The police fears could cause trouble for Iranian-Americans if they are seen acting in a way that police might find “suspicious.”
The Associated Press reports that Los Angeles, which has the largest Iranian community outside Iran, has moved potential Iranian threats to the top of its intelligence briefings over the past few weeks. And the New York Police Department said it assumes Iran would attack the city, with its especially large Jewish population.
The main concern is an attack on Jewish targets—and the main focus of public police efforts has been to try to reassure American Jews of protection.
There is no sign Iran would strike at Americans—in fact, the Islamic Republic’s leadership seems to understand that an attack on American citizens would likely cause a war. In 1980, the Islamic Republic murdered an anti-regime Iranian dissident in Maryland and fire-bombed the Iran Times office in Washington, DC, but its operative who carried out those attacks later said he was forbidden to attack any Americans.
Last year, US officials charged Iran with plotting to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington. One thing that stood out about that plot was that the Mexican hired to do the killing proposed to set off a bomb in the ambassador’s favorite restaurant, which he warned would be filled with American citizens, possible even US senators, and his Qods Force contact said that didn’t matter. That suggests that not all Iranian officials at the operational level understand the meaning of Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attacks.
Law enforcement officials are keeping an eye out for potential Iranian operatives or anyone with links to Hezbollah, commonly used as a proxy terrorist group by the Islamic Republic.
The rash of incidents in Thailand, India, Azerbaijan and Georgia have especially sensitized police in recent days.
“The attacks overseas raise everybody’s anxiety level a little bit,” said Deputy Chief Michael Downing, commander of the Los Angeles Police Department’s counterterrorism and special operations bureau.
Los Angeles police have increased their outreach to Iranian and Jewish communities, assuring them there is no reason to be paranoid or overly anxious, Downing said in an interview with the Associated Press
An unclassified US government intelligence bulletin last week warned, “We remain concerned Iran would consider attacks in the United States,” and predicted that domestic violent extremists “will continue to threaten and conduct isolated acts of violence against Jewish organizations.”
But it acknowledged, “We have no specific information that Iran or its surrogates are targeting Jewish organizations, facilities or personnel in the United States.”
The head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess, told Congress last Thursday that his agency believes Iran is “unlikely to initiate or intentionally provoke a conflict,” although he acknowledged that Iran could attempt to deploy terrorist agents around the world.
In New York, the director of intelligence analysis for the New York Police Department (NYPD), Mitchell D. Silber, called the Iranian threat there “neither an idle nor a new threat.… Iran’s next target could well be on American soil,” Silber wrote in an opinion piece last week in The Wall Street Journal.
Earlier this week, the NYPD increased security around synagogues as a precaution.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano conducted a conference call two weeks ago with 250 members of the US Jewish community to discuss the potential threat from Iran and urged them to remain on the lookout for anything suspicious, said Paul Goldenberg, director of the Secure Community Network, an organization that oversees safety for Jewish groups around the country.
“At this juncture, we’re being very careful. This community is not operating in panic,” Goldenberg said. “I would not stop for a moment to go to synagogue on Saturday or to visit a Jewish federation on Sunday, and that is our message at this time.”
US officials have long worried that Iran would use Hezbollah to carry attacks into the United States. After a decade of investigations, the FBI has identified Hezbollah sympathizers and financiers, but current and former counterterrorism officials said there has been no clear evidence of an operational Hezbollah cell on US soil.
“Their potential threat is greater than any other group out there,” said Andrew Arena, the FBI’s special-agent-in-charge in Detroit. Hezbollah isn’t just a terrorism group, he said. “You’ve got to look at them militarily. You’ve got to look at them as an intelligence threat. They’re more sophisticated because they’ve been doing it a lot longer.”
Arena said conventional wisdom has been that Hezbollah does too well raising money in the US and therefore considers attacks in the US to be unwise. But, Arena said, the question is what is Hezbollah’s line in the sand, what would cause the group or Iran to unleash its US-based volunteers to attack the US.
In Los Angeles, law enforcement has always been concerned about people with Hezbollah ties involved in selling counterfeit goods, Downing said. And while the Hezbollah operatives have yet to turn their focus toward attacking the U.S., “given the right set of circumstances, it wouldn’t take too much for them to go operational,” he said.
Earlier this month, Hassan Nasrollah, the leader of Hezbollah, gave a speech in which he put some distance between Hezbollah and Iran. He seemed to fear that the world would view Hezbollah as a lackey of Iran and attack Hezbollah at the same time as any attack on Iran.
Iran has threatened to attack American interests “all around the world” in the event of any American attack on Iran. It has always caveated that threat as one of retaliation only.