In 2011, intelligence officials uncovered a plot to kill the Saudi Ambassador during his trip to the United States. He was to be blown up while he dined in a Washington DC restaurant.
Not come more was in the media after the initial news item on it. Years later, it is time to take another look due to a helicopter that was operated by Customs and Border patrol in Laredo, Texas that was shot at by ground fire and had to make an emergency landing.
This post brings home two points. 1) Iran is a mortal enemy of Saudi Arabia and does attempt to kill anywhere in the world. 2) The Iranian killing force al Quds has fully integrated with a drug cartel, Los Zetas that operates inside our southern neighbor, Mexico and had free access in the United States.
Neither terror group are on any U.S. terror list…let that sink in…
FreeBeacon in part:
The helicopter, part of USCBP’s Office of Air and Marine, was struck by gunfire on its side and on the rotor blade. The pilot was forced to make an emergency landing.
The law enforcement officers on the helicopter spotted the traffickers along the river during a routine flight around 5:00 P.M. local time June 5.
“The pilot was able to make a safe landing; there were no injuries,” said USCBP spokesman Daniel Hetlage, adding that U.S. and Mexican authorities are continuing to investigate. He declined to elaborate.
“I understand that they were chasing some people with bundles of marijuana,” Webb County Sheriff Martin Cuellar told the Laredo Morning Times. “People are getting desperate and crossing narcotics across the border.”
The helicopter that took fire was an EC-120, a medium-range turbine engine-powered aircraft.
A U.S. official said the helicopter attack was unusual but not unprecedented. The incident was not widely reported at the time and highlights the increasing danger of porous U.S. borders and widespread drug trafficking that takes place across them, the official said.
U.S. border security problems are expected to be a major topic of debate during the presidential election campaign.
The area near Laredo is a major transit route for Zetas drug runners.
Joel Vargas, head of intelligence for the international association InterPort Police, said the recent escape of Mexican drug kingpin El Chapo Guzman will re-energize drug cartel cells in Mexico that are battling the major Sinaloa drug cartel.
“The partnership between the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas, even with their own internal fighting going on, makes the border town of Laredo, Texas, a powder keg,” Vargas said. “El Chapo will re-attempt to take back not only Laredo, Texas, but also consolidate control of El Paso, Texas.”
A month after the U.S. helicopter was forced down by gunfire, Mexican authorities killed six drug runners near Mexico’s Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo, Texas.
The six suspects had fired on a Mexican Blackhawk helicopter, hitting it several times.
The Mexican helicopter incident July 6 involved an armed convoy of suspected Zetas drug cartel members.
According to U.S. officials, the Zetas are a well-armed organization. Authorities in Guatemala have captured M-16 and AK-47 rifles and grenades from Zetas operating in that country.
The Zetas also make extensive use of social media. The group has posted photos of beheadings it has carried out against members of rival drug gangs. It has also claimed responsibility for killing several bloggers who they say had exposed some of the group’s members.
The Zetas were implicated in an Iranian plot in 2011 to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Quds Force, a paramilitary and covert action force, attempted to recruit Zetas members to conduct attacks against the United States.
The Quds force also has been seeking to collaborate with Zetas in setting up transit routes that will be used to smuggle Afghan heroin into the country.
As a result of the 2011 plot, the Obama administration placed Quds Force commander Gen. Qasem Soleimani, on the list of designated terrorists.
The Iran nuclear agreement reached in Vienna earlier this included Soleimani on a list of Iranians who would have sanctions against them lifted in the future.
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From TWS in part:
The revelation that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and its Quds Force had plotted to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States – by blowing him up as he dined at a Washington restaurant – is a stark reminder of the nature of the Tehran regime and its ambitions. But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the story is that Iran’s thugs are developing a strategic partnership with Mexico’s most violent thugs: Los Zetas may only be the second-largest drug cartel in the Drug Enforcement Administration’s rankings, but they’re probably the most lethal. The gang is said to have formed around a platoon’s worth of deserters from Mexico’s special operations forces, and became the elite troops of another Mexican drug organization, the Gulf Cartel. The leader of that cartel got himself arrested, and the Zetas moved out on their own.
The Zetas have shot their way to prominence ever since, in turf wars with other gangs and in a number of spectacular massacres. This past August, the Zetas conducted a mounted raid on the Casino Royale – yes, the Casino Royale – in Monterrey in Nuevo Leon. After gunning down a few gamblers and guards at the entrance, they then doused the premises with gasoline and set the entrance ablaze. New reports indicate that more than 60 were killed, and another 35 trapped inside the building. The purpose of the attack appears to be simple retaliation for the Calderon government’s crackdown on the cartels, to demonstrate vividly that Mexican security forces – 3,000 were sent to restore order in Monterey – could not control what amounts to an insurgent group. The attack was mostly an act of political symbolism.
The alliance with the Zetas is only the tip of the Iranian iceberg in Latin America. As Roger Noriega and Jose Cardenas have recently written, “Iran has made the Western Hemisphere a priority….The real game changer has been the alliance developed between Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.” In addition to the Quds Force, Iran often operates through Hezbollah, which has established networks in the Lebanese communities that have long-standing enclaves in the trading and port cities of South America. In addition to Chavez, Iran has established closer ties to the Bolivian government of Evo Morales’s and Rafael Correa’s regime in Ecuador.
No one has tracked the increasing strategic cooperation between Iran, other anti-America states, international criminal, and narco-gangs than Douglas Farah of the International Assessment and Strategy Center. Recently, he testified to the House Homeland Security Committee that:
We see the further empowerment, training and technological support [to] the oppressive security apparatuses in the increasingly undemocratic Bolivarian states provided by the Iran-Hezbollah-IRGC/Quds Force combine….[They] are the sharpest edge of the sword at present, and the one most openly aimed at the United States, and the one least tractable to diplomacy. More details are here.