Mujahedin Khalq and Spying

Four ways the West got the Iran nuclear issue wrong

First denying Iran’s nuclear rights and then using suspect intelligence to build a false picture of its programme

For more than three decades, the United States and its European allies have committed one fundamental error after another in the process of creating a commonly held narrative that Iran was secretly pursuing a nuclear weapons programme. The story of how suspicions of the Iranian programme hardened into convictions is a cautionary tale of political and institutional interests systematically distorting the judgments of both policymakers and intelligence analysts.

Too many of these basic errors have been committed along the way to cover them all in a single article. But four major failures of policymaking and intelligence represent the broad outlines of this systematic problem.

1. Denial of Iranian rights, followed by denial of the truth

The first failure, which set in train all the others, involved the US trying to strangle the nuclear programme of the Islamic Republic in its cradle and then blithely acting as though it bore no responsibility for the resulting shift in Iranian nuclear policy. It all started with a decision by the Reagan administration early in the Iran-Iraq war in 1983 to put diplomatic pressure on its allies to stop all nuclear cooperation with Iran. France was pressed to forbid a French-based multilateral consortium from providing the nuclear fuel that Iran had counted on for its lone nuclear reactor at Bushehr.

The US State Department acknowledged at the time that it had no evidence that Iran was working on or even wanted nuclear weapons. That US effort to choke off any nuclear assistance to Iran thus represented an extremely serious violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which guaranteed Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear technology.

Not surprisingly Iran responded to that US denial of its nuclear rights by defying US wishes and acquiring the technology to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel itself on the black market and later through negotiations with China and Russia. US aggressiveness toward Iran’s nuclear programme had backfired.

But instead of recognising that it had made a serious error, Washington compounded the original policy blunder by treating the Iranian response as prima facie evidence of nuclear weapons intent. In 1995 Secretary of State Warren Christopher, in the course of explaining an order by President Bill Clinton banning all US trade and investment in Iran, accused Iran of having an “organised structure dedicated to acquiring and developing nuclear weapons.” That was an obvious reference to the Iranian efforts to acquire centrifuge and other enrichment technology. The Clinton administration thus acted as though there was no relationship between Iran’s interest in obtaining gas centrifuge technology and the US denial policy that preceded it.

2. The intelligence goes wrong

The CIA and other Western intelligence agencies began to drift away from reality on the Iran nuclear issue in the early 1990s, when Western intelligence agencies were gleefully poring over intercepted telexes from Sharif University in Tehran seeking various “dual use” technologies – those that could be used either for a nuclear programme or for non-nuclear applications. They had found that the telex number on many of the messages was that of the Physics Research Centre, which was known to do research for the Iranian defence ministry. That was enough to convince them that Iran was pursuing a covert nuclear weapons programme.

The telexes ultimately turned out to be false positives, however. In late 2007 and early 2008, Iran turned over detailed documentation showing that every one of the “dual use” procurement items sought in those telexes had been requested by various faculties of Sharif University for faculty and student research. And the Physics Research Centre’s telex number was on the telexes because the former head of the organisation was teaching at the university and had been asked to help in the procurement of the items. The intelligence analysts had wrongly interpreted the inherently ambiguous “dual use” evidence as confirming pre-existing suspicions of Iran’s intentions.

That analytical failure was a template for a series of four intelligence assessments of the Iranian nuclear programme by the CIA’s Nonproliferation Center and later by the US intelligence community as a whole that falsely concluded that Iran had an active nuclear weapons development programme as of the time of the assessment. That string of false positives raises serious questions about the 2007 US national intelligence estimate by a team of analysts that had just repeated the same mistake in a draft estimate only a few months earlier.

3. Ignoring the Fatwa against chemical weapons

The belief of Western governments that Iran must have pursued nuclear weapons has been based on their ignorance of a pivotal historical episode that should have caused them to question that belief. During the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, Saddam’s troops attacked Iran with chemical weapons many times, killing 20,000 Iranians and severely injuring 100,000. Yet Iran never retaliated with its own chemical weapons, as Joost Hiltermann’s A Poisonous Affair, the authoritative source on chemical attacks in that war, has documented.

That fact poses a fundamental challenge to the Western narrative on the Iran nuclear issue, because there is no credible explanation for the Iranian failure to retaliate with chemical weapons other than the fact that supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had forbidden the possession and use of all weapons of mass destruction as illicit in Islam. The Revolutionary Guards acted on their own to acquire the capability to produce mustard gas weapons, as the wartime Iranian Minister for military procurement has confirmed in a recent interview. But his account of his meetings with supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini also confirms that Khomeini pronounced a fatwa against such weapons early in the war and repeated it in 1987.

The implications of that historical episode for an understanding of the politics of WMD policy in Iran are obviously far-reaching. It lends strong credibility to the Iranian claim that the current supreme leader’s fatwa against nuclear weapons is an absolute bar to Iran possessing such weapons. But the news media has continued to dismiss the problem by clinging to an old narrative, which was based on false information that Iran not only had possessed chemical weapons but also had used them.

4. Refusing to acknowledge the weaponisation evidence is tainted

For nearly a decade, the international politics of the Iran nuclear issue have revolved around intelligence documents and reports of Iran nuclear weapons work. A 1,000-page cache of documents that surfaced in 2004 showed the redesign of Iran’s Shahab-3 missile to accommodate a nuclear weapon and high explosives experiments that could only be used for nuclear weapons. More incriminating intelligence documents followed in 2008-09. The IAEA has now been investigating them for nine years.

But Western governments, abetted by compliant news media coverage, have chosen to ignore the considerable evidence that these documents were of very dubious origins. Contrary to the cover story that the documents were passed on to Western intelligence by a participant in a covert Iranian programme or by a German spy, a former senior German foreign office official has now revealed that the German intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, obtained them from a sometime source who was a member of the Iranian exile terrorist organisation Mujahedeen E-Khalq (MEK). The MEK was then serving Israel’s Mossad as a means of laundering alleged intelligence, so it is safe to assume that the documents came from Israel.

IAEA director general Mohamed El Baradei (1997-2009), who insisted that the documents had not been authenticated, recalled in his memoirs, “No-one knew if any of this was real.” Against the wishes of the Bush administration, he refused to use them as evidence against Iran.

Major contradictions between information in the papers and the independently verifiable timelines of Iran’s missile and nuclear programmes indicated that the authors were not Iranian specialists. The re-entry vehicle depicted in the studies, for example, was not the one that Iran was redesigning at the time and that was revealed to the world only after the documents were handed over.

El Baradei also revealed that a subsequent series of intelligence documents, which included the claim that Iran had installed a large cylinder at Parchin to test atomic weapons designs, had been passed on to the IAEA directly by Israel. That intelligence proved to be equally problematic: former IAEA nuclear weapons expert Robert Kelley found the Parchin cylinder claim technically implausible.

The US government and its Western allies have all closed their eyes, however, to the evidence that these documents were designed to justify US action by the United States against the Islamic republic. The political convenience of the accepted narrative of the Iran nuclear issue has continued to suppress any active interest in learning the truth.

– Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian writing on US national security policy. His latest book, “Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare,” was published in February 2014.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Middle East Eye

January 12, 2015 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

US officials’ support for MKO stems from its intelligence-gathering on Iran

Former US officials support for MEK due to the group’s intelligence gathering against Iran, reported Washington Times.

Washington Times cites former US officials who are backing the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK, a.k.a. MKO( as saying that the intelligence-gathering role of the MKO in Iran is the reason why they support the group.

Guy Taylor’s Washington Times wrote in a report which was published on the Washington Times that each of the former U.S. officials who spoke with The Times on his report acknowledged that some of their respect for the MKO “stems from the group’s history of having shared intelligence with Washington” about Iran’s nuclear program and the Iranian military activity inside Iraq.

The MKO has provided U.S. military officials and successive U.S. administrations with “all types of good intelligence,” said Gen. Shelton.

All of these former U.S. officials also acknowledged that their “travel and accommodations expenses in France” were being paid for by the MKO.

“However, each also asserted that it is common practice for them to accept payment for speaking engagements and stressed that their support for Friday’s rally and the plight of the MEK had nothing to do with money.”

One March 13, 2012, New York Times reported that the prominent former American officials have been giving well-paid speeches in support of the MKO which was fighting to reverse its 15-year-old designation by the State Department as a terrorist organization .

“Former chairman of the Democratic National Committee said he had given seven or eight speeches since July calling for the M.E.K. to be taken off the terrorist list and estimated that he had been paid a total of $150,000 or $160,000.” “Rendell said he had been told that his fees came from Iranian-American supporters of the M.E.K., not from the group itself.”

Other former officials who have accepted fees for speaking in support of the MEK said that they and their agents had not received subpoenas. Some did not respond to inquiries. The fees have ranged from $15,000 to $30,000 for a brief speech.

Washington Times added that questions over the extent to which it may or may not be in Washington’s best interest to support the group continue to swirl through Washington’s foreign policy community.

“The biggest question centers on whether the NCRI is truly representative of the wider Iranian opposition community — inside Iran and around the world.”

Taylor added that finding informed sources willing to speak openly on the question, however, is known to be difficult.

“One source approached by The Times said it was unthinkable to speak openly against the NCRI because doing so would result in death threats from this group.”

“Nothing signals cluelessness about Iran more than treating NCRI as a legitimate opposition group,” said the source, who agreed to be quoted only on the condition of anonymity. “It sided with Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war, so its popularity in Iran is on par with that of the American Taliban who fought alongside Osama bin Laden against the U.S”.

The MKO’s spokesman in Washington told Washington Times that such characterizations are nonsense and argued that the organization’s reach and popularity inside Iran are deep and were instrumental in bringing about the 2009 uprising against the government in Tehran!

Asked about where the organization gets its funding, MKO spokesman asserted that financing “has been and continues to be the Iranian people inside and outside Iran”.

All of the former U.S. officials who spoke with The Times for this article acknowledged that their travel and accommodations expenses in France were being paid for by the NCRI. However, each also asserted that it is common practice for them to accept payment for speaking engagements and stressed that their support for Friday’s rally and the plight of the MEK had nothing to do with money.

July 2, 2014 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Mossad used Mojahedin Khalq for years

Global fear of Iran’s ‘controversial’ nuclear programme is a ‘US-Israeli construct’

‘Iran will have enough enriched uranium for nuclear bomb by next summer’ – Netanyahu at the UN General Assembly in Sep 2012

Iran’s nuclear talks with the P5+1[1] are taking place in Vienna. A “solid commitment” from Iran is needed, ensuring that its stated peaceful atomic energy programme is not a clandestine attempt to build nuclear weapons. The Iranians have found themselves needing to make a leap towards lifting the crushing international sanctions, notably those imposed by the US. It is the basis of these sanctions that MEMO has re-examined with a group of senior researchers in the field.

When Ellie Geranmayeh, Iran expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) spoke with MEMO, she insisted, “In the same way that any potential military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear programme needs to be explained to the United Nations, the West also needs to explain the basis of its accusations and suspicions.”

Ever since the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported “sensitive enrichment and reprocessing activity” in Iran in 2003, the country has been under close supervision. The UN Security Council decided to impose economic sanctions for Iran’s non-compliance with its previous request to suspend enrichment activities before extending them in 2007, 2008 and 2010. According to Reuters, Washington was recently pushing for an even more severe attack on the Iranian economy, but this was rejected by the Security Council. Iran’s former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, argued that the sanctions are “illegal” and imposed by “arrogant leaders”. The sanctions are devastating the Iranian economy and have been imposed despite the fact that Iran’s uranium enrichment is being held below 5 per cent, consistent with developing fuel for a civilian nuclear power plant. US pressure has led several nuclear contracts between Iran and foreign governments to fall through.

The United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC)[2], meanwhile, has used its official website to “call for action” to change the course of its declining share of the global enrichment market, underscoring the need to “limit the spread of enrichment technologies to rogue states”. This controversial Western centric use of the phrase “rogue states” demands a thorough investigation, according to many experts.

Furthermore, the West’s foundation for these claims against Iran has too many fault lines “to begin to even list them,” claims historian and Iran nuclear expert Dr Gareth Porter. The single biggest factor pushing “the elite’s obsession over Iran as a threat and as an enemy,” he says, “is that the basic premise was laid down early at the end of the Cold War.” His ground-breaking work recently received the annual Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism from the London-based journalists’ Frontline Club. MEMO spoke to Porter about the trajectory of the “imminent Iranian nuclear threat” and its construct by a handful of powerful actors with a particular political agenda and documents “with little reliability” that the media over the last decade have had no qualms about accepting and sharing as (unauthenticated) “evidence”.

1)”The laptop documents”

One of the main anomalies in America’s porous trajectory on Iran is the pseudo-crucial “laptop documents”. Presented by the US to the Security Council, these 1,000 pages are alleged to contain research on nuclear weapons-related activities, stolen from the computer of an Iranian scientist or engineer who was, it is claimed, involved in the programme. “This was a trick to cover the truth,” said Porter. He recapped how the documents were passed to Germany’s intelligence agency by a member of the Mujahideen-E-Khalq (MEK) an Iranian terrorist organisation in exile, which has been a client of Israel’s Mossad spy agency for several years. German intelligence and many other government officials, including ex-US Secretary of State Colin Powell, warned that the US and EU should not make the mistake of basing policy on this information.

2) Redesigned Iranian missile

Another central anomaly is the “discovery” that the Iranian missile re-entry vehicle is depicted in the documents as being redesigned to accommodate a nuclear payload. “This was one that had been discarded by Iran at least two years before the drawings were said to have been made,” Porter argues, “not according to Iranian sources, but an authoritative Western source: the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).”

3)Technical errors

“The discovery that the same drawings of an alleged effort to redesign the re-entry vehicle of the Shahab-3 missile contained numerous technical errors,” Gareth Porter contends, “indicated again that they had not been done by those involved in Iran’s missile programme.”

4) Codename (5.15)

This was given to one of the sub-projects in the alleged nuclear weapons research programme that was, in truth, the number assigned to a contract with the civilian atomic energy organisation of Iran or an ore processing facility and was signed two years before the supposed covert research programme was even said to have begun.

Israel’s position

Last week, at the Herzliya Conference, Israel’s platform for the articulation of national policy, Global Jewish News Source reported major Israeli politicians with strong beliefs in this propaganda. “What is at stake is not merely Israel’s position in the Middle East,” argued Likud’s Yuval Steinitz, “what is at stake is the fate of the entire world… Iran is a nuclear threshold state. It just hasn’t created the weapons yet.”

Lina Khatib of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think-tank explained to MEMO how Israel been trying to push the US to take military action against Iran to stop its nuclear enrichment programme. Further, the government in Tel Aviv has also been engaging in “clandestine intelligence operations to halt Iran’s nuclear developments, for example through cyber-attacks,” she warned. In response, America pushed back against Israel’s request for military strikes against Iran, and is not likely to include Israel as a formal partner in the Vienna negotiations over the nuclear file, “though the US will ensure that Israeli interests are represented during the talks”.

“Overwhelming” evidence exists, according to Dr Gareth Porter, that it was Israel’s Mossad that produced the falsified documents that have propelled the “manufactured crisis” forward, “not just once, but twice”. First came the “laptop documents” that surfaced in 2004 followed in 2008-2009, two years into his research, when a series of intelligence reports and allegedly Iranian documents were given to the IAEA directly by the Israelis, “resulting in more accusations following the November 2011 IAEA report”.

According to Porter, Israeli’s pressure on the Obama administration to make demands of Iran will ensure that the talks fail. “Thus far that Israeli strategy has succeeded, because the Obama administration has demanded a cut in Iranian centrifuges that makes it difficult to envision a final compromise.” Basing any military action on false dossiers would be as irresponsible as the invasion of Iraq in 2003; the world witnessed what consequences that had, when soldiers on the ground had no clue about what was going on.

Current talks

Iran has been talking separately with most of the members of the P5+1 group in advance of the formal meetings week. Although reports have been modestly positive about the potential outcome, the final accord date set as July 20 is already predicted to be given a six-month extension by government officials from most of the countries involved.

Porter remains “very worried” that the talks will fail because of America’s “hard-line” refusal to tolerate any Iranian enrichment of uranium to support even its present nuclear reactor, “much less future reactors”. He recently interviewed Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, who has not given up hope of renewed and extended diplomatic flexibility on behalf of the US. Even so, he indicated that statements had been made in the talks, as well as to the media, that were “posturing”. He implied that this was politically dangerous because it would make later adjustment in the US negotiation stance very difficult.

According to Lina Khatib, we will see the lifting of some sanctions, but a comprehensive deal will take time to be made and implemented. However, as Iran’s nuclear programme is primarily, she says, “aimed at giving Iran political weight in the Middle East and international recognition as a major regional player, rather than at preparing to conduct a nuclear attack,” there might be more “muscle-flexing” involved than seen so far.

The threat of an ISIS take-over of major Iraqi cities near the border with Iran has collided with the current negotiations on the country’s nuclear programme and arguably paved the way for an indirect willingness to reach an agreement with America. The pace of events means that Iran, which in the 1980s fought former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein for eight years, may be willing to cooperate with Washington to bolster Iraq’s Shi’ite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has said that he will consider such cooperation, if the US takes action in Iraq.

However, a US official cautioned against reading too much into the latest talks: “No one should expect that all of a sudden, overnight, even if we resolve the nuclear agreement, that everything will change. It will not. The fundamentals remain exactly as they are. Until we resolve the nuclear issue there cannot be any kind of fundamental change in this relationship.”

Footnotes

[1] Iran has had meetings with China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. These six are known as the P5+1 (the permanent five members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) or alternatively as the E3+3, used by European countries. These meetings are intended to resolve concerns about Iran’s nuclear programme.

[2] USEC: the American corporation that contracts with the United States Department of Energy to produce enriched uranium for use in nuclear power plants.

Henriette Johansen, Middle East Monitor,

June 19, 2014 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

How US Policy on Iran Came to Be Based on Fabricated Documents

The key “evidence” of an Iranian nuclear weapons program comes via the MEK, a cult-like terrorist group—and was likely produced by Israel.

The nuclear talks between the P5 plus 1 (the permanent five UN Security Council members plus Germany) and Iran entered the drafting phase in Vienna on May 13. The objective is to reach a final deal in the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program by July 20, although the talks could be extended by mutual agreement for another six months. But the Obama administration is demanding a deep reduction in Iran’s uranium enrichment capabilities, which makes a successful conclusion of the negotiations highly unlikely.

This deal-killing demand is not based on an objective assessment of Iran’s nuclear program. It has been justified by the highly politicized concept of “breakout,” which refers to the time it would take Iran, in theory, to enrich enough uranium to weapons-grade level for a single nuclear weapon. But the administration’s embrace of the breakout concept is based on a false narrative about an alleged past covert Iranian nuclear weapons program, which the Obama administration inherited without the slightest questioning from the George W. Bush administration.

The Obama administration’s decision to demand draconian cuts was adumbrated by Robert Einhorn, who was the State Department’s special adviser for nonproliferation and arms control until June 2013. In a report published this past March, Einhorn wrote, “The number and type of centrifuges will be limited to ensure that breakout times are…a minimum of 6 to 12 months at all times.” And in a later article in The National Interest, Einhorn explained what that would mean in terms of reduction from Iran’s present 19,000 centrifuges: “an enrichment capacity greater than a few thousand first-generation centrifuges would give Iran an unacceptably rapid breakout capability.”

Secretary of State John Kerry confirmed that Einhorn revelation in testimony on April 8 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Responding to committee chairman Robert Menendez’s complaint that the administration would allow Iran to accumulate enough weapons-grade uranium to make a single nuclear weapon within six to twelve months of a decision to do so, Kerry said, “I’m not saying that’s what we’d settle for,” hinting that the administration might demand an even longer breakout period. And he defended six to twelve months as “significantly more” than the two months he said was estimated to be the existing Iranian breakout capability.

The insistence on such a reduction in Iran’s enrichment capability is certain to be rejected. Iran has long asserted that it needs a much greater number of centrifuges than specified in US demands, enough to provide nuclear fuel for future nuclear power reactors as they come online. Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif explained to me in an interview on June 3 that Iran is proposing to reassure the United States and its negotiating partners that it isn’t interested in breakout; it will do so by converting all low-enriched uranium immediately into a form that would not be available for weapons-grade enrichment (around 90 percent purity), and then into fuel assemblies for a nuclear reactor.

The Obama administration has taken the position that Iran has no legitimate need to produce its own reactor fuel and should rely instead on the Russians and the French for its supply. Zarif told me, however, that it is “thirty years too late” to tell the Iranians that they must rely on other states for their nuclear fuel. He pointed to the long history of agreements with other states, both on nuclear fuel supply and other forms of nuclear cooperation, on which the other states have reneged.

France, under US pressure, refused to provide enriched uranium fuel assemblies to Iran in the early 1980s despite earlier legal arrangements to do so. It was precisely because US intervention had eliminated the possibility of reliance on foreign enrichment that Iran decided in the mid-1980s to develop its own enrichment capability. That lesson was underlined once again when Russia, under US pressure, delayed the shipment of nuclear fuel for the Bushehr power plant in 2005–06 in order to pressure Iran to cease enrichment entirely.

The insistence that Iran must not be allowed to have the enrichment facilities that would support a civilian nuclear program is the logical consequence of a false narrative about Iran—namely, that Tehran has been systematically concealing a nuclear weapons program that was active at least as late 2003. This view, now almost universally accepted by the US national security establishment and political elites in the United States and Europe, has been reinforced by nearly a decade of mainstream media coverage. The centerpiece of the narrative is the idea that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has published, in the form of two sets of intelligence documents, hard evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program at least from 2001 to 2003.

The first set of documents, which surfaced in 2004, was said to have come from the laptop computer of an Iranian scientist working on the program. It included a series of drawings of efforts to integrate a nuclear weapon into the re-entry vehicle of Iran’s Shahab-3 missile. Descriptions of those drawings were leaked to selected journalists from 2005 on, generating sensational media stories of a “smoking gun” of nuclear weapons intent.

The US National Intelligence Estimates of 2005 and 2007, which concluded that Iran had carried out a nuclear weapons program, were based in large part on the assumption that those documents were genuine. The IAEA described them as “credible” in 2008—despite the fact that its director general at the time, Mohamed ElBaradei, warned repeatedly that their authenticity had not been established.

But a fundamental error in the re-entry vehicle documents proves they were fabricated: the missile they showed had been abandoned by 2000—two years before the drawings were made—in favor of an improved model whose re-entry vehicle bore no resemblance to that of the old model. And the real story of those documents, revealed to me last year by Karsten Voigt, a former senior official in Germany’s foreign ministry, is that they were turned over to Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, by a member of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), the cult-like Iranian terrorist group that has been fighting the Tehran regime ever since the early 1980s. Furthermore, a senior BND official told Voigt that German intelligence officials regarded the source as “doubtful” and were concerned about what appeared to them to be the Bush administration’s intention to base its Iran policy on those documents.

The MEK role in transferring the documents indicates that they originated in Israel, because the MEK had been serving as a client of Israel for several years, including the “laundering” of Israeli intelligence reports by presenting them to the IAEA and the press as coming from the MEK itself. Israel also provided a new series of documents and intelligence reports to the IAEA in 2008 and 2009 claiming that Iran had been testing nuclear weapons designs and had continued to work on other components of nuclear weapons well after 2003. Although the IAEA never mentioned Israel publicly, former director general ElBaradei reveals in his memoirs that Israel provided the documents directly. After ElBaradei was succeeded by the more pliable Yukia Amano, the IAEA used those Israeli-supplied documents as the basis for its November 2011 report, which made a series of new accusations about Iranian nuclear weapons research projects going beyond the alleged 2001–03 program.

The unquestioning acceptance of this false narrative has shifted the political discourse surrounding the nuclear negotiations sharply toward the Israeli position. As a result, the Obama administration is more vulnerable to the propaganda war against negotiations that Israel’s clients in Congress are waging.

The biggest impact of the false narrative has been to impose the concept of breakout on the administration’s diplomatic posture. That concept is always presented as merely a technical tool to measure Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon. Its real significance, however, is the assumption implicit in it that the Islamic Republic has been working feverishly to obtain nuclear weapons and must be prevented by US power from doing so.

During the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, ruled out the possession of weapons of mass destruction as illicit under Islam, even as Iraq was inflicting horrific casualties on Iran with chemical weapons attacks. That episode makes the fatwa against nuclear weapons by the present supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, entirely credible.

The actual behavior of Iran in recent years has also belied the breakout narrative. By early 2010, breakout theory advocates were already claiming that Iran could produce enough highly enriched uranium for a bomb in just six months. The Ahmadinejad government leaned toward an extreme nationalist, anti-Western political constituency, and at the time there were neither active negotiations nor punishing sanctions on Iran’s oil industry that would have provided an incentive to slow a race toward breakout capacity. But instead of using the years from 2010 to mid-2012 to begin enriching to weapons grade, Iran moved in the opposite direction. It did not use more than half the centrifuges it already had in place to enrich uranium, and it began converting much of its 20-percent-enriched uranium to oxide form, making it far more difficult and time-consuming to enrich to weapons-grade levels.

In fact, the breakout concept is based on an entirely implausible assumption—that Iran would deliberately invite confrontation with the United States by rushing to enrich enough uranium for a single bomb—one that would not even be available for use for as long as three or four years, according to US intelligence estimates.

The narrative that now threatens to plunge the United States into much more dangerous tensions with Iran is the most successful example of a fundamental and persistent problem of US national security policy. Falsified intelligence was used to get the US public to go along with wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The falsehoods about the Tonkin Gulf incident before the Vietnam buildup and Iraq’s alleged WMD programs before the Iraq War were eventually unmasked, albeit after US troops had been committed.

The success of the false narrative on Iran has been facilitated by the disappearance of the investigative function of Congress and the corporate media. Resistance to the manipulation of opinion on national security issues can only be successful if we strengthen the ability of independent media to alert Americans to strategic falsehoods early in their gestation.

Gareth Porter , The Nation

June 12, 2014 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Historian: Israel gave fake Iran dossier to MKO

In an interview with Press TV, Gareth Porter said he has evidence of MKO’s submission of documents to the German intelligence in 2004, claiming that Iran has been seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

“And the MKO undoubtedly got them from Israel – A document that connects the MKO and Israel that the MKO had been laundering intelligence for the Israelis for years,” he said.

Porter, author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of Iran Nuclear Scare, said there is “absolutely convincing evidence” that the MKO documents were “fabricated.”

He said Israel and the United States started in 1983 fabricating documents against the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program by raising claims that Iran is running a “covert nuclear weapons program.”

The investigative journalist said under former US President W. George Bush (2001-2009), the Israeli regime moved to “essentially create a set of documents that would indict Iran as pursuing nuclear weapons.”

However, he said, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) made it clear that it had “not established the authenticity of those documents.”

“[The IAEA then director Mohamed ElBaradei] insisted they should not be used as evidence in regard to Iran’s nuclear program,” said Porter.

In his book, Porter wrote that the international hype created over Iran’s nuclear energy program has been in fact a scenario orchestrated by the Israeli spy agency Mossad and the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

June 7, 2014 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

The Manufactured Story about Iran’s Nuclear Program

Israel used Mojahedin Khalq, MKO, MEK, Rajavi cult

As Iran and the world powers resume nuclear talks in Vienna with the hope of reaching a comprehensive agreement over Iran’s nuclear program by mid-July, the Israelis and their lobbyists in Washington are intensifying their efforts to scuttle the talks. In addition to all the efforts in the US Congress to impose additional sanctions on Iran, thus bringing the talks to a premature end, there are indications that Israel and her friends are continuing with various acts of sabotage against Iranian nuclear facilities.

In 2010, the so-called Stuxnet virus temporarily disrupted the operation of thousands of Iranian centrifuges. At least five Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated. Iran has also said that it has discovered tiny timed explosives planted on centrifuges but has disabled them before they could go off. On Monday 17 March 2014, Iran said that an alleged attempt to sabotage one of its nuclear facilities had involved foreign intelligence agencies that had tampered with imported pumps. However, in addition to all those acts of sabotage, there seems to be an intensive effort to manufacture a crisis by means of false intelligence.

Prior to the devastating Iraq war that destroyed the country and killed upwards of half a million people, not to say anything of thousands of Coalition forces who were killed and the two trillion dollars that was spent, a number of neocons bent on the invasion of Iraq manufactured various false reports in order to mislead the public and pave the way for the war.

On September 8, 2002, Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller published a story in the New York Times that openly alleged that Saddam Hussein had intensified his quest for a nuclear bomb. They wrote: “In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium… Bush administration officials say the quest for thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes is one of several signs that Mr. Hussein is seeking to revamp and accelerate Iraq’s nuclear weapons program.”

The unsuspecting public was misled by that false intelligence and the result was one of the longest and most disastrous wars in US history.

How the manufactured crisis was manufactured

In his latest groundbreaking book, entitled A Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of Iran Nuclear Scare , the historian and investigative journalist Gareth Porter catalogs a long list of false reports manufactured by Israeli intelligence agencies in order to mislead the public and pave the way for a war against Iran.1

MC-cover-final-684x1024In this book Porter shows how Israeli agents have fabricated many stories in order to accuse Iran of trying to manufacture nuclear weapons. He also shows how the IAEA has been manipulated to put out reports suggesting that Iran had a covert weapons program. One instance of the false intelligence is the story of how some documents allegedly stolen from an Iranian nuclear weapons research program became a primary driving force in building a consensus about an Iranian covert program.

Porter shows how John Bolton cooperated with the Israelis to ensure that “the IAEA would not be able to allow Iran to get by without being accused of having a nuclear program, and he didn’t believe that would be possible unless some special moves were made.”2

Around the same time, in the absence of any proof that Iran was trying to get nuclear weapons, the Israelis decided to create a file of documents, which would be attributed to a covert nuclear weapons program. They got the terrorist group the Mojahedin-e Khalq to make the public case on behalf of Israel about the existence of a covert military program in Iran.

A major revelation in the book concerns the account provided by a former senior official in Germany’s Foreign Ministry, Karsten Voigt , who was in charge of German-U.S. relation from 1997-2013 and who had warned his U.S. colleagues that the information about Iran’s nuclear program had come from a member of the Mojahedin-e Khalq and was unreliable.

The German Intelligence Service, the BND, had warned the Americans during the run-up to the Iraq war that a source used by American officials, now known as Curveball, whose false stories about mobile bioweapons lab had been used by Colin Powell in his UN speech could not be relied upon. However, it seems that the aim of the policy-makers is not to ascertain the truth, but to make use of any material that backs their policies.

As we saw during the run-up to the Iraq war such false assumptions could be very dangerous and could justify an illegal war. The same thing seems to be happening again. As Jim Lobe pointed out in an important article, “Top Israel Lobby Group Loses Battle on Iran, but War Not over,” frenzied efforts to demonize Iran and prevent the success of the talks are still continuing.3

Prominent neoconservative writers Bret Stephens and Reuel Marc Gerecht called for a much tougher approach to talks with Iran over its nuclear program in a debate hosted by the McCain Institute on March 11.4 In an article written in 2002, Reuel Marc Gerecht had argued that an invasion of Iraq would “probably” cause regime change in Iran. 5 As that did not happen, he is at it again, trying to bring the regime change by other means. Meanwhile, State Department Assures Israel that war is likely if Iran talks fail and that attacking Iran is “alternative” to diplomacy.6

However, faulty intelligence has enabled some US analysts to claim that Iran has a large-scale nuclear weapons program. However, none of these assumptions have been based on facts. Porter writes: “US and Israeli policies have been driven by political and bureaucratic interests, not by a rational, objective assessment of available indicators of the motives and intentions of Iranian leaders”.

Nevertheless, the same faulty intelligence has enabled the West to take Iran’s file out of the IAEA and into the U.N. Security Council and to impose unprecedented sanctions on Iran that have gravely affected Iranian economy and the lives of millions of Iranians.

A recent example: The Iranian ship with missiles heading from Iran to Gaza

It is clear that despite some setbacks the Israelis still continue to demonize Iran by any means possible. On the eve of Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington early in March 2014 to meet with President Obama and speak at the annual AIPAC conference, suddenly a story grabbed the headlines of most Israeli and US newspapers about the Israeli Special Forces seizing an Iranian ship with missiles heading from Iran to Gaza.

Haaretz reported: “Israeli naval forces on Wednesday intercepted an Iranian arms vessel carrying medium-range missiles in the Red Sea, about some 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) from the Israeli coast. The shipment was headed for the Gaza Strip via Sudan.” The report helpfully added: “Israel is hoping the incident will help prove to the P5+1 that Iran is still deceiving the West, despite the friendly tone characterizing the recent talks in Vienna over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.”

According to the Israelis, the weaponry actually originated in Syria from where it was flown to Tehran. It was then put on board the Klos-C ship at the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. From there it went to Um Qasr in Iraq, before heading back out of the Persian Gulf and round to the Red Sea where it was intercepted. 7

The Israelis say that it was due to dock in Port Sudan, from where the weapons would have moved overland through the Sinai Peninsula and ultimately into the Gaza Strip.

The fact that many parts of the story do not add up does not seem to bother anyone as long as it provides a backdrop to Netanyahu’s appearance in Washington.

Why in the midst of a war would Syria send some of her most sophisticated weapons to Tehran to be then sent to Iraq before heading back to the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea to go through the Sinai Peninsula that is in the midst of intense insurgency activities, to then be sent to the Gaza Strip through the tunnels that have been destroyed by the new Egyptian regime?

And why it is acceptable for Israel to intercept the ship heading for Sudan in international waters? These are some of the questions that need to be answered.

It seems that those who concocted this story did not even know that since the start of the Syrian crisis Iran has broken with Hamas, which has clearly sided with the rebels. At a time when the Iranian government is getting close to the West and is on the verge of make-or-break talks with the West, why would Iranian leaders jeopardize the success of the talks by trying to smuggle weapons to Hamas, with which they have hostile relations?

As Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s Twitter account noted, the weapons’ shipment was seized just in time “for the AIPAC conference”. He added: “An amazing coincidence! Or the same unsuccessful lies.”

The post 9/11 Karine A story

Shortly after 9/11 when the then reformist government of President Mohammad Khatami expressed condolences to “the great American nation” and collaborated with the Americans in Afghanistan and a new chapter of more friendly relations was about to open up between Iran and America, we had a similar incident, the so-called Karine A affair. In that incident too, commandos from Israel’s Navy seals unit allegedly swooped on the Karine A in international waters in the Red Sea, overpowering the crew of the ship and seizing the weapons that they claimed were intended for the Palestinian Authority headed by Yasser Arafat, with whom Iran did not have very warm relations

Ariel Sharon stood on the dock at Israel’s Red Sea Port of Eilat displaying the alleged weapons that had been seized. The illegal seizure of the ship in international waters achieved Sharon’s two main aims. It blew up the faint hopes of peace with the Palestinians, and at the same time it put an end to any rapprochement between Iran and the United States.

No excuse when it comes to Iran

If in the case of Iraq Western leaders could claim that they were not sure whether Iraq was pursuing nuclear weapons or not – although the “Dodgy Dossier” and fabricated intelligence by the Office of Special Plans created by Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith suggests otherwise – in the case of Iran they do not even have that excuse.

At least since 2003 when an Iranian negotiating team led by Hassan Rouhani and the European Troika (Great Britain, France and Germany) reached an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program and Iran signed the Additional Protocol and even suspended enrichment for over two years, and certainly since 2007 when the NIE said with “high degree of confidence” that Iran did not have an ongoing nuclear weapons program, the world has known that all the hype about Iran’s nuclear weapons was only aimed at manufacturing a false crisis.

It is in the light of all these previous experiences that Gareth Porter’s A Manufactured Crisis is of such great significance, because it shows once and for all with meticulous documentation the nature of the lies concocted by Israel against Iran.

Questions we must ask

The question is why the information provided by the book is not at the top of the news in the Western press?

Why is the case against Iran not reviewed in the light of these revelations and why has a final deal not been reached?

What are the negotiators waiting for and what else do they need to have in order to be convinced of the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program?

Why is the public so quiet about all these lies and distortions, and why do they not speak out against a manufactured crisis that could affect us all?

Why are Israeli officials who have been guilty of such willful distortion of truth not brought to book and condemned by the international community?

Are we not colluding with all these lies and disinformation by remaining silent?

The Soviet dissident author Yevgeny Yevtushenko said: “When the truth is replaced by silence, the silence itself is a lie.” It is time for all of us to speak out and put an end to all these lies.

•Gareth Porter, Manufactured Crisis (Just World Books, 2014) For a review of the book see: “A Manufactured Crisis”, by Peter Jenkins, Lobe Log, January 29, 2014. [↩]

•See “Manufacturing a Narrative for War – Gareth Porter on Reality Assets Itself”, The Real News Network, March 17, 2014. [↩]

•Jim Lobe, “Top Israel Lobby Group Loses Battle on Iran, But War Not Over”, antiwar.com, January 23, 2014. [↩]

•See “Iran Nuclear Deal: Breakthrough or Failure”; Also see: Derek Davison, “Give Peace (Talks) a Chance?” Lobe Log, March 12, 2014 [↩]

•See: Reuel Marc Gerecht ,“Regime Change in Iran? Applying George W. Bush’s ‘liberation theology’ to the mullahs”, The Weekly Standard, August 5, 2002 [↩]

•See Jason Ditz, “State Department Assures Israel: War Likely if Iran Talks Fail. Attacking Iran Is ‘Alternative’ to Diplomacy”, antiwar.com, February 01, 2014 [↩]

•See: Israel Halts ‘Weapons Shipment from Iran’, BBC [↩]

Dr Farhang Jahanpour is a former professor and dean of the Faculty of Languages at the University of Isfahan, Iran, and a former Senior Fulbright Research Scholar at Harvard. He is Associate Fellow at the Faculty of Oriental Studies and tutor in Middle Eastern Studies at the Department of Continuing Education at the University of Oxford Read other articles by Farhang, or visit Farhang’s website.

Farhang Jahanpour

March 26, 2014 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Report Discloses MKO’s Ties with French Counterintelligence

The terrorist Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO, also known as MEK, NCRI or PMOI) has been reporting its activities and operations in Iraq as well as the status quo in the country to the French counterintelligence agency every two weeks for years, a report revealed on Monday.

The MKO leaders were called to the headquarters of the French counterintelligence agency every two weeks to present their intelligence on the situation in Iran, Habilian Association – a human rights NGO representing the families of 17,000 Iranian terror victims – said quoting a report from the Lebanese al-Nahar daily.

“We have had good relations with the French government since 2002 and had regular contacts with the French counterintelligence agency, interior ministry and president’s office,” Spokesman of the MKO in France Afshin Alawi told the AFP according to al-Nahar.

“The counterintelligence agency had some meetings with us at its headquarters so that we present our reports on the events in Iran,” he added.

The MKO, founded in the 1960s, blended elements of Islamism and Stalinism and participated in the overthrow of the US-backed Shah of Iran in 1979. Ahead of the revolution, the MKO conducted attacks and assassinations against both Iranian and western targets.

The group started assassination of the citizens and officials after the revolution in a bid to take control of the newly-established Islamic Republic. It killed several of Iran’s new leaders in the early years after the revolution, including the then President, Mohammad Ali Rajayee, Prime Minister, Mohammad Javad Bahonar and the Judiciary Chief, Mohammad Hossein Beheshti who were killed in bomb attacks by the MKO members in 1981.

The group fled to Iraq in 1986, where it was protected by Saddam Hussein and where it helped the Iraqi dictator suppress Shiite and Kurd uprisings in the country.

The terrorist group joined Saddam’s army during the Iraqi imposed war on Iran (1980-1988) and helped Saddam and killed thousands of Iranian civilians and soldiers during the US-backed Iraqi imposed war on Iran.

Since the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the group, which now adheres to a pro-free-market philosophy, has been strongly backed by neo-conservatives in the United States, who eventually took the MKO off the US terror list.

The US formally removed the MKO from its list of terror organizations in early September 2012, one week after the then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, sent the US Congress a classified communication about the move. The decision made by Clinton enabled the group to have its assets under the US jurisdiction unfrozen and do business with the American entities, the State Department said in a statement at the time.

February 4, 2014 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq Organization as a terrorist group

The MKO-Israeli Spying network

While the Israeli security forces announced the arrest of an Iranian-born with Belgium citizenship accusing him of spying for Tehran, the Iranian officials said they have arrested Israeli spies for planning to sabotage nuclear sites. However, Mujahedin Khalq Organization admitted its organizational connection with the suspect tried in Israeli court. The propaganda arm of the MKO, National Council of Resistance the NCR announced a statement to desperately try to deny Mansouri’s current link with the group.

Apparently the MKO’s statement is a reaction to what the Belguim’s newspaper Le Soir published on the news of the arrest of the alleged Iranian spy, Ali Mansouri. Le Soir reported that the suspect had identified himself as a supporter of the MKO. The group’s PR machine uses fallacious arguments to induce Mansouri as an agent of the Iranian Qods Forces who had infiltrated the MKO.

By intentionally or unintentionally confirming its close and long-time relation with the suspect, the NCR loses its face.

The MKO’s announcement on Ali Mansouri as a person who has once been an adherent to the group was faced with revelations by the side of former members of the group who used to know Mansouri during their membership in the Cult of Rajavi. They recall him as an intelligence agent of the group against Iranian government.

Mohamamd Razaghi, former member of the MKO reveals his personal experience with Ali Mansouri while both of them were associated with the group. Ali Mansouri has been a go between for the MKO’s secret section and Mossad, Razaghi says.”Many ordinary members of the ET section [Intelligence Section of the MKO] remember him because every now and then they were tasked to do things for him,” Razaghi reveals. "It was no secret to us even in those days that he was working as an agent between MKO and Mossad and that is why he travelled personally to Israel a few times."

The NCR admits that Ali Mansouri has been an MKO sympathizer in Turkey since 1980 but Mohammad Razaghi completes NCR’s account:” In reality, Ali Mansouri was resident in Turkey between 1980 and 1998 and was in charge of gathering intelligence from inside Iran. He himself would travel to Iran every now and then. The MEK, of course, was very keen to keep him and his work secret.”[2]

Definitely, Ali Mansouri is not the only MKO-Mossad agent who has been detected in recent years. Assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists have been “ joint Mossad-MEK operations,” a confidential source who is a former Israeli cabinet minister and senior IDF officer, told Richard Silverstein, journalist on January 13, 2012, the day Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan , the director of Natanz Uranium facility was murdered.[3]

According to the Associated Press, a group of suspected Israeli spies have recently gone on trial in Iran. Earlier this month Judge Dadkhoda Salari was quoted as saying that the group was led by three people who hired some 60 others to conspire against Iran’s ruling Islamic government.[4] But the most recent account of the Israeli spying network in Iran was revealed in the Washington Post. Washington Post says Turkey deliberately blew up cover of an Israeli spy ring working inside Iran in early 2012 and dealt a significant blow to Israeli Intelligence gathering.[5]

The MKO-Israeli alliance was also confirmed by other sources including the NBC News in February 2012. “Deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group that is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service, US officials told NBC News , confirming charges leveled by Iran’s leaders.[6]

In their anti-Iranian campaign, the declaration of detaining the Iranian-Belgian man came as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was traveling to the United States to show off his wary of the likely improvement of relations between Iran and the West. The Timing was well organized. As Reuters puts, Israeli analysts questioned the timing of the affair, suggesting it was being showcased as part of efforts to discredit Tehran’s new opening to Washington.” [7]

Once Ali Mansouri turned into an expired agent, the MKO-Israeli PR machine used him as fuel to heat harder on war drums against Iranians.

While the negotiations over Iranian nuclear program between Iran and the US, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany in Geneva seem to spark hope for progress, the MKO and Israel have to make harder efforts to obstruct advancements.

By Mazda Parsi

Sources:

[1]https://www.nejatngo.org/en/posts/5448

[2]ibid

[3]Silverstein, Richard, Israeli Source: Assassination of Iranian Nuclear Scientist Joint Mossad-MEK Operation, Tikun Olam, January 13, 2012

[4]The Associated Press, Suspected Israeli spies stand trial in Iran, Oct. 12, 2013

[5] Rueters, Turkey revealed Israeli spy ring to Iran-report, Oct 17, 2013

[6] Engel, Richard & Windrem, Robert, Israel teams with terror group to kill Iran’s nuclear scientists, US officials tell NBCNews, NBC, February 9, 2012

[7] Heller, Jeffrey, Israel showcases Iranian spy case as Netanyahu visits U.S., Reuters, September 30, 2013

October 23, 2013 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq Organization as a terrorist group

Spy nabbed in Israel MKO agent

A former member of the terrorist Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) says a man arrested in Israel on charges of spying for Iran has been a long serving member of the anti-Iranian group.

Ali Mansouri, a dual Iranian-Belgian national, was detained on September 11 by Israel’s internal security service, Shin Bet, allegedly for taking notes on the security screenings at Israel’s international airport and photographing the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, according to the Israeli security agency.

The former MKO member, however, said Mansouri was a close member of the MKO for at least 30 years and has been working as a go-between for the terrorist group and Israel’s spy agency Mossad.

He added that Mansouri, who lived in Turkey between 1980 and 1998, travelled to Iran regularly posing as a businessman to gather information for Mossad and MKO leaders.

It was no secret to us even in those days that he was working as an agent between MKO and Mossad and that is why he travelled personally to Israel a few times, the source said.

The amateur nature of the photos taken by Mansouri and the timing of the arrest have raised speculations that the arrest was politically motivated.

The Israeli regime announced the arrest in late September as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu left for the US to persuade US President Barack Obama that stepped-up sanctions, not diplomacy, is the way to deal with Iran over its nuclear energy program.

The visit came after a trip by an Iranian delegation to the US headed by President Hassan Rouhani, and his UN General Assembly address that many in the West hailed as a first step to a possible resolution to the nuclear standoff.

The MKO fled to Iraq in the 1980s, where it enjoyed the support of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and set up Camp Ashraf in the eastern province of Diyala, near the Iranian border.

The group also cooperated with Saddam in the massacres of Iraqi Kurds and in suppressing the 1991 uprisings in southern Iraq.

The MKO is listed as a terrorist organization by much of the international community and has committed numerous terrorist acts against Iranians and Iraqis.

October 23, 2013 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq Organization

Razaghi: Israel’s Iranian spy belongs to Mojahedin Khalq

Following the arrest of Iranian nationals on spying charges in Israel, Mohammad Razaghi, a former member of the terrorist Mojahedin Khalq organisation reveals his personal knowledge of one of these individuals. Ali Mansouri has been a long serving member of the organisation who acted as a go between for the MEK with Mossad, and who travelled to Iran to gather information for them.

Ali Mansouri was a close member of the MEK for at least 30 years. During that time he was well known in the organisation as a go between for the Mojahedin Khalq’s secret section (known as ET or Etelaat) and Mossad. Many ordinary members of the ET section of the MEK remember him because every now and then they were tasked to do things for him.

According to an NCRI (National Council of Resistance of Iran, aka MEK, PMOI, MKO, Rajavi cult) statement [in response to his arrest], “Since 1980, Ali Mansouri has been a merchant in Turkey and expressed sympathy for the PMOI”.

In reality, Ali Mansouri was resident in Turkey between 1980 and 1998 and was in charge of gathering intelligence from inside Iran. He himself would travel to Iran every now and then. The MEK, of course, was very keen to keep him and his work secret.

I remember clearly a few times that I was tasked to go to see him to collect some pictures and documents about Mehrabad Airport and Jamaran H.Q. and to bring them to our safe house and hand them over to my commanders. At that time he was working under cover as a businessman and would travel to Iran regularly. He and his network were clearly spies working on sensitive information inside Iran.

On some other occasions I witnessed his participation in the financial affairs of the Mojahedin Khalq in Turkey, like renting offices and houses to be used as open and covert safe houses in Istanbul.

Ali Mansouri obviously had a lot of information about the MEK and their work and as a long time serving intelligence officer of Etelaat (or Mokhaberat as the MEK used to call it in Saddam’s era), it is obvious that he would have been introduced to Mossad. It was no secret to us even in those days that he was working as an agent between MEK and Mossad and that is why he travelled personally to Israel a few times. Although, as usual, he used the cover of “Business” and “Trade”, there is no doubt that he was in close contact with and worked with the MEK and Mossad during his visits to Israel.

But what happened this time?

I believe that after the failure of the MEK in trying to create yet another nuclear revelation in their own name, (this time bringing out Saddam’s infamous torturer Mehdi Abrishamchi to announce it), and after everyone witnessed the cold response of the media and political circles to their new show, they have decided that the work of Ali Mansouri has not been good enough or maybe he has not been truthful enough with them and is therefore a traitor, or any other cultish reason that they come up with, and therefore they have decided to set him up and in this way they can get rid of his information (he can’t talk if in an Israeli prison), and also use it as propaganda in advance of the nuclear talks in Geneva.

In its statement, the NCRI (aka Rajavi cult, MEK, MKO) claim that:

“In July 2005, without prior invitation, he participated in the celebration of the anniversary of Mrs Rajavi’s liberation [from French custody on terrorism charges] and under the pretext of handing a letter to Mrs Rajavi, he attempted to get close to her but failed as he was stopped by her security.”

The questions to the terrorist cult is:

– why didn’t the MEK announce the nature and connections of Ali Mansouri in 2005 so that he would be exposed and not able to continue?

-Why did it take 30 years for MEK leaders to find out that a close member of theirs is working for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards?

-MEK leaders overtly and easily label all and every ex member and critic as a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and give out daily statements to this effect. Why is it that they did not give a statement about a real member. Why did it take over 10 years to suddenly wake up and give a statement now?

In another part of the statement the NCRI (Rajavi cult) say:

“The NCRI Security and Anti-terrorism Commission learned in 2007 that although this individual has Belgian nationality, he covertly travels to Iran under the pretext of visiting his brother. Hence, it advised PMOI supporters to disassociate from him.”

The NCRI Security and Anti-terrorism Commission have apparently been so disoriented that they have gaffed again, a big gaffe.

The question is: From 2007 until now you have distributed hundreds of statements against every ex member and every critic of the cult (including the latest one with all the clearly unfounded lies and misinformation misusing all sorts of sources which do not exist) and spent millions to silence your critics. What happened to this particular case? Why is it that your statement hasn’t been seen until 2013? Is it not the case that he was under your (and Mossad) protection?

As someone who has known him, yes, Ali Mansouri has been travelling to Iran. But again, I know that he was travelling as an agent of the Mojahedin Khalq and Mossad. As shameful as it is, the cult, Rajavi, and their paymaster Mossad have yet again sacrificed a 30 year long serving intelligence officer to cover up their recent failures as well as getting rid of him and the information he is carrying.

Mohammad Razaghi, Paris

October 19, 2013 0 comment

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