9/11: The Iran Factor; The final report of the 9-11 Commission reveals troubling new evidence that Tehran was closer to Al Qaeda than Iraq was.

Publication: Newsweek

Publication Date: 26-JUL-04

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Byline: Michael Isikoff and Michael Hirsh (With Mark Hosenball and Steve Tuttle)

The Iranian frontier with Afghanistan is a wild and desolate area of goat farmers and mud-brick huts, the perfect place for illicit opium--and terrorists--to cross the border. But the region is hardly a no man's land. U.S. intelligence believes that in faraway Tehran, the hard-line Islamist clerics who now exercise near total control over Iran directed their border guards to help jihadists coming from Afghanistan. And sometime between October 2000 and February 2001, according to the forthcoming final report of the 9-11 Commission, eight to 10 of the "muscle" hijackers of the September 11 plot were among those who benefited from this Iranian good-fellowship.

That conclusion--the strongest evidence yet of a relationship between Iran and Al Qaeda--is one of the most surprising findings to emerge in the commission's report, which is due out this week. According to a December 2001 memo buried in the files of the National Security Agency, obtained by the commission, Iranian officials instructed their border inspectors not to place Iranian or...

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