a threat that originated with the Iranians.

U.S. officials and their Western colleagues are divided over just how serious a threat Iranian intelligence poses in Central Asia. Some security specialists play down the activities. Iran may well be what the Clinton administration calls the world's "premier state sponsor of terrorism." But the Iranians are also bureaucrats of terrorism, slow in their planning and meticulous in their record-keeping. Much of the activity in the region could be triggered by nothing more menacing than the Guards' desire to update their files, some specialists feel. The Dushanbe incident, however, indicates that sometimes Iranian activities go beyond renewing their Rolodexes. And other Western officials note Iran's close relationship with some of the more militant and feared terrorist groupings--organizations such as Hamas, Hizballah and Islamic Jihad. Iranian activities in Central Asia, a Western diplomat says, bear ominous resemblance to an action plan: the creation of "target profiles" for future attacks.

Though they are loath to mention it in public, there is one tragedy in particular that weighs on the minds of U.S. officials as they watch Iranian operatives in Central Asia: the June 1996 truck bombing of a U.S. Air Force housing block in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. servicemen and at least one Saudi. Officially, the attack is still being investigated by the U.S. government, but privately many officials say that Iran is on the top of their suspect list. If a U.S. report eventually declares Iran the perpetrator, the Clinton administration will be under intense pressure to retaliate--perhaps with an air strike, probably aimed at Revolutionary Guard and intelligence centers. Analysts believe that Tehran would then feel obliged to hit back. U.S. installations in Central Asia could well prove to be the most accessible--and best researched--targets available.

Western diplomats and officials are equally unsure about what the Iranian activities say about President Khatami and his declarations of detente. The predominant working assumption is that Khatami's desire to improve relations with the West is genuine, but is not shared by more traditionalist and hard-line elements in the Iranian leadership--including those who control the Revolutionary Guard and other intelligence agencies. U.S. officials also agree that for Iran, American inroads into Central Asia and the Caucasus must look menacing. Iranian leaders of all persuasions are undoubtedly unhappy at the energetic efforts that Washington is making to prevent Tehran from benefiting from the boom that will undoubtedly follow the opening up of Caspian Sea oil fields. "They don't think it's our neighborhood or that we should be as active and welcomed as we are," said a senior State Department official. "What we're doing there isn't benign from their point of view." But as long as Khatami fails to rein in Iran's Revolutionary Guard, his control over the country and his desire to open up to the outside world will both remain in doubt.

--With Reporting by Massimo Calabresi /Tirana And Douglas Waller /Washington