Blinken Appears to Confirm Iran Is Targeting Current U.S. Officials

S ecretary of State Antony Blinken seemingly confirmed during testimony Tuesday that Iran is plotting attacks on both current and former U.S. officials. While there have been reports about threats to former senior officials, Blinken’s comments appear to be the first disclosure of any plot concerning current officials.

The Biden administration’s top diplomat addressed the threats under questioning from Senator Ted Cruz before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Is it true that the IRGC is actively trying to murder former senior officials of the United States?” Cruz asked.

“I’m not sure what I can say in an open setting, but let me say generically, that there is an ongoing threat against American officials both present and past,” Blinken answered.

The phrasing leaves room for interpretation. But the testimony is likely to feed into congressional concerns about nuclear negotiations with Iran being carried on in spite of these threats.

Blinken, citing the confidentiality of the talks, declined to answer Cruz’s questions about whether the U.S. had offered to lift the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s (IRGC) designation as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) in return for Iranian assurances to end its ongoing assassination plots, as certain news reports had indicated.

The top diplomat did, however, say that he shares Cruz’s concerns about the IRGC and, specifically, its paramilitary Quds unit, saying that “86 of the 107 designations by this administration have been against the IRGC or its component parts.” He also said that the administration told the Iranian government to stop targeting Americans.

Throughout the hearing, Blinken blamed the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement in 2018 and to opt for a “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign for a rise in Iranian attacks across the Middle East. He noted that the Bush and Obama administrations declined to put the IRGC on the FTO list in the first place on the advice of the military and the intelligence community.

But Blinken argued that while the agreement being negotiated in Vienna doesn’t address Iranian terrorist campaigns, those malign efforts would be worse if Iran were to obtain a nuclear weapon in the absence of a new agreement.

Iranian plots on U.S. soil so far have not stopped the administration from staying in the talks. The Washington Examiner and the Associated Press reported last month that the Iranian regime is targeting former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and former national-security adviser John Bolton.

Tehran, meanwhile, reportedly rejected the administration’s offer to lift the FTO in exchange for an end to the plots, with an IRGC commander even calling it “inevitable” that Iranians will get revenge for the U.S. operation that killed IRGC Quds force commander Qasem Soleimani.

Blinken’s comments today came at a pivotal moment for the Iran nuclear talks in Vienna, which have stalled amid Iranian stonewalling. At no point during the hearing did Blinken wholly rule out lifting the IRGC designation, though he implied that such a move is now unlikely.

“The only way I could see it being lifted is if Iran takes steps necessary to justify the lifting of that designation,” he told Senator Todd Young. “It would require Iran to take certain actions and to sustain them,” he later said, adding that if the designation were lifted and Iran failed to meet its obligations, “it can always be reimposed.”

Blinken then downplayed the practical significance of the IRGC’s designation, saying that “there are myriad other sanctions” on the group already.

“The primary sanction when it comes to the FTO designation is a travel ban, and the people affected by that ban when it comes to the IRGC — as you know, the IRGC is a large force that has a lot of conscripts in it — they would not be able to travel. The people who are the real bad guys have no intention of traveling here anyway,” he continued.

Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, disputed that claim, saying that Blinken’s comment ignores “the utility of the FTO’s legal, economic, political, and immigration-related penalties.”

“Be they sanctions busters, procurement agents, or others, Iranians that have run afoul of U.S. law enforcement in the past four decades were seldom ‘the real bad guys,’” Taleblu told National Review.

Hundreds of Gold Star family members and wounded veterans asked President Biden, in a letter last week, not to delist the IRGC, as it would hamper their efforts to seek financial awards resulting from lawsuits targeting the group.

“The IRGC’s FTO designation provides American victims of terrorism — including the Gold Star families of more than 600 U.S. soldiers murdered by the IRGC and Hezbollah in Iraq — with powerful evidence as they pursue accountability for the attacks that wounded them or killed their family members,” the letter’s signatories wrote.

The designation has not only been a sticking point in negotiations but has divided congressional Democrats. In recent weeks, over 20 Democratic lawmakers, including Senator Joe Manchin, have expressed their concern over reports that the administration is mulling an end to the FTO determination.