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    EDITOR'S NOTE - The recent arrests of terrorists trained at an
Iranian religious school underscores beliefs that Iran has
overshadowed Libya and Syria as a sponsor of terrorism. Western
intelligence officials also cite recent violent attacks on Iranian
dissidents and threats by Iran to retaliate for events in the Persian
Gulf.
    
By ED BLANCHE
Associated Press Writer
    NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) - Iran has emerged as the spearhead of a
''troika of terrorism'' and many of the terrorists are being trained
at a religious school in the holy city of Qom, Western intelligence
officials say.
    Several alumni of the Hojjatian religious school have been arrested
in recent months, shedding light on the school's clandestine
activities, amid growing fears of an upsurge in Iranian terrorist
activity.
    Those fears have been fueled by recent bloody attacks on Iranian
dissidents and Iranian threats to retaliate for U.S. and European
intervention in the Persian Gulf.
    Iranian terrorist activity has come into sharper focus since Libya
and Syria, long identified by the United States as sponsors of
international terrorism, were forced to pull in their horns.
    Ian Geldard of the London-based Institute for the Study of Terrorism
says Iran has taken the lead in what he calls a ''troika of
terrorism.'' He notes that Libya's Col. Moammar Gadhafi ''has taken a
back seat'' since the U.S. air raids on Tripoli and Benghazi in April
1985 and the Syrians later ''got their fingers burned'' over
allegations they were involved in the attempted bombing of an Israeli
airliner in London.
    ''The Iranians are more fanatically anti-Western than Syria or
Libya,'' Geldard says. ''They believe that a new age of Islamic
supremacy is dawning, with them in the forefront of this jihad, or
holy war.''
    In recent months, Iranian agents have attacked opponents of the
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's fundamentalist regime in Pakistan,
Britain, Austria, Greece and Turkey and assassinated several people.
    One Qom alumni is Fouad Ali Saleh, a Tunisian Shiite Moslem arrested
in France in March. He is believed to be the leader of an Iranian
cell in Paris controlled by Iran's hard-line intelligence minister,
Mohammed Rey-Shahri.
    Another is Mohammed Moujaher, 33, also arrested in Paris last March.
France's counterintelligence agency, the Directoire de la
Surveillance du Territoire, or DST, has identified him as an agent
controlled by officials in the Iranian embassy.
    The DST was able to crack at least two Iranian cells, made up mainly
of Tunisians, through the defection of a third Qom graduate, a
32-year-old Tunisian code-named Lotfi by French officials.
    He walked into the DST bureau in the Loire Valley city of Tours in
central France last February and spilled the beans on his comrades in
return for immunity and relocation in the United States.
    Lofti implicated Iranian terrorists in 1986 bombings in Paris, in
which 13 people were killed and 200 wounded and which had earlier
been blamed on Lebanese Christian radicals. He also fingered other
Tunisians recruited by Rey-Shahri's ministry.
    According to intelligence sources, Lotfi said he went to Iran out of
religious fervor after Khomeini's Islamic revolution toppled the late
Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1979.
    At the Hojjatian school in Qom, he received religious indoctrination
and terrorist training, Lofti said.
    Graduates of the school, particularly non-Iranian Shiites who are
less suspect, are sent abroad to spy on Iranian exiles and set up
sleeper cells activated by Tehran agents posted in Iranian embassies.
    Lotfi's interrogation led French security authorities to Wahid
Gordji, a translator at the Iranian embassy in Paris, in connection
with the 1986 bombings.
    Gordji, suspected of controlling Iran's underground network in
France, holed up in the embassy. That triggered a diplomatic war with
Tehran that led to a rupture in relations on July 17.
    Links were restored in December after the French government made a
deal with Iran to free French hostages held by Iranian-backed Shiites
in Lebanon in return for letting Gordji leave the country.
    The scale of Iran's web of terror has emerged from interviews with
specialists in terrorism, Iranian dissidents with contacts in Tehran
and Western intelligence sources.
    Paul Bremer, head of the State Department's counterterrorism agency,
said in a recent magazine interview: ''Iran is a state which supports
terrorism. It has supported terrorism in the past and continues to
support terrorism.''
    Iranian-backed Shiite terrorists have been active since 1979.
    Among their victims were more than 240 American servicemen
slaughtered in a suicide truck bombing of the U.S. Marine
headquarters in Beirut in 1983.
    Most of the 21 foreigners, including eight Americans missing in
Lebanon, are believed held by Iranian-backed Shiites. The hostage
crisis has dragged the United States, Britain, France, West Germany,
Ireland and other countries into the maelstrom of Iran's
revolutionary politics.
    Iran's terror network comprises at least two identifiable tiers, one
controlled by the Internal Security Ministry in Tehran and which
works through Iranian embassies abroad. The other is a loosely
structured alliance of Iranian-backed groups that include ''wild men
who often act on their own,'' Geldard says.
    Professor Paul Wilkinson, a specialist in terrorism at the
University of Aberdeen's International Affairs Department, says
Iranian-sponsored terrorism is expected to escalate ''as Tehran
becomes more desperate for victory in the war against Iraq.''
    The center of much of the escalating terrorism can be traced to
Shiite Moslem fundamentalists of Hezbollah, or Party of God, in
Lebanon, analysts say.
    Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the Bekaa Valley of east Lebanon
train Islamic zealots and funnel recruits from among Lebanon's
million-strong Shiite community to Iran for ideological and religious
indoctrination before being sent on missions abroad, Geldard says.
    Western intelligence sources and Iranian exiles with contacts inside
their homeland say that the more structured Iranian network is
masterminded by Rey-Shahri.
    The ministry's Eighth Branch, housed in a nondescript building in
Tehran's Pasdaran Street, controls Hezbollah and has direct control
of fundamentalist factions in Lebanon who hold the foreign hostages,
according to officials of the Mujahedeen Khalq, or People's Warriors,
the main Iranian opposition movement.
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NICOSIA, Cyprus: opposition movement.
    However, Geldard notes: ''The Iranian network has no fixed
structure. The whole Tehran leadership is involved in one way or
another.
    ''Whether there's one single mastermind is open to question. Some
Iranian leaders take a greater interest in this sort of thing than
others.
    ''But they all have their own death squads to kill off their own
particular enemies.''
    Geldard continues: ''The Iranians, like the Libyans, have been
assassinating their enemies, what Gadhafi calls Libya's 'stray dogs,'
since 1980. But it's only now that the strands of Iranian terrorism
have become more evident.''
    American intervention in the Gulf ''won't necessarily make all that
much difference in Khomeini's overall strategy,'' Geldard says. ''The
United States is seen as Iran's fundamental enemy because it's the
major Western power, the symbol of everything Tehran opposes.
    ''The Iranians are obsessive about destroying the West and all
things non-Islamic. There's no middle ground for them.''
    Hezbollah is now believed to have activists ''all over the West and
they act as Khomeini's hit men,'' Geldard says.
    Wilkinson says the main Iranian network is controlled by
Rey-Shahri's ministry and extends as far as Southeast Asia where it
recruits Moslem fanatics.
    Intelligence sources noted that this web breaks down into regional
networks, with the Middle East controlled from Iran's Beirut embassy,
Africa from Sierra Leone and western Europe from Geneva.
    The European net is controlled by Iran's permanent United Nations
mission in Geneva, the sources say.
    It runs agents in Paris, Bonn, Hamburg, Cologne, Vienna, Brussels
and Rome.
    Wilkinson says the second network groups pro-Iranian factions
abroad, such as Lebanon's Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, which holds U.S.
and French hostages, and the Iranian-backed al-Dawaa al Islami, or
Islamic Call, a movement of dissident Iraqi Shiites loyal to
Khomeini.
    These factions are controlled by religious or political leaders in
Tehran ''who are powerfully connected,'' Wilkinson says.
    The sources identified one as deputy Foreign Minister Ali Akbar
Mohtashemi. As Iran's ambassador in Damascus several years ago, he
was a key figure in organizing Hezbollah and other radical Shiites in
neighboring Lebanon.
    Mohtashemi, who lost a hand in a book bomb explosion in Damascus in
1983, has been linked by U.S. Intelligence to the suicide truck
bombings of the U.S. and French embassies in Beirut in October 1983.
    Coordination between these networks is patchy because ''these groups
are often driven by their own militancy with their own tactical
objectives'' that need not always dovetail with the grander designs
of Iranian leaders, Wilkinson notes.
    ''They have a lot of wild men,'' he says. ''These are the people we
really need to worry about, people who single-handedly hijack an
aircraft with little hope of success.
    ''But they've been indoctrinated that to die in a jihad means they
will go to paradise. That's not something fanciful as many Westerners
believe.
    ''These people really believe it and this attitude has to be
understood more in the West if we're to be able to combat this kind
of fanaticism.''
    Wilkinson stressed: ''This poses a big threat to secular states who
don't seem to understand the nature of the beast they're up against
in what I believe is going to be a very difficult period.
    ''We should have taken effective steps to curb this long before now.
Iran is not Libya.
    ''The Iranians have an intensity of revolutionary fervor that leaves
the Libyans at the starting block. And unlike Libya, Iran is a
regional power that's playing for high stakes.''
    The Iranians, as the beacon for Islamic fundamentalists, can call on
a vast manpower pool from Lebanon to the United States, from Britain
to West Germany and Turkey, where there are large Iranian
communities.
    ''It's impossible to say how many of these potential terrorists are
trained,'' Geldard notes. ''But they represent a large pool of
sympathizers who can provide support for terrorist groups.''
    Islamic fighters, fired by Iran's successes in the war with Iraq,
have intensified their attacks against Israel in south Lebanon.
    Aided by Iranian Revolutionary Guards in east Lebanon, they now pose
as big a threat as the Palestinians once did.
    Egypt recently rounded up hundreds of fundamentalists following
abortive attempts to assassinate government leaders and U.S.
diplomats.
    President Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981 by fundamentalists
after signing a peace treaty with Israel.
    Kuwait, which Iran accuses of aiding Iraq, has been hit by attacks
by pro-Iranian Shiites, including an abortive attempt to assassinate
the emir in 1985.
    Tunisia, Morocco, Turkey and even Yugoslavia have had to contend
with the rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism.
    Tunisia severed relations with Iran in March and expelled six
Iranian diplomats it accused of masterminding fundamentalist violence
aimed at overthrowing the government.
    Lebanese Shiites have been arrested in West Germany and Italy trying
to smuggle explosives for terrorist attacks.
    West German authorities obtained information pointing to a wide
network of Islamic operatives - many of them North African and
Lebanese - active in Western Europe from interrogating a Lebanese
Shiite named Mohammed Ali Hamadi.
    Hamadi, whose brother is Hezbollah's security chief in Beirut, was
arrested in January trying to smuggle 9.5 gallons of highly explosive
methyl nitrate hidden in wine bottles through Frankfurt airport.
    He is also wanted by U.S. authorities for the 1985 TWA hijacking in
which a Navy diver was killed and 38 Americans held hostage in
Beirut. Bonn has refused to extradite him.
    ---
    Ed Blanche, the AP's Middle East news editor, has written
extensively on terrorism in Europe and the Mideast.
    END ADV
    
 
 
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