Pompeo says Iran is new base for al-Qaida but offers little proof

Al-Qaida’s new base of operations is in Iran, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Tuesday, using his last days in office to tie together two of what he called the world’s greatest terrorism threats but offering no underlying intelligence as evidence.

His conclusions were quickly tempered, and even contradicted, by some current and former American officials who said there was little new intelligence to suggest that Iran was any kind of active headquarters, much less a hub where al-Qaida’s leaders can direct operations with the support of the government in Tehran.

Pompeo, who was President Donald Trump’s first CIA director for a year, called Iran “the new Afghanistan” for al-Qaida militants.

“They are partners in terrorism, partners in hate,” Pompeo told an audience at the National Press Club in Washington.

Pompeo spoke alternately about al-Qaida’s “new home base” and a “new operational headquarters” in Tehran, bewildering counterterrorism officials, who said there was no evidence for his assertions. Some said his comments appeared to represent his own analytic conclusions, rather than those of the U.S. intelligence community.

Pompeo cited a “sea change” in the ties between Sunni-led al-Qaida and Shiite Iran after 2015, when he said the clerical government in Tehran had allowed the terrorist network’s senior operatives to centralize inside its borders.

He said Iran had given travel documents, identification cards and passports to al-Qaida militants and allowed them to move freely around the country. He also confirmed for the first time a New York Times report in November that al-Qaida’s second-in-command, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Muhammad al-Masri, was assassinated in Tehran in August.

At some point before al-Masri’s death, the CIA concluded that he and another senior al-Qaida leader in Iran, Saif al-Adl, reorganized al-Qaida’s global management structure and placed a renewed priority on plotting attacks, according to a senior State Department official who briefed reporters after Pompeo’s speech. The official would not give a date or approximate time frame for the

CIA assessment, saying only that it had happened after 2015 and was sent to the State Department in the past week.

Other American officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence said the confirmation of the Masri assassination was the core of any new or specific information that Pompeo revealed Tuesday.