The Third View on Mujahedin Khalq

USA registers MEK as FTO and then trains them in Nevada State!

According to Seymour Hersh, a dissident Iranian terrorist group (M.E.K.) had been listed in 1997 as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. The Pentagon, in 2005, trained USA registers MEK as FTO and then trains them in Nevada State! members of the group in Nevada. These dissident Iranian terrorist were then returned to Iran and “many have engaged in covert activities”.

These Iranian terrorists (M.E.K.) remain on that list today.

The Iranian operatives were trained in communications, cryptography, weaponry, and small-unit tactics over a six-month period, a retired four-star general familiar with the details told Hersh.

The general said the training was done by Joint Special Operations Command(JSOC) who claim they were neither aware of nor involved in the training of M.E.K. members.

U.S. officials have denied any role in the killings of five Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007. However, they have said that the M.E.K. assassins, alleged to have been involved, were trained and financed by Mossad, the Israeli secret service.

A former Iranian M.E.K. official, told Seymour Hersh other M.E.K. defectors trained in Nevada told him their training included communications intercepts.

The U.S. provided M.E.K. operatives with the know-how to intercept telephone calls and text messages inside Iran and the M.E.K. shared the information collected with U.S. officials.

“Some American-supported covert operations continue in Iran today, according to past and present intelligence officials and military consultants,” Hersh reported.

M.E.K. stands for Mujahideen-e-Khalq. It began as a student Marxist-Islamist group in the 1970s that was “linked to the assassination of six American citizens,” Hersh noted.

Presently, they are some Jewish USA congressmen, along with a few congressional zio-stooges who are howling for the de-listing of the M.E.K from the USA registry of foreign terrorist organizations. It’s ironic that those who assist a terrorist organization that is on the USA list of such groups are subject to criminal charges.

Some analysts have suggested that delisting such an organization and bringing them to America could be fatal. As this M.E.K terrorist group who were financed by the Mosaad (Israeli Intelligence Agency), could stage a false flag terror attack on American soil which would be blamed on Iran.

Hence, the Zio-controlled White House would be justified in attacking Iran. And, the diabolical criminal Zionist entity (Israel) would have achieved its objective __tricking America into attacking Iran on their behalf.

by ron abbass , ronabbass.wordpress.com

April 16, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Terrorism; US rhetoric and politics

Former U.S. Officials Investigated for Receiving Payments to Promote a Designated Terror Group

Jeremiah Goulka, former RAND expert on the Mujahedin-e Khalq, says war hawks from Bush admin. and some Democrats were paid by the group to advance its interests in DC and are being investigated by US Treasury

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay in Washington.

Well, what do the following list of former government officials have in common? People like former Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge, former Homeland Security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend, former attorney general Michael Mukasey, former UN ambassador John Bolton, as well as former Republican mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani, former Democratic governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, and former governor of Vermont Howard Dean, ex-FBI director Louis Freeh, and retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Hugh Shelton? What are all these people have in common? Well, they’re all being investigated by the Treasury Department for material aid, receiving money from a terrorist organization, at least an organization that’s on the State Department’s foreign terrorist organization list. What’s the organization? Well, the MEK.

Now joining us to talk about what the MEK is and what this is all about is Jeremiah Goulka. Jeremiah is an independent public policy scholar and writer. From 2007 to 2010 he was an analyst at the RAND Corporation, where he conducted research for the U.S. military and was a lead author of The Mujahedin-e Khalq in Iraq: A Policy Conundrum. Before that, he worked as a lawyer in the Justice Department under the Bush administration. And let me add he has now become a critic of much of the policy he used to work for. Thanks for joining us, Jeremiah.

JEREMIAH GOULKA, PUBLIC POLICY SCHOLAR: Thanks for having me.

JAY: So give us a quick, first of all, rundown just what the MEK is, for those who haven’t followed the story, and then we’ll get into what the heck are all these officials doing taking their money.

GOULKA: Sure. The MEK is an Iranian dissident group. It was founded in 1965 by several graduate students at the University of Tehran. Their goal was to fight against the regime of the Shah, which they saw, accurately, as a puppet of the U.S. government. Soon the Shah’s regime found out about them, suppressed them pretty brutally. And one leader survived prison, whose name is Massoud Rajavi. In the Iranian Revolution there were lots of different dissident groups, not just Ayatollah Khomeini’s group.

And as the leader of the Mujahedin-e Khalq, Rajavi tried to participate in the new government. He

wanted to run for president. Several members of the MEK wanted to run for the Majlis, which is the Iranian parliament, but Ayatollah Khomeini’s government pushed the MEK out of the running. And in response to that, the MEK turned against the new government, and it did so violently. The result was that the new government brutally suppressed the MEK, its leaders went into exile in France, and its members went underground in Iran. So this is 1981.

Fast forward to 1986, and you’re in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war. The MEK’s leadership makes a deal with Saddam Hussein, the starter of the Iran-Iraq War, which was an absolutely catastrophe for Iran. The deal was that Saddam would provide weapons, some territory within Iraq, in exchange for the services of the MEK. The services that they would render would be providing some soldiers, particularly providing some intelligence and interrogation of Iranian POWs. In exchange for this, what the MEK was going to get in the bargain was the power of Saddam’s military, in their hope to install themselves as the new government of Iran.

Well, this failed. Historically it was their biggest mistake, because the Iranian people saw the MEK essentially as traitors by signing up with the instigator of that horrible war. The MEK, you know, voluntarily crossed the border into Iran and fought against Iranian soldiers. In fact, they launched an invasion after the ceasefire in that war. So the Iranians basically have no—there’s no support for the MEK, not much support. The MEK claims that there’s a lot, but it’s not true. The government still hates the MEK, but that’s a side matter.

JAY: And why were they put on the terrorist list?

GOULKA: So in 1997, after the creation of the Foreign Terrorist Organization list, MEK was one of the first couple to be put on there. One—well, the factual predicate for them being on there is that they assassinated several Americans in Tehran back during the Shah’s era, specifically three military officers and three civilians who were military contractors. They also did various attacks against American interests and assassination attempts during the time. And the MEK have been violent until just a few years ago, doing lots of attacks against Iranian targets, government targets, mostly in Iran but occasionally in Europe, even in the U.S., with some bystanders as casualties. The MEK also make a point of saying that the MEK was added to the FTO list as a political reason, because the Clinton administration was trying to make nice with the government, at the time, in Iran, which was perceived as being more moderate. And, well, of course, it’s a political list and political actions by governments, so I think that there’s probably some truth to that, but that doesn’t make it not true that the [crosstalk]

JAY: And why did they stay on this list during the whole Bush administration years, when we know that Bush—the Bush administration was actually putting a lot of money into trying to have this sort of terrorist fund subversive types of activity in the border regions of Iran? I mean, there’s lots of stories that the CIA and others were promoting this kind of stuff, so why not take them off the list?

GOULKA: Well, there’s a bit of having your cake and eating it too. The government could—the Bush administration was able to keep—by keeping the group on the list, they have more of a negotiating point with the group. You know, it’s a carrot to offer the group if they’ll kind of play nicely. That’s part of it.

But it also was not like there was a monolithic point of view in the Bush administration about the MEK. When I was at the RAND Corporation and did my interviews for the report that you mentioned in the introduction, I spoke to dozens of U.S. officials, and the points of view varied. The people who were of the strongest on to Tehran type attitude, who wanted to invade Iran, they saw the MEK as a potentially useful ally, in the sense of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And there were several people who were sort of fooled by the MEK’s excellent press relations that it’s been doing since leaving Iran in 1981, where they have this thing called the National Council of Resistance of Iran, which is the political arm, which has been selling themselves as a liberal, democratic, human rights respecting organization that could go in and be the new—either be the new government or help create a new democracy in Iran. It’s very much like how Ahmed Chalabi sold himself in the Iraqi National Congress.

JAY: I mean, what evidence is [there] that they’re not liberal, democratic, and so on and wouldn’t play this role?

GOULKA: Well, what we’ve said in the report and has been said by others, such as Human Rights Watch, is that the group actually is a cult. So this is another part of the history. Starting in 1985, Massoud Rajavi, the leader, married Maryam Rajavi, who was the wife of one of his colleagues in the MEK, and the two of them turned the group into something of a cult of personality. This became—started in earnest when they were in the desert in 1986, in the desert of Iraq, fairly isolated, and they had a hard time recruiting any new recruits after their participation with Saddam in the Iran-Iraq War because they had lost their support in Iran.

So the new members who were joining after that time, at least some of them cannot be believed to have been true volunteers. But from a lot of former members I spoke to, it appears that lots of them were actually duped into ending up at MEK camps—promises of jobs, wives, and help of getting asylum or residency rights in other European countries. So you have lots of people who have now been trapped in these Iraqi camps, MEK camps in Iraq, and have been enduring various forms of cult behavior, such as sexual control, thought control, brainwashing, limited access to other media, limited food, limited sleep, make-work projects.

JAY: And there’s supposed to be celibacy and various sorts of things, unless you’re the leading couple, I guess.

GOULKA: Exactly. That’s one of the big parts of it is the mandatory divorce and celibacy,—

JAY: Of course, no one—.

GOULKA: —as well as gender segregation.

JAY: Now, what evidence is there that they have been, over the years, conducting terrorist actions against Iranians, Iranian officials? Is there evidence of assassinations or such?

GOULKA: Well, they took credit for it for years. The difference happened after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, that—well, actually, they say that as of 2001 they stopped committing violent attacks, that they’ve decided to basically change course and pursue what they were doing with more of a kind of a democratic approach. Starting in 2003, that became more in earnest, as they were now being—actually taking—. Well, it’s a confusing thing to describe, and I explained it in the RAND Corporation report, that when we invaded Iraq in 2003, the perception of the U.S. government was that the MEK was going to participate with Saddam as, quote,”a wholly owned subsidiary”, end quote, of the Saddam army, when there was a quick ceasefire soon thereafter and the U.S. consolidated the MEK at one of its several camps near the Iranian border. And since then there has been a very focused effort by the MEK to earn U.S. pleasure, approbation. And of course this makes sense, because in 2003 you had the administration saying on to Tehran. And so the MEK quickly realized that Saddam failed to put them into power into Iran—maybe the U.S. could.

JAY: So, again, just to be—are there specific examples of how this organization qualifies to be on the terrorist list?

GOULKA: So they’re putting a big push now to get off of the list. And, of course, getting off of the list matters, because that frees up their ability to raise money, and they would certainly use it to make it seem like the U.S. actually supports them. But what they’re using—one of the ways that they say they should not be on the group—on the list is that they say that those assassinations back in the ’70s were done by a splinter group or a different MEK, and that they’re not, you know, responsible for those, and therefore they don’t fall under the requirements of the act. And since Iran has not been an ally of the U.S. in many, many years, therefore attacks done against Iranians don’t count as being against the interests of the United States or its allies.

JAY: And that—I suppose that is the true definition of how United States looks at terrorism: if it’s against an ally, it’s terrorism; if it’s against an enemy, it’s not terrorism. So within the lines of Washington rhetoric and politics they may not be so wrong.

GOULKA: Exactly. And, of course, that raises the issue now that since their goal is—. Their immediate goal is to get off the FTO list, but their big goal is to get into power in Iran, and they want to use the United States’s military to get that. So as they’ve been promoting the fears of a nuclear Iran—the MEK in 2005 were the ones to have a press conference announcing to the public the existence of the Natanz nuclear facility. You know, as a side note, then that information came to them, it appears, from the Israeli government, which wanted also to have this be put into the public arena, and the U.S. already knew. But the MEK’s been waving the flag of fear about Iran since then.

And why do they want this fear promoted? It’s to get the U.S. to invade Iran to put them in power. And I can’t think of anything that would be more against the interests of American national security than for us to actually have an actual invasion of Iran. Considering the tragedy of the Iraq War, to expect anything else other than a protracted occupation and reconstruction would be foolish.

JAY: The MEK is still on the State Department’s foreign terrorist organization list. And now you’ve got all these government officials taking money and essentially—what is it?—they’re getting paid for speaking engagements and they’re lobbying to get the MEK off the list. But that in theory is illegal, is it not?

GOULKA: In theory. So the material support law created in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 is something that’s been viewed from the start as having a very low threshold of activity to count as being material support, and that’s a, you know, federal crime. And this law has been sort of broadly interpreted by the Supreme Court since then, and so you’ve seen a number of people who have gone to prison for fairly minor things.

So here you have these prominent former officials taking money to speak on behalf of the MEK at events organized by the MEK. And are they committing a crime? Well, what’s particularly interesting here is: on one end you have the notion of equal enforcement of a law. If you’re going to enforce it against Muslims in America, why would you not enforce it against prominent public officials? And, you know, we can wonder then about the impunity that prominent powerful officials can enjoy.

On the flipside, there is a First Amendment question here that, aside from their taking money and doing this in concert with a designated foreign terrorist organization, they are—these officials are making their own political statements, and maybe those should be protected by the First Amendment.

So I think this does raise questions about how well tailored that statute actually is.

JAY: But that’s quite a different thing, to take money and have your say, taking money from—or taking money from a terrorist organization or a foreign government. There was just a Pakistani fellow who I think just got sentenced to two years ’cause he was taking ISI Pakistani money to try to lobby in the United States and—but hadn’t declared himself, you know, an agent of a foreign government and such. I mean, similar issues. Once you take money, you’re not in the same category as just free speech, no?

GOULKA: That’s true. But, of course, money and speech have been heavily linked in the last few years.

JAY: Yeah. So what—just to final—to sum up or to end with, what do you make of the Treasury Department actually going after these guys, including two prominent Democrats? This doesn’t happen without the White House signing off, one would think, and it’s very hard to believe such serious high-level people get investigated and the White House doesn’t get consulted. What would be their interest in pushing this?

GOULKA: Well, I think you’re right that no bureaucrat is going to go step on the toes of prominent officials like this without serious approval from above. I mean, I can attest to that from when I used to work at the Justice Department. I think that—just speculating, I think this is probably linked to what Obama said in his AIPAC speech, that there’s a lot of loose talk of war, and I see this as being a statement to these officials that they need to watch their step. They’ve responded by giving public speeches since, so they are saying sort of bring it on, we’re going to keep doing this. But it—you know, we’ll see what actually happens.

JAY: They’ve responded by making public speeches that they got paid for? Or just public speeches?

GOULKA: I don’t actually know, but they were at at least one MEK-organized event where these folks have been paid to speak previously.

JAY: The MEK is able to organize events in the United States even though it’s on that list. How is that?

GOULKA: Oh, they—everything is done through organizations—they claim that they’re not connected to the MEK, that they just happen to have similar viewpoints, they happen to support the MEK. They’re often involved with people who actually used to be members of the MEK or the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the MEK’s political arm, until those were listed on the FTO list, and then they promptly cut their ties and say that they’re independent or have their own new, you know, little think tanks to promote the interests of the MEK. And there is also a group called the Iran Policy Center that was founded by several ex-Reagan officials that has been promoting the interests of the MEK for the last while, and, you know, they have to pay close attention to not running afoul of the law. How exactly that’s happening, how we’re doing that, I think the Treasury Department’s checking that out.

JAY: And I guess the next step—if this gets serious, at some point the Justice Department steps in. If there’s going to be any charges, does it come from the Justice Department? Or can the Treasury Department actually lay charges?

GOULKA: Well, as I understand it, the Treasury Department can take action such as freezing accounts. But if there’s going to be actual criminal charges, that’s in the Justice Department’s field.

JAY: And then that’s when we’ll find out how serious they’re really pushing this.

GOULKA: That would be a big step.

JAY: Thanks very much for joining us, Jeremiah.

GOULKA: Thanks so much for having me.

JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

Download Terrorism; US rhetoric and politics

April 14, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

US trained Iranian ‘terrorist’ group

The United States’ Joint Special Operations Command (JSOT) conducted training for the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), an Iranian opposition group listed by the US as a terrorist organization, journalist Seymour Hersh claims.

The Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site, 65 miles from Las Vegas, was the site of extensive military and intelligence training for the MEK, in addition to elite Iraqi combat units, Hersh writes in The New Yorker. The training is believed to have been covertly sanctioned by the Bush administration, and was stopped shortly before President Obama took office.
“We did train them here, and washed them through the Energy Department because the D.O.E. owns all this land in southern Nevada,” a former senior American intelligence official said. “We were deploying them over long distances in the desert and mountains, and building their capacity in communications — coordinating commo is a big deal.”

Hersh’s article quotes a retired four star general who advised the Bush and Obama administrations on national security issues. The general noted that Iranians associated with the MEK received “standard training in commo, crypto, small-unit tactics and weaponry.” He also said he cautioned the JSOT that the Iranian government was very good at counterintelligence and that the US could end up in a lot of trouble if the training program was discovered.

Former and present intelligence officials, Hersh states, also note that US has been providing the MEK, directly or indirectly, with arms, intelligence and logistics since 2003.

But it turns out that the US is not the MEK’s only ally. A former senior intelligence official said Israel cooperated with the MEK to conduct a number of sabotage operations inside Iran, including pipeline attacks. Last month two senior Obama administration officials told NBC News that Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, trained and financed MEK units that organized the assassinations of Iran’s nuclear scientists. MEK spokesmen have denied this claim.

Delist or not delist?

The MEK is a formerly radical Islamic-Marxist movement, labeled a “cult” by Human Rights Watch and listed by the US State Department as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, alongside Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah.

In the meantime, more and more public figures, including former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, have been pushing for the MEK to be delisted as a terror group. But experts note that the US would be better off not delisting the MEK if it is to continue its alleged close ties.

“On the one hand, the MEK was relisted year after year after year in the eight-year duration of the Bush administration, and it’s been relisted since Obama came into office,” Reza Marashi, research director of the National Iranian American Council noted on RT’s Alyona Show. “So it might just be as easy as, if we’re going to continue to cooperate with this group directly or indirectly it doesn’t really make a difference if they’re on the terrorist list because this was so close-hold until recently. This wasn’t readily available information even to people inside the US government.”

Hersh is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters. He has also won two National Magazine Awards and is a five-time Polk winner and recipient of the 2004 George Orwell Award.

April 12, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Recent story on U.S. training terrorists in Nev. is shameful

It has been revealed that under the Bush administration the United States helped train a terrorist group that has been linked to the deaths of Americans and Iranian nuclear scientists. This was revealed after investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh filed a story a blog for “The New Yorker” linking the U.S. to the terrorist group MEK. Members of MEK were trained in Nevada and have been used as “surrogates” in Iran for the U.S., according to Hersh.

Recently, the MEK was linked to the killings of several Iranian nuclear scientists that sparked public outrage by Iranians and some in the U.S. The U.S. claimed it had nothing to do with the murders in Iran, however, since the story has emerged it has been proven that the U.S. helped train the individuals in the group responsible for the killings of the scientists. This presents quite the paradox for the U.S.: We fight terrorism abroad in the name of freedom, yet we train terrorists on our own soil. The irony of this occurring during the Bush Administration, which stripped citizens of basic civil liberties with the Patriot Act, is unexpected, but not surprising.

MEK has been on the state department’s list of terrorist organizations for the last 15 years. There is an overlap here. While the MEK was on the state department’s list, they were being trained secretively in at a Nevada base in 2004 and early 2005. Hersh said the U.S. tends to “encourage insurrection abroad” in Iran by groups like MEK to further its intelligence regarding the Iranian regime. The MEK has also been linked to using explosives that were created by the U.S., most notably in the case of the Iranian nuclear scientist. “It’s not an accident that these weapons can be traced to the Navy Seals,” Hersh said in an interview on “Democracy Now!.” The training of MEK stopped under the Obama administration.

Hersh’s work deserves praise. In an age dominated by corporate media afraid of stories that reveal wrong doings of large businesses and the U.S. government, this story reveals that the U.S. is not how it always says it is. Although we claim to fight terrorism it seems that with this, we bolstered it by training assassins on our own “free” soil.

By The Parthenon – Marshall parthenon

April 12, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

For Official Washington, Terrorism Is a Laughing Matter

Just how serious is Washington about battling terrorism? The airwaves fill regularly with sanctimonious declamations about terrorist threats and with vows to pursue the war against them to its ultimate conclusion—a war without territorial limits, and with ill-defined opponents and no clear time horizon. A forever war. But to insiders, it is evidently a laughing matter. Developments the past week suggest that for some prominent Washington figures, rubbing elbows with a scheduled terrorist organization and taking money from its front groups is a no-brainer. It may be that they know something most of us don’t about the intelligence community’s dealings with these terrorists.

The State Department scheduled the Mujahideen-e Khalq, or People’s Mujahideen of Iran (MEK) as a terrorist organization in 1997. Regularly described as a cult, the group mixes Shia Islam, Marxism, and rituals venerating its charismatic leaders. While these leaders claim to have renounced terrorist violence, they have a history of advocating violence to accomplish religious and political objectives. The MEK earned its place on the State Department’s list based largely on an assassination campaign that targeted American military personnel in Iran in the mid-Seventies. Three military officers and three defense contractors were murdered in MEK-linked attacks: Lieutenant Colonel Louis Lee Hawkins (USA), Colonel Paul Shaffer (USAF) and Lieutenant Colonel Jack Turner (USAF), as well as William Cottrell, Donald Smith, and Robert Krongard, who were in Iran working with Rockwell International on the NSA’s Ibex System.

It is unlawful to accept funds from the MEK or to support the group materially, yet its supporters managed to stage a conference in Washington this past week. Among those appearing were Mitchell Reiss, a senior adviser to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and former attorney general Michael Mukasey. Both Reiss and Mukasey openly joked that they were potentially committing a criminal offense by aiding a scheduled terrorist group.

Why would Washington political figures publicly associate themselves with a terrorist organization? It might be because they know that the United States itself shelters, arms, trains, and supports the same group—and that prosecutors would therefore face a quandary in going after them. The covert relationship between the MEK and the U.S. military and intelligence communities has not been very covert. The official U.S. account is that following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the MEK was disarmed and confined to a former Iraqi military base, Camp Ashraf.

American intelligence figures familiar with the arrangement paint a different picture, noting that U.S. forces housed, armed and protected the MEK in Iraq. After the American withdrawal, Iraqi forces raided Camp Ashraf. American officials scrambled to find new lodgings for the MEK, ultimately placing them at the U.S.-maintained Camp Liberty, near Baghdad Airport. American officials are now said to be arranging the relocation of MEK forces to a new facility constructed for them in Kurdish northern Iraq, close to the Iranian border.

The New Yorker’s Sy Hersh recently succeeded in documenting more of the MEK relationship with the JSOC, the Pentagon’s covert intelligence operation. Hersh takes us to a site in the Nevada desert sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas:

It was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K…. The M.E.K.’s ties with Western intelligence deepened after the fall of the Iraqi regime in 2003, and JSOC began operating inside Iran in an effort to substantiate the Bush Administration’s fears that Iran was building the bomb at one or more secret underground locations. Funds were covertly passed to a number of dissident organizations, for intelligence collection and, ultimately, for anti-regime terrorist activities. Directly, or indirectly, the M.E.K. ended up with resources like arms and intelligence. Some American-supported covert operations continue in Iran today, according to past and present intelligence officials and military consultants.

Hersh notes that the Obama Administration halted the MEK training programs. Since Obama’s team came to office, however, the organization has ramped up its efforts to move the president’s policies back into line with George W. Bush’s. This explains the aggressive outreach, including generous speaking fees and trips abroad, to political figures in both parties. The MEK plainly wants to align itself with the United States in a coming war against Iran, by establishing itself as a source of intelligence and perhaps as an instrument of black operations.

Indeed, with the United States waging a covert war against Iran, the MEK may already be in the thick of things. NBC News recently reported that the MEK is collaborating in a carefully orchestrated and remarkably effective Israel- run campaign to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists. Former CIA senior analyst Paul Pillar recently wrote a blog post indicating that he considers the report credible. He notes, moreover, that the assassination campaign can be considered classic terrorism, applying the definition used by the U.S. government.

Those arguing for the MEK to be delisted as a terrorist group claim that their 1970s assassination spree was the work of a fundamentally different organization. The modern MEK, they argue, is fully aligned with American foreign-policy objectives and is well-positioned to assist the United States in a coming military confrontation with Iran. In particular, they say that the MEK has provided essential intelligence about Iran’s nuclear weapons program, which the U.S. intelligence community generally believes was curtailed in 2003.

These claims may all be true, but they don’t convincingly address the MEK’s historic use of terrorist tactics, its pattern of human rights abuses, and its culture of violence. Moreover, the Iraq War should have left Americans wiser about émigré groups who peddle evidence of weapons programs as a rationale for the invasion of their homeland and for their eventual installation as a new and friendly government.

The Obama Administration may be caving in to the political pressure brought by the MEK’s well-compensated Beltway friends. The State Department has reportedly suggested that if the MEK’s leadership accepts resettlement in northern Iraq, this will be counted as another factor in support of delisting. If the MEK succeeds in this goal, America’s posture as an opponent of terrorism will be a laughingstock, and will demonstrate that in Washington today, a little bit of cash, prudently spread, can accomplish almost anything.

Harpers

April 10, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Former US Representative Patrick Kennedy Paid by MEK Terrorists

Unimaginable treason, shamelessly defended

First seen on DeadLineLive: March 20, 2012 – In an astounding interview uploaded on August 29, 2011 by Think Progress.org, former US Representative Patrick Kennedy is asked about his appearance at a rally on behalf of Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), a US State Department-listed foreign terror organization (#29). He shamelessly declares that not only was he paid a sum of 25,000 USD to appear at the rally, but that he also believes in MEK’s “cause.”

Don’t forget to check out our article covering how U.S. officials have confirmed that the Israeli Mossad is training terrorists and running their operations in Iran, largely through the MEK.
Kennedy would further astound us by claiming Iranians are “exporting” rocket propelled grenades and IED’s (improvised explosive devices) to “kill Americans.” He states, “you could never pay me enough to be on the side of any group that is killing Americans,” apparently oblivious to the fact that MEK is listed as a terrorist organization specifically because it has indeed killed Americans.

He would then go on to implicate several other co-lobbyists working with him, claiming that he stands with “a whole array of military leadership” in his support of MEK.

US State Department-listed foreign terror organization, Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK), has carried out decades of brutal terrorist attacks, assassinations, and espionage against the Iranian government and its people, as well as targeting Americans including the attempted kidnapping of US Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II, the attempted assassination of USAF Brigadier General Harold Price, the successful assassination of Lieutenant Colonel Louis Lee Hawkins, the double assassinations of Colonel Paul Shaffer and Lieutenant Colonel Jack Turner, and the successful ambush and killing of American Rockwell International employees William Cottrell, Donald Smith, and Robert Krongard.

Image: A screenshot from the US State Department’s website showing MEK listed as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” (29. Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK)). Paradoxically the US State Department along with the UN and Neo-Conservative lobbyists have been the sole factor in harboring, training, arming, and keeping in existence this terrorist organization.

Admissions to the deaths of the Rockwell International employees can be found within a report written by former US State Department and Department of Defense official Lincoln Bloomfield Jr. on behalf of the lobbying firm Akin Gump in an attempt to dismiss concerns over MEK’s violent past and how it connects to its current campaign of armed terror – a testament to the depths of depravity from which Washington and London lobbyists operate.

To this day MEK terrorists have been carrying out attacks inside of Iran killing political opponents, attacking civilian targets, as well as carrying out the US-Israeli program of targeting and assassinating Iranian scientists. MEK terrorists are also suspected of handling patsies in recent false flag operations carried out in India, Georgia, and Thailand, which have been ham-handedly blamed on the Iranian government.

MEK is described by Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Ray Takeyh as a “cult-like organization” with “totalitarian tendencies.” While Takeyh fails to expand on what he meant by “cult-like” and “totalitarian,” an interview with US State Department-run Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty reported that a MEK escapee claimed the terrorist organization bans marriage, using radios, the Internet, and holds many members against their will with the threat of death if ever they are caught attempting to escape.

By every conceivable measure, MEK are terrorists who most definitely have American blood on their hands. Kennedy’s defense preys upon what he must believe to be an infinitely ignorant, intellectually sloven audience and makes a mockery out of the 6,000+ Americans who’ve died in the fraudulent “War on Terror.” In a nation which claims to derive its global moral superiority from the “rule of law,” allowing Kennedy and those lobbying with him on behalf of MEK to continue flagrantly violating the law with impunity only further erodes America’s terminally deteriorating legitimacy both at home and abroad.

To understand “Why?” the US is backing a listed terrorist organization, please read: “Israel US: Partners in International Crime: US think-tank admits Iran is not a threat to either US or Israeli security, devises narrative to sell unnecessary war to public.”

April 10, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Confirmed: Terrorist Organization Trained on US Soil by US Military

Ynetnews reported in their article, “US operated deep in Iran, trained assassins,” that, “the New Yorker reported over the weekend that the US trained members of the Iranian opposition group Mujahideen-e-Khalq. According to previous reports, Israel has been cooperating with the group, which allegedly carried out hits on Iranian nuclear scientists.” Ynetnews also reported that US officials doubt Iran is or will be developing nuclear weapons, as has been claimed to justify years of sanctions, covert subversion, terrorism, and unprovoked attacks by the West against Iran.
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Image: Rudy Giuliani consorting with MEK’s political wing leader Maryam Rajavi in Paris, France. Giuliani is best known for his role playing a strong supporter for the “War on Terror” and his incessant fear mongering verses “Islamic extremists.” In real life, he coddles listed terrorist organizations in direct violation of US law and even lobbies for them.

It appears that not only Israel, but the US in tandem with Mossad have been training, arming, financing, harboring, and directing the US State Department-listed foreign terror organization (#29) Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) since as early as 2005 where MEK terrorists were brought to Las Vegas, Nevada to train. The April 2012 New Yorker article, “Our Men in Iran?” by Seymour Hersh, elaborates in detail how the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) trained a listed terrorist organization on US soil before sending them back to Iran with weapons and money to carry out “anti-regime terrorist activities.” MEK is suspected to be behind a rash of assassinations targeting Iranian scientists, as well as handling patsies in a string of international bombings US and Israeli officials attempted to pin on Iran.

And while MEK’s representatives, including a growing lobby in Washington D.C. consisting of some of the most disingenuous supporters of the “War on Terror,” including Rudy Giuliani, former US Marine Commandant General James Jones, Tom Ridge, and Lee Hamilton, claim MEK has renounced “terror,” the entire purpose of training them, funding them, and getting them removed from the US State Department “Foreign Terrorist Organization” list is to allow them to carry out a wider campaign of violence against the Iranian people with even greater US support. In essence – to support terror on an unprecedented scale.

This is stated in US policy think-tank Brookings Institution’s “Which Path to Persia?” report published in 2009 which stated (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.

In contrast, the group’s champions contend that the movement’s long-standing opposition to the Iranian regime and record of successful attacks on and intelligence-gathering operations against the regime make it worthy of U.S. support. They also argue that the group is no longer anti-American and question the merit of earlier accusations. Raymond Tanter, one of the group’s supporters in the United States, contends that the MEK and the NCRI are allies for regime change in Tehran and also act as a useful proxy for gathering intelligence. The MEK’s greatest intelligence coup was the provision of intelligence in 2002 that led to the discovery of a secret site in Iran for enriching uranium.

Despite its defenders’ claims, the MEK remains on the U.S. government list of foreign terrorist organizations. In the 1970s, the group killed three U.S. officers and three civilian contractors in Iran. During the 1979-1980 hostage crisis, the group praised the decision to take America hostages and Elaine Sciolino reported that while group leaders publicly condemned the 9/11 attacks, within the group celebrations were widespread.

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. 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.”

– page 117-118 of ”Which Path to Persia?“ Brookings Institution, 2009

Clearly the United States, its policy makers, and “elected representatives” are well aware that MEK was, and still is a terrorist organization, targeting not only military and political targets in Iran, but civilian targets as well. The indefensible excuse being used now, is that MEK’s terrorist activities are only being directed at the people of Iran, not the West, therefore it is somehow justifiable.

….
MEK has carried out decades of brutal terrorist attacks, assassinations, and espionage against the Iranian government and its people, as well as targeting Americans including the attempted kidnapping of US Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II, the attempted assassination of USAF Brigadier General Harold Price, the successful assassination of Lieutenant Colonel Louis Lee Hawkins, the double assassinations of Colonel Paul Shaffer and Lieutenant Colonel Jack Turner, and the successful ambush and killing of American Rockwell International employees William Cottrell, Donald Smith, and Robert Krongard.

Admissions to the deaths of the Rockwell International employees can be found within a report written by former US State Department and Department of Defense official Lincoln Bloomfield Jr. on behalf of the lobbying firm Akin Gump in an attempt to dismiss concerns over MEK’s violent past and how it connects to its current campaign of armed terror – a true testament to the depths of depravity from which Washington and London lobbyists operate.

MEK today is described by Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Ray Takeyh (who was attempting to defend MEK) as a “cult-like organization” with “totalitarian tendencies.” While Takeyh fails to expand on what he meant by “cult-like” and “totalitarian,” an interview with US State Department-run Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty reported that a MEK Camp Ashraf escapee claimed the terrorist organization bans marriage, using radios, the Internet, and holds many members against their will with the threat of death if ever they are caught attempting to escape.

With a similar story being uncovered behind Al Qaeda’s Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) which has been for decades backed, armed, trained, and directed by the CIA and MI6 under varying banners up to and including NATO’s recent 2011 Libyan intervention – a pattern of using “terrorists” as both a convenient casus belli and as an effective proxy military force is becoming apparent. With LIFG commander Abdul Hakim Belhaj turning up in Syria carrying out a NATO-backed campaign to topple President Bashar al-Assad, it appears terrorist mercenaries in the employ of the West are at work there as well. Tales of “pro-democracy” “freedom fighters” are spun for anyone ignorant enough to believe them, while in reality the violence there is nothing more than the symptoms of neo-imperial machinations.

The War on Terror is a Fraud

The “War on Terror” is a fraud. For 10 years the West, and in particular America’s armed forces have been lied to, misled, and bled dry literally while the American tax payers have been bled dry financially. Americans have resigned their personal freedoms to the “Patriot Act” and the increasingly perverse and invasive Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The corporate-financier think-tanks, like the Brookings Institution, who conspire to train, arm, and fund terrorist organizations we supposedly sent thousands of our sons to die fighting, and who’s “omnipresent danger” we have surrendered our liberties to help combat, do so not for the greater good of the American people, but for the greater good of the corporate-financier sponsors that fund their work.

Image: Some of the corporate sponsors behind the Brookings Institution, who have openly conspired to fund, train, and arm terrorist organizations to carry out regime change in Iran. America is bled to death literally and financially to fight wars of conquest justified by claiming armies of omnipresent terrorists threaten the West’s way of life, when this very army of terrorists is a creation of the corporate-financier oligarchs in Wall Street and London in the first place.

For it is the corporate-financier oligarchs who have made trillions fighting this unending war, who have had barriers such as individual liberty and state sovereignty torn down in their quest for more wealth and power, and who have overturned nation after nation only then to be rolled into their growing Wall Street-London collective. This is modern global empire – its moral imperative one entirely contrived to hide a glaring reality so outrageous even when it is admitted amongst the mainstream press, the general public has no idea, apparently, what to make of it.

It would be suggested, however, that the public identify these corporations, boycott them completely, and replace them with a new, local paradigm with a moral imperative derived from their own personal convictions – not ideology sold to them on the corporate-sponsored evening news.

April 9, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

US Pentagon Trained Iranian terrorists in Nevada

The intrepid Seymour Hersh reports at the New Yorker that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) of the US military gave members of the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK or People’s Holy Jihadis) training in signals intelligence at a facility in Nevada during the Bush era. The MEK was then and is now on the US State Department’s terrorism watch list, so the Pentagon’s deployment of this group was quite illegal.

The MEK was given a base in eastern Iraq by Saddam Hussein, who used the some 4,000 guerrillas who gathered there to harass the Islamic Republic of Iran. The MEK had its origins in an Islamic-Marxist guerrilla group of the 1970s that fought the forces of the Shah. It joined in the revolution against the Shah in 1978-79 but broke with the Ayatollah Khomeini regime and turned to a massive campaign of bombing and sniping against it. In return, the regime killed suspected MEK members. The group evolved into a political cult, with insistence on glaze-eyed absolute obedience to the leader, Maryam Rajavi, and cult-like practices such as forced marriages and divorces (not to mention the long history of violence inside Iran).

When the US occupied Iraq, some in the Pentagon adopted the MEK at Camp Ashraf near the Iranian border for use against Iran. The MEK has bought a lot of big American politicians and seems to have promised the Israelis it would recognize Israel if it ever came to power in Iran; figures connected to the Israel lobbies have hypocritically campaigned to have the MEK delisted as a terrorist organization, despite it long and bloody record of attacks on civilians. As recently as this year, NBC quoted unnamed US government officials alleging that the MEK has been assassinating Iranian scientists in Iran.

Hersh reveals a trail of blatant hypocrisy on the part of the US government. “Our” terrorists are not terrorists even if they have blown up non-combatants, but national liberation groups such as Hizbullah in Lebanon are designated terrorists. Government officials have even brandished the word “terrorism” to describe perfectly peaceful protesters and dissidents inside the US, while JSOC was flying dyed-in-the-wool terrorists to Nevada for training.

The USG Open Source Center translated a report in the MEK newspaper regarding the hobnobbing of Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton and others with the MEK leadership in Paris recently:

“– On 24 March, the NCRI secretariat website published a report on an international conference held in Paris to address MEK concerns and issues, which was attended by NCRI President-elect Maryam Rajavi as well as former high ranking officials from the United States and Europe including Rudy Giuliani, Tom Ridge, John Bolton, Patrick Kennedy, and Colonel Wesley Martin.. According to the report, the issues raised included the adoption of a “decisive policy” against Iran’s regime, protection of the rights of Camp Ashraf and Liberty residents, and the elimination of MEK’s “terrorist label.” Rajavi said that “the only way to prevent an Iranian atomic bomb or the occurrence of an unprecedented conflict” was “regime change” by the Iranian people and resistance. On the issue of Camp Liberty, Rudy Giuliani said: “Let us go there. Let us see it with our own eyes.” He added: “Currently the enemy of stopping Iran becoming nuclear is appeasement. This wrong perception has made Iran more determined in becoming nuclear. Let us stop appeasement. Let us stop the efforts for negotiations. Stop writing letters to the ayatollahs. Let us rise up and say as Americans that we are for regime change in Iran and we will take every step necessary to stop Iran becoming nuclear” (National Council of Resistance of Iran in Persian — Website of an exiled political umbrella coalition of Marxist and Islamist organizations — Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK or MKO), National Liberation Army of Iran (NLA), People’s Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI), National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), and Muslim Iranian Students Society (MISS); on US State Department’s list of terrorist groups since 1997;

As Sheila Musaji points out, lots of American Muslims are in jail for ‘material support of terrorism,’ but American politicians and pundits get a free pass for actively supporting the MEK– which, remember, is definitively on the terrorism watch list.

Note to the US government and the Neocons: George Orwell’s 1984 was a dark political satire, not a blueprint for how you should do things.

April 9, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Blowback: In Aiding Iranian Terrorists, the U.S. Repeats a Dangerous Mistake

A New Yorker article reports that U.S. Special Forces funded and trained a group called MEK, extending a long history of short-sighted, enemy-of-my-enemy foreign policy.

American foreign policy can get complicated. In the 1980s, the U.S. supported Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein because he was the greatest enemy of our enemy, the Islamic Republic of Iran. He’s dead now because the U.S. invaded his country in 2003, a war heavily premised on claims that he was supporting terrorism, namely al-Qaeda. He wasn’t supporting al-Qaeda. But he did support another terrorist group, called Mujahideen-e Khalq, or MEK. Now many leading American officials want the U.S. to support MEK because they are an enemy of Iran. According to a new New Yorker article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, the Bush administration gave MEK money, guns, and even training at a Nevada base starting in 2005.

In other words, if Hersh’s story is true, then the U.S. supported the terrorist ally of its enemy, whom we killed in part because we thought he supported some other terrorists that he actually didn’t, because those terrorists are the enemy of our other enemy. Got it?

Even if Hersh is wrong, there is a long list of U.S. leaders and officials who would like to make him right. Members of the "MEK lobby," as it’s often called, support at least removing the group from the list of officially designated terrorist groups, and often some combination of arming or funding the fighters. They include: two former CIA directors, a former FBI director, a former attorney general, Bush’s first homeland security chief, Obama’s first national security adviser, Rudy Giuliani, and Howard Dean. A House resolution calling for MEK to be de-listed as a terrorist group has 97 co-sponsors.

It’s not a coincidence that the pro-MEK position can seem confusing, even contradictory. The world is too complicated and interconnected for "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" to work as a foreign policy mandate. It leads the U.S. to work against its own long-term interests, "solving" short-term problems by creating bigger, longer-term problems. For example: supporting Arab dictators to suppress the Arab Islamist parties that may soon take over, supporting Latin American rightist who ended up being murderous dictators, supporting anti-Soviet fighters who later turned against us, and so on. Sometimes, the U.S. even supports enemies-of-our-enemies who are actively and currently also our enemy: Afghan drug ring leader Ahmed Wali Karzai, for example, or, starting in 2003, Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi.

Still, let’s assume, for the purposes of discussion, that American MEK enthusiasts are right in arguing that the radical Marxist group, which assassinated six Americans in the 1970s, has since become, and always will be, as American as apple pie. Supporting this terrorist group is still likely to do far more harm than good.

The U.S. has a long history of arming rebels, insurgents, and outright terrorists who want to fight our enemies for us. Even when it works — and it often doesn’t — the U.S.-sponsored fighters often spread small arms, exacerbate anti-American attitudes, and entrench a cycle of violence that can continues for years and sometimes spin out of control. When Congress shoveled millions of dollars into CIA programs to support anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan, much of the guns and money by design went to the extremists. A December 1984 CIA memo identified "fundamentalists" such as Mujahideen leader (and current American enemy) Gulbidden Hekmatyar as "the best fighters" and thus best recipient of American backing. Even the Afghan extremists who didn’t turn against the U.S. did use their arms and money to rampage across Afghanistan, sowing the chaos, violence, mistrust, corruption, crime, and poverty that has plagued the country for now 30 years.

Again, let’s give the MEK and their American backers the benefit of the doubt, and assume that the group, though it has long behaved as a terrorist organization, will now act more like freedom-fighter rebels, combating the Iranian regime without harming Iranian society. (This would be mostly new for them, and most Iranians don’t see them this way.) Supporting the group is still likely to backfire and do more harm to U.S. interests than good.

The 30-year U.S.-Iran conflict can, generally speaking, take one of four paths: regime change from within (a revolution, which the failed 2009 protests show is extremely unlikely), regime change from without (a U.S.-led war, also extremely unlikely after the Iraq debacle), a "grand bargain" where both sides find acceptable terms for peace, or the status quo. The first two options are too unlikely to plan around and the status quo, most observers seem to agree, isn’t working so well. That leaves a grand bargain. This logic is as obvious in Washington as it is in Tehran, but a combination of mutual mistrust and the domestic politics of both countries have stymied three attempted peace deals in a row.[..]

The revelation that the U.S. supported MEK (despised within Iran not so differently from how Americans despise, say, al-Qaeda) will probably make a "grand bargain" for detente less likely.[..]

This will probably also worsen popular Iranian perceptions of the U.S. and popular appetite for detente. How can the U.S. say it stands with the Iranian people, Iranians might ask, when it funds the terrorist group that attacks Iranian people? …This news — not to mention photos from the big pro-MEK that Congress holds every year — will likely drive the Iranian public and regime closer together, entrench the hardliners within the regime, and set back American "soft power" outreach to Iranians.

There might be some short-term gains for supporting the MEK. The group may have supplied valuable intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program and has been linked to the killings of Iranian nuclear scientists (though it’s not clear if this actually does much good). But the long-term effects, though impossible to predict, could be far worse. No matter which militant group we’re supporting in what corner of the world, that history always seems to repeat itself.

By Max Fisher , The Atlantic

April 8, 2012 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Our Men in Iran?

From the air, the terrain of the Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site, with its arid high plains and remote mountain peaks, has the look of northwest Iran. The site, some sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas, was once used for nuclear testing, and now includes a counterintelligence training facility and a private airport capable of handling Boeing 737 aircraft. It’s a restricted area, and inhospitable—in certain sections, the curious are warned that the site’s security personnel are authorized to use deadly force, if necessary, against intruders.

It was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K. The M.E.K. had its beginnings as a Marxist-Islamist student-led group and, in the nineteen-seventies, it was linked to the assassination of six American citizens. It was initially part of the broad-based revolution that led to the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran. But, within a few years, the group was waging a bloody internal war with the ruling clerics, and, in 1997, it was listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department. In 2002, the M.E.K. earned some international credibility by publicly revealing Our Men in Iran? —accurately—that Iran had begun enriching uranium at a secret underground location. Mohamed ElBaradei, who at the time was the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear monitoring agency, told me later that he had been informed that the information was supplied by the Mossad. The M.E.K.’s ties with Western intelligence deepened after the fall of the Iraqi regime in 2003, and JSOC began operating inside Iran in an effort to substantiate the Bush Administration’s fears that Iran was building the bomb at one or more secret underground locations. Funds were covertly passed to a number of dissident organizations, for intelligence collection and, ultimately, for anti-regime terrorist activities. Directly, or indirectly, the M.E.K. ended up with resources like arms and intelligence. Some American-supported covert operations continue in Iran today, according to past and present intelligence officials and military consultants.

Despite the growing ties, and a much-intensified lobbying effort organized by its advocates, M.E.K. has remained on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations—which meant that secrecy was essential in the Nevada training. “We did train them here, and washed them through the Energy Department because the D.O.E. owns all this land in southern Nevada,” a former senior American intelligence official told me. “We were deploying them over long distances in the desert and mountains, and building their capacity in communications—coördinating commo is a big deal.” (A spokesman for J.S.O.C. said that “U.S. Special Operations Forces were neither aware of nor involved in the training of M.E.K. members.”)

The training ended sometime before President Obama took office, the former official said. In a separate interview, a retired four-star general, who has advised the Bush and Obama Administrations on national-security issues, said that he had been privately briefed in 2005 about the training of Iranians associated with the M.E.K. in Nevada by an American involved in the program. They got “the standard training,” he said, “in commo, crypto [cryptography], small-unit tactics, and weaponry—that went on for six months,” the retired general said. “They were kept in little pods.” He also was told, he said, that the men doing the training were from JSOC, which, by 2005, had become a major instrument in the Bush Administration’s global war on terror. “The JSOC trainers were not front-line guys who had been in the field, but second- and third-tier guys—trainers and the like—and they started going off the reservation. ‘If we’re going to teach you tactics, let me show you some really sexy stuff…’ ”

It was the ad-hoc training that provoked the worried telephone calls to him, the former general said. “I told one of the guys who called me that they were all in over their heads, and all of them could end up trouble unless they got something in writing. The Iranians are very, very good at counterintelligence, and stuff like this is just too hard to contain.” The site in Nevada was being utilized at the same time, he said, for advanced training of élite Iraqi combat units. (The retired general said he only knew of the one M.E.K.-affiliated group that went though the training course; the former senior intelligence official said that he was aware of training that went on through 2007.)

Allan Gerson, a Washington attorney for the M.E.K., notes that the M.E.K. has publicly and repeatedly renounced terror. Gerson said he would not comment on the alleged training in Nevada. But such training, if true, he said, would be “especially incongruent with the State Department’s decision to continue to maintain the M.E.K. on the terrorist list. How can the U.S. train those on State’s foreign terrorist list, when others face criminal penalties for providing a nickel to the same organization?”

Robert Baer, a retired C.I.A. agent who is fluent in Arabic and had worked under cover in Kurdistan and throughout the Middle East in his career, initially had told me in early 2004 of being recruited by a private American company—working, so he believed, on behalf of the Bush Administration—to return to Iraq. “They wanted me to help the M.E.K. collect intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program,” Baer recalled. “They thought I knew Farsi, which I did not. I said I’d get back to them, but never did.” Baer, now living in California, recalled that it was made clear to him at the time that the operation was “a long-term thing—not just a one-shot deal.”

Massoud Khodabandeh, an I.T. expert now living in England who consults for the Iraqi government, was an official with the M.E.K. before defecting in 1996. In a telephone interview, he acknowledged that he is an avowed enemy of the M.E.K., and has advocated against the group. Khodabandeh said that he had been with the group since before the fall of the Shah and, as a computer expert, was deeply involved in intelligence activities as well as providing security for the M.E.K. leadership. For the past decade, he and his English wife have run a support program for other defectors. Khodabandeh told me that he had heard from more recent defectors about the training in Nevada. He was told that the communications training in Nevada involved more than teaching how to keep in contact during attacks—it also involved communication intercepts. The United States, he said, at one point found a way to penetrate some major Iranian communications systems. At the time, he said, the U.S. provided M.E.K. operatives with the ability to intercept telephone calls and text messages inside Iran—which M.E.K. operatives translated and shared with American signals intelligence experts. He does not know whether this activity is ongoing.

Five Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated since 2007. M.E.K. spokesmen have denied any involvement in the killings, but early last month NBC News quoted two senior Obama Administration officials as confirming that the attacks were carried out by M.E.K. units that were financed and trained by Mossad, the Israeli secret service. NBC further quoted the Administration officials as denying any American involvement in the M.E.K. activities. The former senior intelligence official I spoke with seconded the NBC report that the Israelis were working with the M.E.K., adding that the operations benefitted from American intelligence. He said that the targets were not “Einsteins”; “The goal is to affect Iranian psychology and morale,” he said, and to “demoralize the whole system—nuclear delivery vehicles, nuclear enrichment facilities, power plants.” Attacks have also been carried out on pipelines. He added that the operations are “primarily being done by M.E.K. through liaison with the Israelis, but the United States is now providing the intelligence.” An adviser to the special-operations community told me that the links between the United States and M.E.K. activities inside Iran had been long-standing. “Everything being done inside Iran now is being done with surrogates,” he said.

The sources I spoke to were unable to say whether the people trained in Nevada were now involved in operations in Iran or elsewhere. But they pointed to the general benefit of American support. “The M.E.K. was a total joke,” the senior Pentagon consultant said, “and now it’s a real network inside Iran. How did the M.E.K. get so much more efficient?” he asked rhetorically. “Part of it is the training in Nevada. Part of it is logistical support in Kurdistan, and part of it is inside Iran. M.E.K. now has a capacity for efficient operations than it never had before.”

In mid-January, a few days after an assassination by car bomb of an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, at a town-hall meeting of soldiers at Fort Bliss, Texas, acknowledged that the U.S. government has “some ideas as to who might be involved, but we don’t know exactly who was involved.” He added, “But I can tell you one thing: the United States was not involved in that kind of effort. That’s not what the United States does.”

Seymour M. Hersh,

April 7, 2012 0 comments

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