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Iranian President Mohammed Khatami, in an unprecedented diplomatic gesture, sent a private emissary to Jeddah with a message of top importance for relay to President Bush via visiting Vice President Dick Cheney, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly.

The letter, delivered Saturday, March 16, was also addressed to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the intelligence service reported.

What did it say?

The note attempts to persuade the United States and Israel that carrying out plans to destroy Iran's nuclear reactor at Bushehr would be undeserved and counter-productive.

This was the first communication from Iran to a U.S. leader since Bush included that country in his "axis of evil" speech and accused the Islamic Republic of sending Revolutionary Guard agents into Afghanistan to subvert the Karzai interim government.

It was also the first indirect message from Tehran to the Israeli government since the Palestinian arms ship Karine-A was captured Jan. 3 with a weapons cargo loaded up at an Iranian island.

Khatami disclaims at length any involvement by the Iranian government and armed forces in the smuggling of al-Qaida fighters out of Afghanistan to the Middle East. He places full responsibility for this operation squarely in the court of his colleague, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who, he says, ran it with the help of his private intelligence agents, militia and loyal Revolutionary Guard elements.

The Iranian president also claimed that the same parties managed the Karine-A arms-smuggling project and assured the U.S. and Israel that the vocal Iranian expressions of support for the Palestinian cause were meaningless.

For the first time, Khatami spoke of a bitter power struggle in Tehran between his reformist faction, which seeks closer relations with the United States, and Khamenei's hardliners, warning it could explode into street battles in the country's main cities, according to DEBKA's sources.

He explained that if Israel attacked the Bushehr reactor, he as head of Iran's nuclear program, would be forced to step down, tipping the scales of power in Tehran in favor of the extremists.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's sources in Jerusalem add that upon receipt of the communication from Tehran, Sharon handed Cheney a confidential Israeli intelligence file documenting in detail the activities of Iranian intelligence networks across the Middle East and their efforts to stud the region with al-Qaida bases. The dossier offered a close-up view of the al-Qaida presence in Lebanon, mostly in Palestinian refugee camps, and in Cyprus, which has become a way station for terror operatives on the move and a logistical base whence they pick up funds and forged travel documents.

The top-secret documents pinned down the Islamic network's hidden locations in Sudan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Ethiopia and Somalia. Sharon told Cheney that Israel knew all about the factional divisions in the top levels of government in Tehran. But Israeli intelligence thought Khatami was blowing them up as a form of spin. Every top political and military official in the Iranian regime rules a defined jurisdiction, which enables him to set up his own power base. The Iranian president, whose purlieu is outside national military and intelligence affairs, has no formal say in the formulation of foreign and defense policy. This enables him to hold clean hands up to the outside world and pose as the Islamic regime's most ardent antagonist of the extremist sponsor of terror, Ayatollah Khamenei.