Michael Flynn: Iranian Spies Are Up to No Good in New York City

by JIM GERAGHTY

Michael Flynn: Iranian Spies Are Up to No Good in New York City As mentioned yesterday, one of Donald Trump’s potential running mates is retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and author of the new book, The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and its Allies.

NRO contributor Michael Ledeen is his co-author. From p. 88: Nor does Iran need atomic bombs to gravely threaten American security. Every day we see evidence of Iranian espionage in the United States – to take the most recent example, a man named Mohammed Alavi was arrested for providing Iran with the floor plan of America’s largest nuclear power plant – and numerous Iranian “diplomats” at the United Nations have been thrown out of New York City for taking photographs of train and subway stations. From the New York Daily News in 2012: Cops have caught “hostile” Iranian snoops shooting pictures and video at key city sites at least six times since 9/11 — twice the number previously reported. NYPD intelligence boss Mitchell Silber disclosed the cases Wednesday to the House Homeland Security Committee, which is looking at the growing threat posed by a cornered Iran and its proxies in the U.S. — chief among them Hezbollah. “We believe this is neither an idle nor a new threat,” Silber told the panel, calling them incidents “we struggle to categorize as anything other than hostile reconnaissance of New York City.” In May of 2005 six men on an East River sightseeing cruise raised the crew’s suspicion when they paired off with maps and cell phones, talking on them “in an unusual manner” while they shot video and photographed landmarks including the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. Tipped off, the NYPD determined all of the men were on the Iranian government payroll, one of them at the rogue nation’s mission to the United Nations. Ah, Iran, our partners in peace! Didn’t hear much about that in the national news, did you? Flynn continues: It is hard to imagine that there are no Hezbollah terrorist groups inside this country. If they could blow up buildings in Buenos Aires, they can surely do the same here, and they have bragged that they have studied our weak points carefully, and are ready to attack when circumstances are more favorable. The on pages 104 and 105: At minimum, the ability for al-Qaeda terrorists to transit Iran was very useful. The public would know a lot more about this complex relationship if the Obama administration would permit the publication of the (more than a million) documents seized by operatives of the Sensitive Site Exploitation team at bin Laden’s compound immediately following his death. That very important body of information constitutes what a senior U.S. military official calls “the single largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever.” Disappointingly, only a couple dozen of those documents have been made public, and the Defense Intelligence Agency’s numerous summaries and analyses of the files remain classified. But even the public peek gives us considerable insight into the capabilities of this very dangerous global organization. One letter to bin Laden reveals that al Qaeda was working on chemical and biological weapons in Iran. Another document mentions negotiations with the government of Pakistan. Others provide details of operations under way in Africa, and still others speak of preparations for Mumbai-style attacks in European cities. This morning, much of the buzz is about Trump picking Indiana Governor Mike Pence. Picking Flynn could turn the election into a referendum on the Obama administration’s approach to fighting terrorism – terms of debate that are likely to be more favorable to Trump and Republican hopes than many other options.