PRESIDENT Bush said on Friday that the United States is likely to grant a visa to Iran’s new president for the United Nations’ opening session next month, even though the administration continues to probe whether Mahmood Ahmadinejad was connected to the 1979-1981 seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran. The tentative decision comes as a secret US intelligence report circulated within the administration said that there is so far no evidence Ahmadinejad was involved — and that he may have opposed the takeover because of fears about the neighbouring Soviet Union — according to US officials familiar with the report.

Many devout Muslims feared the former communist state, both because of its atheist ideology and because of its occupation of northern Iran during and after World War II, which sparked the first crisis at the United Nations. In a speech more than six years ago, Ahmadinejad publicly challenged the wisdom of the takeover, the report notes. “There is relative certainty that he was not one of the actual captors,” said a US official familiar with the allegations, first made by at least four former hostages based on the similarity between pictures of Ahmadinejad and a bearded young captor.

All week, the State Department has been interviewing some of the 52 people held in Iran for 444 days to see whether they can provide specifics that would alter their initial assessment, State Department officials said. The US intelligence community now believes it was a case of mistaken identity. The original embassy captors also denied that Ahmadinejad played a leadership role or that they knew him at the time, even though he was a student activist during that period.

The secret report also says US intelligence has found no evidence to back up assertions from Iranian dissidents that Ahmadinejad was involved in planning the assassinations of Iranian Kurdish politician Abdul-Rahman Ghassemlou and two colleagues on July 13, 1989, in Vienna.

The intelligence report is not considered final or conclusive, stressed officials, who would discuss it only on the condition of anonymity because it is classified. But it lays out all available evidence as well as the sources of claims about misadventures by Iran’s president; some of the sources have their own agendas or biases, the report notes, according to US officials.

“It wants to leave people as much room for debate, discussion as possible,” said a senior State Department official. Ahmadinejad has had limited exposure to the outside world. At the United Nations, Secretary General Kofi Annan said he will use the mid-September UN opening to bring Iran’s new leader into contact with his Western critics. “We will use the General Assembly to bring them together,” he told Reuters.—Reuters