The Iran-Zeta plot: Just the stuff of movies?

FBI director: Mexican drug cartel was sought out to help kill Saudi ambassador

Posted Oct 12, 2011

Ioan Grillo
GlobalPost

TalkMediaNews/FlickrFBI Director Robert Mueller speaks during a congressional hearing in 2010. Mueller said Tuesday that Iranian agents were sent to Mexico to meet with members of the Zeta drug cartel to hire hitmen who would assassinate the Saudi ambassador.

FBI Director Robert Mueller said the plot was so surreal it “reads like the pages of a Hollywood script.”

Iranian agents, he said, went to hire hit men from Mexico’s ruthless Zeta cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador on U.S. soil.

Or did they really?

The indictment shows that no genuine Mexican cartel operatives were involved at all.

Instead, the alleged Iranian agent Manssor Arbabsiar ran straight into the mysterious CS-1 — a confidential informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

CS-1 then carefully lured Arbabsiar down the garden path – until he had allegedly paid $100,000 up front and promised $1.4 million more for killers to use guns and bombs against the target.

Watching the relentless violence in Mexico, many have feared for some time that the ruthless cartels could bring their bloody mayhem north of the Rio Grande.

But taking out such a high focus diplomatic target in the United States is the last thing that Mexican cartels want to do.

The traffickers make an estimated $30 billion every year selling cocaine, marijuana, crystal meth and heroin to American users.

Why would they want to bring heat on this lucrative industry by plunging into the cauldron of Middle Eastern politics?

The cartels are even cautious about murdering rival drug dealers on U.S. soil.

After a cell of Zetas committed a string of five homicides in Texas in 2005 and 2006, U.S. police hit back hard, rounding up Zeta operatives and dishing them out mammoth prison sentences.

Since then, the cartel has been very quiet in its land of milk and honey.

A crucial question over the assassination case is who contacted who first.

Was the whole idea in fact dreamed up by American intelligence ops, who went to Arbabsiar with the proposal?

Perhaps, we’ll find out by the time the Hollywood film about this is actually made.

This article originally appeared on GlobalPost.