Mansour Arbabsiar appears in a New York courtroom.
Known to friends as an easygoing, scatter-brained fellow, the used-car dealer from Texas is an unlikely central figure in an international terrorist murder plot.
His cousin, however, cuts a more ominous shadow.
The cousin was once accused of helping Shia militias in Iraq. He's alleged to have planned an audacious raid where gunmen wearing U.S. uniforms abducted American soldiers in central Iraq and later shot them dead.
As details of the purported Iran-backed plot to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington emerged this week, the two cousins' contrasting lives underline the ambiguous nature of the case.
The only man arrested so far, Mansour Arbabsiar, is a 56-year-old Iranian-born Texas businessman who appears to be a hapless operator snagged in a classic sting operation.
A criminal complaint filed in district court in New York details Mr. Arbabsiar's failed attempts to hire the Mexican Zetas drug cartel to kill the Saudi envoy, a bizarre scheme that a Foreign Ministry spokesman in Tehran brushed off as a fabrication by "the U.S. and Zionist regimes."
The court filing says Mr. Arbabsiar was guided by a cousin, whose name wasn't made public.
The U.S. Treasury Department, however, announced sanctions against five men tied to the plot, including the cousin, identified as Abdul Reza Shahlai, a commander in the Quds Force, an arm of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Unlike his cheap-car-selling kin, Mr. Shahlai, 54, has long been known to the U.S. military and intelligence community, who see him as a big player in the shadowy conflict that Washington and Tehran have waged through proxies over the years.
The Treasury Department first ordered sanctions against Mr. Shahlai in 2008, alleging he helped a militia in Iraq, the Jaysh al-Mahdi Special Groups, providing training and supplying them with rockets, mortars shells, C-4 explosives and RPG-7 grenades.
The Treasury Department also alleged that Mr. Shahlai planned a Jan. 20, 2007, raid that killed five American troops in the Shia city of Karbala in Iraq.
"The Iraqi special groups could not have conducted this complex operation without the support and direction of the Quds Force," U.S. Brigadier-General Kevin Bergner once told reporters in Baghdad.
He said prisoners and captured documents revealed that the Quds Force provided the militia with American uniforms, false papers, cars and information about the soldiers' shift changes. This enabled the attackers to enter into a coalition compound, shoot one soldier dead and abduct four others who were later killed.
"Senior leadership in Iran" was aware of the Quds Force's activities, Gen. Bergner said, refusing, however, to address reporters' questions about whether the Iranian government was openly killing American soldiers.
CIA Director David Petraeus, who was the American general in overall command in Iraq, has also outlined the prominent role of the Quds Force in Iraq.
In a public talk last year, Mr. Petraeus recalled that, as his forces battled Shia militias in the spring of 2008, he was contacted by "a very senior Iraqi leader" who said he was passing on a message from the head of the Quds Force, General Qasem Soleimani.
"He said, `General Petraeus, you should know that I, Qasem Soleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and Afghanistan. And indeed, the ambassador in Baghdad is a Quds Force member. The individual who's going to replace him is a Quds Force member.'"
Gen. Soleimani is also among the five men that U.S. Treasury has named in connection with this year's alleged plot to kill the Saudi ambassador.
While Mr. Shahlai and the Quds Force appear ruthless, his cousin seems clueless.
Mr. Arbabsiar is alleged to have travelled to Mexico to hire a hit man, not realizing he was dealing with a paid informant. The court indictment says Mr. Arbabsiar told the informant that he was acting at the request of a cousin who had been "on the CNN" and was "wanted in America."
Being an amateur terrorist is not necessarily incongruous. From Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, to Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber, misfits and unremarkable men have been involved in terror plots, often because they had the right type of passport.
Whether Mr. Arbabsiar was commanded by rogue elements in Iran might become clearer if his prosecution sheds more light on the $100,000 he wired to the informant. U.S. authorities will only say that the money was sent from a non-Iranian foreign bank.
In the past, the Quds Force has relied on Iran's state-owned Bank Melli, which has used shells companies and other "deceptive banking practices" to hide its involvement, the U.S. Treasury has alleged.
Tu Thanh Ha