NAIROBI, Kenya – When Ethiopia’s intelligence agency recently uncovered a cell of 15 people, it said the embassy of the United Arab Emirates was shrouded with a box of weapons and explosives, claiming it was a major attack with the potential to wreak havoc. in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.
But the Ethiopians have left out an important detail about the alleged conspiracy: who is behind it.
The only clue was the arrest of a 16th person: Ahmed Ismail, who is accused of being the head, was admitted to Sweden in collaboration with friendly ‘African, Asian and European intelligence services’, the Ethiopians said.
Now U.S. and Israeli officials say the operation was the work of Iran, whose intelligence service activated a dormitory in Addis Ababa last year with instructions to also gather information about the embassies of the United States and Israel.
They say the Ethiopian operation was part of a broader effort to find soft targets in African countries where Iran may avenge painful, high-profile losses, such as the death of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s leading nuclear scientist, who was killed in November, according to Israel. . , and Major General Qassim Suleimani, the Iranian pioneer who was assassinated by the United States in Iraq just over a year ago.
Heidi K. Berg, director of intelligence led by the Pentagon’s Africa command, said Iran was behind the 15 people arrested in Ethiopia and that the “brain of this weathered conspiracy,” Mr. Ismail, was arrested in Sweden.
“Ethiopia and Sweden have worked together to disrupt the conspiracy,” Admiral Berg said in a statement.
Iran has denied the allegations. “These are unfounded allegations provoked only by the malicious media of the Zionist regime,” a spokesman for the Iranian embassy in Addis Ababa said. “Neither Ethiopia nor the Emirates have said anything about Iranian interference in these issues.”
The United Arab Emirates angered Iran when it normalized relations with Israel in September as part of a series of agreements mediated by the Trump administration in recent months known as the Abraham Agreement.
An Ethiopian police spokesman, who named only two of the 15 people arrested, declined to say why Ethiopia was not protesting Iran for the plot. Several diplomats have said that Ethiopia, as Africa’s diplomatic capital and home to the African Union headquarters, is trying not to become publicly involved in delicate issues involving major powers.
Nevertheless, Ethiopia’s national intelligence and security service said a second group of plotters was preparing to hit the Emirate Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan. A Sudanese official confirmed the bill.
A senior US defense official linked the arrests in Ethiopia to a failed Iranian plan to assassinate the US ambassador to South Africa, which was reported by Politico in September. US and Sudanese officials agreed to discuss the matter on condition of anonymity because of its diplomatic and intelligence sensitivity.
Many of the Ethiopian arrests and the alleged Iranian role still remained obscure. Ethiopian police have yet to formally charge the 15 suspects of the plot, of whom only two have been identified. Israeli officials say as few as three of them may actually be Iranian agents, while the others are trapped in the Ethiopian drum.
And the arrests in Ethiopia come at a time of heightened political sensitivity in Iran and the United States, as the Biden government considers its position on Tehran and the Obama nuclear deal with Iran, which President Donald J. Trump scrapped in 2018, would revive. .
In addition to the pressure on President Biden, Iran’s intelligence minister suggested last week that his country might try to acquire nuclear weapons if US sanctions are not lifted soon.
While Admiral Berg confirmed several details about Iran’s role in the Ethiopian arrests, other military and diplomatic officials in Washington did not want to discuss it.
In contrast, officials in Israel, whose government is openly hostile to any thaw between Washington and Tehran, highlighted the alleged conspiracy as further proof that Iran cannot be trusted.
Despite all its efforts, Iran has yet to deliver on its promises of revenge for its genuine losses, other than a rocket attack on US troops in Iran in January 2020, days after General Suleimani was assassinated.
Any plan to hit the United Arab Emirates, as suggested by the arrests in Ethiopia, would be a strange choice, given the potential to undermine the alleged nuclear diplomacy with Iran, said Aaron David Miller, a foreign policy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International, said. Peace.
However, other analysts say the UAE is high on Iran’s enemy list and that the embassy in Ethiopia could offer an indisputable target at a time when Ethiopia is being distracted by a war raging in the northern Tigray region since November. .
“Africa is a relatively easy place to operate, and Ethiopia is dealing with other issues,” said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer at the Brookings Institution.
The murky episode was apparently destined to become the latest in a series of cat-and-mouse episodes between Iranian and Israeli agents on African soil in recent years.
During the 1990s, Iran enjoyed close ties with Sudan under autocratic ruler Omar Hassan al-Bashir, and in the following decade, he was able to build his warships in Eritrea.
Israel struck back in 2009 with airstrikes on a convoy of smuggled trucks in Sudan aimed at preventing the weapons supplied by Iran from reaching the Gaza Strip, U.S. officials said.
But Iran’s ties with the Horn of Africa have weakened over the past few years, and the involvement of Israel and the Emirates has increased.
The Emirates helped mediate an important peace agreement between Ethiopia and Eritrea in 2018, and now it is Emirati warships that have been captured in Eritrean ports.
In November, following a call between Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, a team of Israeli drones arrived in Ethiopia to help eliminate the locusts that had plagued the country’s farmers.
Weeks later, Yossi Cohen, the head of Mossad, Israel’s secret intelligence service, met with his Ethiopian counterpart to discuss what they call “counter-terrorism operations.”
Elsewhere in Africa, Israeli intelligence officials say they regularly reject friendly countries over alleged Iranian activities.
In Kenya, two Iranians arrested in 2012 and charged with possession of 15 kilograms of explosives are serving 15 years in prison. Kenyan officials said the men were members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds. They said they were interrogated by Israeli intelligence while in Kenyan custody.
Four years later, in 2016, Kenya deported two Iranians arrested outside the Israeli embassy with video footage of the facility. Iran said the men, who were traveling in an Iranian diplomatic car, were university teachers.
Iranian agents are suspected in attacks or wheeled in countries such as Georgia, Thailand and India. On February 4, a Belgian court stripped an Iranian envoy of his diplomatic status and sentenced him to 20 years in prison for arranging a failed bombing raid on an Iranian opposition rally in France in 2018.
The failed plot and another in Denmark forced the European Union in 2019 to impose sanctions on Iran’s external espionage service, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security. According to Israeli officials, the same agency organized the operation in Ethiopia.
Sofia Hellqvist, a spokesperson for the Swedish police authority, asked questions about the arrest of Mr. Ismail, the alleged main leader, refers to the authorities in Ethiopia.
A United Arab Emirates spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Given the interests, it was unclear why the Iranians would venture an approach to the Biden government by now launching an operation.
Farzin Nadimi, an Iranian military specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Iran may want to send a message to Biden administrative officials that “unless they quickly reach an agreement with Iran, that is what they are doing.” get: a dangerous environment. ”
Declan Walsh reported from Nairobi; Eric Schmitt of Washington; Simon Marks of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; and Ronen Bergman of Tel Aviv. Rick Gladstone contributed reporting from New York.