Intel Trove From Iranian Defector

I'm getting the feeling Ali Reza Ashgari is not the only one who will be flipping, but even if he's the only one, we're gleaning plenty of valuable information nonetheless.

Iran's ex-deputy defense minister smuggled top-secret maps and documents - some of which prove terror ties around the Middle East - out of Tehran when he defected to the West, former colleagues said yesterday.

The confidential files Ali Reza Asghari brought with him provide details about Iran's links to terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad as well as the radical Mahdi Army and Badr Corps in Iraq, according to an influential Arab newspaper.

An Iranian colleague told the paper, Al-Sharq al-Awsat, that Asghari also had secret documents concerning Iran's nuclear missile program.

Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards are beefing up defenses around the country's nuclear reactors out of fear that the United States and Israel, now armed with the new intelligence, could attack them, the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan reported yesterday.

Read the rest.

Meanwhile, Max Boot has an interesting piece from earlier this week, which appears in today's print edition of the New York Post, yet isn't linked on their site.

Attempts by numerous naysayers to deny the evidence of Iranian involvement in Iraq are almost comical. American troops at several bases in Iraq have laid out mortars, rockets and bomb components with serial numbers betraying their Iranian origins. They have even detained senior officials of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force, which is responsible for supplying munitions to Iraqi militias.

Yet critics profess to remain unconvinced that all these actions were approved by the Iranian leadership. As if it’s common in a dictatorship for the security forces to act contrary to the orders of the dictator. In fact, there is no evidence that the Quds Force has gone renegade and much evidence that it is doing the bidding ofIran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to whom it directly reports.

Faced with such a flagrant casus belli, not to mention President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s blood-curdling threats against our ally, Israel, the U.S. would be perfectly justified in hitting Iran now, before it acquires nuclear weapons. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that such an attack is the best strategy at the moment or the one that the administration is pursuing.

Previously:

Big Iranian Fish

Former Iranian Official Talking

Top Iranian General Disappears