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Tel: (301) 946-2918. Fax: (301) 942-5341
Copyright © 1994-98, by the Middle East Data Project, Inc. All rights reserved.
An Iranian opposition group that has been identified by the State Department as a terrorist organization has been directing political campaign contributions toward a select group of Congressmen and to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign, in a coordinated effort to win political favors, an investigation by The Iran Brief has revealed.
The contributions total more than $204,000 and span a three and a half year period, from April 1993 through November 1996, an analysis of public data bases maintained by the Federal Election Commission records show. The money was given to a small number of Congressmen who have been avid supporters of the Mujahidin-e Khalq (MEK), also known as the People's Mujahidin Organization of Iran (PMOI). During the time-frame of the contributions, the recipients sponsored numerous Congressional resolutions and "Dear Colleague" letters and letters to the President, the Secretary of State, and other top officials, urging U.S. government recognition and support for the Mujahidin as well as its political front organization, the National Council of Resistance (NCR), and its Iraq-based military wing, known as the National Liberation Army (NLA). All of the groups are led by Mujahidin leader Massoud Rajavi, and his third wife, Maryam. The State Department accuses the group of having "fully supported the [U.S.] Embassy takeover and opposed releasing our diplomats," (See box, page 3), and of operating "like a cult," not a democratic organization. The MEK vigorously denies both accusations.
By far the top recipient of the MEK largesse was Congressman Robert Torricelli (D,NJ), who successfully ran for Senate in 1996. One of the first contributions to Torricelli's Congressional campaign by a Mujahidin supporter was a $1,000 check from Ramesh Sepehrrad, of Springfield, Va., dated Oct. 26, 1993. Ms. Sepehrrad is active within the MEK's women's organization and has appeared at numerous public pro-MEK rallies, according to other Iranian exiles and MEK sympathizers interviewed by The Iran Brief. She contributed a total of $5,000 to different campaigns targeted for support by the NCR's Washington office over a two year period.
As a Congressional candidate, Torricelli received $49,000 from MEK officers, supporters, and sympathizers, FEC records show. But the favors really started coming in once Torricelli threw his hat into the Senate race. The New Jersey Democrat received 82 separate $1,000 checks and two more $500 checks from MEK sources between August 1995 through November 4, 1996, bringing total MEK contributions to Torricelli during the past three years to $132,000 - a very sizable piece of change, even for a high-rolling campaigner like Torricelli.
Torricelli's campaign also appears to have benefited from four checks totaling $23,000 sent in to the Democratic Senatorial campaign by Shahriar Kiamanesh between May 1994 and October 1996, who intelligence sources said was a high-level MEK operative "who has spent many years in Baghdad" with the organization. In May 1994, Mr. Kiamanesh listed his employer as American Leading Technologies, of Alexandria, Virginia - a company believed to be associated with the MEK - and which was used extensively for the campaign contribution scheme. His three 1996 contributions were registered in the name of the Iranian Community-USA, of Falls Church, Virginia. This would appear to be affiliated with another known MEK front, the Iranian Community of Virginia, which was used extensively to lobby Congressmen in 1995. If these amounts are added to the other Torricelli donations, they bring the total of MEK contributions to Torricelli to $155,000.
Bundled checks: As in other campaign dollars-for-favors schemes, the checks arrived at Torricelli's Senate campaign headquarters in bundles, so there could be no mistake as to the political message they were intended to carry. All but three of the checks were grouped with other MEK contributions. On Aug. 1, 1995, the campaign received fourteen MEK-related checks, worth $14,000. (Four of the persons writing checks to Torricelli's new-founded Senate fund also wrote $1,000 checks the same day to his House campaign fund). On Dec. 22, $17,000 came into the Senate fund, and on Dec. 29 another $19,000. On Jan. 11, 1996, there was $9,000; on March 25, another $14,000; on May 13, $8,000 more. In a final push, $3,000 more came in on Nov. 4, 1996, the eve of the election. Of that amount, $1,000 came from a high-level Mujahidin operative, Fazeleh Rassouli, and another $2,000 from the Mehre Iran Farsi School in Burke, Virginia, which is operated by the Mujahidin as part of its social services network, to offer young Iranians an alternative to the regime-run Farsi school at the Islamic Center in Potomac, Maryland. It was contributed in the name of the Mehre school principal, Mansoureh Zamani.
Other Iranian-Americans have contributed to Torricelli's campaigns at various times, since in addition to his outspoken support for the MEK the New Jersey Democrat has also been a sharp critic of the Tehran regime's abysmal human rights record, a stance which has won support from Iranian-Americans of various political backgrounds. Among the most prominent of these supporters is former Iranian Ambassador Hushang Ansary, who runs a series of investment firms and has also contributed to the campaign of New York Republican, Alfonse D'Amato. Along with his wife, Ambassador Ansary contributed $4,000 to Torricelli, while contributing more than $50,000 to various Republican candidates and to the RNC. Another prominent Iranian-American who contributed to Torricelli's Senate campaign was Hassan Nemazee, who runs an investment firm in New York. Khosrow Semnani, an industrialist in Salt Lake City, Utah, earlier wrote a $500 check to Torricelli's House campaign.
But Nemazee, Semnani, and Ansary's contributions were made separately, without any apparent coordination with other donors; in addition, in no instance did they coincide with contributions from individuals tied to the MEK. And all three individuals are well-known in the business community and respected in Washington. What distinguishes the Mujahidin-related contributions is that they came grouped together, from obscure individuals, and with only rare exceptions they were all for the same amount, $1,000. Another oddity: in most cases, the persons who signed the checks do not have listed telephone numbers, nor, in many cases, do the companies they listed as their employers. Some of these companies have been publicly identified by the FBI as Mujahidin fronts. Others are known to U.S. law enforcement as MEK front companies, well-informed Iranian and U.S. government sources said. (See below).
Other recipients: After Torricelli, the recipients of MEK-related funds were Congressmen Dan Burton (R,Ind), who received $19,000, Gary Ackerman (D,NY), who took in $18,250, Bob Ney (R,OH), who received $4,000, and Edolphus Towns (D,NY), who received a scant $1,000. The $7,000 Rep. James Traficant (D,OH), received from Mujahidin sources weighed the heaviest percentage-wise in his campaign, accounting for 17.5% of all contributions he received from individuals in the 1995-1996 election cycle.
All five Congressmen, and Senator Torricelli, have been outspoken lobbyists on behalf of the Mujahidin, often sponsoring letters calling on Congress to support the National Council of Resistance and its leaders, Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, and urging the State Department to hold a dialogue with the organization. Indeed, it is precisely this type of political support that appears to have prompted the Mujahidin contributions, since the money only really began flowing once the organization realized in 1993 that it was headed for big trouble in Congress as a result of a counter-lobbying campaign spearheaded by Senator John McCain and Congressman Lee Hamilton, who was then chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Both Hamilton and McCain wrote the State Department in 1993 asking for a clarification of U.S. policy toward contacts with the group. The reply Hamilton received from the State Department, dated Sept. 20, 1993, was devastating (See box).
Quid pro quos: Given the dramatically worsening climate on Capitol Hill and the openly hostility of the State Department toward the group, it may have been that the NCR's Washington, DC office was hoping to use contributions by Iranian-Americans to firm up the support of Congressmen it considered key to its lobbying campaign in the United States. The chronology of events suggests a series of clear quid pro quos in this regard.
The day after the State Department letter was received, four suspected MEK supporters each wrote $1,000 checks to the campaign of Republican congressman Dan Burton. Between October 1993 and April 1994, MEK supporters and suspected sympathizers would contribute another $13,000 to Congressman Torricelli. This first spate of contributions appears to have had a specific purpose: countering the efforts of Hamilton and McCain.
In early 1994, Senator McCain sponsored legislation that officially branded the Mujahidin and the NCR as "terrorist organizations," and called on the State Department to issue a public report on the organization's activities. At Torricelli and Burton's prompting, House members in conference deleted the McCain language from the State Department Authorization Bill on April 4. At the same time, the NCR's Washington office publicly accused McCain of cow-towing to the Tehran regime, and revealed that a lobbyist paid by the Islamic Republic government, Bijan Sepassy, had warmly welcomed McCain's anti-Mujahedin efforts. According to declarations on file with the Justice Department, Sepassy's organization, the Forum on American-Iranian Relations (FAIR), was established with a $120,000 "loan" from the Tehran government. The ongoing concern of the Tehran regime with the MEK's activities can be seen from a Aug. 30, 1997 speech by Iranian president Khatami, in which he called on the West to stop providing support and safe haven for the group and suggested that he would take such a move as a "good will gesture" to which Iran would respond favorably.
When queried about the campaign contributions, a spokesman for the NCR's Washington, DC office expressed surprise. "How did you get that information?" he asked. When informed that campaign contributions are considered public information in the United States, he promised to get back to us later to discuss the issue of NCR and MEK campaign contributions. By the time we went to press, he had not replied, although we fully expect the NCR to come out with a statement in the meantime. The spokesman, Abdolnaser Rashidi, who works full time in the NCR office, was not a major contributor, although he is listed with the FEC as having made a $500 contribution to the campaign of New York Democratic Edolphus Towns on May 24, 1996.
On the terrorism list: In mid-1994, the situation deteriorated even further when the State Department released its annual report on international terrorism, which for the first time listed the MEK and the NCR in its appendix describing "terrorist organizations." (In fact, a spokesman for the State Department's counter-terrorism office told The Iran Brief last week that the State Department has "always referred to the Mujahidin as a terrorist group, even if they were not mentioned in the appendix to our annual report until 1994." Furthermore, he said that the State Department was in the process of responding to a Congressional requirement to issue an official U.S. government list of international terrorist organizations, but had not made any final determination whether to include the Mujahidin).
On June 21, Torricelli wrote to Asst. Secretary of State Robert Pelletreau, requesting that the State Department "consult" with the Mujahedin. Two weeks later, top Mujahidin members Shahriar Kiamanesh, Fazeleh Rassouli, and Mansoureh Zamani spearheaded another spate of contributions to Torricelli's campaign that resulted in 11 checks - each for $1,000 - which arrived on July 5, 1994. On August 5, Reps Torricelli, Traficant, Towns, Ros-Lehtinen, Dellums, Burton, and Crane released a "Dear Colleague" letter, calling for "fair treatment for [the] Iranian Resistance," a term they used to describe the NCR and the Mujahidin.
The State Department report: By mid-September 1994, word was circulating on Capitol Hill that the State Department was in the final stages of reviewing its report on the Mujahidin, and that it would be unsparing in exposing the group's terrorist actions, past and present. In an effort to pre-empt the report, Reps. Torricelli, Ackerman, and Burton held a press conference at the Capitol criticizing the State Department effort and once again calling for a "dialogue with the Iranian Resistance." A separate statement to the same effect is issued by Rep. Ed Towns.
Two days later, Mujahidin supporters, spearheaded by the head of the group's Women's Organization, Behjat Dehghan, sent $5,000 to the Burton campaign. On Oct. 19, Dehghan organized another $3,000 that went to Ackerman; and on Oct. 24, Hedayat Mostowfi - who works out of the NCR office in Washington, DC - assembled 8 other donors to contribute $9,000 to the Torricelli campaign. From Oct. 1994 through Dec. 1995, Mostowfi personally contributed another $1,000 to Torricelli and $3,000 to Dan Burton, although Burton's campaign records indicate that $1,000 was returned (perhaps because he had exceeded the annual contribution limits of $1,000 per campaign).
In 1995, the Mujahidin paid $40,000 for a single "Dear Colleague" letter of support, with contributions to Reps. Torricelli, Burton, and Ackerman
Letter to Clinton: The next big burst of funding surrounds a "Dear Colleague" letter organized by Congressmen Torricelli, Ackerman, Traficant, and Burton in the spring and early summer of 1995. On June 8, the Congressmen held a press conference to announce that a letter in support of the NCR had been signed by 194 members of Congress and had been sent to President Clinton on May 30. On July 5, they released the text of the letter, which they claimed had obtained 202 signatures. The letter urged the president to "support the Iranian people's cry for democracy" and stated that the National Council of Resistance of Iran, led by Massoud Rajavi, "will contribute to the realization of political pluralism and democracy in Iran." It was this latter statement that prompted the retraction of several members of Congress, including Virginia Democrat James Moran, who stated they had signed the letter "under false pretenses." A counter-lobbying effort by rival Iranian opposition groups, and by the Iranian-American Republican Committee of California, prompted a dozen more Congressmen to publicly withdraw their signature. Many were admonished into doing so by personal letters from the Chairman of the California Republican Party, John Herrington. [See IB 8/1/95].
Congressman Moran's retraction is of particular interest, since he had been lobbied to address an MEK rally in Washington, DC by Hossein Panah, who introduced himself not as a Mujahidin member, but as the representative of a non-profit group, the "Iranian Community of Virginia." Dr. Panah, who is known within the Iranian community as a skilled heart surgeon, showed up at Moran's office on July 24 to protest his retraction. He was accompanied by 9 other Mujahidin sympathizers, who threatened Moran staff members for the Congressman's change of heart.
MEK supporters backed up their commitment to the Congressional letter to Clinton letter with hefty campaign contributions. On July 11, 1995, they contributed $9,000 to the Burton campaign (led by Kiamanesh, Mostowfi, and Mansoureh Zamani), and on Aug. 1 they followed up with another $14,000 to Torricelli, split between his House and newly-inaugurated Senate campaigns. On October 27, $7,000 arrived from the same sources to Gary Ackerman's campaign. Added to the $7,000 for Torricelli on April 4, another $3,000 in between, that comes to $40,000 for a single "Dear Colleague" letter.
Traficant fund-raiser: Ackerman aides responded to queries from The Iran Brief concerning NCR/MEK contributions by acknowledging that the New York Democrat had openly solicited funds from MEK sympathizers "because we have a lot of Iranian-Americans it our district, so it's a natural to go to them for contributions." Although the aides made no bones about the Congressman's support for the MEK - and Ackerman defended the group vigorously against charges of being a terrorist organization at a July 1997 press conference - they pleaded ignorance of any specific quid pro quos generated by the campaign donations, or whether Ackerman had attended specific fund-raising events on Oct. 27, 1995 or Dec. 26, 1995, when most of the money came in.
A senior aide to Ohio Congressman James Traficant had a better memory. Asked about the $6,000 contributed to Rep. Traficant on Nov. 28, 1995 by Ramesh Sepehrrad, Shahriar Kiamanesh, Diana Arani, Jalal Arani, and Hossein Panah, the aide said these contributions had resulted from a fund-raising breakfast hosted by the NCR at a Washington, DC hotel. "We made it very clear that the Congressman would only take contributions from U.S. citizens," the aide said. Later that same day, Traficant entered an "Extension of Remarks" into the Congressional Record, in which he praised the Mujahidin and called the NCR "the only alternative to the present regime." When challenged this past summer about his support for the Mujahidin, Traficant told reporters he felt the group had "evolved significantly" from the 1970s, and was no longer anti-American or anti-democratic. (See "New Pro-Mujahidin letter sent to Clinton," below). Neither Torricelli nor Burton's office were able to respond to questions by press time. However, Burton's campaign appears to have woken up to Mujahidin tactics, since the Congressman stopped publicly supporting the group in late 1995; and indeed, MEK contributions to Burton dried up in December 1995.
Methodology: In putting together our analysis of MEK-related campaign contributions, we first identified a handful of known MEK members and supporters, then checked an Internet data base of FEC records containing campaign contributions for the 93-94 and 95-96 campaign cycles. By entering this information into our own data base, we were able to identify key dates, when groups of contributions were made by those individuals together with other persons. In the end, more than 20 MEK activists directly accounted for more than half of the $204,250 we identified as originating from MEK-related sources.
The other $97,250 came from Iranian-Americans spread all over the United States, who had the distinction of repeatedly contributing to campaigns targeted by the NCR's Washington, DC office for fund-raising support, and uniquely contributing on dates when known MEK activists were contributing. If an individual's campaign contributions did not meet this pattern, or were spread more widely (for instance, to other candidates), then we excluded them from our calculations. Reviewing our records, a federal law enforcement official familiar with the group and with campaign finance issues commented: "This certainly has all the bells and whistles of a coordinated campaign to influence Congress."
There were other similarities, which in other circumstances, might appear merely coincidental. Of 94 individuals who had made political contributions, a public records data base search only found telephone listings for ten of them. And of these, one number had been disconnected, another one changed, and a third was busy for two days. We found this odd since many of the individuals listed their employers as innocuous-sounding U.S. corporations - such as Bankers Life & Casualty, in Indianapolis, Indiana; Calcopy, in El Sobriante, CA; Village Cleaners, Inc., in Cary, NC; Tore-Air, in Irvine, CA; Fluor-Daniel, also in Irvine; or Alpha Merics Corp, in Woodland Hills, CA. One person we did manage to contact in Miami, Florida, refused to discuss his campaign contributions and asked to call us back (he never did). Another one contacted in Virginia reacted in a similar fashion - as did the NCR office. The others never returned repeated messages.
Of the three MEK companies operating in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC with listed phone numbers, two had just answering machines operating during working hours, while the third - Phoenix Tour and Travel, in Annandale - was just a pager.
The NCR has demonstrated repeatedly its ability to mobilize up to 2,000 persons in both Washington, DC and in Los Angeles, for public demonstrations against the Tehran regime. Our investigation shows that the group has a well-organized network of supporters in other parts of the United States as well. That individuals from such far-flung places as Bensalem, Pennsylvania, Minneapolis, Minnesota, New City, New York, Ballwin, Missouri, or Smyrna, Georgia, would send in personal checks to specific candidates on the same dates as known MEK supporters in the Washington, DC area clearly demonstrates a well-orchestrated, and centrally planned campaign. It also shows that the group has been successful in mobilizing support against the Tehran regime.
Is it legal? Campaign contributions from foreign citizens are illegal, unless they are green card holders. We showed a list of campaign contributors to a U.S. counter-intelligence official, with access to INS records, to inquire whether these individuals had green cards. While he could not comment on particular individuals because of Privacy Act restrictions, the official noted that some of the persons identified in the FEC data base as campaign contributors did not have green cards - making their contributions clearly illegal.
Contributions from foreign organizations are also illegal under U.S. law. Only on one occasion did an MEK member contribute in the name of the NCR - a $1,000 check sent in by Soheila Alighoi Mayelzadeh on May 19, 1995 to the campaign of Jim Traficant - making that contribution clearly improper, if not illegal, in so far as the NCR is registered as a foreign agent with the Justice Department. Contributions by NCR employees in Washington should also fall under this category, including the $5,000 contributed by Hedayat Mostowfi to the Torricelli and Burton campaigns, and the $500 sent by Abdolnaser Rashidi to Edolphus towns. The $3,500 contributed by Burke, Va. medical doctor Hossein Panah may also qualify as a contribution by the group, in so far as Dr. Panah personally lobbied Congress on behalf of the organization.
U.S. election law also specifically prohibits contributions made in the name of another. The fact that several individuals from the same MEK companies - AXS Computer, American Leading Technologies, and Phoenix Tour and Travel - were used to funnel contributions to pro-MEK Congressmen could trigger an FEC investigation, to determine whether campaign laws were violated. Similarly, U.S. election law requires that individuals who "act together as a group to conduct Federal election activity" should register as a "political committee," commonly known as a PAC.