Iran’s Top Terrorist Emerges From the Shadows
By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

When Iran’s Brigadier Gen. Qassem Suleimani was leaving on a foreign mission a few years ago, his daughters begged him to bring back designer jeans.

It must have been a dispiriting request for Iran’s terrorist chief, head of the Quds Force, or The Jerusalem Brigade, Iran’s supersecret overseas intelligence and sabotage unit.

As an elite of the elite Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Suleimani’s daughters would be expected to be role models for Iran’s brand of militant Shiite Islam, right down to their Calvins.

Under the mullahs’ puritanical dress code, jeans are verboten, though commonly worn under the head-to-toe black cloaks women have to wear until they’re safely indoors.

“It’s kind of ironic, isn’t it?” says a longtime close observer of Iran, chuckling. “It shows he has the ordinary pressures of a normal dad.”

But otherwise, the general is anything but normal.

If Washington ever attacks Iran’s nuclear facilities, it will fall to Suleimani to coordinate terrorist retaliation against U.S. targets abroad, from Beirut to Buenos Aires.

The Quds Force is the tip of the spear.

Suleimani reports directly to Iran’s supreme leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, analysts say.

“He is an extremely important and influential guy,” says Robert Grenier, a former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.

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