CIA director Mike Pompeo described the connection between Iran and al-Qaeda as an “open secret” Thursday, a relationship that he and others criticized the Obama White House for downplaying.
“It’s an open secret and not classified information that there have been relationships, there are connections,” Pompeo said during an event held by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “There have been times the Iranians have worked alongside al-Qaeda.”
Pompeo said that that cooperation sometimes occurs because the two view the West as a common enemy.
“They’ve cut deals so as not to come after each other, that is, they view the West as a greater threat than the fight between the two along their ideological lines,” he said.
He added that the intelligence community is still monitoring those ties, especially given the complexity of the situation in Syria.
“With the defeat of the real estate proposition in Syria and Iraq for ISIS, we watch what’s going on in Idlib, you’ve got ISIS folks, al-Nusra front, al-Qaeda folks up in the North,” he said, “we are watching to see if there aren’t places where they work together for a common threat against the United States.”
The Obama administration drew criticism from lawmakers like Pompeo (when he was in the House) for seeking to obscure ties between Iran and al Qaeda. Critics said that was motivated by a desire to protect the 2015 nuclear deal. An Obama administration official told THE WEEKLY STANDARD last July that “anyone who thinks Iran was or is in bed with al-Qaeda doesn’t know much about either.”
TWS has reported on links between Iran and al-Qaeda, as partially illuminated by documents captured in the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden:
Pompeo said that the CIA would release more of those documents in coming days. Obama’s former national security adviser Tom Donilon has described the quantity of intelligence captured in that raid as enough to fill a “small college library.”
The yet-unreleased files documenting the Iran-al Qaeda relationship, TWS has reported, “are among the most important and explosive documents still being withheld from the American people.”
