Mujahedin-e Khalq, the largest opposition to Khomeinists in the early
days of the Iranian Revolution, continues its bizarre political
career, and its backers are still numerous in Washington. -- Yoshie
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Walter Lippmann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Nov 29, 2006 8:32 AM
Subject: Strange Bedfellows: Iranian Imbroglio Give New Boost to Odd
Exile Group (WSJ)
To: CubaNews <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
With Washington having openly budgetted tens of MILLIONS of dollars
to back opposition militants in two countries, Cuba and Iran, perhaps
the revelations of strong support for these Iranian dissident militants
isn't such a surprise nor are they strange bedfellows as this WSJ
headline suggests. Isn't it interesting:
Only ONE single legislator of the 535 members of the U.S. House of
Representatives is mentioned here in the pages of the most
prestigious business newspaper in the U.S.A. The story below isn't
about Cuba at all, but about the support for the Iranian Mudjehadeen
which exists in Washington. Recall that Washington backed the
anti-Soviet mudjehedeen in the 1980s. Perhaps now with the change
in party control over the U.S. Congress, some light can be shed on
the funding of such groupings and their networks of support withing
the U.S. political establishments? Cross your fingers...
Walter Lippmann, CubaNews
Los Angeles, California
============================================
("Among the MEK's Washington supporters are a significant mix of
lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen,
a Florida Republican who chairs the International Relations
Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia, drafted
legislation this year that would require the White House to
provide funding to Iran's largest opposition groups, although
the bill doesn't explicitly name the MEK.")
============================================
November 29, 2006
PAGE ONE
Strange Bedfellows
Iranian Imbroglio
Gives New Boost
To Odd Exile Group
Called a Terror Cult by Many,
MEK Wins Friends in U.S.
Because It Opposes Tehran
A Rally Near the White House
By ANDREW HIGGINS and JAY SOLOMON
November 29, 2006; Page A1
Early this summer, as Washington fretted about Iran's nuclear
program, supporters of Mujahedin-e Khalq, an Iranian opposition
group, held a rally in an auditorium two blocks from the White House.
Prominent members of Congress addressed the crowd, as did the State
Department's recently retired ambassador-at-large for war crimes.
Maryam Rajavi, the dissident outfit's leader, beamed in a stirring
speech via satellite from France. Denouncing Iran's clerical rulers
and their nuclear ambitions, she proclaimed democracy "the answer to
Islamic fundamentalism."
Mujahedin-e Khalq, known as MEK, is Iran's largest exile opposition
group and, say its supporters, the best hope of bringing democracy to
Iran. It reaches into Iran through its own satellite TV channel and
claims an underground network of activists inside the Islamic
republic. It also has a big presence in neighboring Iraq, where U.S.
soldiers watch over more than 3,000 MEK members gathered in a
sprawling camp north of Baghdad.
The MEK, however, has a big handicap: The U.S. government says
it's a terrorist organization. Officials cite its role in the murder of
Americans in the 1970s and subsequent terror attacks that killed
hundreds of Iranians. Another big blemish is the group's long
collaboration with Saddam Hussein. On top of all that, former members
describe the MEK as a personality cult obsessed with celibacy and
martyrdom.
So how does an outlaw organization with a bloodstained past, a
history of intimacy with Iraq's toppled despot and a reputation for
oddness generate thunderous applause almost within earshot of the
Oval Office?
Part of the answer lies in subterfuge: Mujahedin-e Khalq, which means
People's Holy Warriors, has a raft of support groups with innocuous
names, such as the National Convention for a Democratic, Secular
Republic in Iran, the host of the Washington event. These haven't
been banned and disavow violence.
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein greets Massoud Rajavi, head of the
Iranian opposition group Mujahedin-e Khalq, before America's 2003
invasion of Iraq.
More important in blurring the MEK's status, however, is the muddle
surrounding U.S. policy toward Iran. With the U.S. armed forces
bogged down in Iraq and America's military options against
neighboring Iran severely limited, the MEK and its fans are lobbying
hard to present the group as an ally that can help curb Tehran's
growing influence. These supporters, who include lawmakers and
conservative foreign-policy analysts, insist the MEK has no links to
terrorism.
Most U.S. officials scoff at forming any alliance with the MEK and
dispute its claims of having a mass following in Iran, stressing that
many Iranians despise the organization. A senior White House official
says the Bush administration continues to view the MEK as a terrorist
organization and "not an advocate for democracy or human rights" in
Iran.
But some Iran analysts say the MEK's thinly disguised presence in the
U.S. makes a mockery of the administration's antiterrorism campaign.
The White House accuses Iran of supporting terrorist groups, they
say, yet turns a blind eye toward the MEK. "It gives the impression
that some terrorist organizations are better than others," says Trita
Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, an
Iranian-American civic organization.
Charm Offensive
Leading the push to get the MEK's "terrorist" tag removed, with help
from some members of Congress, is an outfit called the Iran Policy
Committee. The committee's president, Raymond Tanter, a former
National Security Council official under President Reagan, says the
MEK's designation is "restraining" the organization's ability to
promote democratic change in Iran. His group recently published a
glossy book that challenges the terrorism charges made against the
MEK, and this month helped host an event on Capitol Hill arguing the
same point.
The charm offensive has taken the MEK far from its origins. First set
up in 1965 by vaguely Islamic left-wing intellectuals in Tehran,
Mujahedin-e Khalq used to curse American "imperialism" and murdered a
string of U.S. military personnel and defense contractors in the
1970s, says the State Department. The group blames the attacks on
rogue Marxist factions and says they were not endorsed by MEK's
leaders, who were in jail at the time or had been executed.
Mujahedin-e Khalq members at a rally in Camp Ashraf, north of
Baghdad, before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
Shortly before Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, the Shah's crumbling
America-backed regime released jailed MEK activists. One of them,
Massoud Rajavi, a former law student at Tehran University, became the
group's paramount leader and allied with Islamist forces to topple
the Shah. But the group quickly split with Iran's new clerical rulers
led by Ayatollah Khomeini, who executed thousands of MEK supporters.
The MEK retaliated with a wave of terror of its own.
Mr. Rajavi fled to France, where his brother, a doctor, has a house
in Auvers-sur-Oise, a sleepy town outside Paris. To rally Iranians to
his cause, Mr. Rajavi sent Massoud Khodabandeh, a British-educated
electrical engineer, to Iran's Kurdish region to set up a radio
transmitter. He began to broadcast taped tirades against Ayatollah
Khomeini.
In France, the group swiftly fell prey to political and romantic
bickering. Mr. Rajavi, who had just divorced his second wife, shocked
supporters by taking up with the wife of a close friend and fellow
MEK activist. They married and she took the name Maryam Rajavi.
Another contentious liaison followed. Mr. Rajavi moved to Iraq in
1986 with his new wife and forged an alliance with Saddam Hussein,
then at war with Iran. Former MEK members say the Iraq dictator
provided a six-story office building in Baghdad and military bases,
including Camp Ashraf, named in honor of Mr. Rajavi's first wife, who
had been killed in Iran by Ayatollah Khomeini's regime.
After a disastrous lunge into Iran in 1988, the MEK embarked on a
more successful military venture. It helped Saddam Hussein crush an
uprising by Kurds after Iraq's defeat by U.S. forces during the 1991
Gulf War, according to U.S. diplomats and the State Department's 2005
Country Reports on Terrorism.
Increasingly seen in the West as an Iraqi stooge, Mr. Rajavi sent Ms.
Rajavi back to France to drum up support. Her campaign made some
headway but foundered when the U.S. and Europe began looking for ways
to reach out to Iran's newly elected reformist president, Mohammad
Khatami.
Senior diplomats in the Clinton administration say the MEK figured
prominently as a bargaining chip in a bridge-building effort with
Tehran. Washington hoped it could get Iran to back a Middle East
peace initiative, stop funding terrorist groups and forswear nuclear
weapons. Iran, for its part, wanted the U.S. to take a hard line
against the MEK.
In 1997, the State Department added the MEK to a list of global
terrorist organizations as "a signal" of the U.S.'s desire for
rapprochement with Tehran's reformists, says Martin Indyk, who at the
time was assistant secretary of state for Near East Affairs.
President Khatami's government "considered it a pretty big deal," Mr.
Indyk says.
The MEK also got hit by a string of defections. Among those to quit
was Mr. Khodabandeh, the electrical engineer. He married another
defector, Anne Singleton, an English woman who had visited Camp
Ashraf, where she says she was taught an anti-imperialist song that
vowed "death to America." Ms. Singleton wrote a book denouncing the
MEK as a crazed cult of enforced celibacy and brutal discipline.
Other former members describe a good cause warped by methods
reminiscent of Mao Tse-tung's Cultural Revolution -- a constant hunt
for internal enemies, ideological "cleansing" sessions and harsh
punishment of real or imagined dissent. Mohsen Abbasloo, a
28-year-old former MEK activist, says he was jailed and beaten at
Camp Ashraf for over a month after he voiced mild doubts. "I went
there full of hope but it was not even 1% of what I expected," says
Mr. Abbasloo, who says he spent four years at the huge desert complex
of barracks, office buildings and military training grounds between
Baghdad and Iraq's border with Iran.
Mohammad Mohaddessin, a veteran MEK member and chief foreign-affairs
official of its political arm, denies accusations of brutality and
describes defectors as "tools of the Iranian regime."
Throughout the 1990s, the MEK continued to operate in Washington and
elsewhere through various front organizations, the most prominent of
which was the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran. In
1999, the State Department banned the NCRI on the grounds that it is
the MEK's official political arm. The NCRI describes itself as an
Iranian parliament-in-exile comprising 530 members and not just
representing the MEK.
Its former U.S.-based spokesman, Alireza Jafarzadeh, remained a
regular on the Washington lobbying and policy circuits. In recent
years he appeared routinely on Fox News as a foreign-affairs analyst.
In 2002, he held a Washington news conference to reveal a secret
uranium enrichment facility in the Iranian city of Natanz. The
International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna later confirmed the
claim. President Bush and other senior U.S. officials publicly
praised what they called an Iranian "dissident group" for unearthing
the information.
Former MEK members and some U.S. officials say they believe the
Natanz information was fed to the MEK by Israel, which wanted to make
it public. The MEK derides this as nonsense.
John Moody, a Fox News senior vice president, says Mr. Jafarzadeh's
contract as a foreign-affairs analyst lapsed, but doesn't rule out
further employment. "He consistently provides accurate and sometimes
exclusive information," he says.
In 2002, 150 members of the House of Representatives signed a
petition seeking the MEK's removal from the U.S. government's
terrorist list.
As America geared up for war with Iraq in early 2003, the MEK muted
its adulation of Saddam Hussein, say people who were in Ashraf at the
time. Top leaders, including the Rajavi couple, quietly bailed from
Camp Ashraf.
"We suddenly noticed that a lot of senior people were missing," says
Behzad Alishahi, an Iranian who spent more than 15 years at the camp
working as an MEK TV presenter. Just before the U.S. invaded in
March, he says, hundreds of MEK fighters rushed toward the Iraq-Iran
border for an attack on Iran. They turned back, he says, after U.S.
planes bombed their convoy and Camp Ashraf.
Ms. Rajavi fled to the group's compound in Auvers-sur-Oise, France.
Her husband vanished, along with his hairdresser and bodyguards. This
stirred rumors that he had been picked up by the U.S. military and
was providing intelligence about Saddam Hussein and also Iran.
A State Department official says Mr. Rajavi was last seen in Baghdad
in March 2003 and is now either dead or in hiding. The MEK says he's
alive and evading Iranian assassins.
When American troops pulled up outside Camp Ashraf shortly after the
fall of Baghdad in April 2003, the MEK offered no resistance and
later agreed to disarm. Mr. Alishahi says he and colleagues at the TV
station were ordered by MEK commanders to destroy film and other
evidence of close ties to Saddam Hussein.
U.S. officials launched a review of camp residents to decide if they
should be prosecuted for terrorism. At the same time, the Central
Intelligence Agency warned French authorities to watch out for the
MEK. The French dispatched hundreds of police to storm the MEK's
Auvers-sur-Oise compound. They arrested Maryam Rajavi and carted away
$9 million in cash and documents detailing bank accounts in France,
the U.S. and elsewhere holding tens of millions of dollars.
Also confiscated, says a senior French security official, were videos
of Mr. Rajavi meeting Saddam Hussein and 99 satellite-positioning
devices programmed with coordinates for Iran. The French also found
what they say were signs that the Iraqi dictator had bankrolled the
organization, something the MEK has always denied. These included
stacks of dollar bills wrapped in Iraqi newspapers and documents
relating to a gift of Iraqi oil, say French officials who were
involved.
Drawing Criticism
The raid drew criticism from lawmakers and others in France and also
the U.S. About 10 MEK members set themselves on fire in Europe and
Canada in protest. Two died from their burns. French police released
Ms. Rajavi but launched a formal terrorism-conspiracy investigation
of her and 16 others.
Mr. Mohaddessin, the group's foreign-affairs spokesman, who was also
detained and later released, ridicules the raid as a publicity stunt
to win favor with Iran. There were enough police, he says, "for a
coup in an African country."
The U.S. review of Camp Ashraf, which began around the same time as
the French raid and finished in summer 2004, partially vindicated the
MEK. Only one person has faced any U.S. charges, a naturalized U.S.
citizen from Iran who was arrested in September in New York for
allegedly providing support to a terrorist group. The roughly 3,300
now still in Ashraf were given the status of "protected persons"
under the Geneva Convention, which promises humane treatment for
nonnationals in a country at war. The U.S. military, as the occupying
power, took on the role of protector. A White House official says
this "protected" status applies only to individuals, not to the MEK
as an organization.
Former Ashraf residents say MEK commanders, most of whom are women,
have worked hard to woo the American soldiers who are now nominally
in charge, inviting them to use a big swimming pool and serving them
pizza. American forces have, under an agreement with the MEK,
confiscated the group's roughly 300 tanks, 250 armored personnel
carriers, 250 artillery pieces and 10,000 small arms. They also blew
up most of the MEK's ammunition. But Camp Ashraf still functions as a
bastion of opposition to Iran, shielded from the turmoil elsewhere in
Iraq by American soldiers.
In June, the MEK camp hosted a mass rally of Iranian dissidents and
thousands of Iraqis. Ms. Rajavi sent a message from France urging
them to "cut off the tentacles of the Iranian regime." The MEK's
satellite TV station, meanwhile, pumps out adulatory propaganda for
Ms. Rajavi and her missing husband, Massoud.
Both the Pentagon and the U.S. Central Command declined to comment on
the military's dealings with the MEK in Iraq. But individual officers
have expressed support for the MEK. In May 2003, Maj. Gen. Raymond
Odierno, then-commander of America's 4th Infantry Division, commended
MEK members at Camp Ashraf for their cooperation and told reporters
that "this should lead to a review of whether they are still a
terrorist organization."
In 2005, following a report by Human Rights Watch detailing torture
and other abuses at MEK camps in Iraq before the U.S. invasion, the
commander of a U.S. military police unit that had been stationed at
Camp Ashraf wrote to the U.S.-based human-rights group to defend the
MEK. He said U.S. forces had not found "any credible evidence" of any
such abuses and said he would "like my own daughter to someday visit
these units for the cultural exchange."
In Washington, debate raged during this time over how to deal with
the MEK, say current and former U.S. officials. Amid the screening of
Ashraf residents, some in the Pentagon pushed to use the MEK as a
tool against Iran and Iranian-backed militants operating inside Iraq,
say current and former State Department officials involved in Iraq
policy.
Colin Powell, who was then secretary of state, pushed back against
the idea of cooperating with the MEK, say current and former
officials. Mr. Powell and his underlings argued that any flirtation
with the MEK would undermine Washington's stand against terrorism.
The State Department then designated the group's previously tolerated
U.S. affiliate, NCRI-U.S., as a terrorist front for the MEK. In
August 2003, the Federal Bureau of Investigation shut down its
offices at the National Press Club in Washington.
"There was this kind of language [being offered by Pentagon
officials] that one man's terrorist was another man's freedom
fighter," says Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Mr. Powell's chief
of staff at the time. He says the State Department pushed through
2003 and 2004 for the MEK's disarmament.
Douglas Feith, who served as the Pentagon's No. 3 civilian official
until last year, denies any desire by the Pentagon to cozy up to the
MEK. "The idea that we would use them against Iran is fantasy," he
says.
MEK leaders sheltering in the West are now ramping up a campaign,
along with their American and European fans, to present Maryam Rajavi
and her missing husband as the only way to stop Iran from developing
a nuclear bomb. This summer, thousands of their supporters gathered
in a Paris convention hall. Ms. Rajavi arrived in a chauffeured
Bentley, stepping onto a red carpet to the sound of trumpets. Rose
petals were strewn at her feet. A former French prime minister and
other VIPs applauded.
Among the MEK's Washington supporters are a significant mix of
lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a
Florida Republican who chairs the International Relations
Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia, drafted legislation
this year that would require the White House to provide funding to
Iran's largest opposition groups, although the bill doesn't
explicitly name the MEK.
Mr. Abbasloo, the former Camp Ashraf resident, who is now in Europe,
says he doesn't like Iran's current regime but mocks the MEK as an
alternative. "This would only replace a snake with a crocodile," he
says. "I hope America is not going to be that stupid."
--
Yoshie
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