Iran is pushing back against U.S. efforts to strengthen sanctions against Tehran in response to an alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington, demanding a public apology and unspecified monetary damages, an Iranian diplomat tells NBC News.

The Iranian demands were contained in a recent letter to the U.S., according to the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity. It calls on the U.S. to apologize publicly to both the Islamic republic and officials of the Al Quds Force for “material and moral damages” caused by “this baseless accusation,” which it argues violated "international rules and regulations."

The letter states that such deception has become "a permanent part of statecraft in the U.S.," according to the source, citing as an example the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which it says was “based on such false information.”

"After killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and U.S. soldiers and wasting billions of dollars from the U.S. citizens' pocket, the U.S. has no other way out except leaving Iraq," the diplomatic source said, recounting the argument made in the letter.

The diplomatic source would not provide details on when the letter was sent out, to whom it was addressed or who in the Iranian government wrote it. .

A State Department representative acknowledged Sunday that a letter had been received, but declined to discuss its contents.

The spokesperson added that the two sides are talking about the alleged plot, saying the U.S. "is still in contact with Iran regarding this case and continue to receive non-constructive responses."

The letter raises the stakes in a diplomatic standoff arising from the indictment last month of an Iranian American and an Iranian on terrorism and other charges related to the alleged plot.  

U.S. officials have cited the plot as the latest example of Iranian terrorism and evidence of its increasing extremism. At the same time, Iranian officials at all levels of the government, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, have excoriated the U.S.

"If U.S. officials have some delusions, (they must) know that any unsuitable act, whether political or security, will meet a resolute response from the Iranian nation," Khamenei warned two weeks ago on Iranian television, suggesting the allegations may be used by the Obama administration to justify war.

President Mahmud Ahmadinejad said similarly that "Iran is a civilized nation and doesn't need to resort to assassination."

 "The culture of terror belongs to you," he said, referring to the United States.

Iran also has demanded that a diplomat be allowed to visit the Iranian American suspect, Manssor Arbabsiar, in prison, a request that has yet to be honored.

Nueces County Sheriff's Office / AP file

Manssor Arbabsiar, 56, has pleaded not guilty to a five-count indictment alleging he plotted to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States.

On the U.S. side, President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder have all publicly discussed the significance of the alleged plot, with Clinton stating unequivocally that the U.S. is using the allegations as leverage to secure tougher sanctions, including new measures in the United Nations. In the past, Russia and China have resisted such sanctions.

Just last week, Treasury dispatched its undersecretary for terrorism finance to Europe, where he held meetings with senior government officials in London, Paris, Berlin, and Rome and shared details of the alleged plot.

Arbabsiar, a former used car salesman, was arrested on Sept. 29 in New York. He faces several charges including conspiracy to murder a foreign official, specifically Saudi ambassador Adel al-Jubeir; conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction; and conspiracy to commit an act of terrorism.

U.S. prosecutors alleged that Arbabsiar and the other suspect, Iranian Gholam Shakuri, planned to assassinate the Saudi ambassador by planting a bomb in a Washington restaurant. The plot reportedly was uncovered when a Drug Enforcement Administration informant told agency officials that Arbabsiar had attempted to contacted members of the Los Zetas Mexican drug cartel to try and obtain the explosives.

Shakuri is believed to still be in Iran. U.S. officials said he is a member of Iran's Quds Force, the covert operations arm of the country’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Arbabsiar will be back in Manhattan federal court on Dec. 21 for a status update hearing.

NBC News producer Catherine Chomiak contributed to this report.

Related coverage in Open Channel:

Sources: Would-be assassin linked elite Iran military unit to drug trade 

Last alleged Iran assassination plot on U.S. soil was a success 

Iranian military official implicated in plot and deadly Iraq attack

Leon Neal / AFP - Getty Images

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange stands in front of a backdrop featuring inverted banking company logos at a news conference Monday in London.

WikiLeaks, online publisher of leaked government and corporate documents, has temporarily suspended  publication, and founder Julian Assange said Monday that the controversial site will cease to exist at year’s end if it is unable to circumvent what it calls a “banking blockade” that is choking off its financial support.

The suspension of publication was announced on Sunday in a statement (.pdf) on the WikiLeaks website, which said that an “arbitrary and unlawful financial blockade” imposed on Dec. 7, 2010, by the U.S. and other governments “destroyed 95 percent of our revenue.” It blamed the funding cutoff on on its publication of thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables in November.

Sharp criticism of the publication by U.S. officials led numerous financial institutions – including Bank of America, Visa, MasterCard, eBay Inc unit PayPal and Western Union. – to block donations to the whistle-blowing organization.

The WikiLeaks statement said the publishing suspension would allow members of the secretive group to focus on fund-raising.

At a news conference Monday in London, Assange said that WikiLeaks only has enough cash on hand to cover the next few months.

 "If WikiLeaks does not find a way to remove this blockade we will simply not be able to continue by the turn of the new year," he said. "If we don't knock down the blockade we simply will not be able to continue."

The WikiLeaks statement said the organization is challenging the financial action in an antitrust complaint filed with the European Commission and has initiated “pre-litigation” action in the U.S.,U.K., Iceland, Denmark, Brussels and Australia.

Karim Kadim / AP

Two Iraqis watch a TV broadcast on the death of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi Friday in Baghdad, Iraq.

By Robert Windrem, NBC News' senior investigative producer

Some have written that Libya had a "Ceausescu moment" on Thursday, when former dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s body was paraded through the streets of Misrata. But while photos of the corpses of former Romanian Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were widely distributed after they had were executed on Christmas Day, 1989, their  bodies were quickly buried without any public display. 

Getty Images

Nicolae Ceausecu

But history provides several more-apt comparisons of deceased leaders being publicly dishonored, including:

Najibullah, the one-named, Soviet-backed dictator of Afghanistan, who was holed up at the U.N. compound in Kabul when Taliban soldiers came for him on Sept.  27, 1996. He had believed, incorrectly, that his presence at the U.N. compound would offer him protection and that the Taliban would not kill him. They did more than that.

The Taliban fighters first castrated him, then broke his fingers. Finally, they dragged him to death behind a truck through the streets of Kabul. After Taliban fighters were persuaded he was dead, his body was hung from a traffic light. His brother, who was with him at the compound, faced a less public fate. He was shot to death.

The body of Saddam Hussein, following his execution on Dec. 30, 2006, (which was recorded on a prison guard's cell phone), was taken from prison and brought to a "viewing party" at an Iraqi government official's home before being buried, according to some published accounts. There was no public parading of the body, but pieces of the hangman's rope were distributed as souvenirs to those present at the hanging.

AP

A poor choice of footwear tripped up former Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Said.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Said also met an ignominious and pubic end.  After King Faisal II and his family were assassinated at the royal palace on July 14, 1958, Said fled and went into hiding. But he was discovered by supporters of the coup led by two Iraqi colonels as he sought to flee the country disguised as a woman. His fatal mistake: He was wearing men's shoes.  He was shot dead and buried, but his body was disinterred, dragged through the streets of Baghdad, where it was hung up in a public plaza, burned, and mutilated.

The closest comparison to Gadhafi’s end may be that of Benito Mussolini, the Italian Fascist leader who was killed April 28, 1945. 

In the final days of World War II, Mussolini was trying to escape to Spain through Switzerland, where his Fascist ally, Francisco Franco of Spain, had a plane waiting for him.   

Topical Press Agency / Getty Images

Italian dictactor Benito Mussolini is shown wearing ministerial garb in a 1926 file photo.

Mussolini and an entourage, including his mistress, Carla Petacci, were moving along the shoreline of Lake Como toward the border when they were stopped by partisans who recognized "Il Duce" even though he was dressed in a German military uniform.

He was taken to a house where the commander of the Communist partisans told him he was there to rescue him. The partisans put the group on a truck, but after a short ride the commander ordered Mussolini to get off and he was shot twice in the chest and killed.  Shortly afterward, the others, mostly ministers from Mussolini's government, were executed by a firing squad.

The next morning, the bodies of Mussolini, Petacci and the others were trucked south in a moving van to a plaza in Milan, where partisans had recently been publicly executed. After being dumped at 3 a.m., word spread of their arrival. Soon, all were hung upside down on meat hooks from the roof of a gas station, where they were stoned by passing Italians. 

After he was buried in an unmarked grave, Mussolini's body was dug up by loyalists and moved around Italy until authorities recovered it months later.  But it was not buried in the Mussolini family plot for another 10 years. 

A powerful new computer virus that some are calling the "Son of Stuxnet" has been discovered, and researchers are concerned about its potential for attacking critical infrastructure computers around the world.

The mysterious Stuxnet worm -- perhaps the most powerful ever created -- managed to infiltrate computer systems in Iran and do damage to that nation's nuclear research program. The new worm, dubbed Duqu, has no such targeted purpose. But it shares so much code with the original Stuxnet that researchers at Symantec Corp. say it must either have been created by the same group that authored Stuxnet, or by a group that somehow managed to obtain Stuxnet's source code. Either way, Duqu's authors are brilliant, and mean business, said Symantec's Vikrum Thakur.

"There is a common trait among the (computers) being attacked," he said. "They involve industrial command and control systems."

Symantec speculates that Duqu is merely gathering intelligence as a precursor to a future industrial-strength attack on infrastructure computers.

“Duqu's purpose is to gather intelligence data and assets from entities, such as industrial control system manufacturers, in order to more easily conduct a future attack against another third party,” Symantec said in an announcement. “The attackers are looking for information such as design documents that could help them mount a future attack on an industrial control facility.”

At the moment, Duqu only creates a back door into infected systems, connecting them to a command computer somewhere in India. No marching orders have yet been given, Thakur said. But those who control the machines could do virtually anything they wanted, Thakur said.

"The kinds of consequences we could see ... if the computer is told download this file, it will download the file. If the file says shut off this service, and that had an effect on a power plant or a conveyor belt, it would do that," he said.

Duku is so similar to Stuxnet that F-Secure's antivirus program initially identified it as Stuxnet, said F-Secure's Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen.

"Duqu's kernel driver is so similar to Stuxnet's driver that our back-end systems actually thought it was Stuxnet," he said in a Tweet.

The mysterious Duku is designed to leave the back door open for precisely 36 days, and then self-destruct.

Symantec was first alerted to the existence of Duqu on Friday, when an unnamed security firm that had already worked with a Europe-based victim shared his research with the firm. Symantec researchers worked through the weekend trying to understand the virus, which they have since learned has infected industrial computers "around the globe," Thakur said.  He wouldn't identify the initial victim or say how many known victims there are.

Symantec’s analysis shows the Duqu may have been used to surveil computers around the world as far back as December 2010.

McAfee researchers Guilherme Venere and Peter Szor said in a blog post that they are pretty sure Duqu was written by Stuxnet's authors, in part because both programs utilize fraudulent "stolen" digital certificates which had been issued to companies in Taiwan. The use of what appear to be real digital certificate keys make both programs particularly deceptive. It also proves the programmers are clever enough to fool Certificate Authorities who issued the certificates.

"It is highly likely that this key, just like the previous two, known cases, was not really stolen from the actual companies, but instead directly generated in the name of such companies at a CA as part of a direct attack," the blog entry said.

Duqu’s attack pattern differs dramatically from Stuxnet, which was designed to attack a very specific computer system -- one that was involved in critical nuclear research inside Iran. The virus’ target led many to speculate that the virus was invented by Israeli programmers, or a cooperative effort of government-backed Israeli and American computer hackers. 

This "Son of Stuxnet," with its much wider focus, might call into question the origin of the virus, but Thakur wouldn't speculate on that.

"It's my personal belief that the guys who wrote Stuxnet knew exactly what they were doing, and if you thought they were good guys then, you probably don't have anything more to worry about now," he said. "But if you didn't, you probably have a lot to worry about."

Symantec isn't finished analyzing Duqu; it has several other samples of the virus from other victims which it is analyzing now.

"We wanted to put out the word so people know about the threat, and know what to watch out for, such as traffic to unknown servers or what files to look for so they can try to block them," he said. "In the coming days, we will look into information from other sources we have and see if we can get more information on what these guys are actually going for. The key thing missing here, unlike Stuxnet, is we don't know what they are looking for."

Follow Bob Sullivan on Facebook or Twitter. 

The Texas suspect charged in the alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States claimed in recorded conversations that his Iranian handlers were actively involved in the drug trade and could arrange for large shipments of opium to be delivered to a Mexican drug cartel, according to law enforcement sources familiar with the probe.

Reuters

Manssor Arbabsiar, in a 1996 Nueces County, Texas, Sheriff's Office photograph.

The criminal complaint against Manssor Arbabsiar, released by Justice Department officials this week, makes no mention of alleged drug smuggling by the Iranian Qods Force, an elite covert arm of the Iranian military whose top officials allegedly coordinated and funded the plot to assassinate Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir, according to U.S. officials.

But two U.S. law enforcement sources told NBC News that Arbabsiar, in recorded conversations with an undercover drug informant, said in coded language that the same individuals who were orchestrating the bombing plot against the ambassador were involved in drug dealing. He told the informant that his Iranian handlers could arrange to provide Los Zetas, a Mexican drug cartel, with “multi-ton” shipments of opium, the sources said.

The major drug deal never materialized, however, and the allegations about Qods Force drug smuggling were not pursued because U.S. officials wanted to focus on the attempt to assassinate al-Jubeir on U.S. soil, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The officials said Drug Enforcement Administration director Michele Leonhart was even asked not to appear at the press conference announcing the assassination plot charges -- a noticeable absence given that one of her agency’s informants uncovered the alleged plot. (President Barack Obama, however, later called and thanked Leonhart, said a law enforcement official.)

Arbabsiar’s assertions about  Qods Force drug dealing  inject another puzzling dimension into a case that has triggered a crisis in U.S.-Iranian relations. While accusing the Qods Force of  arming terrorist groups throughout the Middle East and orchestrating  attacks against American  troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. officials have never publicly accused the organization of involvement in international narcotics smuggling.

If these allegations are true, “They would be a game changer,” said Douglas Farah, a national security analyst who has closely studied Qods Force activities in Latin American and frequently testified before Congress on the issue.

The Qods Force has built up a significant presence in Latin America, especially in Venezuela, where it has forged close ties with the government of anti-U.S. President Hugo Chavez, said Farah. The organization has also long had extremely close ties with,  and directly funded, Hezbollah -- a Mideast terror group that has long been linked to the drug trade and money laundering. But there has been no clear evidence linking the Qods Force directly to narcotics smuggling or to dealing with the Mexican cartels, said Farah. 

Read more reporting by Michael Isikoff in 'The Isikoff Files'

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment about the alleged drug discussions, saying the department was not prepared to discuss any aspect of the case that was not in the criminal complaint released this week. “This is not a drug case,” the spokesman said. 

The man behind the alleged plot, Arbabsiar, was an Iranian-American used car salesman with a long history of financial troubles and brushes with the law, including criminal charges for  resisting arrest in 1987 and a 2001 arrest for driving without a proper license, according to a Texas law enforcement official. But he had never been accused of any narcotics charges, said the official. 

According to the criminal complaint released Tuesday, Arbabsiar first met in Mexico on May 24 of this year with a DEA informant who he believed was an operative of Los Zetas, one of Mexico’s most-violent drug cartels. The informant had previously been convicted of state-level drug charges, but avoided jail time and got the charges dismissed by agreeing to serve as a paid undercover informant for the DEA’s Houston field division, according to U.S. officials. 

A U.S. law enforcement official said Arbabsiar came to meet the informant by pure happenstance: While living in Corpus Christi, he had developed a friendship with the informant’s aunt, the official said. .

According to the complaint, Arbabsiar asked the informant the first time he met him if he was knowledgeable about explosives, explaining that he was interested in attacking an embassy of Saudi Arabia. The informant replied that he was familiar with C-4, a type of plastic explosives, it said.

Within a week, Arbabsiar flew overseas and returned to the U.S. in late June, holding additional meetings with the informant that were secretly tape-recorded on behalf of the government. In one of these conversations, on July 14, the informant told Arbabsiar that he could arrange to assassinate the Saudi ambassador, but that it would take four men and cost $1.5 million. Arbabsiar agreed, leading U.S. officials to describe the scheme this week as a “$1.5 million” plot. (A key part of the criminal charges against Arbabsiar relates to two later wire transfers totaling $100,000 to a New York bank.) 

It is not clear precisely when the discussions about Qods Force drug smuggling took place.  But one analyst said that such claims by Arbabsiar could fuel skepticism about some aspects of the U.S. charges. 

“This raises additional question marks about this case,” said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council and the author of an upcoming book on U.S.-Iranian relations. “The Qods Force is associated with some other really nasty things, but not this. This doesn’t fit.”

But a senior U.S. law enforcement official disputed that analysis, saying that U.S. officials have received intelligence reports for some time indicating that Qods Forces officers have been working with Venezuelans -- including some officials in that country's government -- who have been involved in shipping cocaine to West Africa. But so far, the official said, there has not been enough evidence to bring any criminal charges against Iranians who have been implicated. 

The Defense Department, which has promised to publish a reliable account of how it spends its money by 2017, has discovered that its financial ledgers are in worse shape than expected and that it will have to spend billions of dollars in the coming years to make its financial accounting credible, the Center for Public Integrity reported Thursday.

Win Mcnamee / Getty Images

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday. He was joined by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen.

The U.S. military has spent more than $6 billion to develop and deploy new financial systems, but the effort has been plagued by significant added overruns and delays, defense officials told the CPI, a nonprofit investigative news organization.

The Government Accountability Office said in a report last month that although the services can now fully track incoming appropriations, they still can't demonstrate that their funds are being spent as they should be.

Despite the difficulties in putting a new audit system in place, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, in opening remarks to the House Armed Services Committee, pledged Thursday to cut the implementation timeline in half "so that in 2014 we will have the ability to conduct a full budget audit."

"This focused approach prioritizes the information that we use in managing the department, and will give our financial managers the key tools they need to track spending, identify waste, and improve the way the Pentagon does business as soon as possible." 

But the effort to speed accountability will itself be costly. Pentagon officials were already budgeting $300 million a year for new accounting systems and other preparations for 2017. The CPI reported that several officials estimated that meeting the earlier deadline could cause that spending to rise beyond a billion dollars over the next three years.

The Pentagon’s bookkeeping has come under increased scrutiny as Congress and the Obama administration have vowed to reduce the federal deficit. The Pentagon requested $671 billion for fiscal 2012, but disputes over the deficit prevented Congress from passing the budget by the Sept. 30 deadline. The department could face substantial cutbacks if a special bipartisan "supercommittee" can’t agree on a formula for reducing the deficit.

As the Associated Press explained this week, the summer debt agreement between President Barack Obama and Congress mandates $350 billion in defense cuts over 10 years, and that figure could grow significantly depending on how the supercommittee slashes at least $1.2 trillion from future deficits. But if the panel stumbles, or Congress rejects its recommendations, the cut to defense could be even deeper as automatic reductions kick in, with half coming from defense.

Panetta testified Thursday that the budget cuts will force difficult choices.

"We have a strong military, but one that has been stressed by a decade of fighting, squeezed by rising personnel costs, and is in need of modernization given the focus of the past decade," he said, referring to fighting insurgencies and terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, international security issues have grown more complex, Panetta said, noting the United States in the future must be prepared to continue dealing with violent extremism as well as the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea, the prospects of cyber attackers who may target American infrastructure, and other threats.

"Our challenge is taking a force that has been involved in a decade of war and ensuring that we build the military we need to defend our country for the next decade even at a time of fiscal austerity," Panetta said in a statement prepared for a House Armed Services Committee hearing. Also testifying before the panel was Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, making his first congressional appearance since taking over as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Oct. 1.

NBC News Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

The Washington Post / Washington Post via Getty Images

Daoud Salahuddin, aka David Belfield,in 2006.

By Robert Windrem, NBC News investigative producer

U.S. Iran watchers continue to be puzzled by the alleged assassination plot against the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., wondering why Tehran would want to carry out an attack on the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C., and risk consequences that could include war.

Reuters

Manssor Arbabsiar is shown in a 1996 Nueces County, Texas, Sheriff's Office photograph.

Intelligence and security officials say that the case laid out Monday by the Justice Department, which alleges that three senior Iranian officials directed former car dealer Manssor Arbabsiar to arrange the killing of Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir, is intriguing and reads like a spy novel. But they also note that in spite of years of bad relations, Iran’s security forces haven’t sought to carry out such an attack on U.S. soil since 1980.

And that attack, in July of that year, was quite different than what the Justice Department laid out on Tuesday.

It occurred midway into the Iran hostage crisis, and a little more than a year after Iran’s clerics had taken over in Tehran.  Tensions were high in both capitals as round after round of failed negotiations, punctuated by a failed rescue attempt, made for daily headlines. 

Ali Akbar Tabatabai had been the press attache for the Iranian Embassy in Washington under the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and was well known in the city, having become a popular organizer of embassy parties and somewhat of a celebrity himself. Once the shah fell, Tabatabai used his press contacts in the U.S. and elsewhere to push anti-Ayatollah Khomenei articles. Moreover, he was holding meetings of a counterrevolutionary group at his home in Bethesda.

Iran’s new Islamic government – or at least elements of it -- wanted him eliminated, but getting to Tabatabai was no easy matter.  The new government had few agents in the United States and U.S. security agencies were focused on making certain that no new ones entered the country.

One Iranian-American who drew attention from the FBI and other agencies was a Washington rug dealer, Bahram Nahidian.  He and his Connecticut Avenue shop were regular targets of surveillance and agents soon became interested in Nahidian’s ties to a group of young African-Americans. 

The agency’s interest had been piqued, ironically, on the very day U.S. embassy staff had been seized in Tehran -- Nov. 4, 1979.  On that day, Nahidian was arrested at the Statue of Liberty with five other men who climbed the statue, unfurled a banner bearing anti-shah slogans and then chained themselves to the railing and began chanting.

Among the five was 29-year-old Daoud Salahuddin, formerly known as David Belfield. Belfield was a North Carolina native who grew up on Long Island in a Baptist family.  He later claimed to have been radicalized first by watching television reports on the beatings of civil rights workers in Alabama.

By the late 1970s, he had converted to Islam and moved in with Nahidian at his home in Washington. Law enforcement officials later said that he would regularly recruit others in the Washington area to join him at Nahidian’s shop.  Among the places where he recruited Americans was the D.C. prison in Lorton, Md., where he would “bring the message of Islam to black inmates."

For a short time, he also worked at an Iranian diplomatic office in Washington as a security guard.

Then, on July 22, according to multiple accounts -- including his own -- Salahuddin, dressed in a U.S. Postal Service uniform, rang the front doorbell at Tabatabai’s Bethseda, Md., home.  When an associate of Tabatabai opened the door, Salahuddin told him he had a special delivery package for Tabatabai that required a signature. When his target appeared at the door, Salahuddin shot him three times in the abdomen. Tabatabai died 45 minutes later.

With apparent help from the Iranians, Salahuddin made his way through Canada and across Europe, finally landing in Tehran nine days later to a hero’s welcome.  Since then, he has lived a varied life in Iran, teaching English, fighting alongside the Mujahedin in Afghanistan, editing an English language website and, most famously, acting in one of Iran’s most honored motion pictures, “Kandahar.”

In the film, Salahuddin plays an American political activist turned medic in Afghanistan.  He aids an American woman who has returned to Afghanistan to rescue her sister, learning as she moves through refugee camps and cities about the damage wrought by the Taliban. 

In the last decade, there have been reports that he has been willing to return for trial or that he is willing to serve as a mediator between the U.S. and Iran. But Salahuddin, now 61, has for the most part remained in Iran. He did travel to Istanbul in 1995 for an ABC News interview in which he admitted killing Tabatabai, calling it an “act of war.”   He also said he had met with Robert Levinson, the former FBI agent who disappeared in Iran in 2007. 

As for Nahidian, he later denied that Salahuddin had lived at his home or that he had converted him to Islam. He also denied any role in Tabatabai’s death, but told the Washington Post that he was “very happy this happened. (Tabatabai) is a man who says ‘why doesn't the U.S. bomb all of Iran.’ He wants Iran to be destroyed. … I have no fear of any of this. … The maximum they can take is my life, and I am more than happy to do that for the cause of Islam.”

Then NBC News reporter Brian Ross confronted Nahidian in a parking lot in November 1980, an encounter that was captured in this Nightly News story produced by the author of this post.

Nahidian remains active in Washington area mosques and last year appeared at a rally in Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Park, where he echoed the Iranian line that the Sept. 11 terror attacks were part of a U.S. conspiracy to justify the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan “and now Pakistan.” “They plot and they scheme and no doubt God is plotting and scheming against them too,” he told the crowd.

There are, of course, substantial differences between the plot alleged this week by the Justice Department and what took place in Bethesda in 1980 although both did involve assassination.  The key difference is that, in 1980, it succeeded.  

U.S. officials have released new information accusing three high level Iranian Revolutionary Guard officials of overseeing an alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador. One of them, a deputy commander in the Iranian Qods Force, had previously been accused of plotting a highly sophisticated attack that killed five U.S. soldiers in Iraq, according to U.S. government officials and documents made public Tuesday afternoon.

The Qods Force official who coordinated the alleged plot was identified by the Treasury Department as Abdul-Reza Shahlai, the cousin of the suspect, Manssor Arbabsiar. Arababsiar was accused by U.S. law enforcement officials of seeking to carry out the plot to kill Saudi Ambassador Abdul al-Jubeir in Washington, D.C. and carry out other terrorist attacks in the U.S.

Three years ago, Shahlai -- the key Iranian official coordinating the attack -- was designated as a terrorist by the Treasury Department for fomenting violence in Iraq, including working with the anti-U.S. Mahdi Army to carry out a mass attack on U.S. soldiers in Iraq, according to Treasury documents.

In particular, he was accused of planning a Jan. 20, 2007, attack by Mahdi Army militia members aimed at U.S. soldiers in Karbala, south of Baghdad. In that attack, up to a dozen fighters with false IDs disguised themselves as an American security team to penetrate the provincial government building in Karbala and open fire. One U.S. soldier was killed in the initial attack and four others were abducted and found shot to death soon after.

Shahlai was not identified by name in the criminal complaint released by the Justice Department, referred to only as a "cousin" of the suspect, a high-ranking official in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

But on Tuesday the Treasury Department identified him and two other senior Iranian Qods Force officers as being involved in both the earlier attack and the plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador on U.S. soil and imposed economic sanctions against them. The Treasury Department move significantly ratchets up the pressure against Tehran.

The senior Qods Force officers were identified as Maj. Gen. Qasem Solemami and Halem Abdollahi.

Solemami oversaw the Iranian officers involved in the plot, according to the Treasury announcement. Soleimani has twice been previously blacklisted by the department, most recently for allegedly overseeing Qods Forces in involved in human rights abuses against protesters in Syria.

Abdollahi allegedly coordinated aspects of the operation aimed at the Saudi ambassador, according to the announcement.

The Qods Force, an arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, is described by Treasury as the Iranian government's primary foreign action arm for support of terrorist organizations and extremist groups around the world. It is accused of providing training, logistical assistance and material and financial support to the Taliban, Lebanese Hezbollah and Hamas, among others. Its officers have also supported attacks against U.S. and allied troops and diplomatic missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Treasury announcement.

In a strongly worded letter to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon obtained by NBC News, Iran’s Ambassador to the U.N., Mohammad Khazaee, said Iran “strongly and categorically rejects these fabricated and baseless allegations.”

Accusing the U.S. of “warmongering,” Khazaee charged that U.S. authorities were carrying out an “evil plot in line with their anti-Iranian policy to divert attention from the current economic and social problems at home and the popular revolutions and protests against United States’ long supported dictatorial regimes abroad.”

Earlier Tuesday, Iran rejected U.S. claims that Tehran was involved in a plot to assassinate al-Jubeir.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast called the claims a "prefabricated scenario."

"These old-fashioned behaviors are based on the long-standing hostile American-Zionist policies and are ridiculous show in line with scenarios to provoke division," the semiofficial Fars news agency quoted Mehmanparast as saying.

Oregon Department of Geology and Minerals

Photo shows volcanic tuff containing erionite in Oregon.

By Myron Levin, FairWarning.org

Mesothelioma, an exceedingly rare and lethal form of cancer, was once thought to be caused only by inhaling asbestos fibers.

Then in the late 1970s, when astonishing rates of the disease were reported among villagers in central Turkey, studies determined that a different fibrous mineral was the culprit. Erionite was abundant in native soil and stone, and so easy to work with that villagers had used it to build homes.

In the most devastated communities, known locally as “cancer villages,” mesothelioma rates were off the charts--responsible for 40 percent to 50 percent of all deaths. Animal studies showed erionite to be 100 to 800 times more carcinogenic than asbestos and, according to a scientific paper, “almost certainly the most toxic naturally occurring fibrous mineral known.”

In the U.S., medical journals and news stories presented the Turkish epidemic as a gruesome, but distant, catastrophe. They largely omitted a key fact: Erionite deposits are present scores of sites in at least a dozen western U.S. states.

Interviews and documents from the 1980s show there was a flicker of interest in assessing the risks in the U.S., but researchers and officials lost interest and moved on to other things.

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The result is that, after three decades, erionite remains a word most Americans—and many environmental officials--have never heard. Amid an expansion of roads, pipelines, power lines, wind and solar farms and recreation sites in remote areas of the West, erionite is unregulated, and federal agencies have failed to alert land-use officials, developers and residents of affected areas so that they might take precautions on their own.

Uneasy about the long silence, some government officials and scientists  are trying to fashion a federal response. Toward that end, a meeting planned next week at the National Institutes of Health, will bring together representatives of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, and the U.S. Geological Survey, to discuss potential risks from erionite and other hazardous minerals.

“We need to be cautious because there’s clear evidence of disease” from mineral fibers, said Dr. Aubrey Miller, a senior medical advisor at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences who will chair the meeting.

“At a minimum, we can begin to start to educate the public and policymakers,” he told FairWarning. “I certainly don’t want to count bodies later.”

Driving the renewed interest is fear of repeating past government failures to promptly inform the public of potential hazards.

One case involved Libby, Montana, where asbestos contamination from a mine near the town was blamed for scores of deaths and illnesses among workers and residents. Vermiculite ore tainted by asbestos and mined from about 1920 to 1990 was given to unwary residents for use as insulation and in other building projects. When the EPA arrived on the scene in 1999, it came under scathing criticism for failing to act earlier to inform the community and launch a cleanup.

Another was the disclosure that road crews in North Dakota, heedless of the danger, had used erionite-tainted gravel to cover hundreds of miles of unpaved roads in the western part of the state, including school bus routes, along with parking lots and recreation sites.

Erionite is found where volcanic ash and rock have been weathered by alkaline water, Like asbestos, it is harmless until it is disturbed, and the microscopic, needle-like fibers become airborne. And like asbestos, greater and more frequent exposure generally means higher risk.

No proof has emerged of erionite-related illnesses in North Dakota or other western states, but experts say that is less than reassuring. Mesothelioma usually takes 30 to 50 years to develop, is sometimes mistaken for other cancers, and when identified often is automatically assumed to be asbestos-related.

In Mexico, a mesothelioma cluster has been reported in a rural area near the border of Zacatecas and Jalisco states. Medical reports say victims had no known exposure to asbestos, but lived on a plain rich in zeolites, the mineral family that includes erionite.

When Turkish researchers in the 1970s found soaring rates of mesothelioma in the Cappadocia region, they linked it to villagers inhaling dust while farming potatoes and scallions. They soon discovered that residents were also being exposed inside their homes built with erionite-containing stones.

Research later uncovered a genetic factor. People in the hardest-hit villages had long been shunned by horrified outsiders, leading to inbreeding and magnifying the risk for those with a genetic predisposition to the harmful effects.

Documents reflect a brief interest in the health implications for the American West.

In an area of north central Nevada where erionite was present in road dust, researchers from the University of Utah examined chest radiographs from a local hospital, but turned up nothing unusual. But they also published a case report describing a local road construction worker with respiratory disease whose lung biopsy showed fibrous particles “consistent with erionite” An investigation of mesothelioma “in the Intermountain region and exposure relationships would be useful,” they wrote.

But according to two of the researchers, Dr. William Rom, currently director of the pulmonary division at the New York University School of Medicine, and Dr. Kenneth Casey, now at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, their request for a grant from the Institutes of Health was turned down.

About the same time, with the Defense Department proposing to build a network of “racetracks” to shuttle nuclear MX missiles over a vast area of the Great Basin, opponents seized on the problem of erionite dust. The plan was abandoned, and interest in erionite faded, too.

It was revived by chance after an official from the U.S. Geological Survey gave a talk at the spring banquet of the University of North Dakota geology department in 2005. He spoke of the need for geologists to be aware of naturally occurring hazards, mentioning erionite. An assistant professor named Nels Forsman piped up: “Hey, we’ve got some of that right here in North Dakota.”

In the mid-1980s, Forsman, had done a field study in the Killdeer Mountains of western North Dakota for the state geological survey. His 1986 report noted the presence of erionite, but he knew nothing of the events in Turkey and didn’t give it much thought.

“Nobody in our department had heard anything about it” until the banquet, Forsman told FairWarning.

But Forsman then alerted the geological survey, which contacted the state health department, which in turn brought in the EPA. Their investigation launched in 2006 revealed that erionite-containing gravel from pits in western North Dakota had been spread over some 300 miles of unpaved roads.

Air sampling along the gravel roadways and in vehicles, including inside school buses, revealed erionite levels similar to those in some stricken Turkish villages, though at lower concentrations than the most devastated communities. A preliminary health study that included 15 people thought to have high exposure to road gravel found two with pleural plaques, or lung scarring, consistent with inhalation of mineral fibers.

Michele Carbone

Dr. Michele Carbone, director of the University of Hawaii Cancer Center.

Though the erionite situation quickly erupted into a major story in North Dakota, it drew virtually no media attention outside the state. So complete was the blackout that last December, when Dr. Michele Carbone, a prominent mesothelioma researcher, briefed lung specialists at a national medical meeting in Chicago, it was the first they had heard of it, according to some who attended.

In response to the discovery, the North Dakota Department of Transportation has banned the use of erionite-containing gravel on state roads. But the western part of the state is in the midst of a gigantic oil boom, bringing a massive increase in truck traffic and road dust that residents say clouds visibility and may be harming crops and human health. Last month the state industrial commission and two of the most affected counties authorized a study of the best ways to reduce road dust.

Some agencies in other states are taking safety measures, though the efforts have been isolated and piecemeal.

In eastern Oregon, which has large erionite beds, the state transportation department is conducting a study. The idea is to avoid being “blissfully ignorant” of the locations of erionite or other naturally occurring hazards in future construction and maintenance work, said Matthew Mabey, a research engineer with the Oregon Department of Transportation.

Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries

Erionite in rock formations, Rome, Oregon.

In Montana, where road building crews in the 1960s ripped the top off an erionite-bearing mountain and spread the fill along more than three miles of state highway 323, soil samples have shown erionite levels as high as 20 percent.   Highway workers have been directed to use protective suits and respirators when their work involves land disturbance, such as clearing ditches and mowing vegetation.

Erionite also occurs in rocky outcrops in parts of the Custer National Forest in southeastern Montana and western South Dakota. Forest Service officials have adopted dust control measures, including wetting down helicopter landing spots when fighting wild fires.

In a joint report, Custer National Forest and Montana officials cited the need for a federal policy to reduce risks from erionite and naturally occurring asbestos.

Mining is another activity without any rules on erionite exposure. No erionite has been mined in the U.S. for about 30 years, but it is sometimes mixed in with other types of zeolites that are produced at a few mines in the West. According to an EPA report in1987, a producer contacted by the agency stated that its zeolite products “can contain 10 to 30 percent erionite.”

Most zeolites produced today are of two varieties, chabazite and clinoptilolite. With their ability to trap and filter contaminants, they have been used to purify water and to treat radioactive and other hazardous wastes.

From its Mud Hills mine in the Mojave Desert in California, Steelhead Specialty Minerals has produced clinoptilolite for cleanup of the tsunami-stricken Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, said its president Wallace McGregor.

Along with others in the industry, McGregor said current operators are well aware of erionite, and take pains to avoid it. But “I wouldn’t say there isn’t a trace,” he added. It’s “maybe an overstatement that there are not traces of a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, in a zeolite deposit.”

Carbone, who will be among those presenting at the meeting at the Institutes of Health, has called for action to prevent and detect mesothelioma cases in North Dakota and other erionite-rich areas.

Mesothelioma is “a cancer that in most cases can be prevented,” he said in an interview. “We really have the possibility to do something…to prevent cancer in future generations.”

FairWarning is a nonprofit, online investigative news organization focused on public health and safety issues.

By Jim Gold, msnbc.com reporter

A health issue as old as jet air travel took off anew this week with Boeing Co. settling a lawsuit brought by a former American Airlines flight attendant.

Terry Williams, a 42-year-old mother of two, accused the company of faulty airplane design that left her suffering disabling health woes after breathing toxic jet oil fumes that entered the cabin of an American Airlines MD-80’s air conditioning system.

The fact that oil fumes, often carrying a "dirty socks" odor, have leaked into cockpits and cabins on rare occasions ever since jet airplane designers decided to use systems that draw — or "bleed" -- air from jet engines is not in dispute.

As early as 1953, Boeing issued a "Decontamination Program" report based on a study of bleed air in B-52 flights.

"The possible toxic effect of the contamination is still unknown," noted  the report, which was turned over to Williams' legal team during the discovery process. "As a result, except for specific instances, the crew used 100% oxygen throughout all flights and made their observations by removing their masks for a moment or two."

It also said the odor "permeates the nasal passages of the men, their clothing, oxygen masks, cabin lining, etc., and lingers for a substantial period of time after exposure occurs."

Despite industry acknowledgement that contaminated air occasionally breaches airliner cabins when seals fail, they have long asserted publicly that "cabin air is safe," saying such exposures are rare and would not produce long term health effects.

Pilots, flight attendants and even some passengers who claim the fumes have left them with long-term ailments like tremors, memory loss, dizziness, disorientation,  headaches and fatigue have had tough times proving their cases. And some crew members who have lost their jobs, allegedly due to ailments from fumes, claim the airline industry and many regulators have covered up the issue and understated the severity of the problem.

Click here to read the full story about Wednesday’s settlement and the long-running debate over the safety of jetliner cabin air.