How
False Stories of Iran Arming the Houthis Were Used to Justify War
in Yemen

By
Gareth Porter

January
02, 2015 “Information
Clearing House”
– “Truth
Out”
– Peace talks between the Saudi-supported government of Yemen and
the Houthi rebels ended in late December without any agreement to
end the bombing campaign started by Saudi Arabia and its Gulf
allies with US support last March. The rationale for the Saudi-led
war on Houthis in Yemen has been that the Houthis are merely
proxies of Iran, and the main alleged evidence for that conclusion
is that Iran has been arming the Houthis for years.

The
allegation of Iranian arms shipments to the Houthis – an
allegation that has often been mentioned in press coverage of the
conflict but never proven – was reinforced by a
report released last June by a panel of experts created
by the UN Security Council: The report concluded that Iran had
been shipping arms to the Houthi rebels in Yemen by sea since at
least 2009. But an investigation of the two main allegations of
such arms shipments made by the Yemeni government and cited by the
expert panel shows that they were both crudely constructed ruses.

Diplomatic
cables released by WikiLeaks reveal that the story of the arms
onboard the ship had been concocted by the government.

The
government of the Republic of Yemen, then dominated by President
Ali Abdullah Saleh, claimed that it had seized a vessel named
Mahan 1 in Yemeni territorial waters on October 25, 2009, with a
crew of five Iranians, and that it had found weapons onboard the
ship. The UN expert panel report repeated the official story that
authorities had confiscated the weapons and that the First
Instance Court of Sana’a had convicted the crew of the Mahan 1 of
smuggling arms from Iran to Yemen.

But
diplomatic cables from the US Embassy in Yemen released by
WikiLeaks in 2010 reveal that, although the ship and crew were
indeed Iranian, the story of the arms onboard the ship had been
concocted by the government. On October 27, 2009, the US
Embassy sent
a cable to the State Department noting that the Embassy
of Yemen in Washington had issued a press statement announcing the
seizure of a “foreign vessel carrying a quantity of arms and
other goods….” But
another cable dated November 11, 2009, reported that the
government had “failed to substantiate its extravagant public
claims that an Iranian ship seized off its coast on October 25 was
carrying military trainers, weapons and explosives destined for
the Houthis.”

Furthermore,
the cable continued, “sensitive reporting” – an obvious
reference to US intelligence reports on the issue – “suggests
that the ship was carrying no weapons at all.”

A follow-up
Embassy cable five days later reported that the
government had already begun to revise its story in light of the
US knowledge that no arms had been found on board. “The ship
was apparently empty when it was seized,” according to the
cable. “However, echoing a claim by Yemen Ambassador al-Hajj,
FM [Foreign Minister] Qaairbi told Pol Chief [chief of the US
Embassy’s political section] on 11/15 the fact that the ship was
empty indicated the arms had already been delivered.”

President
Saleh had hoped to use the Mahan 1 ruse to get the political
support of the US for a war to defeat the Houthis.

President
Saleh had hoped to use the Mahan 1 ruse to get the political
support of the US for a war to defeat the Houthis, which he was
calling “Operation Scorched Earth.” But as
a December 2009 cable noted, it was well known among Yemeni
political observers that the Houthis were awash in modern arms and
could obtain all they needed from the huge local arms market or
directly from the Yemeni military itself.

Unlike
the government’s story of the Mahan 1 and its phantom weapons, the
official claim that a ship called the Jihan 1, seized on January
23, 2013, had arms onboard was true. But the totality of the
evidence shows that the story of an Iranian arms shipment to the
Houthis was false.

The
ship was stopped in Yemeni waters by a joint patrol of the Yemeni
Coast Guard and the US Navy, and an inspection found a cache of
weapons and ammunition. The cargo including man-portable
surface-to-air missiles, 122-millimeter rockets, rocket-propelled
grenade launchers, C-4 plastic explosive blocks and equipment for
improvised explosive devices.

Some
weeks later, the UN expert panel inspected the weaponry said to
have been found on board the Jihan 1 and found labels stuck on
ammunition boxes with the legend “Ministry of Sepah” –
the former name of the Iranian military logistics ministry. The
panel report said the panel had determined that “all
available information placed the Islamic Republic of Iran at the
centre of the Jihan operation.”

But
except for those labels, which could have been affixed to the
boxes after the government had taken possession of the arms,
nothing about the ship or the weapons actually pointed to Iran.
All of the crew and the businessmen said to have arranged the
shipment were Yemenis, according to the report. And the expert
panel cited no evidence that the ship was Iranian or that the
weapons were manufactured in Iran.

The
expert panel cited no evidence that the ship was Iranian or that
the weapons were manufactured in Iran.

The
case rested on the testimony of the Yemeni crew members of the
Jihan 1 – then still in government custody – who said they had
sailed from Yemen to the Iranian port of Chabahar, had been taken
to another Iranian port and then ferried by small boat to the
Jihan 1 sitting off the Iranian coast. But although the panel said
it had access to “waypoint data retrieved from Global
Positioning System (GPS) devices,” it did not cite any such
data that supported the crew members’ story. In fact, the panel
acknowledged that it had “no information regarding the
location at which the Jihan was loaded with arms….”

A
crucial fact about the cargo, moreover, points not to Iran but to
Yemen itself as the origin of the ship: The weapons on the ship
were hidden under diesel fuel tanks and could be accessed only
after those tanks had been emptied. The expert panel referred to
that fact but failed to discuss its significance. But the June
2013report
of a UN Security Council Monitoring Group on Somalia and
Eritrea said that Jihan 1’s crew members had “divulged to a
diplomatic source who interviewed them in Aden that the diesel was
bound for Somalia.” An unnamed Yemeni official confirmed that
fact, which the crew members had kept from the Security Council
expert panel, according to the UN Monitoring Group report.

The
fact that the Jihan 1 was headed for Somalia indicates that the
ship was engaged in a commercial smuggling operation – not a
politically motivated delivery. The lucrative business of
smuggling diesel fuel from Yemen to Somalia had long been combined
with arms smuggling to the same country across the Gulf of Aden
from Yemen, as the Monitoring Group report made clear. The
Monitoring Group report explained that the reason authorities in
the Puntland region of Somalia had made it illegal to import
petroleum products was that arms had so often been smuggled into
ports on its coast hidden under diesel fuel.

The
same UN Monitoring Group report also revealed that a series of
arms shipments had been smuggled to Somalia in late 2012 – just
before the Jihan 1 was seized – in which rocket-propelled grenade
launchers were the primary component and IED components and
electrical detonators were also prominent. Those were also major
components of the Jihan 1 weapons shipment. The report said
information received from the Puntland authorities and its own
investigation had “established Yemen as a principal source of
the these shipments.”

A
key piece of evidence confirming that those arms had originated in
Yemen was a communication from the Bulgarian government to the UN
Monitoring Group indicating that all the rocket-propelled grenade
rounds and propellant charges in one lot manufactured in Bulgaria
and seized in Somalia had been delivered to the Yemeni armed
forces in 2010.

The
information in the Monitoring Group report thus points to Yemeni
arms smugglers as the source of the cargo of weapons and diesel
fuel aboard the Jihan 1. When the arms were seized by the joint
US-Yemen patrol, the Yemeni government evidently decided to
exploit it by creating a new story of an Iranian arms shipment to
the Houthis, and later used the Yemeni crew to provide the details
to the UN expert panel.

The
Somalia and Eritrea Monitoring Group’s report created an obvious
problem for the official story of the Jihan 1, and the Yemeni
government’s anti-Iran, Western backers sought to give the story a
new twist.Reuters
quoted a “Western diplomat” as citing the Jihan
1 arms shipment as evidence that Iran had actually been involved
in supplying arms to al-Shabaab terrorists in Somalia. The
anonymous source noted that the cargo had included C-4 explosives
such as were used by al-Shabaab for terrorist bombings, whereas
the Houthis were not known to carry out such operations. But that
claim was hardly credible, because al-Shabaab had close ties to
al-Qaeda and was therefore an enemy of Iran. It has not been
repeated except in pro-Saudi and pro-Israeli media outlets.

The
Jihan 1 story and the broader narrative of intercepted Iranian
arms shipments to the Houthis, as recycled by the UN Security
Council expert panel, have nevertheless become key pieces of the
widely accepted history of the regional conflicts involving Iran.

Gareth
Porter (@GarethPorter) is
an independent investigative journalist and historian writing on
US national security policy.  His latest book, Manufactured
Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare,
was published in February 2014.