The MEK and Acts of Treason

Israel’s Mossad has spent years on a propaganda campaign aimed at convincing the world Iran possessed a nuclear weapons program – and legitimizing its assassinations of Iranian academics.

The Israeli assassination of Iranian defense official Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is being treated as a triumph of Israeli intelligence, with ubiquitous references in the New York Times and other major media outlets to the killing of”Iran’s top nuclear scientist”. In fact, Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency eliminated Fakhrizadeh, a defense official, despite the knowledge that its public depiction of him as the key architect of an Iranian nuclear weapons program was a deception.

For years, US media outlets have portrayed Fakhrizadeh as Iran’s equivalent to J. Robert Oppenheimer, marketing him to the public as the mastermind behind an Iranian version of the Manhattan Project. This image was developed primarily through a carefully constructed Israeli disinformation operation based on documents that displayed signs of fabrication.

Birth of a Mossad propaganda operation

The origin of the Mossad propaganda operation on Fakhrizadeh lies in the early 1990’s, when the US and Israel first developed suspicions of Iranian ambitions to develop a nuclear weapon. U.S., British, German and Israeli intelligence analysts had intercepted telexes from Sharif University about various”dual use”technologies — those that could be exploited in a nuclear program but also be applied for non-nuclear use.

Many of the telexes contained the number of an organization called Physics Research Center that operated under the watch of Iran’s Defense Ministry. The CIA and its allied intelligence agencies interpreted those intercepts as evidence that the Iranian military was running its own nuclear program, and thus that Iran was covertly seeking a nuclear weapons capability.

During the first term of the George W. Bush administration, the notorious militarist and Likud ally John Bolton took charge of Iran policy, prompting the CIA to issue an estimate concluding for the first time that Iran had initiated a nuclear weapons program. Israel’s Mossad apparently saw Washington’s new posture as a green light to set into motion a black propaganda campaign to dramatize and personalize the secret Iranian nuclear weapons program that was presumed to exist.

Between 2003 and 2004, Mossad produced a large cache of alleged Iranian documents depicting efforts to mate a nuclear weapon with Iran’s Shahab-3 missile and a bench system to convert uranium.

The Mossad files contained multiple tell-tale signs of forgery. For example, the reentry vehicle depicted in the drawings had already been abandoned by 2002 – before these drawings were supposedly created, according to the documents themselves – in favor of a design that looked entirely different and which was first shown in an August 2004 test. So whoever was responsible for the drawings was clearly unaware of the single most important Defense Ministry decision affecting the future of Iran’s missile deterrent.

The CIA never revealed who spirited the documents out of Iran or how. However, former senior German Foreign Office official Karsten Voigt explained to this reporter in 2013 that the German intelligence agency, the BND, had been furnished with the collection by an occasional source whom the intel chiefs considered less than credible.

And who was this source? According to Voigt, he belonged to the Mujahedeen e-Khalq (MEK), the exile Iranian cult which had fought for Saddam’s Iraqi forces against Iran during the eight-year war and by the early 1990s was passing information and propaganda that Mossad did not want to have attributed to itself.

Painting Fakrhizadeh as nuclear mastermind

Those Mossad documents identified Mohsen Fakhrizadeh as the manager of a supposedly top-secret Iranian project called the”AMAD Plan.”In reality, Fakhrizadeh was an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officer and official in the Ministry of Defense Armed Forces Logistics (MODAFL), who also taught Physics at Imam Hussein University in Tehran.

To implicate him as a nuclear project mastermind, the collection of Mossad documents featured a directive supposedly signed by Fakhrizadeh. But since no one outside Iran had ever seen the previously obscure official’s signature, and given the lack of effort to show any official government markings on the documents, there was little to prevent Mossad from forging it.

In their 2012 history of Israel’s intelligence service,”Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service”, Michael Bar-Zohar and Nisham Mishal pointed to Mossad as the culprit behind the appearance of the supposed Iranian nuclear documents. The writers recounted how Mossad gathered the personal information on Fakhrizadeh that was later released to the public through the MEK, including his passport number and his home telephone number.

“This abundance of detail and means of transmission,”Bar-Zohar and Mishal wrote,”leads one to believe that… ‘a certain secret service’ ever suspected by the West of pursuing its own agenda, painstakingly collected these facts and figures about the Iranian scientist and passed them on to the Iranian resistance [MEK].”

The documents also fingered Fakhrizadeh as the former head of the Physics Research Centre, thus deceptively linking him to the procurement efforts for”dual use”nuclear items in 1990-91 that were well known to CIA and other intelligence agencies. That accusation was reflected in the 2006 United Nations Security Council Resolution 1747 listing Iranian officials responsible for nuclear and missile proliferation in Iran. In the UN resolution, Fakhrizadeh was identified as a”[s]enior MODAFL scientist and former head of the Physics Research Centre (PHRC).”

But the Israeli identification of Fakhrizadeh as the head of the PHRC was proven to be a lie. Iran turned over extensive documentation to the IAEA in late 2004 or early 2005 on the PHRC and the procurement telexes, and the documents — which the IAEA did not challenge — showing that a professor at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran named Sayyed Abbas Shahmoradi-Zavari had headed the PHRC from its inception in 1989 until it closed in 1998.

Further, the documents provided to the IAEA revealed that the dual-use technology that Shahmoradi-Zavari helped the university procure through his PHRC connections was actually intended for the university faculty’s own teaching and research. In at least one case, the IAEA personnel found one”dual-use”item had been procured by the university.

These facts should have put an end to the Mossad-created myth of Fakrizadeh as the head of a vast underground nuclear weapons program. But the IAEA never revealed Shamoradi-Zavari’s name, and therefore avoided having to acknowledge that the documents the agency had embraced as genuine had misled the world about Fakhrizadeh.

It was not until 2012 that David Albright, the director of Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, acknowledged that Shahmoradi-Zavari — not Fakhrizadeh — had been the head of the Physics Research Center – although he avoided admitting that the IAEA had relied on documents that turned out be false.

Revving up the propaganda

The Mossad got busy again after the CIA’s November 2007 assessment that Iran had ceased work on nuclear weapons. Determined to neutralize the political impact of that finding, the Israelis apparently began work on a new batch of Iranian top secret documents. This time, however, the Israelis provided the documents directly to the IAEA in late 2009, as then-IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei revealed in his memoirs.

The documents supposedly revealed Iranian defense ministry activities related to nuclear weapons after the cessation of such work that the CIA. One of those documents, leaked to the London Times in December 2009, purported to be a 2007 letter from Fakhrizadeh as the chairman of an organization presiding over nuclear weapons work. But as ElBaradei recalled, the IAEA’s technical experts”raised numerous questions about the documents’ authenticity….”

Even the CIA and some European intelligence analysts were skeptical about the authenticity of the Fakhrizadeh document. Although it had been circulating among the intelligence agencies for months, even the normally unquestioning New York Times reported that the CIA had not authenticated it. Former CIA counterterrorism official Philip Giraldi, who had maintained contacts with active agency personnel, told this reporter CIA analysts regarded the document as a forgery.

A pattern of assassinations justified by disinformation

The killing of Fakhrizadeh was not the first time Mossad bumped off an Iranian it had baselessly accused of playing a leading role in a weapons program. In July 2011, someone working for Mossad — apparently an MEK member — gunned down a 35-year old engineering student named Darioush Rezaeinejad and wounded his wife in front of a kindergarten in Tehran.

The young man was targeted on the basis of nothing more than the research he had conducted on high-voltage switches and his publication of a scholarly paper about his scholarship. The abstract of the professional paper Rezaienejad had published made it clear that his work involved what is called”explosive pulsed power”involved in high-power lasers, high-power microwave sources and other commercial applications.

A few days after the assassination of Rezaienejad, however, an official of an unnamed”member state”provided Associated Press reporter George Jahn the abstract of Rezaienejad’s paper, successfully persuading Jahn that it”appeared to back”the claim that he had been”working on a key component in setting off the explosives needed to trigger a nuclear warhead.”

Then, in September 2011, the Israelis provided Jahn with an”intelligence summary”advancing the ludicrous claim that Rezaeinejad was not an electrical engineering specialist at all, but rather a”physicist”who had worked for the Ministry of Defense on various aspects of nuclear weapons.

The deployment of absurd assertions backed by paper-thin evidence to justify the cold-blooded murder of a young electrical engineer with no record of nuclear weapons involvement illuminated a Mossad modus operandi that has reappeared in the case of Fakhrizadeh: Israeli intelligence simply gins up a narrative centered around fictional ties to a nonexistent nuclear weapons program. It then watches as the Western press uncritically disseminates the propaganda to the public, establishing the political space for cold-blooded assassinations in broad daylight.

Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist who has covered national security policy since 2005 and was the recipient of Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2012. His most recent book is The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis co-authored with John Kiriakou, just published in February.

By Gareth Porter –  The Greyzone

Israel and Trump are deliberately trying to provoke a crisis for the next president to inherit. Lifting unilateral U.S. sanctions is the key to foiling Trump’s attempt to handcuff the new administration.

Imagine for a moment what would happen if unknown assassins murdered a high-ranking U.S. scientist involved with chemical weapons. Let’s say officials in Iran quietly took responsibility, arguing that the United States had violated international law because it continues to hold stockpiles of mustard gas and nerve agents VX and sarin, despite numerous commitments to destroy them starting in the late 1990s.

Compare that fictional assassination with Israel’s actual assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a prominent Iranian scientist described as the”father of the Iranian bomb.”The fictional and real murders are analogous with an important exception: The United States has had a chemical weapons program since 1917. Iran has no nuclear weapons program.

In its waning days, the Trump Administration gave Israel the go ahead to provoke a crisis.

If the Iranian government assassinated a U.S. military or scientific leader, professor Joshua Landis, director of the Farzaneh Family Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at the University of Oklahoma, tells me,”It would cause absolute outrage and very swift retribution.”

On November 27, Fakhrizadeh, a military leader and professor, was killed while on his way to visit relatives outside Tehran. The New York Times cites intelligence sources who identify Israel as responsible for the attack.
“People are angry,”professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi tells me from Tehran. He’s chair of the American Studies Department at the University of Tehran.”People expect retaliation, a lethal strike on Israeli targets,”he says.

While the nature of the military response is unclear, Marandi says,”There will be decreased cooperation with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and increased enrichment of uranium.”

On December 2, the Iranian parliament voted to increase its uranium stockpiles to a higher level than needed for nuclear power generation, but still below the level to build a bomb. It also gave Washington until early February to lift economic sanctions or Iran would bar IAEA inspectors from entering Iran.

It seems obvious to me that in its waning days, the Trump Administration gave Israel the go ahead to provoke a crisis. Trump and Netanyahu hope to handcuff President-elect Joe Biden in future dealings with Iran.

I well remember the days leading up to the 2003 U.S. occupation of Iraq, when I explained that Saddam Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction and wasn’t a threat to the American people.

Now I’m doing it all over again with Iran, except Washington is waging covert, not overt, war against Iran. Based on reporting in Israel and Iran, I wrote in my book, The Iran Agenda Today, that U.S. and Israeli officials know perfectly well that Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program.

U.S. and Israeli officials know perfectly well that Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program… Israel has an estimated 200 nuclear bombs capable of destroying Iran.

Don’t take my word for it. In two separate reports, the CIA and major U.S. intelligence agencies found that Iran has had no nuclear weapons program since 2003. Iranian leaders say they never had a nuclear weapons program at all.

The Netanyahu regime in Tel Aviv never accepted the CIA position, arguing Tehran continued a secret program even after signing the nuclear accord. Netanyahu says that in 2018 Israel took documents from a Tehran warehouse proving Iran continued its weapons program and even mentioned Mohsen Fakhrizadeh by name.

Critics say the warehouse story doesn’t hold up, noting that the documents revealed so far don’t even have Iranian government markings. And no independent, Farsi-speaking experts have been allowed to conduct a forensic analysis of the original documents.

Israel, which secretly developed nuclear weapons in the 1960s, is hardly in a position to criticize Iran. Israel has an estimated 200 nuclear bombs capable of destroying Iran and any Arab country seen as the enemy du jour. Now Netanyahu seems determined to blow up the potential of relations between the United States and Iran, and prevent resumption of the nuclear accord.

According to professor Marandi, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) is suspected of having actually killed Fakhrizadeh.”The MEK works with the United States and Israel,”he says.”Teams from MEK have been involved in the past.”

From 2007-12, Israel used the MEK to carry out sophisticated assassinations of five nuclear scientists inside Iran, as reported in the Christian Science Monitor. The Israeli Mossad trained members of the MEK to carry out the hits.

The MEK began in the 1970s as a revolutionary group opposed to the Shah’s dictatorship. But it fought alongside Saddam Hussein’s troops during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, earning the permanent enmity of most Iranians.

Both Republican and Democratic hawks want to squeeze more concessions from a weakened Iran by demanding a ban on certain conventional missiles and other issues previously rejected by Iran.

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, the MEK switched sides again and allied with Washington and Tel Aviv. It doesn’t allow its members to marry and keeps them isolated from the outside world.

“MEK is a cult and terrorist organization,”Marandi says.

The Trump Administration has squandered resources and wrecked alliances with the Europeans in its failed”maximum pressure”campaign against Iran, says professor Landis.

“America needs a deal,”he continues.”U.S. supremacy in the world has taken a nosedive. Other powers are successfully competing with the U.S. The U.S. is bogged down in the Middle East and needs to avoid nuclear proliferation in the region without going to war with Iran.”

But both Republican and Democratic hawks want to squeeze more concessions from a weakened Iran by demanding a ban on certain conventional missiles and other issues previously rejected by Iran. Possible Iranian retaliation for the Fakhrizadeh assassination would complicate matters even further.

Marandi thinks the Biden Administration should rejoin the accord, regardless of what actions Iran may take in response to the assassination.”Responding to the terrorist attack and waiting for Biden to abide by the nuclear deal, these are two separate issues,”he says.”If Biden chooses to implement the deal, that’s fine with Iran.”

But hardliners in Iran argue that Washington can’t be trusted, and they oppose reopening talks. They advocate a”resistance economy,”combating the effect of U.S. sanctions by producing more products at home, and forging closer alliances with Russia and China. Hardliners are known as principalists because they claim to uphold the Islamic principles of the Iranian Revolution.

Washington can show good faith by lifting sanctions prior to opening negotiations. Then both sides could work out such details as destroying the excess enriched uranium and arranging for frequent international inspections.
“The principalists were defying the nuclear accord from day number one,”a highly placed Iranian journalist tells me from Tehran. Trump and Netanyahu were”a divine gift to them. The assassination of Fakhrizadeh gives them leverage against the moderates in Iran and makes problems for Biden.”

Marandi explains,”It’s widely believed in Iran that Biden won’t fully implement the deal and abide by U.S. commitments. We’ll have to see.”

I think Washington can show good faith by lifting sanctions prior to opening negotiations. Then both sides could work out such details as destroying the excess enriched uranium and arranging for frequent international inspections.

Iranians are waiting for Biden to make the first move after his Inauguration on January 20, 2021. Lifting unilateral U.S. sanctions is the key to foiling Trump’s attempt to handcuff the new administration. We’ll see if Biden finds a good locksmith.

The Progressive – By Reese Erlich

Reese Erlich’s syndicated column, Foreign Correspondent, appears every two weeks. His books include”The Iran Agenda Today: The Real Story from Inside Iran and What’s Wrong with US Policy”­(2018) and”Inside Syria: The Backstory of Their Civil War and What the World Can Expect”(2016). See his website or follow him on Twitter: @ReeseErlich