The CIA had a highly-classified program in place “to study whether it could track and kill terrorists such as” members of Al Qaeda in Iran, but the Obama administration shut it down. Why did CIA director Leon Panetta close the program, codenamed Rigor?

BY Thomas Joscelyn at The Weekly Standard

This past week, Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman of the Associated Press reported a story that deserved to make a splash but didn’t. The CIA had a highly-classified program in place “to study whether it could track and kill terrorists such as” members of Al Qaeda in Iran, but the Obama administration shut it down. Why did CIA director Leon Panetta close the program, codenamed Rigor? The AP’s reporters did not say, but they did note that “monitoring and understanding” the al Qaeda network in Iran “remains one of the most difficult jobs in U.S. intelligence.”

The existence of an al Qaeda network based in Iran has long been known, if too seldom spoken about. Large contingents of al Qaeda fighters relocated to the mullahs’ soil after the fall of the Taliban next door in Afghanistan in late 2001. And there is ample evidence that the al Qaeda fugitives there have been up to no good.

In his book At the Center of the Storm (2007), former director of Central Intelligence George Tenet discusses the intelligence the CIA collected on al Qaeda’s activities inside Iran. “From the end of 2002 to the spring of 2003,” Tenet wrote, “we received a stream of reliable reporting that the senior al Qaeda leadership in Saudi Arabia was negotiating for the purchase of three Russian nuclear devices.” The Saudi al Qaeda chief “relayed the offer directly to the al Qaeda leadership in Iran,” including Saif al Adel, a top al Qaeda military commander who was trained by Iran and Hezbollah in the early 1990s, and Abdel al Aziz al Masri, described as al Qaeda’s “nuclear chief” by 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. According to Tenet, al Adel told the Saudi al Qaeda chief “no price was too high to pay if they could get their hands on such weapons,” but he wanted “Pakistani specialists .??.??. to inspect the merchandise prior to purchase” because al Qaeda had fallen for nuclear scams before.

FULL STORY

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