An Iranian-born Pentagon official will keep her high-level security clearance despite being named part of a covert influence campaign run by Tehran and being called a “spy” by Republicans.
Ariane Tabatabai appeared to be a recruit willing to take part in the covert influence operation run by Tehran’s Foreign Ministry, according to a trove of leaked files revealed last month by Semafor.
She was previously a key aide to suspended Iran envoy Robert Malley, whose secret ties to Tehran caused an uproar in Congress.
Since early 2022, Tabatabai has been chief of staff to the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, Christopher P. Maier.
Malley was quietly placed on unpaid leave in June for his alleged mishandling of “protected material.”
But the Pentagon will allow Tabatabai, 38, to keep his $153,434-a-year job, along with his top-secret security clearance, the Washington Free Beacon reported Wednesday.
Tabatabai (circled) was on the US negotiating team on the Iran nuclear deal in July 2021 when it held talks with the Russian side. @Amb_Ulyanov/X Former Tabatabai boss Robert Malley has been suspended from his role as the Biden administration’s envoy to Iran, with a new trove of emails suggesting he was part of a pressure campaign by Iran to get its way. yours.AFP via Getty Images
“EM. Tabatabai’s employment and clearance processes were conducted in accordance with all appropriate laws and policies,” Pentagon official Rheanne E. Wirkkala wrote to Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) last week.
Republicans reacted furiously to the news that Tabatabai will keep her job (and her access to the Pentagon’s most sensitive secrets) and called her an Iranian “spy.”
““Biden’s Defense Department REFUSES to revoke the security clearance of an Iranian spy working in the Pentagon,” Ernst wrote in X. “More of the POTUS appeasement strategy that has emboldened [Iran] and its proxies, such as Hamas, and threatened our national security.”
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said he may subpoena Tabatabai as part of his committee’s investigation into Malley.
Iowa Republican Senator Joni Ernst called Tabatabai a “spy” in a message posted on X, formerly Twitter. Joni Ernst/X Malley (circled) was part of the team, led by then-Secretary of State John Kerry, that negotiated the Iran Deal. nuclear deal.ZUMAPRESS.com
A Pentagon official told the Post: “The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency has enrolled all Department of Defense service members, civilians and contractors with a security clearance in its continuing vetting program, which is a process that involves periodically reviewing the background of a cleared individual to ensure they continue to meet security clearance requirements and can continue to hold positions of trust.”
Tabatabai, 38, who grew up in Tehran as the daughter of one of the country’s leading political thinkers, has openly argued that Iran is “too powerful to contain” and has urged the United States to align with the Islamic republic and break its ties with Israel and the Gulf States, for the United States’ own good.
Her background and writings cast doubt on the wisdom of the Pentagon’s defense of the Iranian-born Tabatabai, whose Pentagon position gives her access to critical U.S. military intelligence.
Javad Tabatabai (right) was one of Iran’s most prominent post-revolutionary legal and political thinkers until his death this year. He held a high position at the University of Tehran and was close to two Iranian presidents. @HeshmatAlavi / X
Tabatabai, a U.S. citizen born in Tehran, recalled Iran as “a country where you learn to hate ‘Zionists’ before you can spell the word” in a 2014 Tumblr post, though she also claimed not to “want anything to do with it.” ”. with none of that.”
His father, political philosopher Javad Tabatabai, was one of Iran’s most celebrated thinkers before his death in February.
“My childhood… was dominated by politics,” he wrote.
Javad Tabatabai, a former Iranian army propaganda corps officer, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he developed a theory of Iranian supremacy, and became vice dean of the Faculty of Law at Tehran State University after the Iranian Revolution. 1979.
When he was overthrown in 1993, Tabatabai followed his father as he served as a visiting scholar in Germany, France and the United States.
Then-Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was close to Javad Tabatabai and presented him with an award at a ceremony in 2019.Mehr News Agency/Creative Commons
After graduating from SUNY Stony Brook in 2008, he returned to Iran, where his father had slowly regained favor with the regime.
He became an advisor to President Muhammad Khatami and was apparently close to President Hassan Rouhani, who presented him with an award in 2019.
In 2014, less than a year into Rouhani’s first term, Tabatabai was one of three Western academics quietly invited by the Iranian Foreign Ministry to help form a secret influence group, the Iran Experts Initiative, according to reports. leaked documents.
The IEI, organized by Mostafa Zahrani, head of the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s main think tank, aimed to boost public acceptance of then-US President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), through an aggressive media campaign.
At that time, Tabatabai was a perpetual student at 29 years old. She had earned a master’s degree from King’s College London, but she was still pursuing her PhD as a predoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, two of which were inspected in June by its supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were simply boosting civilian nuclear power plans, argued Tabatabai.via REUTERS
Within weeks of the IEI’s formation, Tabatabai apparently complied: he sent Zahrani articles he wrote in the Boston Globe and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in which he claimed that Iran needed nuclear capabilities not for weapons but for the “production of radioisotopes.” for medical purposes.” and for “desalination, a process that consumes a lot of energy.”
His goal, he explained to Zahrani, “was to demonstrate… that Iran should not be expected to reduce the number of its centrifuges” in the ongoing nuclear negotiations.
He met face-to-face with senior Iranian officials, including then-Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, to obtain quotes for a January 2015 article he published in the journal International Affairs, a coup for a doctoral candidate.
Meanwhile, the documents show, he used his Harvard email address to seek Zahrani’s approval for his attendance at international conferences, and even to solicit her help as he crafted testimony to present at a U.S. congressional hearing on the deal. nuclear.
Mostafa Zahrani, head of the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s main think tank, and Tabatabai emailed each other repeatedly, leaked correspondence revealed, and she sought his approval to attend international conferences. Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA/Shutterstock
“I will bother you in the next few days,” he wrote, confident that his task before the committee “will be a little difficult” because his fellow witnesses “do not have favorable opinions about Iran.”
“This is how recruited assets talk to their management officers,” former CIA analyst Peter Theroux told Tablet magazine after reviewing the email chain.
As the IEI sought to influence public opinion, Tabatabai’s career took off.
She became a visiting assistant professor at Georgetown University, completed her PhD in war studies at King’s College London, and established herself as a frequent guest on NPR, the BBC, Al Jazeera, and more, apparently never revealing her connection to the regime of the mullahs.
In a single week in April 2015, as the Iran deal was nearing completion, he published four articles in influential publications such as Foreign Policy and attended multiple interviews, much to the delight of his contacts in Tehran, emails show.
Tabatabai argued that Iran could accept restrictions on the distances its missiles could travel, not to mention the threat they could pose to Israel.
“With or without a deal, Iran is a force to be reckoned with in the Middle East,” he wrote in the National Interest in an analysis titled “Mission Impossible: Iran is Too Powerful to Contain.”
IEI activities faded once the JCPOA was adopted on July 14, 2015, but Tabatabai continued to rise.
Over the next five years, he held prominent positions at a number of major universities and think tanks, and at each stop he expressed his sympathies for Iran.
““The balance of power is really what Iran has been seeking,” he insisted in November 2018, shortly after former President Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA and imposed “maximum pressure” sanctions on Tehran.
Some of the Israeli civilians killed by Hamas gunmen in the Gaza Strip, at Kibbutz Kfar Aza, southern Israel, on October 10, 2023. Tabatabai argued that Iran’s support for Hamas was the fault of the United States .REUTERS
In fact, he argued, Iran’s support for “non-state actors, terrorist groups, militias and insurgents” was all the fault of the United States.
“Iran’s relations with these actors” – including Hamas and Hezbollah – “are largely based on Iran’s need to overcome isolation,” Tabatabai said at the Middle East Institute.
“You know, we can’t ask Iran to abandon all missile activity in the future,” he said in October 2019 at the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress.
“Areas of potential agreement could lie in the types of missiles Iran might agree to have, Tabatabai suggested, not to mention the threat such weapons would pose to Israel, 1,100 miles (1,700 kilometers) from Iran’s border.
““It is clear that everyone wants a missile program, but it is not clear how far these missiles should be able to go,” he continued. “The supreme leader has said 2,000 kilometers, others have said 5,000… those are places to look at and think about.”
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Source: vtt.edu.vn