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Iran

Iran’s best diplomat takes on US power

Fate has given Foreign Minister Zarif the daunting task of foiling a global campaign aimed at bringing his country to its knees and forcing it to submit to American power.

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AP Files/Globe Staff
Donald Trump and Mohammad Javad Zarif.

Hundreds of diplomats from around the world converged on New York this past week for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. One had a tougher job than all the others — the world’s most challenging diplomatic assignment. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif of Iran is today’s David facing the American Goliath. In this confrontation, as in the Bible, the odds favor Goliath.

American leaders are threatening Iran in terms more vituperative than any the United States has ever used against a sovereign nation. To accompany their threats, they have embarked on the harshest campaign of economic sanctions in modern history. Their demonization of Iran wildly exceeds the bounds of reason and geopolitical reality. Fate has given Foreign Minister Zarif the daunting task of foiling a global campaign aimed at bringing his country to its knees and forcing it to submit to American power.

Many senior officials in Washington do not see Iran as a geographical or political entity. To them it is our era’s embodiment of the violent barbarism that has threatened civilization ever since the Visigoths sacked Rome. For much of the last century, we called that nihilistic force “communism.” Then it became “terrorism.” Now it is “Iran.” By portraying Iran as an irredeemable font of evil, we justify the most monstrously misconceived assault on a foreign nation since our invasion of Iraq fifteen years ago.

American sanctions are intended to starve the Iranian economy by forcing every business in the world to stop trading with Iran. Any that refuse, we warn, will be forbidden to operate in the United States. We are also insisting that Iran dismantle the missile defenses that are its main deterrent against attack; embrace Israel, its most persistent enemy; stop aiding governments that request its help, like those of Syria and Iraq; end its support for Palestinian rights; and cut off payments to militias in other countries that are fighting ISIS and al-Qaeda.

In short, we demand unconditional surrender. Zarif’s job is to turn back this tsunami. He is as well prepared for the job as any Iranian.

In vowing to go alone, Donald Trump is turning our country against an agreement it negotiated.

Zarif left Iran at 17 to attend prep school in California. He went on to earn degrees in international relations at San Francisco State University and the University of Denver. Later he became Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, and in 2013 was named foreign minister. During the six-nation talks that produced the 2015 accord restricting Iran’s nuclear program, he led Iran’s negotiating team. Not even these years of experience, however, prepared him for what he now faces. Nothing could have. No diplomat in modern history has had to deal with a multi-faceted challenge like this one. If he fails, his country, which has existed for 10 times longer than the United States, could collapse.

When President Trump addressed the UN on Tuesday, he denounced the country he called “the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism.” He asserted that its leaders have “embezzled billions of dollars from the treasury,” and that they use their power to “spread mayhem across the Middle East” and “fund havoc and slaughter in Yemen and Syria.” All of that is true — if the country in question is Saudi Arabia.

Every serious study of global terrorism in the 21st century concludes that most of the money supporting al-Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, and like-minded gangs comes from Saudi Arabia. It is no accident that Osama bin Laden and most of his 9/11 hijackers were Saudi. No other country, not even Pakistan, has sponsored terror as relentlessly as Saudi Arabia.

The only way to portray Iran as a terrorist state is to define terror as opposing American power. That is Iran’s true sin. Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, made this clear when he warned Iran: “If you cross us, our allies or our partners; if you harm our citizens; if you continue to lie, cheat, and deceive, yes, there will indeed be hell to pay.”

That hell would include the imposition of a deranged totalitarian cult, the Mojahedin-e Khalq, as Iran’s next government. It is an exiled group that’s widely hated in Iran — not surprisingly, since it has assassinated Iranian leaders and sided with Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. Among this cult’s most vocal supporters is Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani. In a speech to one of its support groups in New York last week, Giuliani declared that the overthrow of Iran’s government “could be in a few days, months, a couple of years — but it’s going to happen.”

Zarif’s job is to persuade the world to rebel against Trump’s dictates. He has already had some success, notably in India, China, Russia, and Turkey. The most difficult diplomatic nut to crack will be the European Union. Zarif made progress this week. After he met with EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, she announced that Europe would establish a “legal entity” allowing businesses to sidestep sanctions on Iran. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he was “disturbed and indeed deeply disappointed” by the move, but its scope is still unclear.

A European break with the United States on an issue so dear to Washington’s heart would be a spectacular breach of the trans-Atlantic alliance that has undergirded American foreign policy for 70 years. Zarif must convince Europeans that making this break would be in their long-term interest. That may be too much to expect even from such an evidently gifted diplomat.

By Stephen Kinzer, Bostonglobe

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USA double standards on terrorists
Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

US-Delisted MEK Terrorists Still Openly Committed to Violence

In 2012, the US State Department would delist anti-Iranian terrorist group – Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) – from its Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) list. Yet years later, MEK has demonstrated an eager desire to carry out political violence on a scale that eclipses the previous atrocities that had it designated a terrorist organization in the first place.

In the US State Department’s official statement published in September 2012, the rationale for delisting MEK would be as follows (emphasis added):

    With today’s actions, the Department does not overlook or forget the MEK’s past acts of terrorism, including its involvement in the killing of U.S. citizens in Iran in the 1970s and an attack on U.S. soil in 1992. The Department also has serious concerns about the MEK as an organization, particularly with regard to allegations of abuse committed against its own members.

The Secretary’s decision today took into account the MEK’s public renunciation of violence, the absence of confirmed acts of terrorism by the MEK for more than a decade, and their cooperation in the peaceful closure of Camp Ashraf, their historic paramilitary base.

Yet US policy before the State Department’s delisting, and events ever since, have proven this rationale for removing MEK as an FTO to be an intentional fabrication – that MEK was and still is committed to political violence against the Iranian people, and envisions a Libya-Syrian-style conflict to likewise divide and destroy the Iranian nation.

However, facts regarding the true nature of MEK is not derived from Iranian state media, or accusations made by MEK’s opponents in Tehran, but by MEK’s own US sponsors and even MEK’s senior leadership itself.

“Undeniably” MEK “Conducted Terrorist Attacks”

By the admissions of the United States and the United Kingdom, MEK is undeniably a terrorist organization guilty of self-admitted acts of terrorism. The UK House of Commons in a briefing paper titled, “The People’s Mujahiddeen of Iran (PMOI),” it  cites the UK Foreign Office which states explicitly that:

    The Mojahedin-e Khalq (MeK) is proscribed in the UK under the Terrorism Act 2000. It has a long history of involvement in terrorism in Iran and elsewhere and is, by its own admission, responsible for violent attacks that have resulted in many deaths.

The briefing paper makes mention of “assiduous” lobbying efforts by MEK to have itself removed from terrorist lists around the globe.

A 2012 Guardian article titled, “MEK decision: multimillion-dollar campaign led to removal from terror list,” would extensively detail the large number of prominent US politicians approached and paid by MEK as part of this lobbying effort.

Yet there is more behind MEK’s delisting than mere lobbying. As early as 2009, US policymakers saw MEK as one of many minority opposition and ethnic groups that could be used by the US as part of a wider agenda toward regime change in Iran.

The Brookings Institution in a 2009 policy paper titled, “Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran” (PDF), under a chapter titled, “Inspiring an Insurgency: Supporting Iranian Minority And Opposition Groups,” would openly admit (emphasis added):

    Perhaps the most prominent (and certainly the most controversial) opposition group that has attracted attention as a potential U.S.  proxy  is  the  NCRI  (National  Council of Resistance of  Iran),  the  political  movement  established  by  the  MeK  (Mujahedin-e  Khalq). Critics believe the group to be undemocratic and unpopular, and indeed anti-American.

Brookings would concede to MEK’s terrorist background, admitting (emphasis added):

    Undeniably, the group has conducted terrorist attacks—often excused by the MeK’s advocates because they are directed against the Iranian government. For example, in 1981, the group bombed the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party, which was then the clerical leadership’s main  political organization, killing an estimated 70 senior officials. More recently, the group has claimed  credit for over a dozen mortar attacks, assassinations, and other assaults on  Iranian civilian and  military targets between 1998 and 2001.

Brookings makes mention of MEK’s attacks on US servicemen and American civilian contractors which earned it its place on the US FTO, noting:

    In the 1970s, the group killed three U.S. officers and three civilian contractors in Iran.

And despite MEK’s current depiction as a popular resistance movement in Iran, Brookings would also admit (emphasis added):

    The group itself also appears to be undemocratic and enjoys little popularity in Iran itself. It has no  political base in the country, although it appears to have an operational presence. In particular, its  active participation on Saddam Husayn’s side during the bitter Iran-Iraq War made the group widely  loathed. In addition, many aspects of the group are cultish, and its leaders, Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, are revered to the point of obsession.

Brookings would note that despite the obvious reality of MEK, the US could indeed use the terrorist organization as a proxy against Iran, but notes that:

    …at the very least, to work more closely with the  group (at least in an overt manner), Washington would need to remove it from the list of foreign  terrorist organizations.

And from 2009 onward, that is precisely what was done. It is unlikely that the MEK alone facilitated the rehabilitation of its image or exclusively sought its removal from US-European terrorist organization lists – considering the central role MEK terrorists played in US regime change plans versus Iran.

While MEK propaganda insists that its inclusion on terrorist organization lists around the globe was the result of a global effort to “curry favor with Iran’s clerical regime,” it is clear that the terrorist organization earned its way onto these lists, and then lobbied and cheated its way off of them.

The MEK is Still Committed to Violence Today

While Iranians mourned in the wake of the Ahvaz attack, MEK was holding a rally in New York City attended by prominent US politicians including US President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudolph Giuliani and former US National Security Adviser under the Obama administration, James Jones.

During the “2018 Iran Uprising Summit” Giuliani would vow the overthrow of the Iranian government.

MEK leader Maryam Rajavi would broadcast a message now posted on MEK websites. In her message she would discuss MEK’s role in fomenting ongoing violence inside of Iran.She would admit:

    Today, the ruling mullahs’ fear is amplified by the role of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) and resistance units in leading and continuing the uprisings. Regime analysts say: “The definitive element in relation to the December 2017 riots is the organization of rioters. So-called Units of Rebellion have been created, which have both the ability to increase their forces and the potential to replace leaders on the spot.”

The roadmap for freedom reveals itself in these very uprisings, in ceaseless protests, and in the struggle of the Resistance Units.

Riots by definition entail violence. The riots taking place across Iran beginning in late 2017 and continuing sporadically since – of which Rajavi and her MEK take credit for organizing – have left dozens dead including police.

One police officer was shot dead just before New Year’s, and another three were killed in late February 2018 during such riots.

In the region of Ahvaz specifically, MEK social media accounts have been taking credit for and promoting ongoing unrest there. Ahvaz was more recently the scene of a terrorist attack in which gunmen targeted a parade leaving dozens dead and scores more injured.

Rajavi and MEK’s ultimate goal is the overthrow of the Iranian government. As Brookings admits in its 2009 paper, the Iranian government will not cede power to US-orchestrated regime change without a fight – and MEK was recruited as a US proxy specifically because of its capacity for violence.Brookings would note:

    Despite its limited popularity (but perhaps because of its successful use of terrorism), the Iranian regime is exceptionally sensitive to the MEK and is vigilant in guarding against it.

It was for this reason that Brookings singled them out as a potential proxy in 2009 and recommended their delisting by the US State Department so the US could provide more open support for the terrorist organization.

It is clear that Rajavi’s recent admissions to being behind political violence inside Iran contravenes the US State Department’s rationale for deslisting MEK on grounds that the group had made a “public renunciation of violence.”

MEK is not only refusing to renounce violence, MEK’s most senior leader has just publicly and unambiguously declared MEK’s policy is to openly wield violence inside Iran toward destabilizing and overthrowing the government.From the United States’ ignoring of its own anti-terrorism laws – aiding and abetting MEK while still on the US State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organizations list – to the US now portraying MEK as a “reformed” “resistance” organization even as its leader takes credit for ongoing political violence inside Iran, it is clear that once again the US finds itself a willing state sponsor of terrorism.It was as early as 2007 that Seymour Hersh in his New Yorker article, “The Redirection Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” would warn:

    To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

It is clear in retrospect that the rise of the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” (ISIS), Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, and other extremist fronts in Syria were a result of this US policy. It is also clear that there are many other extremist groups the US has knowingly whitewashed politically and is covertly supporting in terrorism aimed directly at Iran itself.

It is just a matter of time before the same denials and cover-ups used to depict Syrian and Libyan terrorists as “freedom fighting rebels” are reused in regards to US-backed violence aimed at Iran. Hopefully, it will not take nearly as long for the rest of the world to see through this game and condemn groups like MEK as the terrorists they always have been, and continue to be today.

Also in retrospect, it is clear how US-engineered conflict and regime change has impacted the Middle Eastern region and the world as a whole – one can only imagine the further impact a successful repeat of this violence will have if visited upon Iran directly.

By Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine“New Eastern Outlook”.

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Natanz
Mujahedin Khalq Organization's Propaganda System

A Tiny Group on a Compound in Albania are Being Groomed to Destabilize Iran

U.S. President Donald Trump does not like Iran and he has increasingly surrounded himself by people who feel the same way. Understood to be the ghoul siphoning off U.S. power in the Middle East, members of the Trump team have been open about their desire neutralize growing Iranian power.

“We ask all nations to isolate Iran’s regime as long as its aggression continues,” Trump said during his speech to the United Nations’ General Assembly on Sept 25.

“And we ask all nations to support Iran’s people as they struggle to reclaim their religious and righteous destiny,” he added.

White House national security advisor John Bolton promised to bring regime change to Iran by 2019 before stepping back the remarks in a press conference on Sept 24 on the US sanctioning in Iran. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in the same conference regarding the reimposition of sanctions that Iran needs ‘enormous change’ before the U.S. reconsiders its stance. Trump’s lawyer and loyal ally, Rudy Giuliani, said that he hoped the sanctions would bring a “successful revolution” to the nascent country.

Destabilizing the Ayatollah’s regime in Iran is a Herculean task, not least because domestic opposition to it is disorganized and have largely localized, economic concerns.

But the Trump team are convinced that they have an effective tool to antagonize Iran: the Mujahideen al-Khalq (MEK). The MEK claims itself to be Iran’s main opposition group. Bolton, Giuliani and Pompeo have all received thousands of dollars from the MEK to speak on their behalf, championing them as the saviors to the rogue nation.

In reality, the MEK boasts a membership of about 3,000 aging Iranian exiles and former members. Analysts claim the MEK is a cult that shames, tortures and controls everyone inside the group. They live in a military compound in Tirana, Albania, a full 2,130 miles away from Tehran and are only allowed out once a year to attend their annual gathering in Paris. They have virtually no support in Iran.

So how are they the linchpin to the U.S.’ plan for Iran?

The MEK has billed itself to provide two services for those who wish to see a destabilized Iran: a network of spies to provide intelligence and a well-oiled propaganda machine that throws dirt on the regime.

The group’s supposedly deep network of spies inside Iran was given credit for helping to expose the country’s secret nuclear facilities in the early 2000s. In 2002, the MEK’s political wing, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), made a theatrical claim that it had discovered a secret nuclear facility in Natanz, Iran. The claim made the MEK seem like a credible source of insider knowledge into Iran’s clandestine nuclear weapons development scheme, but as it turns out, much of it was just for show.

The international body in charge of monitoring nuclear sites, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) already knew about the Natanz site, making the information less than groundbreaking.

In 2015, the NCRI repeated its style of staging a theatrical reveal when it claimed that Iran was developing a secret ‘underground centrifuge facility’ on the outskirts of Tehran, just before the Iran nuclear deal was signed into effect. Some of the details the NCRI discussed about the site, including “3 by 3 meter radiation proof doors that are 40 centimeters thick and weigh about 8 tons … to prevent radiation leak,” are evidently unnecessary for a uranium-enrichment facility, and the images it ‘released’ were ripped from an Iranian company’s website.

A U.S. State Department spokesperson said “Well, we don’t have any information at this time to support the conclusion of the [NCRI’s] report.”

The ‘reveal’ was fake.

Natanz

What little actual new information it had produced regarding Iran’s nuclear sites were reportedly fed to them by the Mossad, Israel’s secret intelligence, who wanted to reveal the information but needed an element of plausible deniability. The MEK then, was used as an easy middleman.

The other use of the MEK has been as a kind of anti-Iranian regime propaganda machine.

The MEK hosts a lavish annual conference, bringing together its members with some of the world’s top politicians, all united against the Ayatollah regime. The MEK’s leader, Maryam Rajavi, speaks of bringing equality and liberal democracy to Iran in each year’s headline speech. Its official news outlets on its website and the MEK-backed Iran News Wire, produce daily stories on unrest inside Iran to convey to the world that the people of Iran are turning against the regime.

Nevermind that no one is protesting in Iran for the MEK to take over.

Much of Iran News Wire’s story revolve around an ongoing labor strike of Iranian truck drivers; an issue that has no apparent link to the MEK.

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It was recently revealed that many of the MEK members in the Tirana base have been operating a troll factory intended to create the false impression that there are untold masses of Iranians who wish for the MEK to overthrow Ayatollah Khamenei and his clerical government.

The MEK operates thousands of social media accounts that posts pro-regime change messages and fights with the MEK’s detractors.

“The majority of it is abusive, libelous, ad hominem and intended to silence,” Azadeh Moaveni, a fellow at New America said of the posts in an interview with an Al Jazeera team investigating the troll factory.

The posts are often made strategically to create trending hashtags, giving the false impression of a populist insurgency against the regime. To be sure, Iran is experiencing unrests across the country: protests have sporadically broken out over the past year due to the country’s economic woes. Double digit inflation and funding expensive military campaigns in Syria, Iraq and Yemen have hampered the country’s budget, choking off its middle class. The U.S.’ re-imposition of sanctions has only added to that volatility.

While these protests may open the window of opportunity on opposition groups, the MEK is universally reviled in Iran for its role in the Iran-Iraq war and is not a player in the country’s political landscape.

This matters little for those U.S. and European policymakers however, who see a further use in the group. Not as a proxy group or intelligence asset, but a source of money.

The MEK’s Other Use

The MEK, with its generous funding sources, has funnelled millions of dollars to politicians since 2003, giving John Bolton at least $180,000 in one year alone, the man now in charge of forming Trump’s foreign policy doctrine. They pay politicians as much as $50,000 to speak at its conferences, and give to both Democrats and Republicans; anyone who will publicly support them in exchange for donations.

Among their beneficiaries are former presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, the late John McCain who received at least seven installments of MEK funds according to Joanne Stocker, an editor at Defense Post. They’ve also given money to former CIA heads, other national security advisors and heads of homeland security.

From this strategy of all-out spending, the MEK has amassed a veritable army of D.C. insiders and kingmakers who speak on the group’s behalf, convincing their colleagues that the group is paving the way towards a free Iran.

In return as well, the MEK has received tens of millions from the U.S. to build and maintain its current facility in Tirana via a donation to the U.N. Refugee Agency, and likely continues to enjoy support from Saudi Arabia.

What this means in practical terms is that Trump’s foreign policy stance towards Iran will likely always include the MEK

“Anything to needle Iran,” Ervand Abrahamian said of the support for the MEK from countries like Saudi Arabia. Abrahamian is a historian at the City University of New York who wrote a book on the group, called “The Iranian Mojahedin.”

The group, which has a history of being funded by Saudi Arabia, continues to enjoy the support of the country: Prince Turki bin Faisal al-Saud, who used to leave Saudi’s intelligence, spoke at the MEK’s 2016 conference in Paris to make his backing of the group public.

According to Abrahamian, the cost of Saudi’s support for the group is a mere “pittance,” compared to the consequences of regime destabilization. Trita Parsi, a prominent critic of the MEK and founder of the National Iranian American Council, told Al Bawaba that the MEK continues to serve a useful role in egging on regime collapse in Iran.

“If your objective is regime collapse… then the MEK is almost a perfect fit,” said Trita Parsi to Al Bawaba in an interview. The MEK, Parsi argued, is a capable force to effect regime collapse due to their years of fighting both inside and outside of Iran and their ability to conduct espionage operations.

The group, in other words, is not still around to help inspire a democratic upheaval in Iran, but to dismember the country, taking its government and its people with them.

That such destabilization may cause war, an uncontrollable humanitarian catastrophe and more resentment against Western meddling in regional affairs does not seem important to those hoping to see a disempowered Iran.

By Ty Joplin, Albawaba.com

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MEK after Trump
Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

In U.N. speech, Trump fails (again) to make his Iran case

In President Trump’s speech Tuesday at the United Nations, one thing about his Iran policy became clear: its incoherence.

“We ask all nations to isolate Iran’s regime as long as its aggression continues. And we ask all nations to support Iran’s people as they struggle to reclaim their religious and righteous destiny,” Trump said.

Earlier in the day, however, Trump had tweeted about the person who embodies that despised Iranian regime like no other — President Hassan Rouhani: “I am sure he is an absolutely lovely man!”

Those conflicting words underscore this administration’s shaky handle on its biggest foreign policy dilemma.

Iran is once again a focus of the proceedings at the U.N. General Assembly this year. That’s partially by Iran’s own design, as leaders from Tehran seize their lone opportunity on the calendar to meet with other world leaders and the Western media.

But this year American leaders are ratcheting up the pressure. Trump’s speech follows a series of antagonistic statements by his top foreign policy officials in recent days. “There is no love for Iran here in the United States, and there is no love for the United States in Iran, and both sides are going to go back and forth,” Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said Sunday.

Perhaps that is true. Yet it’s also true that each has a strange and enduring fixation — obsession, really — with the other. At no time is that clearer than at the U.N. meetings.

The latest instance is the terrorist attack that occurred Saturday in the southern Iranian city of Ahvaz, which targeted an annual military parade commemorating the start of the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Unknown assailants opened fire on the crowd, which included defenseless women and children. Nine people lost their lives.

Iran was quick to blame regional allies of the United States. The United States, meanwhile, denied any involvement, but multiple Trump administration officials and surrogates used the opportunity to blame Iran.

Rouhani reacted, tweeting that accusing Iran of contributing to an attack on its own people would be like blaming the U.S. government for 9/11.

Even though top Trump officials say that there is no plan for regime change in Iran, their disdain and contempt for the leadership in Tehran has rarely been more palpable.

“I don’t know when we’re going to overthrow them. It could be in a few days, months, a couple of years. But it’s going to happen,” Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer and former mayor of New York, said at a rally Saturday in a Times Square hotel.

That event was organized by supporters of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (MEK), an exiled opposition group that was long on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations. Over the years it has paid large sums of money to current and former U.S. officials — including Giuliani — to amplify its messages.

The MEK is widely considered a cult because of its suspected brainwashing and torture of its own members — especially those who attempt to leave the organization — so current and former U.S. officials working on Iran have quietly tried to keep it out of policy-making deliberations. But the loyalty shown to it by key figures close to Trump, including Haley and Giuliani as well as national security adviser John Bolton, should be worrisome.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his newly appointed special representative for Iran, Brian Hook, continue to say that they want to negotiate with Iran.

“The new deal that we hope to be able to sign with Iran, and it will not be a personal agreement between two governments like the last one, we seek a treaty,” Hook said in a speech last week.

To reach such an agreement, however, would require Iran conceding to a list of 12 demands that Pompeo outlined in May, which is almost certainly unacceptable for Tehran.

Ultimately the Trump policy appears to resemble the one Obama used to induce Iran into negotiations over its nuclear program — minus the participation of other world powers (especially Europe, China and Russia) or any actual incentives for Iran to re-engage in talks.

The Trump administration is hoping to use economic sanctions to create a massive public backlash against the regime. In my own conversations with State Department officials who support such an approach, they seem to be trying to will themselves into believing that such a policy would magically work, but have few arguments to support how it could.

Whether the goal is regime change or a change in the regime’s behavior, the Trump administration has failed to provide a case for how it would achieve either. The president’s speech in New York on Tuesday provided little other than more confusion.

By Jason Rezaian, Global Opinions writer

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Maryam Rajavi
The cult of Rajavi

The ‘political cult’ has created a state within a state in Albania

The ‘political cult’ opposing the Iranian regime which has created a state within a state in Albania

In Tirana, Borzou Daragahi meets defectors of the People’s Mujahedin Organisation of Iran, a controversial group which has found itself the darling of Washington

An Iranian exile group that is a darling of Washington conservatives has set up what critics describe as “a state within a state” inside the tiny Balkan nation of Albania.

From a well-guarded 84-acre (340,000 square metres, or 34 hectares) property it has forged on a hillside in the Albanian countryside, the group – called the People’s Mujahedin Organisation of Iran, commonly known by the acronym MEK, has begun handing out mysterious wads of cash, set up its own radio communications network, and launched deceptive information operations to influence debate about the Islamic Republic – its avowed enemy – say defectors of the group, relatives of members, and Albanian journalists, lawyers and a former intelligence official.

In addition, it has been accused of locking up members inside the camp against their will, an allegation that has long dogged the organisation, which is led by Iranian exile couple Maryam and Massoud Rajavi, and described by former members and Iran experts as a political cult.

“We are supposed to be living in a free and democratic country. But they have built a state within a state that implements its own laws,” says Olsi Yazici, an Albanian writer who is part of the legal team attempting to find out more about the group.

“They are behaving in Albania like a mafia – breaking laws, blackmailing, paying people off, beating people, threatening defectors, accusing anyone who questions them of being an Iranian agent and controlling their members in the camp through Stalinist totalitarian methods. And at the end, they claim to be democrats who will save Iran.”

The Independent reached out to several MEK spokespersons and representatives, seeking comment for the story.

Inside the MEK’s state within a state

As this report was being prepared, the organisation released a five and a half minute video clip that showed drone footage of what it called its “residential compound”, which appears made up of dozens of buildings, and a main entrance flanked by a pair of golden lions, a symbol of the MEK.

The video showed Albanians on construction jobs in the camp, as well as members sipping tea with Albanian neighbours, or making music in a studio, including a cover of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”.

We are supposed to be living in a free and democratic country. But they have built a state within a state that implements its own laws

Olsi Yazici, Albanian writer

“Terrorist, terrorist,” the men screamed at the elderly couple, their arms locked, as they sought to walk away. Canadian-Iranians Mostafa and Mahboubeh Mohammadi say they have struggled to get their daughter, Somayeh, out of the MEK for 21 years.

They haven’t spoken to her since 2004, when they travelled to central Iraq to make a desperate attempt to get her and her younger brother out of the camp the group then occupied. Once they had been sympathisers and had even raised money for the group.

“We would spread out on the streets and show pictures of Iranians the regime had killed, and say their kids are stuck in refugee camps,” recalls Mostafa Mohammadi.

But eventually the Mohammadis turned against the group, which they claimed tricked their daughter into travelling to Iraq, seized her passport, and pressed her into the organisation. Through tremendous effort involving US and Canadian diplomats, they say they managed to extract their son, who is now living in Canada, but not their daughter.

The MEK says Somayeh is in the organisation of her own free will, and has issued videos of her disowning her parents.

At least one other former member of the group in Tirana says he was able to leave the organisation once he told them he wished to part ways.

“I choose to pursue my own life,” he says, asking that his name not be published. “There was no pressure to stay.”

A lengthy statement by the group on the website of its front group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, said that that Mostafa Mohammadi had been in Tehran in 2008 – an allegation he denies – and called Mohammadi’s lawyer an “agent” of the Iranian intelligence services.

The five and a half minute video shows footage of Somayeh Mohammadi with a caption reading that she insists the “Iranian regime deployed her father to accuse MEK (of having) kidnapped her”.

When the Mohammadis first came to Albania to find Somayeh, they were given the runaround by authorities in Tirana, who insisted she was not in the country.

But they managed to get confirmation from a sympathetic local refugee resettlement group that she had arrived in Tirana in 2015. Just days before the confrontation with the MEK members, the Mohammadis managed to prompt a police officer to enter the camp and confirm that she was there, possibly the first time an Albanian official wielding a warrant entered the compound.

“This was a big shock for the MEK,” says Yazici, the writer. “This diminished the role of the commanders in the eyes of the members.”

The Mohammadis had heard that she made her way one day a week to a Tirana hospital, serving as a translator for MEK members seeking medical care. They waited nearby to catch a glimpse of her on 27 July. After a few hours they became discouraged, and began heading back to their hotel.

That’s when a group of four men – who later transpired to be MEK enforcers – surrounded the elderly couple and began screaming “terrorist” at them.

Police soon arrived to break up the melee. Startling the officers, the MEK enforcers continued to strike Mohammadi in front of them, screaming that the frail couple were “terrorists”.

The police rounded up the Mohammadis as well as the MEK enforcers and took everyone to a Tirana police station. MEK leaders summoned their lawyer, Margarita Kola, as well as some leaders of the group. Kola, who once worked as a counsel for the US Embassy in Tirana, claimed she was acting on behalf of the Americans.

“She said, ‘You know who I am or not?’” recalls Migena Banna, the lawyer representing the Mohammadis, who was also at the police station. “She said, ‘I am not just a lawyer, I’m a legal representative of the US embassy.’ Then the police changed their behaviour.”

Kola told The Independent that she did not work for the US embassy but declined to answer whether she had originally made the claim.

Under pressure, police let the MEK members go, but held on to the Mohammadis for eight hours. The Tirana prosecutors’ office told The Independent the case remains under investigation.

Mostafa Mohammadi went to a hospital for treatment for his bruises. By then, the video of the pack of MEK enforcers assaulting the couple had gone viral on Albanian social media. Local television stations arrived to meet the couple, and stories about the search for their daughter began to air. Albanians were outraged.

“We have so many other refugees, Syrians, Iraqis. They can do everything. They go shopping. They are out on the streets,” says Yazici. “Where are these MEK people? Why can’t we see them?”

Much of the world was worried when Donald Trump was elected US president in November 2016. The leaders of the MEK celebrated.

“It was like a wedding,” recalls Hassan Heyrani, a former member of the group’s political committee who defected this year. “It was the whole election of Trump that prompted the group to move forward with the new camp. They were so happy. They said, ‘The geopolitical engine of the region is turning.’”

The story of the 50-year-old group is bound up in the wars, uprisings, and political twists of the Middle East. It was founded by leftist students decades ago to fight against the regime of Iran’s Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, carrying out assassinations of US officials in Iran who were backing him.

It later turned against the clerics who took over in Tehran during the 1979 revolution, staging bomb attacks during the 1980s, when it was granted a camp northeast of Baghdad and joined along Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war.

That move destroyed its popularity among the vast majority of Iranians. But with dozens of tanks and thousands of fighters positioned at a sprawling and inhospitable desert compound called Camp Ashraf, in a province adjacent to the Iranian border, it remained a threat to the Islamic Republic.

Its fortunes changed after the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and toppling of Saddam Hussein. US forces at first bombed the group as an appendage of the Baghdad regime, pulverising many of its tanks. But Washington conservatives later began to cultivate MEK as a potential way of pressuring Tehran.

The group eventually ran afoul of Iranian-backed politicians of the new Iraqi political elite. Members were pressured to leave Camp Ashraf, which was taken over by the Iranian-backed Badr Brigade militia, and relocate to Camp Liberty, on the same compound as US forces and the Baghdad International Airport.

Under pressure by Baghdad authorities to remove the group, the US managed to convince the government of Albania to take in a couple hundred members of the group as refugees in 2013, in what was described as a humanitarian gesture.

But as they came under attack by Iranian-backed Shia militias, as well as pressure by Isis militants, the plan to move a few hundred to Albania somehow turned into bringing the entire organisation from Iraq to southeastern Europe.

Once they had fully moved to Albania, the group first took up residence in a series of empty apartment buildings scattered around the city, and continued its fade into obscurity and irrelevance.

Leaders tried in vain to keep long-isolated members – curious about the modern world, and barred from sex and dating –from drifting away. They tried to erect barriers around one apartment building, but they were promptly torn down by angry local authorities.

With Mr Trump’s election, everything changed. The MEK had spent years cultivating Washington figures such as John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani, who were forces in the new administration in Washington.

In addition, an ambitious and stridently anti-Iran Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman took the reins in Saudi Arabia, and began looking for allies in his aim to roll back and possibly topple the clerical government in Tehran.

Beginning in July 2017, just as Trump began re-imposing sanctions on Iran that Obama had lifted as part of the nuclear deal, the MEK suddenly began buying plots of land in Albania, in a rural stretch of farmland near the town of Manza, between the Albanian capital and the Adriatic Sea.

The Trump administration continues to maintain strong ties with the MEK. At the weekend, the president’s lawyer addressed a gathering of the group at a midtown Manhattan hotel, describing the MEK as an antidote to the brutality and repression of the “outlaws and murderers” in power in Tehran. “Iran is entitled to freedom and democracy,” he said.

Albanian investigative journalist Gjergi Thanasi said the group paid $13m (£9.9m) to buy the first 200,000 square metres of the compound, has since bought another 140,000 square metres, and continues buying up property and racking up significant water, electricity, and internet bills.

They pay for everything with huge wads of cash, sometimes piles of local currency that they purchase through street vendors rather than banks or exchange shops, but also with “crisp hundred-dollar bills”, says Thanasi, leaving no bank trail.

“They pay bills on time,” he says. “They pay in cash. They buy small things in shops or even in malls. They always pay in cash. They do not use bank cards. They love not leaving a footprint.”

Thanasi found the group purchased 1,700 Lenovo brand computers and monitors from an Albanian firm. At first he thought it was some scam to evade import duties and resell the computers at a profit. But the MEK paid full price for the devices. They wanted the computers for the camp, and paid for them in cash. “What the hell do you need so many computers for?” he quips.

The group has a number of big-ticket expenses. It has set up a dedicated high-speed internet. It also managed to obtain official permission to set up its own antenna atop Mount Dajti, on the peaks overlooking Tirana, giving it effectively its own communications network.

A private Albanian security firm, called Argon, guard the camp and its entrances, deploying perhaps nine personnel armed with assault rifles and handguns in six-hour shifts around the clock.

It remains unclear why Albania, a small Balkan country struggling to overcome its reputation for corruption and money laundering in order to become a member of the EU, would allow such a shadowy group to operate with so little scrutiny.

“If I want to buy a car for 2,000 or 3,000 euros I have to use a bank in order to pay for the car,” says Thanasi. “I have to circulate the money through the bank and justify that this quantity comes out of my personal savings.”

The organisation appears to have strong connections to senior Albanian officials. Pandeli Majko, a minister in the current Albanian government of Prime Minister Edi Rama, Fatmir Mediu, a former defence minister, and Elona Gjebrea, a former deputy interior minister, were with Giuliani when he visited Tirana earlier this year for Persian New Year festivities hosted by the MEK.

Heyrani, the 38-year-old former member of the MEK’s political section, says he suspected the group’s sudden riches were coming from Saudi Arabia’s coffers, through a channel organised by Saudi prince Turki al-Faisal, who over the summer, attended an MEK rally in France, along with Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, and Bolton, the White House National Security Adviser.

Heyrani says he had no evidence of Saudi support for the group other than conversations with members of its political leadership. “I said, ‘What a big camp, with so many buildings,’” Heyrani recalls. “He said, ‘Finally, Faisal laid the golden egg.’”

A spokesperson for the the Saudi embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment. Ali Shihabi, founder of the Riyadh-backed Arabia Foundation think tank, said that Prince Turki has denied serving as a conduit for MEK funds.

Hassan Shahbaz, 50 years old, had joined the MEK shortly after the US invasion of Iraq. But it wasn’t until he got to Tirana that he discovered that his elderly mother, two brothers, and two sisters had risked their lives to travel to Iraq in the midst of that country’s 2006 civil war to visit him. When they arrived they were turned away from the camp entrance. “They told them I wasn’t there, and turned them back,” he says today.

When he confronted MEK superiors about their action, they told him to let it go. “For now, freeze it,” he was told.

A few weeks later, during an outing with other MEK members in April, he quietly slipped away from the group, took a taxi back to Tirana and became one of the growing members of the group to defect.

“Back then when they kept us locked up, they could say it’s for our own protection, that the government of Iraq is in the pocket of Iran,” he says. “What’s the argument here?”

Sheltered inside the camp, which members nickname Ashraf 3, the organisation has recreated what critics call its cult-like structure. Members are told to spy on each other, recount their dreams, and take part in hours-long indoctrination sessions.

Defiant members are punished with days-long isolation, barred from contact with their comrades. After outings to hospitals or shops they are patted down, for fear they have tried to smuggle phones into the camp.

The camp is divided into several sections, with the northernmost end reserved exclusively for France-based Rajavi on her rare visits, and an underclass of mostly male labourers separated from the rest of the elite by fences and checkpoints at the far south of the camp.

Heyrani calls the camp a version of Animal Farm, after the book written by George Orwell about an isolated and authoritarian society. In a statement, the group said MEK members “have been been targets of the Iranian regime’s terrorism,” and needed protection. The statement said the MEK members at the camp “have always welcomed friends, dignitaries and journalists from Albania and other countries, both in their current and previous residences. But they are vigilant and experienced enough not to welcome the Iranian regime’s agents.”

Unable to draw new recruits, the organisation is aging and greying, and many of the members might choose to remain in the camp for fear of the outside world.

“They are very lost people,” says retired Colonel Ylli Zyla, a former Albanian counter-terror and intelligence official. “On average they are more than 50 years old. They are slowly, slowly dying off one by one. They don’t have any useful professional backgrounds. All of them are brainwashed.”

Most days, the cadres seem to be deployed on the social media battleground, in an attempt to give an illusion of the popularity the group lacks on the ground.

They spend long hours engaged in Twitter wars against supporters of the Tehran government or even Islamic Republic opponents who also publicly oppose the MEK. “We are told to attack accounts of people who are opposed to or critical of the MEK,” says Heyrani. “Or we would retweet Maryam Rajavi’s speeches.”

They were also told to pretend to take political identities other than MEK supporters. “They would tell us right now the environment is not good for us,” he recalls, in an allegation that was confirmed by other defectors. “They would say that because of the propaganda against us by the regime, it’s better to pretend we’re monarchists, or just Iranian democracy activists.”

Shahin Gobadi, a spokesman for the MEK, on Twitter denounced allegations that the group was running a troll factory in Albania as “preposterous”, calling it a narrative “dictated” by Iranian intelligence officers to international media. The video for the group shows a room full of computers, with members collecting video of protests inside Iran.

Zyla has become something of an expert on the group. Though he says it poses no threat to Albanian national security, he says it has begun to challenge the country’s public order. Its members have been known to harass defectors, who mill about in Tirana’s cafes, and attend weekly vocational training sessions organised by the UN. One defector said he’s been threatened six times since he left the group.

“Even the police are not allowed to go inside,” Zyla tells The Independent. “The Ministry of Interior almost has no control over the camp. Police patrols, to my knowledge, are not allowed in the MEK complex. Their camp has turned into a mysterious bunker.”

Borzou Dargahi, THE INDEPENDENT,

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Maryam Rajavi and Giuliani
Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

US Anti-Iran Summit Coincided with Foreign-Based Terror Attack in Iran Killing 25

A group known as al-Ahvaziya claimed responsibility for the attack on a military parade in Khuzestan Province.

Terrorists in Iran launched an attack on a parade on Saturday killing 25 — including a four-year-old girl. Unsurprisingly, the group claiming responsibility for the massacre has links to foreign entities in Saudi Arabia and their allies.

Also on Saturday, Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, spoke at an “Iran Uprising Summit” in New York City’s Time Square supporting efforts to overthrow Iran’s revolutionary government. The summit included supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and other groups that share Washington’s goal of overthrowing Tehran.

“The people of Iran obviously have now had enough,” Giuliani said on Saturday. “The sanctions are working. The currency is going to nothing … these are the kinds of conditions that lead to successful revolution.”

Giuliani spoke to members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, or MEK, a group Washington only recently removed from their foreign terrorist list — likely in efforts to plot so-called “regime change” in Tehran in broad daylight rather than behind closed doors. John Bolton, Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor, has strong links to the MEK, which has killed over 17,000 civilians terror attacks over the group’s tenure.

The MEK along with similar takfiri groups and their political fronts frequently meet for anti-Iran conferences with high-ranking US and Western diplomats and officials in places like Paris and New York.

Foreign-based Group Claims Responsibility for the Attack

A group known as al-Ahvaziya claimed responsibility for the attack on a military parade in Khuzestan Province which killed at least 25 and injured roughly 60 others. Four terrorists opened fire on crowds. Iranian security forces killed three of the attackers but managed to apprehend one.

Based in London, al-Ahvaziya also has branches in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. The group held their annual conference in Cairo, Egypt last year. Masquerading as a national liberation movement, al-Ahvaziya aims to destroy Iran’s territorial integrity by advocating the secession of Khuzestan Province from the rest of Iran.

Ironically enough, Khuzestan Province contains one of the richest oil fields in the world — producing 750,000 barrels per day with an estimated 65.5 billion in reserves. This falls in line with Washington’s general goal of sanctions to cripple Iran’s economy and foment discontent as well as their broader regional goals of death by Balkanization through splitting up sovereign nations like Syria and Iran to exploit natural resources and acquire capital.

Since 1999, al-Ahvaziya has frequently targeted oil reserves, pipelines, and civilians with bombs. One of their most deadly attacks prior to Saturday’s took place in 2006 when they detonated a bomb in an office building killing 11 and wounding 87.

Al-Ahvaziya has a safe haven in Denmark where the group’s leader provided an interview nearly immediately following the attack.

 Silence and Snark from World Leaders

The world remained relatively silent following the terror attack in Iran on Saturday.

US Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, advised Tehran to “look in the mirror.” Washington claims Iran is the world’s biggest sponsor of terror despite the fact that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and their affiliated groups being the most successful ground force for eliminating terror groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda.

Iran’s UAE envoy, Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, justified the terror attack on Twitter claiming more attacks would soon follow. Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi condemned Abdulla’s remarks as “irresponsible and thoughtless” and demanded Abu Dhabi be held accountable.

On the other end of the spectrum, Russian president, Vladimir Putin, phoned his Iranian counterpart, Hasan Rouhani shortly following the attack to express support. Putin offered condolences and support for further cooperation to combat terrorism.

Iranian president, Hasan Rouhani, offered sympathy to the families of those killed during the attack. Rouhani, along with Tehran’s Top General, IRGC, and Intelligence Minister, all pledged a swift and strong response to those who carried out the attack along with their sponsors.

The CIA launched a coup against the democratically elected government in Tehran 1953. In 1979, Iranians overthrew the CIA-backed regime in a popular revolution which Washington has remained hell-bent on destroying for the past 40 years.

Top Photo | Left to right: Maryam Rajavi, former MEK leader and leader of the National Council of Resistance of Iran talks with Rudy Giuliani and Senator Joe Lieberman at s free Iran Gathering, July 1, 2017. Flickr | Maryam Rajavi

By Randi Nord September 24th, 2018,Mintpressnews.com

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

US Vows to “Overthrow” Iran as Terrorists Target Iranians

A terrorist attack on a military parade targeting civilians and military personnel alike left at least 29 dead and up to 70 more wounded in Iran’s southwest region of Ahvaz.

At the same time, in New York City, US political figures including US President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudolph Giuliani attended and expressed open support for “revolution” in Iran at the 2018 Iran Uprising Summit organized by Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK).

MEK is a terrorist organization that has previously killed US service members and civilian contractors, but was removed from the US State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organizations list in order for the US to more openly and directly support the terrorist front’s efforts to destabilize and overthrow the Iranian government.

West Refuses to Call Ahvaz Attackers Terrorists

The Iranian government has blamed the Al Ahvaziya terror organization for the September 22 attack.

According to the BBC, Al Ahvaziya has also taken credit for the attack – yet the BBC – along with other media fronts across the West as well as Western governments – has refused to characterize Al Ahvaziya as a terrorist organization and instead depicted it as an “anti-government Arab group.”

The BBC’s article, “Iran blames Gulf foes for deadly Ahvaz attack,” would claim:

A spokesman for the Ahvaz National Resistance, an umbrella group that claims to defend the rights of the Arab minority in Khuzestan, said the group was behind the attack.

Yet the same BBC in 2006 after a similar attack in Ahvaz, Iran would clearly characterize the group’s activities as terrorism and would even quote the UK Foreign Office who condemned the attack as terrorism while denying accusations the British government had been covertly backing the terrorists.

The BBC in its 2006 article titled, “Iran accuses UK of bombing link,” would claim:

A UK Foreign Office spokesman in London has denied the accusation, saying Britain condemned terrorism.

“Any linkage between HMG (Her Majesty’s Government) and these terrorist attacks is completely without foundation,” said the official.

The failure of the US and British governments to now wholly condemn the recent Ahvaz attack as an act of terrorism carried out by what is undeniably a terrorist organization, alone raises suspicions. However, US policy papers have revealed a long-term open conspiracy to back armed militancy in Iran, just as the US, UK, and their allies have been exposed currently doing in nearby Syria as well as Libya in 2011.

US-backed Iranian “Revolutionaries” are Terrorists – Says US

As Iran grieved in the wake of the Ahvaz attack, US politicians hosted MEK terrorists in New York, vowing to overthrow the Iranian government.

Reuters in their article, “Trump lawyer Giuliani says Iran’s government will be overthrown,” would report:

President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani on Saturday said that U.S. sanctions on Iran are leading to economic pain that could lead to a “successful revolution” contrasting with administration comments that government change in Tehran is not U.S. policy.

“I don’t know when we’re going to overthrow them,” said Giuliani, who spoke in his own capacity though he is a Trump ally, at an Iran Uprising Summit held by the Organization of Iranian-American Communities, which opposes Tehran’s government.

Reuters would intentionally avoid naming the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and MEK as the event’s organizers – and would even crop a photo for their article of Giuliani speaking to hide the NCRI’s logo.

While defenders of US support for MEK claim the group has reformed itself, US policy papers reveal that MEK was delisted specifically so the US could more openly use the group to carry out armed subversion against the Iranian government on Washington’s behalf.

It should be noted that Giuliani, current National Security Adviser John Bolton, and many other prominent US politicians had lobbied for, and attended MEK events long before the US State Department delisted it as a foreign terrorist organization.

The Brookings Institution in a 2009 policy paper titled, “Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran” (PDF), under a chapter titled, “Inspiring an Insurgency: Supporting Iranian Minority And Opposition Groups,” would openly admit (emphasis added):

Perhaps the most prominent (and certainly the most controversial) opposition group that has attracted attention as a potential U.S.  proxy  is  the  NCRI  (National  Council of Resistance of  Iran),  the  political  movement  established  by  the  MeK  (Mujahedin-e  Khalq). Critics believe the group to be undemocratic and unpopular, and indeed anti-American.

Brookings would elaborate regarding its terrorist background, stating (emphasis added):

Undeniably, the group has conducted terrorist attacks—often excused by the MeK’s advocates because they are directed against the Iranian government. For example, in 1981, the group bombed the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party, which was then the clerical leadership’s main  political organization, killing an estimated 70 senior officials. More recently, the group has claimed  credit for over a dozen mortar attacks, assassinations, and other assaults on  Iranian civilian and  military targets between 1998 and 2001.

Brookings also mentions MEK’s attacks on US servicemen and American civilian contractors, noting:

In the 1970s, the group killed three U.S. officers and three civilian contractors in Iran.

Brookings would also emphasize (emphasis added):

The group itself also appears to be undemocratic and enjoys little popularity in Iran itself. It has no  political base in the country, although it appears to have an operational presence. In particular, its  active participation on Saddam Husayn’s side during the bitter Iran-Iraq War made the group widely  loathed. In addition, many aspects of the group are cultish, and its leaders, Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, are revered to the point of obsession.

Brookings would note that despite the obvious reality of MEK, the US could indeed use the terrorist organization as a proxy against Iran, but notes that:

…at the very least, to work more closely with the  group (at least in an overt manner), Washington would need to remove it from the list of foreign  terrorist organizations.

And while Al Ahvaziya is accused of carrying out the Ahvaz attack, it should also be noted that MEK “networks” specifically in Ahvaz have helped promote and carry out violence ranging from riots to arson for months – openly admitted to by MEK “network” accounts across social media – illustrating a synergy of terrorism, agitation, subversion, and propaganda functioning as an analogue to Western-backed terrorists and their supporters operating in Syria.

Additionally, at the New York City “Uprising Summit,” MEK leader Maryam Rajavi would admit to MEK organizing riots through “resistance units.” In her official message, now posted on various MEK websites, should would openly admit:

Today, the ruling mullahs’ fear is amplified by the role of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) and resistance units in leading and continuing the uprisings. Regime analysts say: “The definitive element in relation to the December 2017 riots is the organization of rioters. So-called Units of Rebellion have been created, which have both the ability to increase their forces and the potential to replace leaders on the spot.”

The roadmap for freedom reveals itself in these very uprisings, in ceaseless protests, and in the struggle of the Resistance Units.

Thus, while Iranians mourned in the wake of the Ahvaz terrorist attack, Rajavi was broadcasting her message in New York City gloating of her terrorist organization’s capacity to sow violence and chaos across Iran.

MEK, Al Ahvaziya, and other terrorist groups operating within or along Iran’s borders do so with extensive, admitted US support.

Iran’s most recent accusations that the West and their Persian Gulf allies are behind terrorist organizations attacking Iran are difficult to dispute when US politicians are consorting with literal terrorists in New York calling for an “uprising” as terrorist attacks unfold inside Iran – more so when US policy papers themselves admit their proxies of choice are undeniably terrorists and supporting them must be done either covertly, or after a thorough political whitewash.

A similar process of whitewashing listed terrorist organizations occurred regarding Al Qaeda-affiliate, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) used by the US and UK to overthrow the Libyan government in 2011, delisted as a foreign terrorist organization by the US State Department in 2015, before members of the terrorist front carried out a suicide bombing in Manchester, UK in 2017 killing 23 (including the bomber).

Spreading Syria’s Chaos to Iran Before the War Ends

The US-engineered proxy war against Syria was always a means toward eventually attacking, dividing, and destroying Iran, before moving onward to Central Asia and southern Russia.

As the Syrian conflict approaches its conclusion, and with that conclusion favoring Damascus and its Russian and Iranian allies, there is renewed impetus in Washington and among America’s allies to spread the war into Iran.

Sanctions, subversion, terrorism, and eventually direct military confrontation are all options either already being exercised, or being prepared to confront and overthrow Tehran’s political order.

By now, even to the most casual observers, it should be clear that it is the West – not Iran – who presents the greatest threat to global peace and stability – sponsoring the very worst terrorist organizations on the planet, carrying out heinous crimes against the populations of Syria, Iraq, and Iran – and as a result of being granted impunity and given endless resources by the West, allowed to menace the Western public as well as amply illustrated during the 2017 Manchester attack.

By Tony Cartalucci

Tony Cartalucci is Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

 

Also:

The Mujahedeen e-Khalq: The US Prepares to Back a New Terrorist Army in Iran, Prelude to a Wider War?

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MKO Terrorists
Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Traitors to the homeland

When Iranians rose up against the tyrannical rule of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1979, they had a picture of what they wanted in its place. It took them a short while, however, to translate that picture into a functioning government that would, among the other things expected of it, establish security.

For nearly a year, a number of outfits openly engaged in armed activity against the new government inside the capital and other cities.

One group was particularly notorious: the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO), known to most other countries by another acronym, the MEK, which espoused a twisted ideology of Marxism and terror combined.

MKO had its roots in a formerly Islamic, student movement against Mohammad Reza Shah, but it had dropped Islam and adopted Marxism along the way, purging those of its members who had refused to acquiesce.

In its metamorphosized form, and after the Islamic Republic was established, MKO would bomb government buildings, conduct targeted killings of prominent political and religious figures, and most grotesquely, carry out routine blind assassinations of ordinary Iranians out on the streets in an attempt to create a sense of instability, insecurity, and fear.

Fear, it thought, would ultimately lead to popular dissatisfaction with the new regime.

It was wrong. And it failed.

Soon, and as the republic gradually solidified, putting into order its security apparatuses, MKO was subdued. Many of its members were either taken into custody or taken out in well-planned security operations. Others either gradually came to their senses and defected, or fled the country.

Dead men (and women) walking

The killing sprees of MKO were finished. But the group itself wasn’t.

In September 1980, a little over a year and a half after the revolution, the then-regime of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, wishing to topple the nascent republic and overtake territory.

That invasion started after Hussein won the blessing of the United States, via the then-National Security Advisor Zbigniew Berzinski, according to Sasan Fayazmanesh, in his book “The United States and Iran: Sanctions, wars and the policy of dual containment.” (Routledge, 2008)

For MKO, the war had an inherent irony. It both threw the group’s surviving members a lifeline and lay bare their most treasonous colors, hastening their effective death:

They joined the Iraqi invasion of their own fatherland, as rank and file — cannon fodder, really. The Iraqi dictator — who was himself overthrown in 2003 by his initial American backers — gave MKO military training and hardware, and a camp near the Iranian border.

Hussein, who eventually agreed to a truce in 1988, nevertheless mobilized MKO members in a relatively large-scale offensive against Iran days after the truce agreement. MKO declared it would be marching to Tehran in a matter of “48 hours.”

Again, it failed.

In a counter-offensive code-named “Operation Mersad,” Iranian armed forces not only thwarted MKO but also almost decimated the group. Bodies of helmeted, indoctrinated young men and women were strewn across the roads or stuck in the mangled wreckage of tanks and other armored vehicles, along Iran’s western borders after the operation.

An image from the archives of the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) shows Iranian soldiers walking past the dead bodies of MKO members and the wreckage of their military vehicles in western Iran in 1988.

When Saddam was toppled in 2003 and a new government took over, the group felt endangered. (It had been designated a terrorist organization by the US since 1997.) So, it was crucial that MKO now got another lease on life.

In the period between the end of the Iran-Iraq War and the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, political winds had already begun to shift, in a way that would somehow benefit MKO:

After he failed to overtake Iranian territory, Hussein invaded and annexed the fellow-Arab state of Kuwait, angering the very similarly fellow-Arab states that had funded his war machine against Iran just years earlier. He faced solid opposition, by a coalition of military forces, with the US at its head, which pushed him back to within Iraqi borders but stopped short of an invasion.

Training assassins and taking them off the terror list

But, no more an obedient friend of the Arab states of the Persian Gulf and America, Hussein was bound to be taken out, a fate that met him in 2003.

What had remained intact of MKO in the ruins of Iraq, however, could still be exploited. At least, so thought Iran’s adversaries.

Saudi funding began to pour in. And “generously-compensated” legions of American lobbyists joined. To no one’s surprise, the group was taken off the State Department’s list of designated terrorist organizations in 2012.

In the lobbying campaign that was launched, “[m]any of the American supporters, though not all, accepted fees of $15,000 to $30,000 to give speeches to the group, as well as travel expenses to attend M.E.K. rallies in Paris,” The New York Times reported that same year.

Furthermore, American journalist Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize winner who has written for The New Yorker, reported in 2012 that a number of MKO members were secretly trained by the United States Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at the Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site, a secretive training facility northwest of Las Vegas, in a program that began in 2005 and purportedly ended “sometime before President Obama took office.”

“The M.E.K.’s ties with Western intelligence [had already] deepened after the fall of the Iraqi regime in 2003,” Hersh wrote.

He also cited an NBC report — itself citing “two senior Obama Administration officials” — that said MKO “units… financed and trained by Mossad, the Israeli secret service” had been involved in the assassination of four Iranian nuclear scientists and an attempted attack on another one after 2007.

Funding ‘regime change’

But Iranian counterintelligence stopped any more such activity.

By 2016, MKO’s hands were increasingly tied. It had to fully leave its last camp in Iraq for the Albanian capital, Tirana. Yet, it was now being more openly embraced by Iran’s Western and Arab adversaries.

In 2016 and 2017, Saudi Arabia’s former spy chief, Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud, attended MKO meetings in Paris. “Advance with God’s blessings,” bin Faisal said in a speech in the 2016 meeting, wishing the terrorists success in attempting “regime change” in Iran.

In 2018, another meeting in Paris attracted Rudy Giuliani, personal attorney to US President Donald Trump, and Stephen Harper, a former prime minister of Canada. Both of them, too, gave speeches advocating “regime change” in Iran.

In September came a revelation of how the group received funding for its “regime change” agenda all along the way: through Saudi smuggling networks and Saudi-linked black market sales.

Former MKO member Massoud Khodabandeh, “who personally oversaw the transfers,” told Jordanian newspaper Albawaba that “Saudi officials operating within the security apparatus of Turki bin Faisal al Saud, the head of Saudi intelligence at the time, and the late king Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, gave the MEK three tons of solid gold, at least four suitcases of custom Rolex watches and fabric covering the Kaaba, the most holy site in Islam. The transfers were worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”

“Gold and other valuable commodities were be shipped from Saudi Arabia to Baghdad. Then, they would be sold in black markets in Amman, Jordan[,] via Saudi-linked businessmen; the money would go to offshore accounts linked to the MEK, funding their operations.”

“Fraud and money laundering” were other source of revenue.

“From Washington D.C., to Tampa, Dallas, Los Angeles and even London, Stockholm and Paris, the MEK operated ‘cells’ that took part in fraud schemes and fake charities,” according to Albawaba, which cited an FBI investigation of the activities.

Online bugs

But, despite the showbiz and the speakers beckoned by the specter of Saudi money, MKO grew increasingly irrelevant in actual space in later years. That was when it took to the virtual.

In an article titled “Faking the online debate on Iran,” Al Jazeera looked at MKO’s latest anti-Iran activities, online.

Late last year, when short-lived protests erupted in some Iranian cities, MKO saw a virtual opening.

Hassan Shahbaz, another former MKO member, said, “Our orders would tell us the hashtags to use in our tweets in order to make them more active. It was our job to provide coverage of these protests by seeking out, tweeting and re-tweeting videos while adding our own comments,” according to Al Jazeera.

Hassan Heyrani, also a former member, said “several thousand accounts” were being run “by about 1,000-1,500” MKO members to turn anti-Iranian hashtags into top trends.

And bots came in handy, too. Lots of them.

Marc Owen Jones, a keen observer of online political propaganda by Saudi Arabia, told the Qatar-based news channel, “If you want to use bots to be effective, you need a lot of accounts, which means you might create a lot of accounts on a specific day or week or month. The majority of the accounts tweeting on the #FreeIran and #Iran_Regime_Change hashtag from late December [2017] up to May, were created within about a four-month window. What that would suggest is that a lot of the activity on those hashtags came from bots.”

The MKO online propagandists may be aided by Saudi companies that, according to an earlier investigation by BBC, offer “automated ‘bot’ accounts” for as little as 200 dollars “to artificially boost the popularity of hashtags to make them trend on Twitter – in contravention of the social media network’s rules.”

(Although not exactly well-liked by his cousin rulers, Saudi Prince Waleed bin Talal — a Twitter shareholder — may be pulling a few strings of his own, may he not?!)

All of that while Twitter recently closed — in the words of Foreign Minister Javad Zarif — the accounts of real Iranians while ignoring MKO’s anti-Iran propaganda activities.

    Hello @Jack. Twitter has shuttered accounts of real Iranians, incl TV presenters & students, for supposedly being part of an ‘influence op’. How about looking at actual bots in Tirana used to prop up ‘regime change’ propaganda spewed out of DC? #YouAreBots https://t.co/dTs0diYrM4

— Javad Zarif (@JZarif) September 16, 2018

Khodabandeh, the former MKO member, told Al Jazeera that the group had “changed from a terrorist military organisation to an intelligence-based propaganda machine.”

He is wrong. MKO continues to be the terrorist organization that it has always been. The only difference now is that, facing Iranian power like never before, the group and its sponsors can only attempt online subversion against Iran. Like Saddam Hussein of Iraq, MKO and the House of Saud will have their expiration dates for the US. And until that day arrives, they can wiggle only as much.

By Hossein Jelveh,

(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV.)

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MEK after Trump
Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Why is Washington Entertaining the MKO as a Political Alternative?

With so many dangerous unknowns revolving around the MKO/MEK and its proclivity to shed blood, Washington’s wholehearted support boggles the mind.

Strong on the legitimacy his office grants him U.S. State Department Mike Pompeo was quick to lambast his predecessor: John Kerry, for diplomatically engaging Washington’s new favorite enemy … the root of all that goes bump in the night: Iran.

Speaking to reporters at the State Department earlier this September Pompeo was lavish in his criticism, somewhat unaware of the sheer irony his ire betrays.

“What Secretary Kerry has done is unseemly and unprecedented,” exclaimed Pompeo before adding: “This is a former secretary of state engaged with the world’s largest state sponsor of terror and according to him, he was talking to them, he was telling them to wait out this administration … You can’t find precedent for this in US history, and the secretary ought not engage in this kind of behavior.”

If Pompeo may, out of political opportunism look onto Kerry’s initiative to communicate with Iran as a betrayal, he’s in no position to grandstand on terrorism – not as far as talking to Terror’s patron goes.

Terror’s Biggest Exporter – Saudi Arabia or Iran?

Let us first of all address the proverbial elephant in the room: Iran. Iran is by no means and no stretch of anyone’s imagination, the biggest “sponsor of terror.” That title was long bestowed to the House of Saud, the very charming monarchical dynasty that birthed Wahhabism and its sister in extremism: Salafism.

Wahhabism and Salafism – which terms have often been used interchangeably, posit that whoever dares exist outside their school of thought ought to perish by the sword. Such an ascetic, violent and reactionary nihilistic interpretation of Islam has served as an ideological ground zero for groups such as Al Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, and the Taliban, if not to say an incubator.

Terror, that Terror which claimed tens of thousands of innocent lives to its flag over the years is ideologically tied up to Saudi Arabia. Worse still, experts have already, proof in hands, assessed beyond any shadow of a doubt that Terror has been one of Saudi Arabia’s most active exports if we consider the resources spent in the promotion of such religious dogmatism.

In his book The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright asserts that while Saudis constitute only one percent of the world’s Muslims, they pay “90 percent of the expenses of the entire faith, overriding other traditions of Islam.” Others estimate that, on an annual basis, Saudi Arabia spends three times as much in exporting its Wahhabi ideology as did the Soviets in propagating Communism during the height of the Cold War.

Back in 2015, President Trump would have agreed with this assessment. In fact, he eternalized such assessment in his book: ‘Time to Get Tough,’ which was published ahead of the presidential election. Trump writes: “Then look at Saudi Arabia. It is the world’s biggest funder of terrorism. Saudi Arabia funnels our petrodollars – our very own money – to fund the terrorists that seek to destroy our people, while the Saudis rely on us to protect them.”

In 2010 then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also came to the conclusion that Saudi Arabia was a great sponsor of Terror.

Her memo, published by WikiLeaks, says Saudi donors “constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”

It further reads that despite some positive steps made by the regime, “It has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority.”

Clinton also stressed that Saudi Arabia provided “a critical financial support base for al-Qa’ida, the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Toiba and other terrorist groups, including Hamas, which probably raise millions of dollars annually from Saudi sources.”

Interestingly enough such knowledge of wrongdoings did not prevent U.S. state officials at the highest levels of government to pursue close relations with Saudi Arabia … and so Secretary of State Pompeo may want to review his initial outcry of disgust vis a vis John Kerry.

Grandstanding is never pretty when done over quicksand.

Is America Aiding And Abetting?

But here is where things get a little dicier… or morally revolting depending on how one wishes to look at it.

Under the Trump administration, the United States has become a de facto patron of terror, if not in means, at least in political accreditations.

In June 2018 Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani spoke to the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an umbrella coalition largely controlled by the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), which was once listed as a terrorist organisation in the U.S. and Europe and is still widely viewed as a Marxist-Islamist cult built around the personality of its leader, Maryam Rajavi.

“We are now realistically being able to see an end to the regime in Iran,” Giuliani enthusiastically called out. And: “The mullahs must go, the ayatollah must go, and they must be replaced by a democratic government which Madam Rajavi represents … Freedom is right around the corner … Next year I want to have this convention in Tehran!”

The former New York mayor, who became a cybersecurity adviser in the White House before being named as Trump’s personal lawyer in April 2018, is one of a long line of American neocons to have attended the NCRI annual conference in Paris, France.

Hinting to America’s role in manufacturing unrest in Iran to manifest regime change in favor of and by the MEK/MKO Giuliani had this to say: “Those protests are not happening spontaneously … They are happening because of many of our people in Albania [which hosts an MEK compound] and many of our people here and throughout out the world.”

U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton is also touting this shadowy exiled cult as an alternative to the Iranian government while arguing democracy building.

The MKO/MEK’s ‘Swath of Terror’

British journalist Lindsey Hilsum had a recent run-in with the MKO/MEK when she traveled to Albania, home to the group’s military arm. Sprawling over 200,000 square meters, the camp benefits from heavy militarised protection, against it seems Albania’s own best opinions … if not wishes.

Hilsum was brutalized by the group after she was accused of being an agent sold to Iran. If the incident was conveniently kept from mainstream media, it nevertheless betrays the nefarious nature of the organization whose taste for secrecy borders the pathological.

In her documentary for Channel 4 (UK) Hilsum produces documents enouncing in no uncertain terms how dangerous Albania believes the MKO/MEK to be – highlighting the length foreign governments will go to secure an alliance with the U.S.

SECRET DOCUMENT OBTAINED BY CHANNEL 4 JOURNALIST LINDSAY HILSUM EXPOSING THE THREAT POSED BY THE MKO/MEK.

With so many dangerous unknowns revolving around the MKO/MEK … notwithstanding the group’s proclivity to shed blood – including that of its members should they wish to leave, Washington’s wholehearted support boggles the mind.

A state department report in 1992 identified the MKO/MEK as responsible for the killing of six Americans in Iran during the 1970s. They included three military officers and three men working for Rockwell International, a conglomerate specializing in aerospace including weapons, who were murdered in retaliation for the arrest of MKO/MEK members over the killings of the U.S. military officers.

The MKO/MEK was an enthusiastic supporter of the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran following the Iranian revolution, something both U.S. officials and mainstream media have been keen to sweep under the rug to serve more immediate agendas.

It called the eventual release of the American hostages a “surrender.”

After falling out with Iran’s new government, led by Ayatollah Khomeini, the MEK launched a bombing campaign against the Islamic government. In 1981, it attacked the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party, killing 74 senior officials including the party leader and 27 members of parliament. A few months later it bombed a meeting of Iran’s national security council, killing Iran’s president and the prime minister.

The state department described the MKO/MEK as cutting a “swath of terror” across the country in the following years and of “violent attacks in Iran that victimize civilians.”

“Since 1981 the [MEK] have claimed responsibility for murdering thousands of Iranians they describe as agents of the regime,” the report said.

In light of Western capitals’ suffering at the hands of terror militants, one would think that they would work to minimize threats – not invite them in.

CHANNEL 4 DOCUMENTARY – SEPTEMBER 2018

By Good Politic

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Rudy Giuliani
Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Giuliani to Speak Beside Leader of Accused Iranian ‘Cult’

The ex-New York mayor and Trump attorney has long been a supporter of the MEK. But the State Department cautions that Giuliani ‘does not speak for the U.S. government.’

President Trump’s personal lawyer on Saturday will speak alongside the leader of an Iranian opposition group that was designated as a terrorist organization and has often described been as cult-like. It’s the latest signal of the Trump administration’s coalescing hard-line stance against Iran.

Rudy Giuliani is scheduled to speak at the Sheraton in Times Square on Saturday to a gathering convened by the Organization of Iranian-American Communities, an anti-regime group he’s addressed before. Also slated to speak is the co-leader of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), Maryam Rajavi, who will address the attendees remotely, according to a representative for the event.

But the Trump administration is already disavowing any implication that Giuliani’s appearance has anything to do with its Iran policies. “Rudy Giuliani does not speak for the U.S. government on foreign policy,” a State Department spokesperson told The Daily Beast.

“Rudy Giuliani has been shilling for the MEK for so long that he is clearly banking on everyone forgetting that the group was listed as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, has American blood on its hands and has never owned up to its deeds,” said Daniel Benjamin, the State Department’s counter-terrorism coordinator in the Obama administration who now directs Dartmouth College’s John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding. “Giuliani’s buckraking has been scandalous all along, but it is worse when he does this while acting as the president’s lawyer.”

    “Rudy Giuliani has been shilling for the MEK for so long that he is clearly banking on everyone forgetting that the group was listed as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, has American blood on its hands and has never owned up to its deeds.”

— Daniel Benjamin

Giuliani confirmed to The Daily Beast that his “firm” will be paid for the speech, but declined to reveal how much, saying it was “confidential, unless they want to disclose the details.” Majid Sadeghpour, a spokesman for the Organization of Iranian-American Communities, said “it is not our policy to discuss any kind of arrangements regarding the speakers. (He also said the group has no “formal relationship” with the MEK or a related group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran.)

“Our relationship goes back approximately 10 years,” Giuliani said, adding that he was invited to speak by “a client of my firm.” Giuliani did not directly respond when asked if he ran his speech by the administration, saying in a text message: “[T]hey are my thoughts as were the over 1,000 speeches I’ve given in the last 17 years and of course before.”

Sadeghpour said the group had invited Rajavi “to provide a video speech about the developments in Iran, as her movement has been the main target of terror plots by the Iranian regime, including here in the U.S.,  as well as arrests and attacks by the Iranian regime inside the country.”

The OIAC conference is pegged to a forthcoming United Nations Security Council session, chaired by Trump and scheduled for September 26, ostensibly about nonproliferation but also about Iran. Trump will discuss “Iran’s violations of international law and the general instability Iran sows throughout the entire Middle East region,” U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said earlier this month.

And on its agenda is the prospect for overthrowing the Tehran regime. “The summit will focus on the organized opposition as the alternative to Iran’s ruling theocracy,” an invitation reads, “as well as the need for a decisive Iran policy to deal with the regime’s suppression of its own citizens and its export of terrorism.”

From 1997 to 2012, the MEK was on the State Department’s list of terrorist groups. The exile organization, implacably opposed to the Iranian theocracy after supporting the 1979 revolution, was a terrorist organization before the mullahs’ takeover. The MEK even killed American military personnel in Iran. It became a catspaw of Saddam Hussein’s during the 1980s, when it attacked regime targets, killed Iranian civilians. And the group has a history of behaving like an abusive cult in its treatment of its members, according to observers like Benjamin.

A 2003 New York Times Magazine story by Elizabeth Rubin, “The Cult of Rajavi,” quoted a former MEK member alleging: “Every morning and night, the kids, beginning as young as 1 and 2, had to stand before a poster of Massoud and Maryam, salute them and shout praises to them.” A 2009 Rand Corporation monograph described the MEK’s “near-religious devotion to the Rajavis (Massoud and his wife, Maryam), public self-deprecation sessions, mandatory divorce, celibacy, enforced separation from family and friends, and gender segregation.”

    “A substantial number of these MEK members… did not have a clear understanding of the group’s goals and methods of operation—particularly with respect to its cult behavior—and many have been forced to remain against their will.”

— Rand Corporation monograph

Yet the U.S. occupation of Iraq treated MEK members there as protected persons beginning in 2003, “which has left the United States open to charges of hypocrisy in the war on terrorism,” Rand observed. Rand’s monograph, penned in 2009, raised alarm about what was then a U.S.-protected MEK site called Camp Ashraf. It said that residents of the camp included “a substantial number of these MEK members [who] were lured to Iraq under false pretenses or did not have a clear understanding of the group’s goals and methods of operation – particularly with respect to its cult behavior—and many have been forced to remain against their will.”

None of that has hobbled the MEK’s outsized political influence in the United States, where it leverages its hatred of the Iranian regime for an enemy-of-my-enemy strategy. Rand called the group “skilled manipulators of public opinion” who are “adept at crafting and promoting its image as a democratic organization that seeks to bring down Iranian tyrants, both secular and religious.”

In 2012, an MEK lobbying effort prevailed on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to remove the group from the State Department’s list of terrorist groups. The MEK has long seen the wisdom of cultivating American political figures across the spectrum, including Democratic ex-governors Howard Dean and Ed Rendell; #resistance hero Michael Hayden, who used to direct the CIA and the NSA; Barack Obama’s former National Security Advisor Jim Jones; and ex-Joint Chiefs of Staff chairmen Hugh Shelton and Pete Pace. On Saturday, Jones will join Giuliani at the forum.

Giuliani has for years backed the MEK, appeared with Maryam Rajaviand taken her group’s money. And he’s spoken to the Organization of Iranian-American Communities before while serving as Trump’s attorney. The last time, in May, Giuliani claimed that Trump is “as committed to regime change as we are,” and pantomimed ripping up the Iran nuclear deal that the Trump administration has abandoned. He also spoke to an MEK gathering in Paris, where Rajavi is headquartered, in June.

Neither Giuliani nor his old law firm, Greenberg Traurig, appear in Justice Department records for foreign lobbying on behalf of the MEK or its known associates. But Giuliani has acknowledged that he took money for his May speech to the Organization of Iranian-American Communities, though he told the Washington Post that he doesn’t discuss his foreign clients with Trump.

Giuliani’s Saturday speech comes amidst rising hostility to Iran and frequent speculation about a confrontation. In July, Trump tweeted at his Iranian counterpart: “NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE.” Last week, the administration showed signs of putting that threat into practice. It threatened reprisal for any Iranian-aligned forces that kill or injure U.S. personnel in Iraq. Shortly afterward, the secretaries of State and Defense stuck by its Saudi and Emirati allies over their brutal, U.S.-backed war in Yemen, a proxy fight against an Iranian-tied group. And James Jeffrey, the State Department special envoy for Syria, said the U.S. military mission in Syria has expanded into ensuring what the Post called an “Iranian departure.”

Giuliani’s “support for the MEK, as well as John Bolton’s longtime backing of the group,  is strengthening the impression here and in Iran that the administration supports a policy of regime change,” Benjamin warned. “The risks and costs of such a policy would be enormous, and it’s a pretty good way to guarantee that Tehran will see building nuclear weapon as being in its interest.”

—with additional reporting by Lachlan Markay

Spencer Ackerman, The Daily Beast

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