Velvet-Iran

Iran's Carpets, Jews, and collateral damage

2011-11-22T10:14:00.000-05:00

A thanksgiving missive that reminds us that Iran is more than Ayatollahs:

A fervent prayer for a peaceful Thanksgiving

November 20, 2011 2:00 AM

In the shop of an Iranian Jew, David Somekh, deep in the shadows of Tehran's bazaars, I bought my first Persian carpet. It was stunningly beautiful, an early tribal Afshar. I forget what I paid for it but I'm sure it was a lot.

I was seduced by its radiance, its asymmetry, the Persian date woven into its pattern; by the hospitality, the cups of tea and coffee, pistachios and idle chatter. Today, each time I step on the rug I revisit those memories with pleasure.

1969. My first visit to Iran. I returned to my home in Beirut with the carpet, its reds so hot they seem to burst through its wrapping, a one kilo tin of black-market caviar, a newly acquired taste for crusty Persian rice and chilled yoghurt-cucumber soup, heavy with garlic, and fond memories of all the Iranians I met.

1979. I sadly realized, after Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile and the dark days of Iran began, that I was no longer welcome.

This week, as I listen and read of a possible preemptive strike on Iran, I think of David Somekh and wonder where he is and will he and his family be safe. I wonder who is worrying about the 25,000 Jews who continue to live in Iran. I wonder who will protect them from the days of rage that will surely follow if Israel or the United States attacks Iran. Mobs are not rational and often strike out blindly. Are they just considered potential "collateral damage?"

From http://www.seacoastonline.com/articles/20111120-OPINION-111200316

Source of Iran's Nuclear Warhead Plans - The CIA

2008-03-05T22:01:00.002-05:00

Who leaked the details of a CIA-Mossad plot against Iran?

By Yossi Melman

The Bush administration is prolonging the hunting season against journalists. The latest victim is James Risen, The New York Times reporter for national security and intelligence affairs. About three months ago, a federal grand jury issued a subpoena against him, ordering Risen to give evidence in court. A heavy blackout has been imposed on the affair, with the only hint being that it has to do with sensitive matters of "national security."

But conversations with several sources who are familiar with the affair indicate that Risen has been asked to testify as part of an investigation aimed at revealing who leaked apparently confidential information about the planning of secret Central Intelligence Agency and Mossad missions concerning Iran's nuclear program.

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Risen included this information in his book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," which was published in 2006. In the book, he discusses a number of ideas which he says were thought up jointly by CIA and Mossad operatives to sabotage Iran's nuclear capabilities.

One of these ideas was to build electromagnetic devices, smuggling them inside Iran to sabotage electricity lines leading to the country's central nuclear sites. According to the plan, the operation was supposed to cause a series of chain reactions which would damage extremely powerful short circuits in the electrical supply that would have led to failures of the super computers of Iran's nuclear sites.

According to the book, the Mossad planners proposed that they would be responsible for getting the electromagnetic facilities into Iran with the aid of their agents in Iran. However, a series of technical problems prevented the plan's execution.

Another of the book's important revelations, which made the administration's blood boil about James Risen, appeared in a chapter describing what was known as Operation Merlin, the code name for another CIA operation supposed to penetrate the heart of Iran's nuclear activity, collect information about it and eventually disrupt it.

Operation Merlin

The CIA counter proliferation department hired a Soviet nuclear engineer who had previously, in the 1990s, defected to the United States and revealed secrets from the Soviet Union's nuclear program. His speciality was in the field of what is called weaponization, the final stage of assembling a nuclear bomb.

The scientist was equipped with blueprints for assembling a nuclear bomb in which, without his knowledge, false drawings and information blueprints were planted about a nuclear warhead that was supposedly manufactured in the Soviet Union. The plan's details had been fabricated by CIA experts, and so while they appeared authentic, they had no engineering or technological value.

The intention was to fool the scientist and send him to make contact with the Iranians to whom he would offer his services and blueprints. The American plot was aimed at getting the Iranians to invest a great deal of effort in studying the plans and to attempt to assemble a faulty warhead. But when the time came, they would not have a nuclear bomb but rather a dud.

However, Operation Merlin, which was so creative and original, failed because of CIA bungled planning. The false information inserted into the blueprints were too obvious and too easily detected and the Russian engineer discovered them. As planned, he made contact with the Iranian delegation to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and handed over to them, also as planned, the blueprints.

But contrary to the CIA's intention, he added a letter to the blueprints in which he pointed out the mistakes. He did not do this with ill intent or out of a desire to disrupt the operation and harm his operators. On the contrary, he did so out of a deep sense of mission and in order to satisfy his American operators. He hoped that in this way he would simply increase the Iranians' trust in him and encourage them to make contact with him for the good, of course, of his American operators.

The result was disastrous. Not only did the CIA fail to prevent the Iranians in their efforts to enhance their nuclear program, this operation may also have made it possible for them to get their hands on a plan for assembling a nuclear warhead.

Freedom of the press

In Israel, military censorship would have prevented the publication of details such as these. But in the U.S., where the principle of freedom of the press is sacred and anchored in the constitution, there is no compulsory and binding censorship. There is, however, an expectation there that the press will show responsibility. This expectation has increased in recent years, particularly with the conservative Bush administration and in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Risen is not the first journalist to have been subpoenaed to give evidence before a grand jury and reveal his sources. According to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, some 65 journalists have been summoned for such investigations since 2001. Some agreed, cooperated and testified. Most refused, so that they would not have to reveal their sources. In this way, they exposed themselves to being charged with contempt of court.

There were some who even preferred to be jailed so long as they were not forced to reveal their source. The best-known case was that of Judith Miller, another New York Times writer. The background to her 85-day imprisonment was her refusal to reveal who had leaked the name of Valerie Plame, a CIA agent, to the media. (The man responsible for the leak was Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a senior aide to Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby was sentenced to 30 months imprisonment but was pardoned by President Bush.)

"It is true that there is tension between the Bush administration and the media," says Steve Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy on behalf of the Federation of American Scientists, an independent body which aims at analyzing the activities of government with a critical eye, "but I would not go so far as to say that the administration is waging war against the media."

In Aftergood's assessment, the danger to the freedom of the press comes rather from private citizens and organizations, those who feel themselves harmed by journalistic publications and commentators and who would therefore like to limit the press' freedom. The most conspicuous of these is Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior editor at Commentary, who believes that liberal newspapers like The New York Times are not sufficiently patriotic. In his articles and in testimony before a Senate committee that discussed the issue, Schoenfeld claimed that

The New York Times reporters had revealed confidential material that weakened America's struggle against Al-Qaida. He calls for relinquishing the soft approach which he says the administration has taken against journalists in whose publications, in his opinion, America's security is harmed.

There are many others who take the opposite approach and believe that the right of journalists to keep their sources secret should be anchored in law. Two Congressmen, the Republican Mike Pence, and Rick Boucher, a Democrat, have proposed legislation to this effect - a law for the free flow of information. The House of Representatives has already approved their proposal but the legislation is being held up in the Senate, to the displeasure of the American Civil Liberties Union.

On the face of it, this is a sensitive issue that is intended to draw the lines between the freedom of information, freedom of the media, and the public's right to know, against the right of a democracy to defend itself against enemies that are not democratic. But James Risen has no doubt that the correct and just moral act on his part has to be to defend his sources, even if this means he will lose his freedom.

The next test case in the U.S. concerning the freedom of the press could be of even greater interest to Israel. It is connected to next month's trial of two former senior American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) employees, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, who have been charged with crimes based on an old First World War anti-espionage law, which has hardly ever been put into practice since.

The indictment states that they obtained confidential information from officials at the Pentagon and transferred it, inter alia, to Israeli diplomats and journalists. A number of American journalists have already been investigated by the CIA in connection to this, and it is possible that they will be called to give evidence incriminating the two senior AIPAC officials.

Raymond Tanter linked to Terrorist Group

2007-05-26T11:58:00.000-04:00

Meanwhile in Palestine and Iraq (The Obsessive Compulsive's Guide to the Middle East): "From the Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Iraq": Craig Unger on How the Neocons Are Pushing For An Attack on Iran: "CRAIG UNGER: Well, there was a front group backing it, and I guess he’s making the case -- he did not respond to my calls, but he had made the case that he was unaware that the money for this event was going to the MEK. Other members of the -- other neoconservative policymakers, such as Raymond Tanter, have come out very much in favor of using the MEK.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain who Raymond Tanter is.

CRAIG UNGER: He is a neocon policymaker, who has suggested using actually tactical nuclear weapons in bombing Iran.

AMY GOODMAN: He’s with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy?"

MeK, Mossad, and the FBI

2007-05-25T23:40:00.000-04:00

The ability of MeK to influence events inside of Iran is greatly diminished. The acts of terror over the last two years attributed to MeK are likely the work of foreign countries. The intelligence regarding the Iranian Nuclear program is actually generated by Mossad and then filtered through the MeK apparatus to protect the identities of the Israeli agents. Time spent looking for MeK agents is time not spent looking for a web of people who further their own self interests by aiding Israel. Mossad has been able to filter dubious information to the American Congress and American Media in a way that inflates its meager credibility. I will not name her here but I believe that an Iranian/American telecom executive is the main conduit of information from Mossad to MeK. The information that Ali Reza Jafarzadeh presents to Congress as evidence smuggled out of Iran by MeK is actually fabrications supplied to him by a rapidly aging double agent. I do not publish her name here but I am always willing to disclose it to American Law Enforcement. So if the FBI team investigating MeK wants to talk, call me at 240-988-4866.
Best wishes,
Barry O'Connell

New French President Sarkozy Enemy of MeK

2007-05-25T21:48:00.000-04:00

New French President Nicolas Sarkozy had a strong record of opposing violent terrorist groups when he was Interior Minister.

France Defends round-up of Mojahedin

Reuters, Paris

PARIS, June 29 (Reuters) - France's interior minister on Sunday defended raids earlier this month on the offices of an exiled Iranian opposition group, saying France would not become a "stomping ground for any terrorist organisation".

French police rounded up about 160 sympathisers of the People's Mujahideen in the raids and has put seven of them, including the leader of its political arm Maryam Rajavi, under formal investigation for possible links to terrrorism.

Several suitcases stuffed with $100 bills totalling more than $8 million were seized, with computers and files belonging to the main armed opposition group to Iran's Islamic leaders.

"Eight and a half million dollars in cash. Is that normal for people who do not work?" Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy told Europe 1 radio.

"If one of the people out there listening had as much as one percent of the cash we found in the coffers of the People's Mujahideen, they would have serious problems with the police and would have to justify themselves," he added.

The United States and the European Union say the People's Mujahideen is a terrorist group.

French intelligence services believe the group has been beefing up its Paris base to make it a global centre from which to launch attacks on Iranian embassies in Europe -- something the group denies.

"France will not allow itself to be a stomping ground for any terrorist organisation," Sarkozy said.

Fakhravar the Neocon Con Job

2007-05-03T21:06:00.000-04:00

Has Washington Found its Iranian Chalabi?

News: Introducing the talented Mr. Fakhravar

By Laura Rozen

October 6, 2006

This past summer, an op-ed appeared in the Washington Post under the byline of Richard Perle, the influential former Pentagon adviser who was a chief booster of Ahmed Chalabi in the run-up to the war in Iraq. As he had prior to the invasion of Iraq, Perle urged the Bush administration to shun appeasement and take an uncompromising stand toward Tehran; as with Iraq, he argued that a hard line was critical to help the population overthrow a brutal regime. And once again, Perle had an exile leader he wanted America to know about: Amir Abbas Fakhravar, “an Iranian dissident student leader who escaped first from Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, then, after months in hiding, from Iran.”

Fakhravar, Perle wrote, had believed George W. Bush’s promise to Muslim dissidents that “when you stand for liberty, we will stand with you.” Now, as the administration was mulling whether to negotiate with Iran, Perle worried that “the proponents of accommodation with Tehran will regard the struggle for freedom in Iran as an obstacle to their new diplomacy.”

It was a rousing call to arms for conservatives, many of whom are convinced that American interests in the Middle East depend on fomenting an uprising in Iran, and who have been frustrated in their search for just the right allies. The Iranian opposition is deeply fractured, and a number of its leading figures are explicitly against U.S. intervention. Iran’s best-known dissident, journalist Akbar Ganji, rejected invitations to meet with administration officials on a recent U.S. visit, and asked instead to see the United Nations’ Kofi Annan and Noam Chomsky. “I advocate change of the regime in Iran,” Ganji told me in July. “But that regime must be changed by Iranians themselves.”

Enter Fakhravar, who is more inclined to say exactly what the hawks want to hear. He told me that Iran’s president wants to wipe Israel off the map, and that “any movement or any action whatsoever” by the United States would “help or enhance the people to rise up.” All the student movement in Iran needed to overthrow the regime, he said, was “a little bit of coordination, organization, and training.”

A virtual unknown both inside and outside Iran when he arrived in the United States in May, Fakhravar has in the months since then ascended to prominence at a dizzying clip. By midsummer he was rushing from testifying on Capitol Hill one moment to an Iran opposition gathering at the White House the next, meeting regularly with policymakers and influential advisers, chatting with the former Shah’s son on his cell phone, and generally being touted as the young, idealistic face of the movement to overthrow the mullahs.

Fakhvavar and Richard Perle
But Fakhravar may be a false messiah. In interviews with more than a dozen Iranian opposition figures, some of them former political prisoners, a different picture emerged—one of an opportunist being pushed to the fore by Iran hawks, a reputed jailhouse snitch who was locked up for nonpolitical offenses but reinvented himself as a student activist and political prisoner once behind bars. Fakhravar and his supporters vehemently deny such allegations, saying that the attacks are motivated by petty jealousy and a vendetta by Fakhravar’s enemies on the Iranian left.

For those like Perle who want the United States to eschew diplomacy in favor of backing regime change, Fakhravar is an essential link in the argument for confrontation with Iran. Rather than reminding Americans of Chalabi, who is now known to have orchestrated much of the Bush administration’s bad wmd intelligence, they’d like to summon memories of the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan sought to embolden and unify dissidents in the Soviet Union. But by choosing Fakhravar, they may have inadvertently accomplished the opposite, exposing the ruptures in the pro-democracy movement and throwing into question the notion that America’s problems with Tehran will be solved by a saffron revolution.

By all accounts, Perle’s rapport with Fakhravar started more than two years ago, when Fakhravar was in and out of Evin, the infamous Tehran political prison where Canadian journalist Zahra Kazemi was tortured to death in 2003. From prison, Fakhravar had been calling the Persian-language pro-monarchist, anti-regime satellite stations broadcast from Los Angeles. Manda Shahbazi, an L.A.-based businesswoman and exile activist, told me that she heard one of those calls, was moved by Fakhravar’s plight, and managed to contact him. She then talked to Perle, who promptly mentioned the Fakhravar case at an Iranian opposition forum in Los Angeles in May 2004. In short order, Fakhravar called Shahbazi and asked to be put in touch with Perle. When Fakhravar left Iran this past April, his first stop was a Dubai hotel room where he met Perle.

“In my eyes I saw the prince of light,” Fakhravar told the New York Sun a few weeks later. “I could see in his eyes he is worried for our people as well as the American people and this is very important and this is very special.” Perle helped arrange for Fakhravar’s entry into the United States and organized a private lunch for him at the American Enterprise Institute; among those attending were State Department and Pentagon officials, selected journalists, and prominent Iran hawk Michael Ledeen.

Fakhravar and Michael Ledeen
Shahbazi, meanwhile, was working to connect Fakhravar with top exile leaders in L.A. and around the world. She had platinum contacts through her father, Yaddolah Shahbazi, a prominent businessman who served as an adviser to the Iranian prime minister during the twilight of the Shah’s regime (and who, for Iran trivia fans, launched a shipping company together with Iranian and Israeli investors that at one point employed Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iran-Contra arms dealer).

Shahbazi also did some contact-building of her own: In August 2005, according to filings with the State Department’s Office of Protocol, she gave Liz Cheney—the vice president’s daughter and a senior State Department official overseeing the Iran-Syria Operations Group—a Persian carpet valued at $4,000, as well as a glass plate engraved with a quote from Dick Cheney about Iran. The rug was among the dozen most valuable gifts bestowed on U.S. officials by foreigners in 2005. When I asked Shahbazi about it, she said she didn’t remember it.

In July of this year, Fakhravar joined Ledeen and other Iran experts in testifying before a Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs subcommittee; that appearance caused him to miss the gathering of Iranian opposition activists the White House had convened that day. It was an only slightly extraordinary day in a schedule replete with official meetings and engagements at Iranian opposition gatherings, where Fakhravar regales audiences with tales of his time in various prisons and his escape, along with his plans to unite student activists.

For Mohsen Sazegara, it all seems a bit much. A soft-spoken Iranian dissident thrice imprisoned in Iran and now based in Boston, Sazegara was reluctant to comment on Fakhravar, saying he had nothing against the young man. When pressed, he told me that Fakhravar was at best a marginal player whose life story has been exaggerated by his allies. For instance, no one “escapes” from Evin prison, Sazegara said; instead, Iranian political prisoners can apply for temporary furloughs, and on one of them, Fakhravar simply decided not to go back. Cina Dabestani, a Virginia-based exile who sometimes translates for Fakhravar, told me that Fakhravar attended law school while in prison, and, at Shahbazi’s urging, went awol after an exam. His escape from Iran—which Fakhravar has claimed was undertaken despite an order to have him shot on sight—involved a regular flight from Iran to Dubai, according to several sources.

Iranian journalists and former fellow inmates also claim Fakhravar was never a political prisoner to begin with, but was locked up for a nonpolitical crime—“unchaste acts” involving fellow students—and then cultivated friendships with student dissidents. “Student circles and journalistic circles don’t recognize him as a student leader,” says Najmeh Bozorgmehr, the Financial Times’ Tehran correspondent who closely followed the 1999 pro-democracy student protests, the Tiananmen Square of Fakhravar’s generation of Iranian dissidents. Adds Hassan Zarezadeh, a journalist and human rights activist who now lives in Canada, “He accidentally got arrested and got interested in politics and opportunistically tried to get close to the center of power and get famous that way. He was never part of the student movement.”

Even more suspicious to some dissidents is the story of how Fakhravar first connected with his U.S. supporters. “I have been arrested 12 times since 1999, and I have never seen anything like this,” says Zarezadeh. “It’s impossible for a political prisoner to have a phone,” he adds, let alone use it to call the foreign press, the exile broadcasters, and a top Pentagon adviser.

Some dissidents believe they do have an explanation: “As far as the other political prisoners were concerned, he was an antenna for the security of the prison and for the security services,” Bina Darab-Zand, a recently released human rights activist, told me when I reached him in Tehran in late August. Nasser Zarafshan, one of Iran’s most prominent human rights attorneys and also recently released from Evin, echoed that claim. “He has been working for the police,” Zarafshan says. “In prison, everybody knows that.” Perle’s office referred questions to Shahbazi, who told me that Fakhravar got the phone by paying bribes; she refused to discuss details of his escape from Iran, saying that it would make it harder for other political prisoners to get out.

Fakhravar
I met Fakhravar recently in an office lent to him by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a small Washington think tank that promotes U.S. intervention to support reform in the Middle East. With his gray suit, freshly shorn hair, and eager-to-please manner, the 31-year-old cut a figure remarkably different from the Fabio-like photos on his website (whose tag line reads “Love, Iran, Freedom”); he could have been a newly minted Ph.D. moonlighting on the Hill. But there was also an air of anxiety about him, a kind of Talented Mr. Ripley quality, as if he were struggling to perform a role. He spent the better part of an hour recounting his life, primarily a series of prison stints he said he had endured starting when he was 17 and in medical school. During the ’99 uprising, he said, he had been serving his compulsory military service in a Tehran clinic, but had managed to be in contact with the student protesters.

When I asked about his critics’ claims, Fakhravar threw his arms up in frustration. He said that among Iranian political prisoners, there is deep division between liberal and leftist blocks, and that Zarafshan and other leftists had “started rumors” about him that were “all false.” He opened his laptop to show photos of himself on a New York street talking with the dissident Ganji, then autographed a copy of his book, Scraps of Prison, printed by an L.A.-based Persian publisher. It is one of three books for which Fakhravar says he has been persecuted, though none of them appear to be widely known. On his website, Fakhravar says he was on the shortlist for a literary prize, the Paulo Coelho award, but there is no evidence that such an award exists—a point first raised on the blog “Moon of Alabama.”

Fakhravar urged me to call exile leaders, including the Shah’s son, who would vouch for him. The people he claims as his allies back in Iran, however, seem less than eager to embrace him. Ahmad Batebi, one of Iran’s best-known student leaders—pictured on the jacket of Scraps of Prison alongside Fakhravar—has distanced himself from him on his blog. Another key activist whom Fakhravar says he worked with, Akbar Mohammadi (the two are shown together in a picture on Fakhravar’s website), recently died on a hunger strike in Evin prison. When I tracked down his sister, Nasrin, she emailed me that Fakhravar and her brother were “not very close.” Fakhravar, she wrote, “is a young man seeking for fame.”

Laura Rozen reports on national security and foreign policy from Washington, D.C. as a senior correspondent for The American Prospect and a contributor to other publications. She writes the blog War and Piece. Listen to her discuss "Has Washington Found its Iranian Chalabi?" on "To the Point," a public radio show.