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US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton maintained that the foiled attempt had been "directed by elements of the Iranian government," but analysts said there was no evidence yet of any senior official involvement by Tehran.
Rasool Nafisi, a US-based Iranian-American scholar who studies Iran's elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, said the alleged involvement of a Mexican drug cartel and the lack of planning indicated no top-level approval.
"I suspect this is not the work of the Iranian regime, when you look at the choice of target, timing of action and type of actor," Nafisi said.
"Looking at assassinations in the past, normally they would have a group planning this kind of operation," he added, referring to Tehran's slaying of Iranian-Kurdish opposition leader Sadegh Sharafkandi in Berlin in 1992.
"In this case, it only seems to be a lone actor."
US authorities have named two suspects in the plot: a used-car salesman from Texas who is Iranian but also a naturalized US citizen, who has been arrested, and another man said to be an Iran-based member of the special operations unit, the Quds Force.
Officials said the assassination bid was broken open by a paid US source posing as a member of a Mexico-based drug cartel, which the defendants believed would provide explosives for the attack.
But the attempt to launch such a bold attack on American soil when US-Iranian ties are at a low ebb, points away from the Iranian leadership, according to Anthony H. Cordesman, a national security expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
If it was directly involved, Tehran would be "basically countering years of efforts" to persuade Arab nations and the United States "that Iran is not a threat," although that did not mean such a link was impossible, said Cordesman.
"People do conduct very clumsy and inadequate plots and governments do not always coordinate with their senior leadership, he said, describing the plot as a "very low-level SET of events," noting that details remained sketchy.
"No one in the United States government has provided any indication of how far this went through the leadership of the Al-Quds system, how the Al-Quds system coordinated with the leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, or whether a senior Iranian leader was involved," Cordesman added.
"We need to have facts coming from government sources, not speculations."
Suzanne Maloney, senior fellow at The Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, said much of what was known of the plot did "not fit the usual patterns of Iran's involvement with terrorist activities."
"It seems quite credible to me that it could be rogue elements, but I don't know to what degree the Iranian military tolerates such dissent," she said.
"The allegation that the world's leading sponsor of terror would deploy a Texas used-car salesman and freelance narco-terrorists in such a dramatic and unprecedented attack seems astonishing, quite frankly, and uncharacteristic of Iran's professionalized terrorist apparatus," Maloney added.
Former Clinton spokesman Philip Crowley was also unconvinced, tweeting: "Could be just a couple of guys or a strategic decision by #Iran. We don't yet know."
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Rasool Nafisi, a US-based Iranian-American scholar who studies Iran's elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, said the alleged involvement of a Mexican drug cartel and the lack of planning indicated no top-level approval.
"I suspect this is not the work of the Iranian regime, when you look at the choice of target, timing of action and type of actor," Nafisi said.
"Looking at assassinations in the past, normally they would have a group planning this kind of operation," he added, referring to Tehran's slaying of Iranian-Kurdish opposition leader Sadegh Sharafkandi in Berlin in 1992.
"In this case, it only seems to be a lone actor."
US authorities have named two suspects in the plot: a used-car salesman from Texas who is Iranian but also a naturalized US citizen, who has been arrested, and another man said to be an Iran-based member of the special operations unit, the Quds Force.
Officials said the assassination bid was broken open by a paid US source posing as a member of a Mexico-based drug cartel, which the defendants believed would provide explosives for the attack.
But the attempt to launch such a bold attack on American soil when US-Iranian ties are at a low ebb, points away from the Iranian leadership, according to Anthony H. Cordesman, a national security expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
If it was directly involved, Tehran would be "basically countering years of efforts" to persuade Arab nations and the United States "that Iran is not a threat," although that did not mean such a link was impossible, said Cordesman.
"People do conduct very clumsy and inadequate plots and governments do not always coordinate with their senior leadership, he said, describing the plot as a "very low-level SET of events," noting that details remained sketchy.
"No one in the United States government has provided any indication of how far this went through the leadership of the Al-Quds system, how the Al-Quds system coordinated with the leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, or whether a senior Iranian leader was involved," Cordesman added.
"We need to have facts coming from government sources, not speculations."
Suzanne Maloney, senior fellow at The Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, said much of what was known of the plot did "not fit the usual patterns of Iran's involvement with terrorist activities."
"It seems quite credible to me that it could be rogue elements, but I don't know to what degree the Iranian military tolerates such dissent," she said.
"The allegation that the world's leading sponsor of terror would deploy a Texas used-car salesman and freelance narco-terrorists in such a dramatic and unprecedented attack seems astonishing, quite frankly, and uncharacteristic of Iran's professionalized terrorist apparatus," Maloney added.
Former Clinton spokesman Philip Crowley was also unconvinced, tweeting: "Could be just a couple of guys or a strategic decision by #Iran. We don't yet know."
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