BRIEF ON IRAN Representative Office of The National Council of Resistance of Iran No. 459 Monday, July 22, 1996 3421 M Street NW #1032, Washington, DC 20007 German Agency Warns of Iran Nuclear Terrorism, Reuters, July 20 BONN — Germany's BND intelligence agency believes Iran has been trying to purchase nuclear materials illegally and has warned against a potential new threat of "nuclear terrorism," a German magazine reported on Saturday. Focus weekly news magazine said that it had obtained a confidential BND report expressing alarm over the extent and "professionalism" of a growing international market in nuclear contraband. It did not say how it obtained the report. "(There is) scarcely a doubt remaining that Iran is interested in buying nuclear materials," the magazine said, quoting the BND report. "(Tehran) is interested with utmost certainty in fissionable material on the black market." The BND report said it could not rule out the possibility that fanatical religious and other extremist groups could get hold of nuclear components and use them along with conventional explosives in terrorist attacks.... Washington recently stepped up its campaign against Iran, which it believes to be a sponsor of terrorism.... [In another report on Saturday, Reuters quoted IRNA as saying that Bernd Schmidbauer, Chancellor Kohl's intelligence coordinator "described Iran-Germany relations as excellent and said that officials of the two countries are in constant touch with one another".] Extradited Iranian Asylum-seeker Arrested by Mullahs, Iran Zamin News Agency, July 21 Holland's media reported that an Iranian asylum- seeker, Peyman Salehi, was extradited to Iran on Friday. Hef Dick, Salehi's attorney in Holland, announced on Saturday that his client was arrested by Iranian authorities immediately upon his arrival in Tehran. An official of Holland's Justice Ministry went to Tehran's airport to see Salehi, but Salehi was arrested before the official could see him.... News Overview Keeping An Eye on Iran Tehran's Stepped Up Assassination Campaign Is A Warning TIME International, July 22 Whether it's chest pains before a cardiac attack or phone warnings that a bomb is about to go off, trouble often tips its hand.... Inevitably, hindsight is 20/20, but heeding tip-offs can do wonders for foresight. That's why it is so important for the industrialized allies and their partners in the Middle East to keep a closer eye on Iran, even though Tehran has not been implicated in the Saudi blasts.... But Iran--which the State Department claims hands out $100 million annually to Islamic groups to carry out terrorist attacks--is flashing warning signals even as the mullahs' regime tempers its rhetoric in hopes of gaining trust and foreign trade. The alert comes in the form of a dramatically stepped-up overseas campaign to eliminate dissidents. A June report by Britain's parliamentary Human Rights Group says Iranian assassins traveled abroad to kill 11 critics of the regime in the first five months of this year, more than in all 1995. Since the Shah's overthrow in 1979, 215 overseas attacks have killed or wounded more than 350 critics in 21 countries, and nearly two-thirds of the assaults have come in the past seven years. That has been while the so-called pragmatist President, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, has been in charge, not the founding "radical," Ayatollah Khomeini, usually considered the more lawless of the pair. This year's casualties include four Iranian Kurds shot in Iraq; two Sunni clergymen killed in Pakistan; a former minister of the Shah's government assassinated at home in Paris; and Zahra Rajabi, a member of the dissident Iranian National Council of Resistance, killed in Turkey, where she headed a delegation investigating the plight of Iranian refugees. The toll might be far higher but for alert Belgian customs officials. In March, while checking the Iranian freighter Kohladooz in Antwerp, they discovered a high- caliber mortar launcher and shells with payloads of 125 kilos of explosives packed in food containers marked as gherkins and pickled garlic.... According to National Council of Resistance officials, Belgian and French security forces concluded that the probable target for bombardment by the giant mortar was the Paris headquarters of the Iranian resistance group and Maryam Rajavi, the organization's president-elect. With this record, not to mention Tehran's praise for the Hamas suicide bombers who killed 62 Israelis earlier this year, the regime's relentless pursuit of nuclear weapons and its extensive military maneuvers this summer in the gulf, why should Iran be rewarded with Western investment? It should not. Why should the European Union accept Iran's hint this month that it will not assassinate British writer Salman Rushdie even though Tehran will not formally lift the fatwa, or death sentence, imposed on him in 1989, because it was levied by Khomeini himself, nor remove the $2 million bounty on Rushdie's head? This is not a trick question, but many in the E.U., though not Britain and the Netherlands, are warming up to Iran. ...With sanctions bills approved in the U.S. Congress... tension is building between Washington's effort to isolate Tehran and Bonn's determination to keep open a critical dialogue. Isolation can work. Witness South Africa. On the other hand, too much dialogue and not enough criticism can be appeasement. When that warning was ignored 60 years ago, after Hitler invaded the Rhineland, the price paid was far too high to endure again.