Quds: Iran's secret weapon

WASHINGTON — A band of religious warriors that Iran's clerical rulers created to spread their country's Islamic Revolution has joined Iran's nuclear program at the center of the rising tensions between Washington and Tehran.

The Quds Force, a secretive overseas arm of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has operatives in Iraq and Afghanistan; runs Shiite extremist networks in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Europe; trains and arms Hezbollah and other Shiite radicals in Iran and Lebanon; and funds the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group. Now it's arming Iraqi Shiite Muslims with armor-piercing bombs, according to U.S. officials.

Many experts now warn that if the U.S.-Iranian frictions over Iraq and Iran's nuclear program escalate into conflict, Tehran would use the Quds Force to launch terrorist attacks against U.S. and allied targets around the world.

"They are the brains behind those who are pulling the trigger," said one official, who requested anonymity because intelligence on the group is highly classified. "You are never going to see their fingerprints."

Iran denies that it's helping to kill U.S. soldiers in Iraq, and the Bush administration has refused to declassify the intelligence that it says proves the Quds Force is sending weapons to Iraqi militants.

Five Iranian officials detained by U.S. forces in recent raids in Iraq are said to be Quds Force operatives, but some U.S. officials think the force isn't in Iraq to direct attacks on U.S. troops. The Iranians, they think, simply want to ensure that Iraq's Shiites prevail over the minority Sunnis. The Quds force is well known to the world's intelligence agencies, but much about it remains unknown.

Although many intelligence services, including those of the United States, Israel and European and Arab nations, have been trying to keep tabs on its operatives for more than 20 years, the unit has been publicly accused of complicity in a terrorist attack only once. That was in the July 18, 1994, suicide bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people and injured 151.

Experts say the force is a highly compartmentalized and disciplined contingent of several thousand men who are trained in espionage, military operations and political analysis, and it reports directly to supreme leader Ali Khamenei.

"It's like taking the CIA, special forces and the State Department and rolling them all into one," said the U.S. official.

Its mission of exporting the Islamic Revolution has meant confronting Iran's main enemies, the United States and Israel, beginning in Lebanon 25 years ago.

Current and former U.S. officials said Revolutionary Guard members helped plan and organize the Hezbollah suicide bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 and 1984, which killed more than 300 people, including 241 U.S. service personnel. Reconnaissance photographs of the Iranian headquarters near the town of Baalbek revealed a mockup of the unfinished defenses around the embassy annex and tire tracks where the bomber had rehearsed his mission.

The force also is believed to have been involved in recruiting and training the Shiite radicals who carried out the 1996 truck-bombing of the Khobar Towers housing complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 U.S. servicemen and a Saudi.

Only now, however, has the United States confronted Iran over the force's activities.

The unit's name, Persian for Jerusalem, reflects the Iranian goal of destroying Israel and liberating Islam's third holiest city.

The force was formally constituted in 1990 as the foreign operations arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a military organization with its own air, land and sea forces that's separate from the regular Iranian military, whose main mission is protecting the ruling ayatollahs.