Tag Archives: Iran Lobby

How the Iran lobby sidetracked the nuclear talks: part 2

In the previous article, we saw how the Iranian regime’s panic over the 2002 outing of its theretofore clandestine nuclear weapons program drove its subsequent decisions about how to deal with the publicity and mollify, or at least occupy, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), and the United States (U.S.).

Having been well-trained by its mentors at the Soviet KGB, the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) quickly established a two-tier system: those nuclear sites, such as Natanz, Isfahan, Arak, and later Fordow, that had been exposed were turned into show sites. IAEA inspectors were invited in, and the so-called EU-3 (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom), later joined by the rest of the UNSC to form the P5+1 (China, France, Germany, Russia, UK, and U.S.), began negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program.

The haggling went on for a decade and counting. At no time from 2003 to this day, however, did Iran itself willingly offer up (as obligated under its nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty signatory status) any information about other clandestine sites in its sprawling nuclear weapons program. For unexplained reasons, nor did the IAEA, P5+1, or UNSC compel it to despite an international sanctions regime ostensibly aimed at getting Iran to comply with six UNSC Resolutions demanding it halt all nuclear enrichment and come clean about its past nuclear activities with “possible military dimensions.”

While international trade relationships, intra-UNSC rivalries, and a reluctance to alienate Iran right out of the talks altogether might explain some of the failure to press Iran about the clandestine elements of its nuclear weapons program, at least for the U.S., there was another player involved in the game: the Iran Lobby.

As discussed in a February 2009 occasional paper by this author and published by the Center for Security Policy under the title, “Rise of the Iran Lobby: Tehran’s Front Groups Move On—and into—the Obama Administration,” “a complex network of individuals and organizations with ties to the clerical regime in Tehran” had organized by the early 2000s to influence U.S. government policy towards the Islamic Republic of Iran.

A follow-on paper, “The Iran Lobby: Alive, Well, and Changing the Face of the Middle East,” published by the Center in October 2014, chronicled what I termed “the disastrous fruits of that network’s efforts.” The term “Iran Lobby,” by the way, was first noticed in the Iranian media itself, in 2007. It seemed a most apt description of the circle of influence operators that were pursuing and achieving positions of influence at the upper levels of U.S. national security then, and certainly all the more so, now.

After more than a dozen years of maneuvering behind the scenes of Washington, DC policymaking, the Iran Lobby today has succeeded in infiltrating the Department of State, National Security Council (NSC), and the nuclear negotiations themselves. Led by NIAC (the National Iranian American Council) and its founder and president, the Iranian-born Trita Parsi, the Iran Lobby counts among its affiliates and supporters a Who’s Who list of influential individuals and organizations ranging from former ambassadors and oil executives, to a bevy of Middle East and Iran experts from leading NGOs and think tanks.

The objective was always clear: shift official U.S. policy on Iran to a position supportive of Tehran’s agenda that sought protracted negotiations to buy time for its nuclear weapons development, financial concessions that eased sanctions and released frozen assets, and a conciliatory posture that eschewed any discussion of military options to deal with Iranian intransigence, ignored Iranian support for Islamic jihad (terrorism), pretended its Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) program didn’t exist, turned a deaf ear to non-stop genocidal threats against the Jewish State of Israel, and generally acquiesced in its regional geo-strategic ambitions.

Above all, there was to be absolutely no discussion of Iran’s parallel clandestine nuclear weapons program. Astonishingly, today, the Iran Lobby has achieved all of this and more.

Not surprisingly, the Iranian leadership mocks the Obama administration, especially Secretary of State John Kerry and his hapless negotiating team. In January 2014, just weeks after the supposed landmark ‘breakthrough’ of the November 2013 “Joint Plan of Action,” Kerry’s Iranian counterpart, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, actually laid a wreath at the tomb of Imad Mughniyeh, the Hizballah terror chieftain responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans from the 1983 Marine Corps barracks bombing to 9/11.

The same month, Iran’s ‘moderate’ president Hassan Rouhani tweeted about how, in Geneva, the world powers “surrendered to Iranian nation’s will.” A senior Iranian TV commentator noted with rare honesty that the Geneva agreement was but “the Treaty of Hudaybiyya.” Following the 2015 April Fool’s Day ‘framework’ agreement, Iranian leadership figures were quick to describe the U.S. version as a “U.S. version” “lie” and declare it “not acceptable to Iran.” Meanwhile, Iran’s Bassij commander Mohammad Reza Naqdi declared that “erasing Israel off the map” was “non-negotiable.”

And yet, the American team practically begged the Iranians to keep talking and give them something, anything to hold up as a ‘success.’

To understand this sorry state of affairs, it is only necessary to understand the function and purpose of hostile influence operations and how the Iran Lobby in America has finessed its way to turning U.S. foreign policy with Iran completely on its head. As described above, maneuvering Tehran-regime-friendly figures into positions of power and influence is the name of the game.

One Sahar Nowrouzzadeh could be Exhibit A for how this works: apparently a former NIAC employee, she now appears on a list of senior White House aides who attended a secure video conference on 31 March 2015 with the U.S. negotiating team in Lausanne, Switzerland. She is listed as the National Security Council Director for Iran.

Meanwhile, her former boss, NIAC’s Trita Parsi, appears in a photo published by the Iranian Fars News Agency, greeting Fereydoon Rouhani (the president’s brother) at the Lausanne talks. Parsi’s Facebook page shows another photo of the NIAC leader smiling at the talks alongside his Research Director, Reza Marashi, and NBC reporter Ann Curry. Marashi’s NIAC bio lists his former employment at the State Department’s Office of Iranian affairs. According to reports, at least Parsi has been present at previous nuclear negotiations in Geneva and Vienna, as well.

This is what a successful infiltration operation looks like. Apparently, Parsi thinks so, too, because on 2 April 2015, he posted the following on his Facebook Page:

“Trita Parsi

“April 2 at 5:22pm ·

“Oops. Just realized I haven’t eaten lunch today. Been too busy gloating…”

How the Iran lobby sidetracked the nuclear talks

The Obama administration spin narrative about what a great success nuclear negotiations with Iran are was already coming unglued the day after the April Fool’s Day ‘framework’ was announced. Mr. Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and their advisors were trying desperately to portray the endless succession of contentious talks between the P5+1 and Iran as a great success even as the Iranians spoiled all the fun by essentially calling the Americans out as liars, and declaring that what they called “the U.S. version” was “not acceptable to Iran.”

And in fact, the European Union, the French, Iran, and the U.S. have all put out differing accounts of what was actually agreed upon in Lausanne, Switzerland in late March 2015. As Amir Taheri pointed out in a trenchant 4 April 2015 piece at the New York Post, all we really have is a “diplomatic dog’s dinner” of competing and contradictory statements. It’s not any kind of agreement at all.

But if we take a step backward and consider what we already know or ought to know about Iran’s nuclear weapons program, it should become rather quickly obvious that all this diplomatic wrangling about centrifuges, enrichment levels, inspection regimes, and sunset clauses is nothing but window dressing.

That’s because the real Iranian nuclear weapons program very likely is not the one they’re all tussling over. The real Iranian nuclear weapons program long ago was withdrawn behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy guarded by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS—Iran’s primary intelligence agency).

While it’s long been known that the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ordered the IRGC to “get the bomb” in the waning days of the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, details about the subsequent 25-year Iranian commitment to comply with that order are much less well-known.

As the so-called “father of the Pakistani bomb,” Abdul Qadir Khan, wrote in documents obtained by the Washington Post in 2010, Pakistan provided Iran with blueprints and parts for centrifuges and shared its secret list of worldwide suppliers. That’s how the Iranian nuclear weapons program got started. But neither the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) nor the public knew anything about this until the Iranian opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), blew the lid off Iran’s program in August 2002. The Iranian regime, a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), went to panic stations and came up with a plan to limit the damage. The Iran Lobby in America would have a key role to play in that damage control operation.

Much as the Iranians’ mentors in the clandestine WMD business—the Soviet KGB—had done earlier when some of its illicit weapons programs made media headlines, the Iranians conceded a few of the sites that were now exposed: Natanz, Isfahan, Arak, and later Fordow.

Lavizan-Shian, where the regime had worked on nuclear warhead design, was deemed too sensitive, so it was simply razed to the ground in 2003 and its components moved elsewhere.

Natanz, the buried uranium enrichment site where some 9,000 centrifuges currently are operating, became the centerpiece of the regime’s new information operation. It was opened to IAEA inspections, figured prominently in the IAEA’s quarterly reports, and was allowed on the P5+1 nuclear negotiations agenda.

Likewise it was with Isfahan, the conversion plant; Arak, the heavy water reactor that gives Iran a parallel plutonium route to the bomb; and Fordow, a deeply buried centrifuge facility.

Everybody was kept very busy arguing, discussing, and negotiating about the sites Iran got caught with—and now, more recently, a non-existent ‘agreement’ that each of the parties describes in its own, mutually contradictory, terms. Indeed, all the negotiating teams from the IAEA, Britain, China, the European Union, France, Germany, Russia, and the U.S. are being kept so busy that nearly everyone has forgotten all about the fact that Iran’s entire nuclear program was an illicit clandestine one until the NCRI exposed it—or that virtually every site in that program that’s now public was revealed by someone other than Iran…which the P5+1 now inexplicably wants to trust to open all its nuclear facilities to IAEA inspection.

Parchin, a military site where the IAEA believes Iran has conducted nuclear trigger explosives tests, provides a good example of how the regime deals with demands to open places to inspection it would rather remain closed: as Bill Gertz explains at the Free Beacon, they just say “no.” And, as with Lavizan-Shian a dozen years earlier, they conduct a “clean-up” operation to tear down buildings and destroy parts of the complex they’d prefer not show up in any more satellite images.

Naturally, Parchin has not been included in any of the P5+1 talks, nor has the U.S. delegation even suggested that it ought to be. It has been the same with other suspicious sites like Khondab and Lavizan-3, now revealed publicly, but left completely off the agenda. This is not to even consider how many additional clandestine sites Iran has been operating, but are as yet not revealed.

The critical issues before us then are not so much about the number of centrifuges, or which generation of centrifuges, or what level of enrichment will be allowed to Iran going forward at the show case sites: rather, we must ask why and how our negotiators have themselves been spun up to dither endlessly, but only about sites already in the public domain. Iran’s secret parallel nuclear weapons program remains unmentioned and untouched.

In Part 2 of this series, the critical role of the Iran Lobby will be examined.