US, Iran secretly discussed swap of al Qaeda detainees for Iranian dissidents

Suleiman Abu Ghaith, Osama bin Laden's son-in-law

By Robert Windrem
Senior investigative producer, NBC News

The arrest of Suleiman Abu Ghaith, Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law, has led to a fresh examination of a little-known chapter in George W. Bush’s “War on Terror’ -- secret talks between U.S. and Iranian officials in 2002 and 2003 aimed at working out an exchange of al Qaeda leaders detained in Iran for Iranian dissidents under U.S. control in Iraq.

The proposed deal fell apart when Washington balked at sending the Iranian dissidents -- members of the People's Mujahedin of Iran, best known by the acronym MEK -- to what they believed would be certain death at the hands of Iranian authorities, current and former U.S. and Iranian officials told NBC News.

Ghaith, who is being held in a New York jail cell after spending a decade in Iran among the al Qaeda group, pleaded not guilty last week to charges of conspiring to kill Americans.

Ghaith has provided an account of his travels to U.S. law enforcement officials, included in a 22-page statement that has yet to be released. He was arrested in Turkey after leaving Iran, transferred to U.S. custody in Jordan and then flown to New York, according to U.S. officials, who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity.

The U.S. has never had a clear idea of the conditions under which members of al Qaeda’s “management council” were held in Iran, but one former U.S. official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said last week that they were hidden "in the blackest of the black boxes" inside Iran's intelligence apparatus. Iranian officials have told NBC News the al Qaeda officials were "in jail" in the Islamic Republic.

While U.S. officials believe the al Qaeda leaders were initially allowed to contact other members of the terrorist organization as they continued to plot attacks against the U.S. and its allies, Alireza Miryousefi, spokesman at the Iranian mission to the United Nations, said that was never the case.

“Our position about al Qaeda is clear," he said Thursday. "Iran has never permitted al Qaeda to have any activity or operation from or inside Iran.” 

The al Qaeda leaders detained after fleeing Afghanistan as the Taliban regime collapsed at the end of 2001 also had family members and bodyguards with them, bringing the total number in the group into the hundreds.

Among the terror group’s leaders taken into custody were Ghaith, Saif al Adel, al Qaeda’s military leader, Saad bin Laden, the deceased son of the late al Qaeda leader, and liaisons with other Sunni terrorist groups, including Chechen rebels in Russia.

U.S. and Iranian officials say that the group -- armed "with a ton of cash," as one U.S. official put it -- bribed their way across the Iran-Afghanistan border and hoped that Iran would treat them as "the enemy of my enemy," as another former U.S. official said.  But they were rounded up not long after their arrival.

The former U.S. officials say the CIA did not learn of the group's presence in Iran until the middle of 2002, at which point the U.S. used back-channel communications to arrange secret talks with representatives of Iran. This was months after President George W. Bush, in his State of the Union address, described Iran as part of an "axis of evil" – along with Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Kim Jong Il's North Korea – presenting a "grave and growing danger" to the U.S.

The talks have been reported before, though previous accounts received little media attention.

In a passage in his memoir, "At the Center of the Storm," then-CIA Director George Tenet, wrote, "In mid-2002 we learned that portions of al Qaeda’s leadership structure had relocated to Iran. This became much more problematic, leading to overtures to Iran and eventually face-to-face discussions with Iranian officials in December 2002 and early 2003. Ultimately, the al Qaeda leaders in Iran were placed under some form of house arrest, although the Iranians refused to deport them to their countries of origin, as we had requested." 

Tenet didn't detail what went on during the discussions, but in another passage said that at the same time the U.S. was meeting with Iranian officials, the CIA learned that the al Qaeda group was not only communicating with Saudi-based leaders of the terrorist group on operational matters, but also trying to obtain nuclear weapons.

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