The idea of Mexican drug cartels cooperating with Iranian plotters to carry out bombings and murders in the United States may be far-fetched.

That is because the alleged plan by Iranian-American suspect Manssor Arbabsiar and a co-defendant to use a Mexican gang to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington may have been as much conceived through a sting operation by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as hatched by a branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.