State Department Documents Expose
Iranian Terror Group
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
(May 31, 2011 - Washington, DC) - An Iranian group that has attracted
high-level support from former White House and senior national security
officials, was dealt a body blow last week in its effort get off the
terrorism list, when the State Department released a series of
documents the group had sought under the Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA).
According to the documents the group, known as the Mujahedin-e Khalq
(MEK, or MKO), supported the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in
November 1979 – not a position to endear itself to U.S. diplomats
- before its “gradual elimination from the ruling coalition” by
Ayatollah Khomeini less than two years later.
The new documents describe the MEK terror campaign against the Islamic
regime during the 1980s and 1990s, and the group’s alliance with Iraqi
dictator Saddam Hussein.
According to hundreds of Iranians interviewed by State Department “Iran
watchers” in Dubai, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Germany, the ties to Saddam
were the most damning.
“Ordinary Iranians were almost uniformly dismissive of the MEK,
reacting with either disdain or apathy,” a recent cable from the U.S.
Consulate in Dubai states.
“The MEK are detested among the young and old in Iran, although many
young Iranians don’t know much about them,” the cable quotes one
Iranian as having told U.S. diplomats.
“They are hated among Iranians, since their hands are stained with the
blood of their fellow countrymen,” another Iranian is quoted as saying
in the just-released cable.
A host of former senior U.S. officials have come out in public in
support of the group, including, most recently, President Obama’s
former National Security Advisor, Gen. Jim Jones.
At pro-MEK event in Brussels on May 25, former White House Chief of
Staff Andy Card, former NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark, former State
Department counter-terrorism coordinator Ambassador Dell Dailey, and
others, argued that the MEK should be treated as a legitimate Iranian
opposition group.
As the U.S. and the European Union continue to ratcheted up sanctions
on the Islamic Republic of Iran this week, many members of Congress are
pressing the State Department to remove the MEK from the terrorism
list, as the European Parliament has recently done.
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), former New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani, and
former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton have
also staked out positions in favor of the group. All three are
potential Republican presidential candidates in 2012.
But the newly declassified State Department cables paint a much darker
picture of the group, starting with the victimization of its own
members if they strayed from the party line or tried to leave the
organization.
Several recent cables from the U.S. embassy in Baghdad detail
interviews with MEK members who managed to escape from Camp Ashraf, a
military base northeast of Baghdad that was assigned to the group by
Saddam Hussein in the late 1980s.
Since the liberation of Iraq by the U.S.-led coalition in 2003, the
group has been confined to quarters. Tensions with the Iraqi government
have been building, and 34 MEK members were killed in April during
clashes with Iraqi Army units.
The escapees – refereed to as “defectors” in the State Department
cables – painted a harsh picture of repression in the MEK camp, and
claimed that the group’s leader had issued standing orders that anyone
caught trying to escape should be immediately executed.
“Many of the defectors alleged psychological and psychical harm at the
hands of the MEK, including solitary confinement in MEK jails in
Ashraf,” one cable states.
Some of the MEK escapees said they had been “lured from Iran with
promises of study abroad opportunities” or “by offers of travel
abroad.” Others were Iranian POWs captured by the Iraqis during the
1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war who were sent to Camp Ashraf with a promise
they would soon be repatriated to Iran or resettled in a third country.
The defectors “reaffirmed existing perceptions of the MEK as a
cult-like organization that thrives on maintaining control of its
members and those lured to Ashraf under false pretenses,” the cable
states.
Allan Gerson, a Washington, DC attorney representing the group in its
efforts to get removed from the State Department’s list of
international terrorist organizations, dismissed the new documents as
“much ado about nothing” when he released them at a lavish Capitol Hill
reception last Wednesday.
“The question is why, when every single Camp Ashraf residents were
taken outside [sic], and interviewed by the U.S. military in American
controlled facilities in 2003 and 2004, and each were given the choice
to leave, none of those individuals had done so?” Gerson asked.
But the State Department cable that recounts the stories of the MEK
escapees, flatly contradicts Gerson’s assertion.
“The defectors confirmed that this was their first encounter with any
foreign mission and welcomed future visits,” the cable states. “The
defectors were all unified in their desire to leave Iraq… Many
accurately pointed out that their failed resettlement has offered
little incentive for other residents to leave Ashraf, fearing similar
hopelessness and “purgatory” in Iraqi hotels.”
The undated cable, signed “Hill,” appears to have been written in 2009
or 2010, when Christopher Hill was the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad.
Already in 1994, the State Department sent a damning 41-page report to
Congress, detailing why it considered the MEK a terrorist
organization.
The “original sin” of the group was the
murder of three U.S. officers
and three civilian contractors working for the Shah’s government
between 1973-1976.
MEK representatives claim that the murders were carried out by a
“Marxist splinter group” before Massoud Rajavi became MEK leader in
1979. But Mujahedin newsletters published in Iran in 1980 celebrated
the murders, calling the U.S. victims “criminal agents of U.S.
Imperialism in Iran.”
During an FBI investigation code-named Operation Suture, an FBI agent
who infiltrated Camp Ashraf and posed as an MEK member reported that
the group continued to celebrate the anniversary of those murders in
late 1980s.
The MEK says that it abandoned violence against the Islamic regime in
Iran in 2001, after a campaign of mortar attacks and hit-and-run raids
against Iranian military and law enforcement personnel failed to win it
popular support inside Iran.
Kenneth R. Timmerman is Executive Director of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran and a Contributing Editor at Newsmax Media