Former Bush Administration officials now say Iran made a concerted effort to help the United States in its fight against Al-Qaeda after 9/11, in an apparent attempt to repair relations with Washington. Iran rounded up hundreds of Arabs who had crossed the border from Afghanistan, expelled many of them and made copies of nearly 300 of their passports, Hillary Mann Leverett, a former State Department official, said Tuesday.
Tehran sent the copies of the passports to then U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan – who passed them on to Washington – and then welcomed U.S. interrogators to question some of the detainees, in an effort to show its long time foe it was ready for peaceful relations, Leverett said in an interview with the Associated Press. As a State Department official assigned to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York, Leverett said she negotiated with Iranian officials in New York on behalf of the Bush Administration between 2001 and 2003. She said during that time Iran sought a more extensive relationship with the United States.
“They thought they had been helpful on Al- Qaeda, and they were,” she said, saying suspected Al-Qaeda operatives were not given safe haven in Iran. “It isn’t something that is talked about,” Leverett said in describing Iran’s role during a forum at the Washington, D.C.-based New America Foundation, a nonpartisan policy institute. Leverett acknowledged, however, that others in the administration argued that Iran had not identified all likely Al-Qaeda members nor provided access to them. They pointed out that many of the expelled Arabs were deported to Saudi Arabia and to other Arab and Muslim countries in the region.
But James F. Dobbins, the Bush Administration’s chief negotiator on Afghanistan in late 2001, agreed with Leverett. He said that Iran was “comprehensively helpful” in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack in working to overthrow the Taliban and collaborating with the United States in installing the Karzai government in Kabul. Dobbins, the author of After the Taliban: Nation- Building in Afghanistan, told the Associated Press Iranian diplomats made clear at the time they were looking for broader cooperation with the United States, but the Bush Administration was not interested. Instead, in 2002, President Bush labeled Iran a member of an “axis of evil.”
Leverett and her husband, Flynt Leverett, a former career CIA analyst and a former National Security Council official, proposed that the next U.S. president seek a “grand bargain” with Iran to settle all major outstanding differences. “The next president needs to reorient U.S. policy toward Iran as fundamentally as President Nixon did with China in the 1970s,” Flynt Leverett told the Associated Press, adding that the United States should clarify that it is not seeking change in the nature of the Iranian regime but rather in its policies, while Iran should accept “certain limits” on its nuclear program.
