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How Obama Could Tame Iran

(Would Obama end CIA use of Terrorist Mojahedin Khalq – Rajavi cult in Iraq?)

Assume that Barack Obama is elected U.S. president this fall and makes good on his promise to negotiate with Iran without preconditions. How will Tehran respond? Recent interviews I’ve held with three authoritative Iranians suggest that Tehran will have preconditions of its own. Before coming to the table, these Iranians say, the United States would first have to end its “hostile policies” toward their country. The most important step pushed by all three is one already promised by Obama: setting a timetable for the complete withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Iraq. Other moves, however—like ending economic sanctions—would conflict with Obama’s campaign pledges and be even more controversial in Washington.

“Signals have come to us about negotiations before [Obama] is in the White House,” I was told by Alaeddin Boroujerdi, chairman of the powerful Foreign Affairs and Defense Subcommission of Iran’s Parliament and a close ally of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “They have sent messages through friendly ambassadors that they are willing to talk to us.” But “the ball is in [Washington’s] court,” he emphasized. “It is the United States that severed the connection with us, and the manner in which relations are restored should reflect that.”

To create a “real change in the atmosphere,” he said, Obama should halt ongoing CIA efforts to overthrow the Islamic republic, release Iranian assets frozen in U.S. banks since the 1979 hostage crisis, end banking sanctions and resume sales of civilian aircraft. That’s a long list, but Boroujerdi implied that any one of these measures, plus an Iraq timetable, would be enough to get a dialogue started.

The importance of an Iraq withdrawal plan was also emphasized by Alireza Sheikhattar, first deputy foreign minister. “Whether it’s three months or eight months or longer,” he said, the important thing is that the United States show “a serious intention” to gradually leave Iraq. Asked whether any U.S. forces could remain there, Sheikhattar replied, “Yes, some could stay to help with training Iraqi forces.” But he drew the line at any U.S. moves to make Iraq “a platform for harming the security of Iran and other neighbors.”

Sheikhattar emphasized the fact that the United States currently controls Iraq’s airspace, which he said “upsets” Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. “The Iraqis should have a real Air Force,” Sheikhattar declared. “Why are they prohibited from having more than token aircraft? They are not poor. They can purchase fighters and have their own aircraft for both internal and external security.” Wouldn’t this pose a security threat to Iran? I asked. Not if Iraq has a sovereign, democratic government, he said, “because there is an absolute majority [there] in favor of Iran.”

Asked about Obama, Hossein Shariatmadiari, editor of the hard-line newspaper Kayhan, was reticent, observing that “anyone replacing Bush will be an improvement. I won’t rule out that Obama does want a new approach to Iran. But we have to see whether he is genuine or is controlled by the same Zionist forces behind the curtain that have controlled Bush,” he said. Even if Obama wants to talk, Shariatmadiari asked, “do we want to talk to him?”

The answer suggested by our conversations is that Iran does want to work out a modus vivendi with the United States—but will play hard-to-get.

Obama will be in a strong bargaining position if he sticks to his pledge to withdraw U.S. combat troops from Iraq over 16 months and also removes U.S. bombers from air bases there. In return, he could demand that Iran prevent the Iraqi Shiite militias it supports from harassing U.S. forces during the pullout, and help in rooting out Al Qaeda from Iraq—a goal Tehran shares with Washington.

To start a broader dialogue on the nuclear issue, Obama would have to take one crucial step sought by Iran: end CIA and Special Forces support for insurgents seeking to overthrow the Islamic republic, especially Kurdish separatists and the Iraq-based Mujahedin-e Khalq. This move wouldn’t need to be publicly announced, however, and would thus have a low domestic political cost for Obama.

Boroujerdi, the parliamentary foreign-policy chief, said that if Washington accepted Iran’s right to continue uranium enrichment for peaceful purposes, the rest of the nuclear issue would be “negotiable.” “We understand and accept that the red line would be the development of a nuclear weapon,” he said.

Ending the Bush administration’s regime-change policy toward Iran is probably key to holding productive nuclear negotiations and would be an acceptable price to pay. But will a President Obama stand up to entrenched forces in the Pentagon, the CIA and allied intelligence services that are already engaged in covert action against Iran? That won’t be easy; the next U.S. president will face tough adversaries in Washington as well as Tehran.

By Selig S. Harrison; Harrison is director of the Iran Program at the Center for International Policy.

Newsweek International

August 4, 2008; International Edition

Harrison is director of the Iran Program at the Center for International Policy.

August 3, 2008 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Looking for a few good spies

Washington calls the Iranian MEK a terrorist group. But some administration hawks think its members could be useful

This is a terrorist cultleader? Maryam Rajavi is dressed in a Chanel-style suit with her skirt at mid calf, lilac colored pumps and a matching headscarf. Over a dinner of kebab, rice and French pastries, Rajavi smiles often and laughs easily. She’s at once colorful and demure, like many an educated woman in the Middle East. Indeed if George W. Bush — who relies on powerful females for counsel — were pressed to identify a Muslim model of womanhood, this 51-year-old Iranian would look very much the part.

But of course that’s exactly the impression Rajavi seeks to give. Behind her smile is a saleswoman’s savvy — and a revolutionary’s zeal to prove that she and her mysterious husband, Massoud Rajavi, are neither cultists nor terrorists. Maryam Rajavi is demanding that the exile groups they lead together, centered on the Mujahedin-e Khalq (People’s Holy Warriors) or MEK for short, should be taken off the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, their assets unfrozen and their energies unleashed. The MEK, Rajavi says, is the answer to American prayers as Tehran continues to dabble defiantly in both terrorism and nuclear arms. "I believe increasingly the Americans have come to realize that the solution is an Iranian force that is able to get rid of the Islamic fundamentalists in power in Iran," she told NEWSWEEK in a rare interview at her organization’s compound in the quiet French village of Auvers sur Oise. The group’s own former role in terrorist attacks dating back to its support for the U.S. Embassy takeover in 1979, Rajavi insists, is ancient history. And the MEK is not a Jim Jones-like cult as critics allege, with forced separation between men and women and indoctrination for children, all overseen by the Rajavis’ autocratic style. Instead, she insists, it is "a democratic force."

Whatever Rajavi’s true colors, NEWSWEEK has learned that her role may be growing in the calculations of Bush administration hard-liners. At a camp south of Baghdad — it’s called Ashraf, after Massoud Rajavi’s assassinated first wife — 3,850 MEK members have been confined but gently treated by U.S. forces since the invasion of Iraq (once they were allies of Saddam against their own country in the 1980s Iran-Iraq war). Now the administration is seeking to cull useful MEK members as operatives for use against Tehran, all while insisting that it does not deal with the MEK as a group, American government sources say.

Some Pentagon civilians and intelligence planners are hoping a corps of informants can be picked from among the MEK prisoners, then split away from the movement and given training as spies, U.S. officials say. After that, the thinking goes, they will be sent back to their native Iran to gather intelligence on the Iranian clerical regime, particularly its efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Some hawks also hope they could help to reawaken the democratic reform movement in Iran. "They [want] to make us mercenaries," one MEK official told NEWSWEEK.

Yet the administration’s new engagement with MEK members has, so far, done little to clarify its still-murky approach to Iran. That is worrisome to many critics at home and abroad — especially since Vice President Dick Cheney said in recent weeks that Iran was now at the "top" of the president’s national-security agenda. Last week, on her first trip abroad as secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice sought to play both hawk and diplomat, reviving the old role she negotiated so often as Bush’s national-security adviser. Pressed by reporters, Rice declined to deny that Bush’s policy toward Iran is regime change, and she even hinted broadly that it was. Rice said that Iranians "should be no different than the Palestinians or the Iraqis or the Afghans or peoples around the world — the Ukrainians — who are determining their own future." All these places have elected new governments under different degrees of U.S. pressure.

At the same time, however, Rice reassured her European counterparts in London, Paris and Berlin that, like them, the administration is putting diplomacy first. That mainly means continuing Washington’s lukewarm support of a European effort to win a permanent freeze on Tehran’s covert nuclear program, along with new rights for inspectors to verify the pact. Rice is also mulling over some new proposals from her own staff that call for Washington to wedge open a new relationship with the Iranian regime by striking "little deals" on areas of overlapping interest, such as Iraq, the Afghan border and the Gulf.

Confused? So are the Europeans. Rice, in fact, privately acknowledged to her European colleagues last week that the administration is still unable to agree on an Iran policy. She also indicated it will take months more to figure one out. One reason is that none of the options is very good. Many inside the administration believe the diplomatic efforts of the so-called European Three — Britain, France and Germany — are mere Band-Aids and will only delay Tehran’s unstinting efforts to build a nuclear bomb, which intel analysts say is about five years off. But even most hawks agree that U.S. military options in Iran are just as unpalatable. What’s left? Bush hopes that his rhetoric of freedom will inspire dissidents within Iran. But some hard-liners in the Defense Department want a more "forward leaning" policy: quietly pushing for regime change by making use of exiles like former MEK members.

Still, Rice and other top State officials remain leery of the MEK, despite renewed efforts to back and fund the group on Capitol Hill. In a conversation with one European counterpart last week, Rice seemed to belittle the Defense Department’s recruitment efforts, saying "the Pentagon is playing at the margins" of the administration’s Iran policy. Sources tell NEWSWEEK that the CIA is also resisting the recruitment of agents from the MEK because senior officers regard them as unreliable cultists under the sway of Rajavi and her husband. A Defense Department spokesman denied there is any "cooperation agreement" with the MEK and said the Pentagon has no plans to utilize MEK members in any capacity.

Rajavi, for her part, is adamant that her organization will never be broken up. "There have been efforts to recruit individuals, or to dismantle parts of the movement," she says. "These have failed." Supporters of the MEK on Capitol Hill, where at least one bill is aimed at restoring the organization to State’s good graces, say that some of its intelligence has already proved very accurate. (It was the MEK last year that revealed Iran’s secret nuclear facilities at Natanz.) It is also clear that Tehran deeply fears the group’s influence. "The Defense Department is thinking of them as buddies and the State Department sees them as terrorists. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle," says Rep. Brad Sherman, a Democrat from California. "Maybe they should get time off for good behavior." Perhaps. But that would require a coherent policy first.

By Christopher Dickey, Mark Hosenball and Michael Hirsh

June 28, 2008 0 comments

Human Rights Abuse in the MEK

MEK;a terror group;a cult or a source of intelligence ?

‘ font-size: 10pt”>The State Department says MEK is a terror group. Human Rights Watch says it’s a cult. For the White House, MEK is a source of intelligence on Iran.

‘ font-size: 10pt”>May 18 – A controversial exile movement cited by President George W. Bush as a source of information on Iran’s nuclear ambitions is condemned for psychologically and physically abusing its own members in a new report by Human Rights Watch.

‘ font-size: 10pt”>In a document scheduled for public release this week, Human Rights Watch alleges that the Iranian exile group known as Mujahedine Khalq (MEK) has a history of cultlike practices that include forcing members to divorce their spouses and to engage in extended self-criticism sessions.

‘ font-size: 10pt”>More dramatically, the report states, former MEK members told Human Rights Watch that when they protested MEK policies or tried to leave the organization, they were arrested, in some cases violently abused and in other instances imprisoned. Two former recruits told the human-rights group that they were held in solitary confinement for years in a camp operated by MEK in Iraq under the protection of Saddam Hussein. MEK representatives in the United States and France, where MEK is headquartered, did not immediately respond to NEWSWEEK phone calls and an e-mail requesting comment.

‘ font-size: 10pt”>MEK has long been controversial because of its history of violent attacks in Iran, its relationship with Saddam’s regime and its background as a quasi-religious, quasi-Marxist radical resistance group founded in the era of the late Iranian shah. In 1997, the Clinton administration put MEK on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist groups. MEK’s U.S. supporters, among whom at one point numbered dozens of members of Congress, charged that the Clinton administration only labeled MEK as a terrorist group as part of an ill-conceived attempt to improve relations with the ayatollahs who currently run Iran. However, the Bush administration added two alleged MEK front organizations to the State Department’s terrorist list in 2003.

‘ font-size: 10pt”>Despite the group’s notoriety, Bush himself cited purported intelligence gathered by MEK as evidence of the Iranian regime’s rapidly accelerating nuclear ambitions. At a March 16 press conference, Bush said Iran’s hidden nuclear program had been discovered not because of international inspections but "because a dissident group pointed it out to the world." White House aides acknowledged later that the dissident group cited by the president is the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), one of the MEK front groups added to the State Department list two years ago.

‘ font-size: 10pt”>In an appearance before a House International Relations Subcommittee a year ago, John Bolton, the controversial State Department undersecretary who Bush has nominated to become US ambassador to the United Nations, was questioned by a Congressman sympathetic to MEK about whether it was appropriate for the U.S. government to pay attention to allegations about Iran supplied by the group. Bolton said he believed that MEK "qualifies as a terrorist organization according to our criteria." But he added that he did not think the official label had "prohibited us from getting information from them. And I certainly don’t have any inhibition about getting information about what’s going on in Iran from whatever source we can find that we deem reliable."

‘ font-size: 10pt”>However, current and former senior U.S. national-security officials, who asked not to be named because they are not supposed to talk about intelligence-gathering activities, say that all the major revelations MEK publicly claims to have made regarding nuclear advances in Iran were reported in classified form and from other sources to U.S. policymakers before MEK made them public. A Western diplomat familiar with the work of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations component that has been monitoring Iran’s nuclear program, said that while the MEK has occasionally come up with accurate information about Iran’s nukes, the group has come up with a similar number of other tips that have not checked out.

‘ font-size: 10pt”>According to Human Rights Watch, several members of Congress, including both Republicans and Democrats, only last month attended a Washington meeting of a legal "MKO-backed" group called the National Convention for a Democratic, Secular Republic in Iran. In February, the group says, a think tank co-chaired by retired U.S. military officers called for MEK to be dropped from the State Department terrorist list and recommended that the U.S. government actively support MEK in its campaign to bring down the Iranian theocracy.

‘ font-size: 10pt”>According to administration officials, some Pentagon officials want to recruit former MEK members as U.S. secret agents who would infiltrate Iran on intelligence missions. The Pentagon has emphatically insisted that it has no plans to work with the MEK or any of the group’s members.

‘ font-size: 10pt”> According to the report, MEK, formed in 1965 by three political activists, originally was an "urban guerilla group" which participated in the struggle against the shah that resulted in the 1979 Iranian revolution and produced the current theocratic regime in Tehran.

‘ font-size: 10pt”>In an early schism following the revolution, the MEK and Abolhassan Bani Sadr, briefly Iran’s president during the 1980 U.S. Embassy hostage crisis, split away from the main revolutionary movement led by Ayatollah Khomeini and went into exile. Later, Bani Sadr in turn split from MEK after a disagreement with Massoud Rajavi, who, with his wife, Maryam, subsequently became the movement’s unchallenged leader. During the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam allowed MEK to set up several military camps in Iraq with a headquarters encampment near Baghdad known as Camp Ashraf and the group proceeded to conduct paramilitary operations against the Tehran regime, the largest of which was mounted unsuccessfully shortly after Iran agreed to a U.N.-brokered ceasefire in the Iran-Iraq War. MEK reportedly lost more than 1,000 fighters in this attack.

‘ font-size: 10pt”>According to Human Rights Watch, following this 1988 military defeat, the Rajavi’s leadership of MEK became increasingly authoritarian and cultlike. According to an MEK defector’s memoir, Rajavi claimed to have a mystical relationship with a prophet known as Imam Zaman, who is Shia Islam’s version of the long-awaited Messiah. In order to better cement their relationship with their leader, and hence ultimately their Messiah, Rajavi then instructed his followers to divorce their spouses. The group had already established a practice of "self criticism," under which members were asked to undergo their own personal "ideological revolution" by confessing personal inadequacies in cultlike confession sessions.

‘ font-size: 10pt”>Paranoid about defectors and possible infiltrators from the Tehran regime’s intelligence apparatus, in the l990s, according to Human Rights Watch, MEK leadership ordered a series of stringent "security clearances" in which "many" members were arrested by group organizers and interrogated and even imprisoned in special buildings inside the boundaries of MEK camps in Saddam-ruled Iraq. Human Rights Watch says the testimony of former MEK prisoners paints "a grim picture of how the organization treated its members, particularly those who held dissenting opinions or expressed an intent to leave the organization."

‘ font-size: 10pt”>Witnesses contacted by Human Rights Watch reported two deaths during the course of MEK internal interrogations and other cases of lengthy imprisonment. One MEK detainee interviewed by Human Rights Watch, Mohammad Hussein Sobhani, claimed to have spent eight and a half years in solitary confinement in MEK detention facilities after he started raising questions about the leadership’s policies. He said he was beaten on 11 occasions with wooden sticks and leather belts. Another former MEK member interviewed by Human Rights Watch, Farhad Javaheri-Yar, claimed to have been imprisoned in solitary confinement by the group for five years.

‘ font-size: 10pt”>Other witnesses told Human Rights Watch claimed it was the practice of MEK interrogators to tie thick ropes around prisoners’ necks and drag them along the ground. One witness told investigators: "Sometimes prisoners returned to the cell with extremely swollen necks ”their head and neck as big as a pillow." In a statement accompanying its investigative report, Joe Stork, a Human Rights Watch expert on the Middle East, commented: "The Iranian government has a dreadful record on human rights. But it would be a mistake to promote an opposition group that is responsible for serious human rights abuses.”

‘ font-size: 10pt”>By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball

September 8, 2005 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Ashcroft’s Baghdad Connection

Why the attorney general and others in Washington have backed a terror group with ties to Iraq

When the White House released its Sept. 12 "white paper" detailing Saddam Hussein’s "support for international terrorism," it caused more than a little discomfort in some quarters of Washington.

The 27-page document–entitled "A Decade of Deception and Defiance"–made no mention of any Iraqi ties to Osama bin Laden. But it did highlight Saddam’s backing of the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO), an obscure Iranian dissident group that has gathered surprising support among members of Congress in past years. One of those supporters, the documents show, is a top commander in President Bush’s war on terrorism: Attorney General John Ashcroft, who became involved with the MKO while a Republican senator from Missouri.

The case of Ashcroft and the MKO shows just how murky fighting terrorism can sometimes get. State Department officials first designated the MKO a "foreign terrorist organization" in 1997, accusing the Baghdad-based group of a long series of bombings, guerilla cross-border raids and targeted assassinations of Iranian leaders. Officials say the MKO–which originally fought to overthrow the Shah of Iran–was linked to the murder of several U.S. military officers and civilians in Iran in the 1970s. "They have an extremely bloody history," says one U.S. counterterrorism official.

But the MKO, which commands an army of 30,000 from bases inside Iraq, has tried to soften its image in recent years–in part with strong backing from politically active Iranian-Americans in the United States. The MKO operates in Washington out of a small office in the National Press Building under the name the National Council of Resistance of Iran. According to the State Department, the National Council of Resistance is a "front" for the MKO; in 1999, the National Council itself was placed on the State Department terrorist list. But National Council officials adamantly deny their group has earned the terror label and have aggressively portrayed itself to Washington lawmakers as a "democratic" alternative to Iranian regime."You’re talking about a really popular movement," says Alireza Jafarzadeh, the National Council’s chief Washington spokesman, who insists that the MKO "targets only military targets."

Only two years ago, these arguments won sympathy from Ashcroft–and more than 200 other members of Congress. When the National Council of Resistance staged a September 2000 rally outside the United Nations to protest a speech by Iranian President Mohammed Khatami, Missouri’s two Republican senators–Ashcroft and Chris Bond–issued a joint statement of solidarity that was read aloud to a cheering crowd. A delegation of about 500 Iranians from Missouri attended the event–and a picture of a smiling Ashcroft was later included in a color briefing book used by MKO officials to promote their cause on Capitol Hill. Ashcroft was hardly alone. Among those who actually appeared at the rally and spoke on the group’s behalf was one of its leading congressional supporters: Democratic New Jersey Sen. Bob Torricelli.

That same year, Senator Ashcroft wrote a letter to Attorney General Janet Reno protesting the detention of an Iranian woman, Mahnaz Samadi, who was a leading spokeswoman for the National Council of Resistance. The case quickly became a cause celebre for the MKO and its supporters in the United States.

U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service agents had arrested Samadi at the Canadian border, charging her with failing to disclose her past "terrorist" ties as an MKO "military commander"–including spending seven months in a MKO military-training camp inside Iraq–when she sought political asylum in the United States several years earlier, according to court documents obtained by NEWSWEEK.

Senator Ashcroft saw the case differently. In his May 10, 2000, letter to Reno, the Missouri lawmaker expressed "concern" about the detention, calling Samadi a "highly regarded human-rights activist" and a "powerful voice for democracy." (As part of a later settlement with the INS, Samadi admitted her membership in MKO but denied that she personally participated in any "terrorist activity." While her grant of political asylum was revoked, the INS dropped its deportation proceedings and she was permitted to remain in the United States.)

Alireza Jafarzadeh, the National Council’s top Washington lobbyist, said he had "several" meetings with Ashcroft aides about the matter and that he "certainly" viewed the Missouri senator as a supporter of his group. But backers of the MKO acknowledge the real lobbying was done by Iranian-Americans in Missouri who wrote letters and made repeated phone calls on Samadi’s behalf. How much Ashcroft got personally involved isn’t clear. A Justice Department spokeswoman told NEWSWEEK that Ashcroft’s letter to Reno was the result of a "straightforward, constituent-type inquiry," adding that the current attorney general would never "knowingly" back any terrorist group. When he signed the joint statement with Bond that was read at the National Council rally at the United Nations, Ashcroft did not "intend to endorse any organization," the spokeswoman, Barbara Comstock, said. "He was supporting democracy and freedom in Iran," she said. Comstock said Ashcroft currently has "no problem" prosecuting all U.S.-based terror groups, including the MKO.

Ashcroft isn’t the only one now distancing himself from the MKO. The Senate’s most aggressive promotor of the MKO for years has been Bob Torricelli, who in recent years has circulated numerous letters among his colleagues–including one as recently as last year–describing the MKO as a "legitimate" alternative to the regime in Iran and urging that the group be taken off the State Department terrorist list. Torricelli told NEWSWEEK he saw his support for the group as a way of putting pressure on the Iranian regime. "They [the MKO] were the only game in town," he said. But Torricelli also said last week said he would no longer push the group’s cause after getting hammered over the issue by his GOP opponent, Doug Forrester, who accused Torricelli of receiving more than $100,000 in campaign contributions from Iranian-Americans who supported the group. (Torricelli aides say the amount is exaggerated and that others, including some leading Republicans, have also received contributions from some of the same Iranian-Americans.) As a result of the September 11 attacks and new concerns about any allegations of terrorism, Bond also has put his backing for the group "in abeyance," an aide said.

Much of the new skittishness among MKO’s congressional backers also stems from the decision by the Bush White House to emphasize the connections between MKO and Saddam. It isn’t the first time this was done. Former Clinton administration official Martin Indyk, who served as assistant secretary of State for Near Eastern affairs in 1997, told NEWSWEEK that one of the reasons the group was put on the terrorism list in the first place was part of a "two-pronged" strategy that included ratcheting up pressure on Saddam. Like the Bush White House, the Clinton administration was eager to highlight Iraqi ties to terrorism and had collected extensive evidence of Saddam providing logistical support to the MKO in the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq War. (The MKO’s headquarters are located on a heavily guarded street in central Baghdad.) But the United States could find no other hard evidence linking Saddam to terror groups, Indyk said. "That was about all we had on [Saddam] when it came to terrorism," Indyk told NEWSWEEK.

National-security adviser Condoleezza Rice said in an interview Wednesday on PBS’s "The NewsHour" that the United States had new evidence from "high-ranking detainees" that Iraq has provided "some training to Al Qaeda in chemical-weapons development." But a top U.S. law-enforcement official recently cast some doubt about the strength of the evidence connecting Saddam and Al Qaeda, telling NEWSWEEK there is far more substantial evidence that Iran was harboring top Al Qaeda leaders.)

The other "prong" in the Clinton strategy that led to the inclusion of the MKO on the terrorist list was White House interest in opening up a dialogue with the Iranian government. At the time, President Khatami had recently been elected and was seen as a moderate. Top administration officials saw cracking down on the MKO–which the Iranians had made clear they saw as a menace–as one way to do so. Still, Indyk said the basic decision to label the MKO as terrorists could be justified anyway. "Yes, they’re bad guys," he told NEWSWEEK. "But no–they’re not targeting us."

Indyk’s comments lend partial support to one of the main contentions of MKO and its congressional supporters: that geopolitical strategy–a tilt toward Iran–was an important factor in the State Department decision to accuse MKO of terrorism. "They wanted to appease the Iranian regime," said Jafarzadeh, the National Council of Resistance lobbyist.

Still, the Justice Department appears only to be stepping up investigations into MKO members. Early last year, the FBI broke up a ring of Iranians who were raising money at the Los Angeles airport under the guise of helping suffering children when, according to a court complaint, they were routing the funds to the MKO. (A federal judge recently tossed the case out of court, but the Justice Department is appealing.) Then, last December, FBI agents showed up at the home of Jafarzadeh. Armed with a search warrant, the agents hauled away boxes of documents, including files on the group’s dealings with members of Congress. One in particular must have gotten the agents’ attention. It was labeled ASHCROFT.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

By Michael Isikoff

June 28, 2005 0 comments