Iranian Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi has said that there are serious holes in the plot that the United States has devised against the Islamic Republic, Mehr News reported.
Moslehi made the remarks in an interview published on Thursday in reference to U.S. officials' claim that they recently thwarted a plot by two men linked to Iran's security agencies to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to Washington, Adel al-Jubeir.
"If you investigate the issue with an intelligence approach, you will find so many contradictions and holes that you cannot believe that a government like the United States, with its many pretensions, has become so pathetic that it has devised such a tactless scenario," Moslehi stated.
"Over the past few days, the heads of the intelligence agencies of a number of countries called me and expressed surprise over the crude scenario and made analyses of and provided some data about the scenario," he added.
Moslehi said that there are certain facts which prove that the U.S. scenario is unfounded, adding, "What they have presented is not the record of what was tapped, but according to what has been mentioned in the indictment issued by the judge of the New York court, it is (the record of) the call that the suspect made after arrest from an FBI office."
"According to their acknowledgement, the suspect, without providing any documentation about who the alleged recipient is, where he is, and what he does, called a person, and then the supposed person on the phone became a Qods commander, and the phone call made from an FBI detention center became a record of what had been tapped," and all this became documentation, Moslehi explained.
He said, "My question is: 'Which intelligence agency or which intelligence officer would guide an operation agent via phone and on the opponent's soil?' The order to kill the supposed target is given to the agent via phone! The place where the murder is supposed to take place, namely the restaurant frequented by the target, is determined in the phone call!"
"What has happened to the world that they present the scenarios of cheap comedies as intelligence documents and send them to the United Nations Security Council?"
The Iranian intelligence minister added, "The characteristics and appearance of the person, who has been declared to be the person who had planned to carry out the assassination, are such a far cry from those of an officer or an intelligence agent that even the world's weakest intelligence agencies would not agree to hire such a person, let alone send him on an operational mission on U.S. soil."
"Why couldn't the supposed suspect, who according to claims by Western media outlets had been living in the U.S. for more than 20 years, obtain U.S. citizenship from the U.S. government until eight months ago? Besides, why did he get involved in such a plot only eight months after obtaining U.S. citizenship?"
Was the suspect not asked to play out the scenario "in return for being granted citizenship? What role did the FBI play in the process of granting citizenship? In the process, the FBI elicited information from the applicant about the issues they wanted (to know about) and asked him to make a commitment to cooperate."
"Do the Americans think that we do not know what the preconditions were for granting applicants citizenship in tens of similar cases? At another opportunity, I will disclose betrayals, not only of the system of the Islamic Republic of Iran but also of very close relatives, that the Americans compelled a number of applicants, who had sold themselves and had turned their backs on the nation, to commit," Moslehi said.
He added, "Technically speaking, the question can also be raised: 'Why should a Mexican drug cartel be used to this end? How is it possible that a cartel, which the Westerners themselves say has an income of tens of billions of dollars, would agree to get into an endless confrontation with the U.S. government in return for one and a half million dollars?"
Moslehi stated that he could not reveal more information due to intelligence considerations.
Elsewhere in his remarks, he said, "There are more fundamental questions about the allegation. For instance, 'Why would the sacred system of the Islamic Republic take such a futile measure? What benefit would it have for us?'"
He added, "We have information that some time ago, (the following) theory was proposed and discussed at a U.S. intelligence agency: 'We should get Iran involved in new issues in order to resolve the problems that the U.S. is experiencing in Iraq and Afghanistan and to knock out Syria.' We also learned that a U.S. intelligence agency had warned U.S. officials about the scenario in question and had said that the scenario was unbelievable and amateurish in nature and would not yield any result."
"However, the Americans made that mistake and staged the crude scenario," which was meant to depict the Iranian intelligence apparatus as incompetent, Moslehi said.