There are new questions swirling around President Biden's now-on-leave special envoy to Iran, Robert Malley and his senior aides following new reporting from Semafor and Iran International that disclosed communications suggesting that Americans, some still in key positions, are tied to efforts by Iranian officials to influence global perception of Tehran.
Launched in the spring of 2014 and called the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI), the new communications show how the influence operation seemingly succeeded via the Biden administration. According to Semafor, "officials, working under the moderate President Hassan Rouhani, congratulated themselves on the impact of the initiative: At least three of the people on the Foreign Ministry’s list were, or became, top aides to Robert Malley, the Biden administration’s special envoy on Iran, who was placed on leave this June following the suspension of his security clearance."
More from Semafor's scoop:
The communications reveal the access Rouhani’s diplomats have had to Washington’s and Europe’s policy circles, particularly during the final years of the Obama administration, through this network. One of the German academics in the IEI, according to the emails, offered to ghostwrite op-eds for officials in Tehran. Others would, at times, seek advice from the Foreign Ministry’s staff about attending conferences and hearings in the U.S. and Israel. The IEI participants were prolific writers of op-eds and analyses, and provided insights on television and Twitter, regularly touting the need for a compromise with Tehran on the nuclear issue — a position in line with both the Obama and Rouhani administrations at the time.
One email message quoted by Semafor from Saeed Khatibzadeh, "a Berlin-based Iranian diplomat and future Foreign Ministry spokesman," to the head of Tehran's Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS) Mostafa Zahrani heralded gaining support for IEI "from two young academics — Ariane Tabatabai and Dina Esfandiary — following a meeting with them in Prague. 'We three agreed to be the core group of the IEI,'" the email states.
More on Tabatabai's apparently close relationship with Iranians, including Mostafa Zahrani:
Ariane Tabatabai, the current Pentagon official, on at least two occasions checked in with Iran’s Foreign Ministry before attending policy events, according to the emails. She wrote to Zahrani in Farsi on June 27, 2014, to say she’d met Saudi Prince Turki al Faisal — a former ambassador to the U.S. — who expressed interest in working together and invited her to Saudi Arabia. She also said she’d been invited to attend a workshop on Iran’s nuclear program at Ben-Gurion University in Israel. “I am not interested in going, but then I thought maybe it would be better that I go and talk, rather than an Israeli like Emily Landau who goes and disseminates disinformation. I would like to ask your opinion too and see if you think I should accept the invitation and go.”
As Semafor notes, "Tabatabai currently serves in the Pentagon as the chief of staff for the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, a position that requires a U.S. government security clearance" and "previously served as a diplomat on Malley’s Iran nuclear negotiating team after the Biden administration took office in 2021." Esfandiary, meanwhile, "is a senior advisor on the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group, a think tank that Malley headed from 2018-2021," according to Semafor.
Another player in IEI is Ali Vaez:
The IEI quickly pushed ahead with one of the initiative’s primary objectives — publishing opinion pieces and analyses in top-tier media in the U.S. and Europe, specifically targeting policy makers. Less than a month after the Vienna gathering, Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group, a close protégé of Robert Malley’s who is listed as part of the IEI, sent an article on defusing the nuclear crisis to Zahrani of IPIS, ahead of publication. “I look forward to your comments and feedback,” he wrote in Farsi on June 4, 2014, attaching a piece entitled, “The Conceptual Perils of Nuclear Diplomacy with Iran.”
The emails show that the article was shared by Zahrani with Foreign Minister Zarif the day it arrived. It was then published 12 days later in the National Interest, under the title, “False Dilemmas in the Iran Talks,” with some minor wording changes. It’s unclear if Zarif made any fixes as no reply email from him is in the chain. While many think tanks and media outlets have policies against sharing articles before publication, ICG said in a statement to Semafor that it routinely and actively solicits the views of the primary actors involved in a conflict and shares relevant text with policymakers.
In one celebratory message from 2015, "Khatibzadeh emailed Zahrani, who then forwarded the message to Zarif and one of the foreign minister’s deputies on the nuclear negotiating team, Majid Takht-Ravanchi. Khatibzadeh attached 10 separate Word documents to the email, each referencing the media footprint of each IEI academic" including "Ariane Tabatabai, Ali Vaez and Dina Esfandiary, all of whom have worked closely with Malley over the past decade," noted Semafor's report.
More on the apparent success of Tehran's attempts to influence conversations about Iran in their favor [via Semafor]:
The list shared by Khatibzadeh showed that in one week, Ariane Tabatabai published four articles, including in Foreign Policy, and gave interviews to the Huffington Post and Iran’s Fars News agency, which is linked to the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, mostly supporting Tehran’s views on the nuclear talks. In an article for the National Interest co-written with Dina Esfandiary, they argued that Iran was “too powerful” to be contained and that “Tehran doesn’t need any agreement to be empowered and to strengthen its foothold in the region.”
Ali Vaez was also extremely prolific in his media outreach. The ICG analyst was cited in virtually all of the U.S.’s major newspapers, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, from the initiation of the IEI in March 2014 to the finalization of the Iran nuclear deal in July 2015.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry, the IPIS think tank, and Zarif, Zahrani, and Khatibzadeh didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The reporting from Semafor and Iran International have some, such as Morgan Ortagus, a former State Department spokeswoman and the founder of Polaris National Security, asking: "Is the Biden administration employing and being advised by Iranian sleeper agents?"
These new revelations about IEI are "grounds for immediate investigation by Congress," Ortagus said in a statement. She noted that "experts have been sounding alarm bells about this infiltration for years" including warnings from Iranian dissidents that the father of a former aide to Malley and current Pentagon official "is a close associate of former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani."
"Meanwhile, even Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif has bragged that he used Ali Vaez to influence Western negotiators," Ortagus reminded. "Yet, Ali Vaez somehow was given so much access to details of ongoing negotiations with Iran that he served as the main source for the recent New York Times' stories on the $6 billion hostage deal."
Calling for "an immediate Congressional and law enforcement investigation into the scope of Iranian influence operations in the United States," Ortagus urged that America "cannot permit our enemies to undermine U.S. national security on such an important issue."