WASHINGTON – The White House demanded information on the exact role of Iran’s president-elect, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in the 1979 hostage crisis, as the country’s democratic opposition prepared for what may be a coming crackdown on dissidents.

President Bush was asked yesterday at a press conference with foreign journalists about reports that five of the hostages held by Iranian students in the 444-day crisis in 1979-80 have recognized Mr. Ahmadinejad as one of their tormentors. “I have no information,” the president said. “But obviously his involvement raises many questions, and knowing how active people are at finding answers to questions, I’m confident they will be found.”

Meanwhile in Iran, supporters of dissident Ahmed Batebi said a warrant for his arrest was published in Tehran newspapers and that the organizer of the July 9, 1999, student Tehran University demonstrations remains in hiding.

The latest allegations against Mr. Ahmadinejad, coupled with an increasingly restrictive political environment for Iran’s opposition, will likely lead to even frostier relations between the Bush White House and the country it dubbed in 2002 a member of the “axis of evil.” Yesterday, the State Department renewed a long-standing warning urging Americans to forgo travel to the Islamic republic.

Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, said that next week the president will seek a strong statement from the Group of Eight industrialized nations to press Iran to keep its commitment not to enrich uranium as international inspectors take stock of the country’s previously hidden nuclear program. Also yesterday, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican of Florida, circulated a letter to her colleagues with the heading “The new so-called ‘president’ of Iran tortured American citizens.”

Even more troubling for American counterterrorism officials than Mr. Ahmadinejad’s possible role in the 1979 hostage crisis is his past as a commander in the al-Quds force – named for the Arabic term for Jerusalem – of the revolutionary guard. The unit is responsible for supporting anti-Israel terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah, and has served as a liaison service to Sunni-Arab terrorist organizations for the Iranian regime. Experts believe the al-Quds force was a channel to Al Qaeda in the late 1990s.

According to a former editor of Iran’s largest daily newspaper, Ettelaat, Alireza Nourizadeh, Mr. Ahmadinejad was the deputy commander for intelligence for the al-Quds force between 1989 and 1991.

The recently retired deputy director of the Middle East office of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Wayne White, in an interview yesterday said, “Let us not forget that [Mr. Ahmadinejad] reportedly is associated with the revolutionary guard corps’ secretive Quds force, which has been involved in assassinations, terrorism including such things as assassinations throughout the Middle East.” Mr. White went on to say, “It’s my impression that the al-Quds force played a significant role in assisting Al Qaeda cadres to escape from Afghanistan following the defeat of the Taliban.”

White House officials have yet to comment publicly about the president-elect’s role in the al-Quds force, but yesterday the message to Tehran regarding the hostage crisis was clear.

Mr. Hadley yesterday said, “One of the things you do when you get a report like this is look back and see what you have in the files, and that’s the process that’s going on now.” A State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, yesterday said that the Iranian government had “an obligation to speak definitively concerning these questions that have been raised in public.”

Reuters reported from Iran that one of the hostage takers, Abbas Abdi, who later turned on the revolution, became a reformist, and was recently released from jail, said the president-elect did not play a role in the November 4, 1979, embassy seizure. Mr. Abdi said that Mr. Ahmadinejad “was not among those who occupied the American Embassy after the revolution.”

Now a senior researcher at a British think tank, Mr. Nourizadeh said the president-elect was “a member of the group that took part in the hostage crisis. Ahmadinejad was a member of a pro-Khomenei student group called the Union of Muslim Students. He was not a leader of the raid, but he participated.”

The ascendancy of Mr. Ahmadinejad has already had ripple effects in Tehran. On Tuesday, the Islamic Republic News Agency reported that the authorities had renewed the hunt for Mr. Batebi. The official news agency quoted a deputy Tehran prosecutor, Mahmoud Salarkia, as saying, “Batebi’s leave was extended a couple of times because he had just got married. Unfortunately, his continued absence led to an arrest warrant being issued.”

“It is worse than the beginning of the week. Now many forces are after him,” an Iranian-American interlocutor for Mr. Batebi, who requested anonymity, said yesterday. “If it was just the Pasdaran before, now it is the police, the Basij, and more units who are looking for him. He is still in hiding and in a safe location.”

Mr. Nourizadeh said yesterday that Mr. Salarkia’s superior, Saed Mortazavi, called newspaper editors into his office last Saturday, the day the election results were announced. At that meeting, Mr. Mortazavi asked that the editors stop publishing stories about a dissident journalist that the prosecutor had jailed earlier in June, Akbar Ganji. “This was a meeting to announce the new policy with the newspapers that are left,” he said.