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Propaganda Jamboree 06.14.15
10:10 PM ET
Iran’s Spies Tried to Recruit Me
Tehran could hardly see my work
as flattering—but a group with the Iranian intelligence service’s backing still
tried to enlist me in a conference against ‘Zionist State Terrorism.’
An Iranian activist group, backed by the
country’s intelligence service, is trying to enlist American journalists and
academics in a propaganda campaign meant to criticize the United States and
Israel. I speak from experience, because the group recently tried to recruit
me.
On May 23, I was contacted via email by a
representative of the “International Congress on 17000 Iranian Terror Victims,”
a self-professed nongovernmental organization that is busy planning its second
annual conference, to be
held in Tehran in August. My interlocutor invited me “to submit your creative
and scientific paper and gain opportunity to take part in the conference.”
I’d never heard of this group. But I get a
lot of invitations to write papers for organizations and conferences I’ve never
heard of. And I was curious what a call for papers from Iran would look like,
so I checked out the group’s website, which is slickly produced and almost
entirely in English. Among the themes this
year’s conference wants to explore are “Zionist State Terrorism against Iran,”
“Cyber Terrorism against Iran,” and “Economic Terrorism against Iran in the
Light of Sanctions.”
OK, I thought to
myself. You must have the wrong Shane Harris. I’m a journalist, not a
commentator. The bulk of my writing
on Iran has focused on what U.S. intelligence officials say about the the
country’s cyber espionage
and warfare
capabilities. The Iranian government could hardly see my work as flattering.
Also, the words “Zionist State” have never appeared under my byline
But then I looked closely at the list of
conference sponsors, which includes—among various religious groups, Iran’s only
broadcasting company, and a government council run by a senior adviser to
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As in the
ministry now negotiating with the U.S. over the future of Iran’s nuclear
program. Also, the head of Iran’s intelligence service spoke at last year’s event.
So a state-sponsored propaganda jamboree
propped up by Iranian diplomats and spies wanted me to publicly criticize U.S.
foreign policy and maybe even come to Tehran for their anti-West hate fest. In
my line of work, we call that a story. Of course I wrote back.
“Thank you for your email. What topics do
you think I would be well suited to write about? Did you have a topic in mind
that you think I should write about?”
A day later, I heard back from my would-be
publisher/host in Iran (who never identified himself or herself by name).
“We heave [sic] three offers for you:
●
Examine the us. and Israel campaign to undermine the Iranian nuclear program,
including state sponsored assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists and
sabotage of Iranian nuclear centrifuges.
●
Why is there a different us. attitude toward Israel’s substantial nuclear
arsenal compared to Iran’s?
●
Fueling Iranophobia under the pretext of “Diversion of Iran’s nuclear program
to military[.]”
How am I possibly the
right guy for this assignment? I thought. Now, I have written, most
recently in my second book, about U.S. cyber operations against the Iranian nuclear program.
Maybe they wanted me to write a straight article that they could then
selectively edit and contort into a screed against the American-Zionist cyber
war against the peaceful nuclear program of Iran. But “Iranophobia”? If this
was a lure, it was coming on a little strong.
Curious about this supposedly independent
organization’s other recruits, I scanned the website for past American
contributors. They weren’t hard to find, either on the site or in some of the
more colorful corners of the Internet.
There
was the Florida Atlantic Unversity professor who questions
whether the shootings
at the Sandy Hook Elementary School ever happened. The editor of a blog
called Truth Jihad who argues
that the 9/11 attack was an “inside job” that has been covered up by the media.
And a man who ran for president under the white supremacist American Freedom
Party, who said in an interview with the conference’s main organizer
that Iran had “courageously stood for its own best interests” in the face of
“Zionist elements [that] surreptiously [sic] control much of the American
landscape.”
This was one of the most ham-fisted
attempts at agitprop that I’ve ever seen. “Barking up the wrong tree” doesn’t
capture how utterly misguided I thought this invitation was. Nothing in the
thousands of articles I’ve written, or my two books, could persuade even a
delusional paranoiac that I’d consent to print my words next to the ramblings
of wackadoodle conspiracy theorists and inveterate racists.
Of course I wrote back!
In a series of subsequent emails, my
contact explained that top papers chosen by the organizers would be published
in a book and that “decision-making institutions will have access to it.” If I
wanted to attend the conference, “we will strive to facilitate it and provide
you funded travel to Iran.” The organizer also offered, in principle, to pay
me, but asked me to name my price first. (I didn’t.)
Throughout my exchange, the question of
who, exactly, was organizing this event was difficult to nail down. While the
conference has the support of high-level government officials and ministries,
it’s nominally run by a group called the Habilian Association.
That group is run by family members of
people who died in terrorist attacks, notably those that Habilian alleges were
committed by the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, or MEK, an exiled Iranian resistance group
that wants to see democratic, non-theocratic rule brought to Iran.
“Habilian is a group featuring a few MEK
defectors and run by the MOIS,” the acronym for the Iranian intelligence
service, Ali Alfoneh, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of
Democracies, a think tank in Washington, told me. “They have previously
produced English language booklets (in print) but this is the most professional
online English language material I have seen.” Another Iran analyst, who asked
me not to identify him, said Habilian has recently sent him several
well-designed and expensive-looking books, written in English, that he presumes
were paid for by the Iranian government. (Iran’s Fars news agency also publishes
a website in English, though the organization describes itself as independent
of the government.)
Habilian’s history with the MEK is only
part of its story, but it bears some emphasis. The MEK has many enemies in
Iran. And experts argue about what degree of popular support it enjoys. But
what’s beyond dispute is that Habilian and the MEK have a blood feud. Habilian
says the MEK is the terrorist organization responsible for so many of those
17,000 deaths, casualties in its quest to seize power. Habilian also views the
MEK as a co-belligerent with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq
war, which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in both countries.
The MEK counters that Habilian is a puppet
of the Iranian regime, which “has organized dozens of photo exhibitions,
published hundreds of books, and produced many television series in a futile
attempt to tarnish the image of the Iranian Resistance,” Ali Safavi, a member
of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran,
under which the MEK sits, told me. “Similarly, it has tried to influence
journalists, opinion leaders, and Iran observers through a steady diet of
misinformation disseminated by its paid and unpaid surrogates outside Iran.”
The MEK—which until 2012 the United States
officially listed as a terrorist organization—stages it own large conference
every year, in Paris, which draws a wide range of former U.S. officials, many
of whom are paid to give pro-MEK speeches. To Habilian, this probably looks as
one-sided and tendentious as its own rants against the Zionist-controlled media
and American foreign policy hypocrisy.
But the tit-for-tat between MEK and
Habilian doesn’t explain why the latter group has expanded its public efforts
beyond a relatively narrow set of grievances. What does criticizing American
cyber warfare efforts or Israel’s nuclear weapons program have to do with the
MEK and Iranian pro-democracy movements?
The answer may lie in the broader Iranian
effort to gin up new types of propaganda and public diplomacy, not all of which
are as boisterous and self-indulgent as the Congress on the 17,000 terror
victims.
“The [Iranian] system has an affinity for
pageantry in the form of conferences and congresses,” Suzanne Maloney, a senior
fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, told
me. “It’s possible that this is just a reflection of an overdeveloped
conference-organizing function within the government bureaucracy, but it’s also
a testament to the fact many Iranians believe that the world has consistently
disregarded their suffering, as during the war with Iraq.”
Habilian’s conference is certainly not the
first polemical pageant to condemn Israel and the West. The “New Horizon”
conference has brought together 9/11 truthers and Holocaust deniers to discuss “the untrustworthiness” of the U.S. and its four
European allies as negotiating partners over Iran’s nuclear program, “as well
as their hypocrisy, and lack of sincerity” and “Israel’s role in originating
this manufactured crisis.” Last year’s event drew anti-Semites who claimed the
Holocaust never happened, and it even attracted one American journalist, Gareth
Porter, who later told BuzzFeed News he’d been snookered into attending the
event by conference organizers who misled him about the kinds of characters it
attracts.
Iran has also sought to turn what it sees
as anti-Muslim rhetoric against those who wield it. Following the attacks on
the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, and the magazine’s subsequent
decision to draw Muhammad weeping on its next cover, two government-sponsored
arts organizations in Iran announced an editorial cartoon contest based on the
theme of Holocaust denial. It was actually the second such competition—the
first was held in 2006, after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ran a
depiction of Muhammad. Contest entries portrayed the Holocaust both as a
fiction and as an event that, even if it were true, pales in comparison to the
atrocities Israel has committed against Palestinians.
But contrast these decidedly unsubtle
attempts at public debate with the use of social media by Iran’s leaders.
President Hassan Rouhani’s Twitter account is filled not with anti-Jewish diatribes
and truther pablum but with images of him receiving foreign ambassadors,
reports on meetings with other world leaders, and retweets of his foreign
minister, Javad Zarif,
who tweets optimistically about negotiations with his Ameican counterparts, not
their alleged efforts to undermine his country with a manufactured crisis.
Zarif isn’t trying to dupe American journalists and thinkers into writing
pro-Iran propaganda. He’s sitting down with them to discuss the future of global power.
And yet Zarif and his colleagues in the
Iranian leadership are throwing their weight behind a conference that is so
hopelessly biased it can be instantly discredited by the very people it seems
meant to reach.
Iran experts and former U.S. intelligence
officials I talked to said it was difficult to know for sure what the Congress
on the 17,000’s goal really is. I had initially suspected that maybe the
conference invitation was an elaborate ruse to get me to travel to Iran, where
intelligence officials would seek to recruit me. Two former U.S. intelligence
officials told me that recruiting journalists, especially under the guise of
some kind of conference or event, was an old trick straight out of the spy
handbook, deployed by the Russians and even Mossad, the Israeli intelligence
service.
But this conference’s strategy seemed more
of a piece with a propaganda campaign that has already managed to enlist some
very outspoken Americans willing to criticize their own government—however
bizarre I may think those criticisms are.
“This would appear to be an attempt to
take the discourse around terrorism, which since 1979 has been used as a
political and rhetorical instrument against the Islamic Republic, and
rearticulate it in a way in which Iran is a victim rather than a perpetrator of
terrorism,” Farzan Sabet, an Iran analyst and visiting fellow at Georgetown
University, told me.
“Given that the Islamic State’s violence
has caught the world’s attention, many in Iran (and their supporters in D.C.) see
this as an opportunity to recast Iran as a partner against terrorism rather
than a foe,” Sabet said.
If that’s true, Iran really needs to up
its game. But there are signs it’s trying. Last month, one of the
state-sponsored groups that put on the Holocaust denial cartoon contest
announced a new competition, this time to mock the self-proclaimed Islamic
State, also known as ISIS. It’s an old tactic—with a crude pedigree—but this
time with a new target, one the U.S. hates as much as Iran.
As inartful and chest-thumping as the
Congress on the 17,000 seems, it’s not the only play Iran is running. Maybe the
propagandists in Tehran aren’t so clumsy after all. Somewhere on the spectrum
of racist rallies and diplomatic Twitter accounts, they might just find a
message that works.
But to the interlocutor who thought it was
worth the time to try to recruit me, I have to ask: Seriously?!
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