Robert Fisk, the SAS and Iran

Interesting comments from Robert Fisk on the Iranian crisis:

The Iranian security services are
convinced that the British security services are trying to provoke the
Arabs of Iran’s Khuzestan province to rise up against the Islamic
Republic. Bombs have exploded there, one of them killing a truck-load
of Revolutionary Guards, and Tehran blamed MI5. Outrageous, they said.
Inexcusable.

The Brits made no comment, even when the Iranians hanged a man
accused of the killings from a crane; he had, they said, been working
for London.

Are the SAS in south-western Iran, just as the British claim the
Iranians are in south-eastern Iraq, harassing the boys in Basra with
new-fangled bombs? (Independent)

What gives these comments a certain piquancy is the fact that Fisk is
the man who exposed the presence of the SAS in Northern Ireland in the mid-1970s.

In an article for the Daily Ireland last year, I revealed the existence of British Government files from 1974 acknowledging the truth of Fisk’s allegations at that time. The file also showed that the SAS troops in the North had been seconded to a covert operations grouping called the Special Reconnaissance Unit.

The SRU was the precursor of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment formed in 2005. It has been reported that the two undercover British soldiers captured by police in Basra in September that year were members of the SRR.

In October 2005, Jamestown analyst Mahan Abedin made some interesting claims about British covert operations in south-western Iran:

According to journalistic sources in Tehran, over the past 16 months several British military intelligence operations have been thwarted by the IRGC, either right on the border with Iraq or inside the extreme eastern regions of Khuzestan.

In one case, it is claimed, the IRGC even detained two British soldiers (of Gujarati origin) who were presumed to be involved in a Force Research Unit (FRU) operation in Khuzestan. The IRGC wanted to publicly humiliate them, but was overruled by senior officials, who delivered the captured soldiers to the British
Embassy in Tehran. (Asia Times)

The FRU was the agent-handling operation implicated in the murder of Pat Finucane. In its new guise as the Joint Support Group, it may now be a part of the SRR.

All these British covert units are well-known to be operating in Iraq. There seems little doubt that the Americans are running covert operations across the border. So are the British involved?

At the moment all we have are allegations from the Iranians themselves, allegations which are however plausible, and being picked up by some very credible journalists. Not enough information for a definitive conclusion, perhaps, but equally too much to discount.