Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Iran group finds allies in White House
But US still wary of opposition once deemed terrorists
For decades, the United States categorized the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, or MEK, as a terrorist organization. In the Trump era, members of the Iranian dissident group, which seeks to topple the government in Iran, have found key allies in Washington.
People close to President Donald Trump, including national security adviser John Bolton, and Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, are supporters of the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq. For years, Bolton and Giuliani have called for a change of government in Tehran and have described the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq as a viable alternative to the government of the Islamic Republic.
Last month, Giuliani appeared at a Mujahedeen-eKhalq conference in Albania, where he condemned the Islamic Republic and described the Mujahedeene-Khalq as a “government in exile.”
“This is a group that we can support. It’s a group we should stop maligning and it’s a group that should make us comfortable having regime change,” Giuliani said to a cheering audience.
During a 2017 Mujahedeen-e-Khalq conference in Paris, Bolton told a room of members that U.S. policy should be “the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran.”
He added, “There is a viable opposition to the rule of the ayatollahs and that opposition is centered in this room today.”
Giuliani and Bolton have received tens of thousands of dollars from the group in exchange for speaking at its rallies and conferences.
Founded five decades ago by leftist students in Iran who opposed the Western-backed monarchy of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Mujahedeen-eKhalq is an insular organization with a militant past. Many Iranians despise the group and from 1997 to 2012, it was on the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist organizations in part because of its bloody attacks in the 1970s that left American diplomats and businessmen dead.
The Mujahedeen-eKhalq and its supporters claim that the group stands for a free and democratic Iran and that its decadeslong struggle has helped make it the most qualified opposition group.
But critics and human rights organizations describe the Mujahedeen-eKhalq as a cult, and many lawmakers and State Department officials don’t believe it has popular support or influence.
The group has a history of networking with U.S. politicians on both ends of the political spectrum.
“Different people come and go with each administration. We’ve had the same position and demands over the years no matter who is in the White House,” said Alireza Jafarzadeh, deputy director of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a Mujahedeen-eKhalq -linked group based in Washington.
But despite its continued lack of support among many in Washington, the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq feels emboldened now that tensions with Tehran have escalated and it has key supporters who have Trump’s ear.
“I can’t recall in the past 40 years seeing such a two-year period where there’s been lots of developments shaping Iran,” Jafarzadeh said.
The Mujahedeen-eKhalq, founded in the early 1960s by husband-and-wife Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, carried out a series of terrorist attacks during the 1970s against Iran in which several U.S. military personnel and civilians who were working on defense projects in Tehran were killed, according to a 1994 U.S. State Department report.
The group also helped the country’s Shiite Muslim clerics topple the shah during the 1979 revolution. But it didn’t take long before the newly formed conservative theocracy headed by antiWestern Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to view the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq as a rival. About 2,000 members of the group relocated to Iraq during the 1980s.
In addition to providing shelter, then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein armed the group with heavy military equipment. During the Iran-Iraq War, its members teamed with Baghdad in an attempt to take down the Islamic Republic. Iraq remained a haven for the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq for nearly two decades.
Throughout that time, the group continued to launch attacks inside Iran and on its embassies abroad. The State Department described the Mujahedeen-eKhalq in its 1994 report as “the single most violent underground group” in Iran.
U.S. relations with the group, however, grew complicated after the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Although the group disarmed and was confined to Camp Ashraf, a 14 squaremile former Iraqi military base, the new Iraqi government wanted its members to leave. Faced with a potential humanitarian crisis, officials in Washington sought to find the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq a new home.
Daniel Benjamin, the State Department counterterrorism coordinator under then-President Barack Obama, said that was a factor in removing the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq from its list of foreign terrorist groups.
“All these people were the subject of violence, that’s what really caused the U.S. to look at the issue to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe,” Benjamin said.
Eventually the U.S. brokered a deal with the government of Albania.
Their future nevertheless looked grim up until after the presidential election in 2016, when Trump’s “maximum pressure campaign” on Iran became American policy.
Already, several policies that the Mujahedeen-eKhalq had long advocated for, such as designating Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group and placing U.S. sanctions on Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have been implemented under Trump.
But the extent to which the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq can gain stronger credibility in Washington — even during the Trump administration — remains uncertain.
“The MEK has American blood on its hands. No serious observer or scholar of the region that I’ve met has thought that the MEK was remotely acceptable to any significant percentage of the Iranian people,” Benjamin said.
And in recent months some officials in the Trump administration have taken steps to distance it from the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq.
In April, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met privately with a small group of Iranian Americans in Dallas. Michael Payma, an attorney, was one of those people invited to attend the roughly hourlong conversation.
“Pompeo said he knows Giuliani and Bolton have had some kind of relationship with the MEK, but he made it clear that neither him nor the president have any association with the group,” Payma recalled.
In June, Brian Hook, U.S. special representative for Iran, reiterated those points.