Both incidents involved the Revolutionary Guards, the hard-line wing of Iran's multifaceted military and security services, U.S. officials noted.
In the 1960s and 1970s he emerged as a leading figure on the hard-line wing of the unionist movement.
Instead, forecasters envision either a slow evolution toward social liberalism under Communist Party reformers or a nationalist takeover from the hard-line wing of the Party.
A hard-line wing of the Bush administration has been pushing to get more money and weapons to the Iraqi opposition in exile.
But those new governments are locked in fierce, sometimes violent, competition with the more hard-line wing of the Islamic political movements over how much of the faith can mix with democracy, over the very building blocks of religious identity.
Experts described him as a competent nonpolitical figure acceptable both to the hard-line wing and to the liberal economic wing of Mr. Putin's administration -- a "liberal hawk," in the words of one commentator.
For Mr. Pence's supporters, "I think the hard-line wing of the United States thinks he did a fine job," said David C. Kang, director of the Korean Studies Institute at the University of Southern California.
Representative Devin Nunes, a California Republican who has been a vocal critic of his party's more hard-line wing, emerged from the conference frustrated and worried that his party did not have a clear strategy on both reopening the government and averting a debt default.
What was particularly damaging to the image of a freshly united party was evidence that the confessions had been deliberately planted by the liberal faction of the Conservatives in an effort to humiliate the leader of the hard-line wing, the shadow home secretary, Ann Widdecombe.
For the previous 12 years he had served in Botha's cabinet as a minister implementing the policy of apartheid in a series of portfolios, and although in 1986 he was responsible for the partial removal of many of the so-called petty apartheid laws, his reputation within South Africa was that of the leader of the so-called Verkrampte, or hard-line wing of the National party.
However, Mathias chose to remain as a Republican, and teamed up with eight other Republican senators to express their dissatisfaction with the hard-line wing of the party.
