State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Friday the warnings have been conveyed publicly as well as through the private, informal channels frequently used by Washington to offer its views to Iranian leaders. Iran and the United States have no formal diplomatic ties.
Also Friday, the U.S. military confirmed that it has gradually increased the number of troops based in Kuwait to 15,000, including two combat brigades, but denied that their presence was part of any military plan to engage Iran.
Navy Capt. John Kirby, a Defense Department spokesman, said the increase was temporary and related to the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq last month. He declined to say how long the troops would remain in Kuwait and played down the significance of their presence.
“I want to disabuse everybody of the notion that there’s some kind of quiet increase going on, specifically aimed at some sort of contingency planning for any one country in that part of the world,” he told reporters at the Pentagon.
At the same time, Kirby acknowledged that “Iran is certainly a factor in our discussions with our allies and in our thinking about the future of the Middle East — there’s no question about it — thanks to their destabilizing behavior.”
Ahmadi-Roshan’s slaying on Monday by a bomb-wielding motorcyclist was the fourth hit in two years on an Iranian scientist with ties to Iran’s nuclear program. Security analysts have linked the attacks to a covert program that seeks to disrupt Iran’s nuclear efforts by all means short of open warfare. Iran also has witnessed a series of cyberattacks on its nuclear facilities as well as mysterious explosions at military research sites.
In the wake of the killing, some Iranian officials accused the IAEA of complicity in the attacks, saying the U.N. watchdog leaked the names of nuclear scientists to Israel so that Israel could covertly plan to kill them. The Tehran Emrouz newspaper reported Thursday that Ahmadi-Roshan had met with IAEA inspectors about his research.
“Some of the agency’s inspectors are Israeli spies, and they have given the names of our scientists to terrorist groups,” lawmaker Mohammad Karami-Rad told the semiofficial Mehr News Agency on Friday.
Current and former IAEA officials dismissed the allegation as absurd.
Warrick reported from Washington. Staff writers Craig Whitlock and Karen DeYoung and special correspondent Ramtin Rastin in Tehran contributed to this report.
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