Posted Wednesday, Apr. 12, 2006 What is Tehran’s main man in Iraq up to? The U.S. military, which claims Iranian special forces and intelligence operatives have infiltrated Iraq, insinuates that Hassan Kazemi Ghomi, the charge d’affaires of the Iranian embassy, is intent on undermining Washington's mission in Baghdad. Indeed, U.S. military intelligence and the American-backed Iraqi National Intelligence Service told TIME that Ghomi is a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force, a special forces outfit much like the Green Berets, with specialized skills in working with local forces and militias. A senior U.S. military intelligence officer claims, “Ghomi is Quds Force,” and part of a “full-spectrum effort” by the Revolutionary Guards to garner influence in Iraq. But in an interview with TIME, Ghomi, who rarely talks with the Western press, denied he is playing a military role in Iraq. He says most of his generation of government officials served, as did he, in the Revolutionary Guards’ Baseej (“volunteer”) units during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s but explains that “I stopped my military service years ago.” (The Baseej continue to be a major pillar of support for Iran’s hardline president