Has a former Iranian commander who organized Hezbollah defected to the West?

The Washington Post has a must-read write-up today on Ali Rez Asgari, described as "a former Iranian deputy defense minister who once commanded the Revolutionary Guard." According to the Post, Asgari has left Iran and "is cooperating with Western intelligence agencies, providing information on Hezbollah and Iran's ties to the organization."

Iranian officials, not surprisingly, are claiming that Israel or the US must have captured Asgari or at least paid him to defect. The Post's source contends, however, that he is "willingly cooperating." Israel denies having anything to do with his disappearance.

If Asgari is talking, he would appear to be someone that would have "high-value" information. As the Post reports:

Asgari served in the Iranian government until early 2005 under then-President Mohammad Khatami. Asgari's background suggests that he would have deep knowledge of Iran's national security infrastructure, conventional weapons arsenal and ties to Hezbollah in south Lebanon. Iranian officials said he was not involved in the country's nuclear program, and the senior U.S. official said Asgari is not being questioned about it. Former officers with Israel's Mossad spy agency said yesterday that Asgari had been instrumental in the founding of Hezbollah in the 1980s, around the time of the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut.

An Iranian official however, who insisted on remaining anonymous, suggested that any information Asgari may have would at this point be stale as, to quote this official, "he has been out of the loop for four or five years now."