The Iranian plot to hire Los Zetas: How an attack in Washington Was Foiled

He chose a windowless hotel room on the border between Reynosa and Texas, asked for the key, and waited patiently for the hitman to arrive. The man made his living selling used cars in Corpus Christi—a city famous solely for being the birthplace of the singer Selena. Someone had passed him the contact details of a gunman from the Los Zetas cartel—the kind of narco he had read about in the papers, the sort who looked just like El Chapo Guzmán: sepia-toned and wearing a belt with intricate piteado embroidery.

The car salesman was named Manssor Arbabsiar; he was 56 years old and led a monotonous life, where his greatest thrill was selling more than one bargain-bin car in a single day. But that afternoon—July 14, 2011—inside the roadside hotel, he spoke to the hitman as one killer to another, and their meeting was recorded on audio:

“I want the ambassador,” Manssor told the Zeta hitman.
“I’m going to need four men,” the man replied, warning him that the fee for the assassination would be higher than usual: one and a half million dollars. Manssor Arbabsiar didn’t haggle over a single peso; he made it clear that there was a budget for the assassination.

The plot being hatched in that motel in northern Mexico was aimed at assassinating the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, a career diplomat with nearly two decades of experience. Al-Jubeir had studied Political Science at the University of North Texas and International Relations at Georgetown; From there, he built a career that saw him serve as the Saudi government’s spokesperson during the Gulf War, foreign policy advisor to the then-Crown Prince, and, later, a trusted counselor to King Abdullah.

Since 2007, Adel al-Jubeir had served as ambassador in Washington with the rank of minister, acting as the Saudi monarchy’s most visible face to the White House. He was no minor official; by then, he was one of the most influential Arab diplomats in the U.S. capital.

Manssor Arbabsiar—a car salesman who, until that moment, had led a rather ordinary life—was negotiating the ambassador’s assassination. That afternoon, they agreed on a price for the ambassador’s head and arranged to meet again in three days to finalize the details of the attack. At their second meeting, the hitman from Los Zetas opened a laptop and showed him a photograph taken from the internet. He also informed him that the diplomat went out to eat a couple of times a week, was escorted by seven or eight men, and frequented a particular restaurant. The hitman asked whether he preferred the job to be done outside or inside the establishment.

He explained that civilians—between one hundred and one hundred and fifty people—ate inside, and there were office buildings on either side. But this didn’t really matter to him: if they could kill him outside, all the better; If not, they should blow up the entire restaurant. When the hitman, with a trace of a conscience, insisted that even U.S. senators used to dine there, Arbabsiar settled the matter with a phrase that, months later, would end up being translated before a federal judge in Manhattan:

—They want that guy dead. If a hundred people go down with him, fuck ’em.

This is how a plot to assassinate a Saudi Arabian official was negotiated on Mexican soil. However, those Zeta hitmen never actually existed: the man Arbabsiar hired to kill the ambassador—identified in court as CS-1—was a confidential DEA informant. He was an individual who had a drug trafficking charge wiped from his record in exchange for his cooperation; he was paid for every piece of information he provided and had presented himself to Arbabsiar as a cartel hitman, acting under instructions from the intelligence agency.

This piece is a collaboration between ARCHIVERO and DOMINGA, reconstructing the story through long-forgotten case files. Cases like this reveal that the official version of events is always a work in progress—an unfinished structure.

The Iranian Cousin and the Quds Force Colonel

This story truly began in the spring of 2011, when Manssor Arbabsiar traveled to Iran to visit his family. During that trip, he met with a cousin who had risen to a high-ranking position in the Quds Force—the covert operations branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The cousin told him he needed someone capable of kidnapping or killing the ambassador and suggested looking into the world of drug trafficking, noting that “those people will do anything for money.”

Arbabsiar, who frequently traveled between Mexico and Texas for his car business, agreed to look for someone. To this day, the exact details of how he connected with an alleged hitman from the Zetas cartel have not been revealed. He recalls that, in the weeks that followed, a courier delivered an envelope containing cash to his home in Corpus Christi, Texas. There, he learned that the courier worked for an Iranian man—”the guy is like a colonel,” he would later testify in court. That colonel was Gholam Shakuri (alias Ali Gholam Shakuri), whom the U.S. government later identified as a Quds Force officer and the right-hand man of Arbabsiar’s cousin.

Next came the meeting with the alleged Zetas member—who, as Arbabsiar would later discover, was actually a DEA informant. With the plan underway, the initial payment arrived on August 1, 2011; $49,960 was deposited into a sting-operation account via a transfer from a foreign bank. A second deposit of the exact same amount arrived on August 9. Yet, more money was still required.

In the weeks that followed, the car salesman began using the code words and terminology associated with the covert assassination plot. On September 2, Arbabsiar asked if “the building is being painted”—code for whether preparations were being made to carry out the killing. He was told that they were. On September 12, he asked if “the number is still the same—one and a half”—referring to the agreed-upon $1.5 million—and promised that if the first job went well, there would be others.

By late September, the informant posing as a member of the Zetas demanded an additional guarantee: half the payment upfront, or for Manssor to travel to Mexico in person to answer for the remainder of the debt. Arbabsiar chose the second option. On September 28, 2011, he boarded a flight to Mexico. However, Mexican authorities had been alerted by their U.S. counterparts and denied him entry into the country. He was ultimately arrested.

Authorities found $3,900 in cash, some Iranian currency, and a flight itinerary ending in Tehran a few days later on the car salesman. Arbabsiar—a man who had never been trained to withstand interrogation—immediately confessed every detail of the plot. FBI agents then instructed him to call his cousin’s right-hand man, Shakuri, from custody as if nothing had happened, and…

“Are you okay?” he asked on October 4, calling from somewhere in Iran.

“Yes, I wanted to see how you’re doing and tell you I’m fine,” replied Arbabsiar—who was already in custody—while an FBI agent recorded the call.

“That’s good, thank God; stay safe,” Shakuri said, before immediately shifting his tone: “What news? What did you do about the building?”

They spoke again the following day. Arbabsiar used the code word he had admitted was assigned to him to refer to the plot against the ambassador.

“I wanted to tell you the Chevrolet is ready—ready to go. I should proceed, right?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Shakuri said. “Are we buying everything?” he asked next.

“I don’t know for now; it’s ready, okay?”

“Then buy it, buy it,” Shakuri insisted. “Yes, buy it all.”

On October 7, during the last of the recorded calls, Arbabsiar relayed a demand to the Iranians from the alleged “Zeta”—whom he referred to simply as “the Mexican”: he wanted the rest of the money, or he wouldn’t do the job. Shakuri responded with a phrase that prosecutors would later cite as evidence that the operation had high-level backing, rather than being the lone whim of a car salesman:

“We guarantee the rest. You were our guarantee.”

A hearing on a man’s state of mind

Manssor Arbabsiar pleaded guilty in October 2012 to three charges: conspiracy to assassinate a foreign official, use of interstate facilities to commit murder-for-hire, and conspiracy to commit an act of transnational terrorism. Based on the sentencing guideline calculations included by his own lawyers in the plea agreement, his offense level theoretically exposed him to a life sentence. However, the law set a twenty-five-year cap.

Before sentencing, the defense played its final card: a special hearing—the kind used in the U.S. federal system to resolve disputes prior to sentencing—in which two psychiatrists debated, over more than a hundred pages of transcripts, whether Arbabsiar suffered from a bipolar disorder that might have clouded his judgment. The defense’s expert maintained that Arbabsiar suffered from episodes of hypomania—a milder form of mania characterized by boundless energy, reduced need for sleep, rapid speech, and impulsive decision-making, yet stopping short of the delusions or total loss of contact with reality that can occur during a full manic episode.

The psychiatrist called by the prosecution disagreed on every point. That same hearing produced a remark that—unintentionally—laid bare another side of the case: an FBI agent confided to the prosecution’s expert that, following the arrest, they had maintained contact with Arbabsiar for nearly two more weeks “because we realized we could gather intelligence. We obtained a lot of intelligence.”

Judge John F. Keenan was unmoved by the medical argument. On May 30, 2013, before handing down the sentence, he gave Arbabsiar the floor; Arbabsiar spoke about himself with a mix of self-pity and bewilderment that did not save him either:

—I have a good heart. Sometimes my mind isn’t in a good place. It races ahead; it moves faster than I do.

Keenan sentenced him to twenty-five years in prison—the maximum penalty allowed by law. Manssor Arbabsiar is serving his sentence at the ADX Florence federal supermax prison in Fremont County, Colorado, after having passed through two other federal facilities. Incidentally, it is the same prison where “El Chapo” Guzmán is held. In 2014, acting without a lawyer, he filed a motion to vacate his sentence, claiming his defense attorneys had represented him poorly; that effort, too, was unsuccessful.

In June 2026, a federal judge denied his request for compassionate release. He had sought it on the grounds that he had lost almost all his vision due to macular degeneration—an eye disease that gradually destroys the central part of the retina and, in older people, often leads to blindness if untreated—and he is now 71 years old. Months earlier, a fellow inmate had handwritten a letter to the court describing his blindness and pleading for leniency. The response was negative.

According to official calculations, Arbabsiar might not be released from prison until March 2032, when he will be 77 years old.

Nothing more was ever heard of Gholam Shakuri, the “colonel” who issued the orders from Tehran. He remains a fugitive. The informant who posed as a Los Zetas hitman—and recorded every word of the negotiation—was never publicly identified, and his real name remains under seal in the case file. According to authorities, had the plot been carried out, it would have involved detonating a bomb at a restaurant in the heart of Washington—with senators and diners inside—commissioned by Iranians from a cartel that, in reality, never actually held a gun under the table.

Source: Milenio