ROBERT Mueller, the director of the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), has described the purported plot as “reading like a Hollywood script”.

Perhaps he should have added that any self-respecting studio would have rejected it on grounds of improbability. Alternatively, the movie would have gone straight to DVD.

After all, the ingredients are incredibly unimpressive. A small-time Iranian-American businessman negotiates a deal with a notorious Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington. His endeavour is believed to have been endorsed by the regime in Tehran.

One of the considered means of assassination involves bombing the said ambassador’s favourite restaurant, which is also frequented by US senators. The collateral damage, so to speak, could involve up to 100 American fatalities, some of them high-profile. The businessman doesn’t seem to care.

Sure, a substantial proportion of Hollywood plots are comparably outlandish, and this sort of scenario could conceivably have served as the opening sequence for a war movie. Even so, it would inevitably had led critics to raise the question: what on earth were the Iranians thinking? And Hollywood would, no doubt, have been accused of preposterously based demonisation.

It is not particularly surprising, then, that the outlines of an alleged real-life plot along these lines have attracted a great deal of scepticism. In the view of former CIA operative Robert Baer, there is a “sloppiness about the case that defies belief”. He goes on to say: “Maybe things have really fallen apart in Tehran, or maybe there’s a radical group that wants to stir up the pot. But the Quds are better than this. If they wanted to come after you, you’d be dead already.”

His reference is to the Quds Force, the foreign operations wing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, which has a reputation for ruthlessness as well as extreme efficiency.

It is supposed to be headed by Qassem Suleimani, described by The Guardian’s Martin Chulov as “one of the most powerful and feared men in the Middle East [whose] power and authority come straight from Iran’s theological leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, bypassing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad”.

The Iranian-American who was supposedly acting on behalf of Quds is Manssor Arbabsiar, who was taken into custody in New York late last month after being deported from Mexico, where on previous visits he had been touch with a man he presumed to be a representative of the Zetas drug cartel — but who in fact turned out to be an informant for the US Drugs Enforcement Administration (DEA).

Their conversations are said to have been taped. Arbabsiar apparently offered a payment of $1.5m for a hit against Adel Al Jubeir, the Saudi ambassador to the US and a confidant of King Abdullah. The smoking gun is reportedly a preliminary payoff of $100,000 that was wire-transferred into the informant’s account in the US.

The discussions are said to have ranged across a direct assassination, a restaurant bomb and even attacks on the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington.

Arbabsiar is believed to have got involved by virtue of family ties with Abdul Reza Shahlai, allegedly a Quds Force member, who is supposed to have introduced him to Gholam Shakuri, who effectively hatched the plot. However, apart from his concurrent business dealings in Mexico and Iran, there has been no satisfactory explanation for the Quds Force’s alleged exploitation of Arbabsiar as an intermediary. The man’s friends and acquaintances in Corpus Christi, Texas, recall him as an occasionally genial and generally absentminded chap who was nicknamed Jack on account of his weakness for Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey.

Most of his business ventures were not particularly successful, and it’s certainly not impossible that a pecuniary incentive could have persuaded him to get mixed up in this sort of plot. But one of the many unanswered questions is why the Quds Force would have trusted him in the first place.

Another is why it would have assumed the Mexican cartel to abide by its penchant for absolute secrecy, even if Arbabsiar’s contact had not turned out to be a DEA informant.

Then there’s the question of the target. Al Jubeir’s role as a vociferous anti-Iranian lobbyist may indeed be galling to Tehran, but surely any Saudi ambassador would aspire to be effective in that regard. And the Iranians couldn’t possibly have been unaware that the repercussions of a successful terrorist attack in the US capital would have been extremely unpleasant for the Middle East as a whole.

The apparent absurdity of the plot does not, of course, rule out its possibility. The US appears to be convinced of its existence. Iran, predictably, has dismissed it as the product of overheated imaginations among its multiple foes.

It’s easy to pour scorn over Ahmadinejad’s pronouncement that “Iran is a civilised nation and doesn’t need to resort to assassination”, given the regime’s propensity for barbaric behaviour. And much the same could be said of the even more unrepresentative Saudi monarchy.

Both of them are key regional powers dominated by competing hypocrisies. Iran welcomed the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, but is extremely repressive domestically and supportive of the Syrian dictatorship.

The Saudi’s gave asylum to Zine El Abedine Ben Ali, mourned the demise of Hosni Mubarak and intervened to prop up the status quo in Bahrain, apart from encouraging the US to attack Iran. Unrest in Saudi backwaters, too, has been blamed on Iranian interference, and Riyadh has threatened to go nuclear if Tehran builds a bomb.

Exactly how the Washington plot fits into this jigsaw is difficult to determine in view of the missing pieces — and it’s unlikely that all the evidence will ever be made public.

There is no doubt some truth in the popular cliché that facts are sometimes stranger than fiction, but the blurred boundaries between the two are particularly frustrating when the conclusions could impinge on the fate of nations.

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