Iranian Terror Deters America

One recent failed Iranian terror plot provides ample and scary evidence of just how far the Iranians are able and willing to go. In 2007, four men planned to blow up fuel tanks and the fuel pipeline under New York’s JFK airport—and sought financial and logistical help from Iran to carry out their plot. “They looked to anyone to help them pull it off,” says Matthew Levitt, a former Treasury Department official and a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who was an expert witness for the prosecution in the trials of the four conspirators. One of them, a Guyanese national named Abdul Kadir, proposed the idea of blowing up JFK to his old friend, an Iranian diplomat he’d known since 1983. According to the Justice Department, Kadir reached out to Mohsen Rabbani, a leading Iranian diplomat whose unique take on foreign relations didn’t prevent him from running for president in Iran’s recent clerically supervised elections. As Levitt puts it, “Rabbani was the primary architect of the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.”