When Tehran Attacks

On Tuesday, the U.S. government reported that it had foiled an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S., along with planned bomb attacks against the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington and possibly in Buenos Aires.

The plotters are linked to the shadowy Qods Force, a special branch of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps or Pasdaran. According to an April 2010 U.S. Department of Defense report, “the Iranian regime uses the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF) to clandestinely exert military, political, and economic power to advance Iranian national interests abroad. IRGC-QF global activities include: gathering tactical intelligence; conducting covert diplomacy; providing training, arms and financial support to surrogate groups and terrorist organizations; and facilitating some of Iran's provision of humanitarian and economic support to Islamic causes.”

Though the Pentagon clearly sees the Qods Force as an integral part of the Iranian regime, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder yesterday suggested that “factions of the Iranian government” had directed the plot. U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein said in a statement that “we must learn how high in the Iranian government this alleged conspiracy reaches.” She is right to be prudent, but the Qods Force are no more independent in their actions than the Navy SEALs would be in theirs.

To doubt the Iranian regime's responsibility in the thwarted attack is to misunderstand its nature, or to somehow fall prey to the delusion that when an Iranian connection appears behind a terror plot, its perpetrators have gone rogue or are acting on behalf of some dark faction to undermine a nonexistent “moderate” camp within the regime. Of course, the Qods Force is rogue, but no more so than the regime that directs its actions. Moreover, all members of the Iranian government are fundamentalists. The differences between them are tactical, and the only question about the thwarted plot in Washington is why the regime chose to escalate matters now—not whether the regime was behind it.

Though details of the plot are still scarce, parallels with previous regime-sanctioned murders are emerging. As in the past, Tehran appears to have drafted Iranians living in the destination country, using as leverage their family connections or friendships forged during the Iran-Iraq war, the early years of the Islamic Revolution or service in the Pasdaran. The Qods Force supplies help, training, logistics and financing. And the orders come from the center of the regime itself.

As Roya Hakakian brilliantly documents in her book “Assassins of the Turquoise Palace” (Grove Press, 2011), Tehran's 1992 attack on the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin originated in the highest echelons of Iran's regime. The names of murdered Iranian dissidents over the years have turned up on a list drawn by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, top government officials made the decisions to go after them, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei approved their decisions, and the Pasdaran worked out the logistics of each operation.

Such massacres go back almost 20 years, to an era of Iranian politics when pragmatism supposedly supplanted radicalism under the presidency of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Yet, behind this smokescreen of moderation, state-sanctioned murderers went on a rampage. The same Qods Force allegedly involved in the Washington plot also appear to have been behind two terror attacks in Buenos Aires: one against the Israeli embassy in 1992 and one against a Jewish cultural center in 1994, which left more than a hundred people dead. Argentina has indicted a handful of Iranian officials for the 1994 bombings, including current Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi, who was commanding officer of the Qods Force in 1994; then-President Rafsanjani; former Revolutionary Guards Commander and later presidential candidate Mohsen Rezai; and Ali Fallahian, who was minister of intelligence in 1994.

This time is no different. Iranian agents couldn't have carried out such an operation unless core members of Iran's leadership, likely including Khamenei himself, had given them their blessing. Every member of the Pasdaran is bound by oath to the Supreme Leader. That oath is not limited to personal loyalty. Rather, it is a solemn commitment to uphold the foundational religious doctrine of the Islamic Republic, according to which the Supreme Leader is God's shadow on earth and the final interpreter of Islamic justice. When the Qods Force carries out operations like the U.S. government reported this week, it is to fulfill its duties under that oath, not to violate it.

We will learn more of this story in the days and weeks ahead. But one thing should be clear already: Responsibility lies at the doorsteps of Iran's regime and its leaders. They should be made to pay a heavy price for their murderous intent.

Mr. Ottolenghi is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the author of “Pasdaran: Inside Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards' Corps” (FDD Press, 2011).