At the same time, Alterman and other analysts predicted that officials in Riyadh would stop short of severing diplomatic relations with Tehran.
“The Saudi instinct is never to cut people completely off,” Alterman said. “Will there be repercussions? Yes. But Saudi Arabia is not going to close the door on rapprochement in the future.”
Memories of a past plot
The charges announced by the Justice Department on Tuesday revived memories of another plot to kill Saudi diplomats two decades ago.
In 1990, three Saudi diplomats posted to Thailand were gunned down in Bangkok on the same day. A year earlier, a Saudi business executive in Bangkok was also shot to death.
A Shiite group in Beirut with links to Iran asserted responsibility for the businessman’s slaying. Some U.S. and Thai officials have said that the killing of the diplomats was the result of a Saudi feud with Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that draws support from Iran.
Iran was accused of orchestrating a series of terrorist attacks against diplomatic and political targets in the ensuing decade, including the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires and a 1996 truck bombing in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, that killed 17 U.S. troops at the Khobar Towers housing complex.
In recent years, however, Iran has looked to traditional battlefields, supplying weapons and explosives to insurgents fighting U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In that regard, if the allegations are true, the contours of an amateurishly brazen plot to kill the Saudi ambassador with a bomb at a restaurant in Washington mark a change in tactics for Iran, analysts said.
“It is sort of out of keeping with normal standards of Iranian subtlety,” said Simon Henderson, a Saudi specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Sly reported from Beirut.
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