Clinton, Christopher and Rafsanjani: Irangate Déjà Vu?

By Richard H. Curtiss

A very strange thing happened nine years ago at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing. At the end of his prepared testimony on July 24, 1985, then-Assistant Secretary of State for Near East and South Asian Affairs Richard Murphy read into the record an unrelated statement about the Mojahedin Khalq—the People's Mojahedin of Iran.

The unsolicited statement strongly criticized the most prominent group in opposition to the Islamic revolutionary government of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as "militantly Islamic, anti-democratic, anti-American" and supportive of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and of the use of "terrorism and violence as standard instruments of their policies."

It was jarring both because it had no relationship to information normally sought by members of the congressional committee and because, with the possible exception of the reference to Afghanistan, it could more accurately have been applied to the Iranian government than to its Mojahedin opponents. A few journalists also found it surprising because, only a month before, when the resistance group had organized anti-Khomeini demonstrations in several world capitals, including Washington, DC, individual members of Congress, concerned about the Iranian government's key role in the holding of American hostages in Lebanon, had sent messages of support. The congressional messages had commended this principal Iranian opposition group for publicly pledging protection for Iran's ethnic and religious minorities, equal rights for women, and free and democratic elections. At the time, however, few U.S. journalists pursued the matter.

As a result, it was not until the Irangate scandal hit the headlines, and nationally televised congressional hearings began to unravel the tangled skein of the Reagan administration's controversial overture to Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani's "moderates" within the Khomeini government, that the truth emerged about the Murphy statement, and subsequent attempts to discredit the members of Congress who had endorsed the Mojahedin.

The statement, according to the Tower Commission Report, was part of the price demanded by Iranian mullahs for participation in what quickly degenerated into Israeli-brokered arms-for-hostages transactions. Murphy, according to Irangate independent counsel Lawrence Walsh's 1993 report, was one of the nine U.S. government players in the Irangate scandal.

In fact, when it seemed to have served its purpose, Murphy briefly backed down from his earlier statement. He told a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on April 21, 1987, "I will very freely admit that there were gaps in our knowledge about the organization...We meet, have met with the Mojahedin Organization here in Washington. They are a player in Iran...We are not boycotting them."

However, in that same month, Rafsanjani, then the speaker of the Majlis, Iran's parliament, said in a statement reported by United Press that if the U.S. government were to restrain the activities of the anti-Khomeini People's Mojahedin, the Iranian government would end its support of terrorist groups in Lebanon. Whether by coincidence or not, very soon thereafter, the State Department informed the Mojahedin that it was no longer welcome to meet and talk with Department of State officials. The de facto State Department boycott on contacts with the Mojahedin has been in effect ever since.

To American journalists, all this is ancient history, even if they have never reported any of it in the U.S. mainstream press. It is a history that has taken a worrisome turn, however, to Washington-based officials of the People's Mojahedin, most of whom have been subsumed into the structure of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCR), an umbrella organization for several Iranian opposition groups in which members of the People's Mojahedin play key—some say dominant—roles. They fear that the State Department again is about to sacrifice them as the pawn in yet another initiative not just to any "moderates" in Iran's Islamic Revolutionary government, but to the very same "moderate" involved in Irangate, Iran's President Rafsanjani.

To explain their worry, National Council of Resistance officials cite as an example of Rafsanjani's "moderation" a statement he made on Oct. 3, 1981 about the People's Mojahedin:

Divine law defines our sentences for them, which must be carried out: 1. Kill them. 2. Hang them. 3. Cut off their arms and legs. 4. Banish them. Had we caught and executed 200 of them just after the Revolution, they would not have multiplied so much. If we don't deal decisively with the [Mojahedin] armed grouplet and agents of America and the Soviet Union today, in three years we will have to execute thousands of them instead of one thousand now.

The statement was made after armed thugs supporting Khomeini broke up a July 20, 1981 demonstration in Tehran by half a million Mojahedin supporters by killing dozens and arresting hundreds, allegedly executing them on the same evening without even recording their identities. It marked the final break between Khomeini's followers and the followers of Mojahedin leader Masoud Rajavi, all of whom had been part of the mass uprising that ousted the Shah of Iran two and a half years earlier. Since then, Rafsanjani's threats have been carried out, literally. The NCR charges that the mullahs have executed 100,000 political prisoners, many in extraordinarily savage and gruesome ways, and jailed 150,000 more.

Among the victims was the first wife of Mojahedin leader Masoud Rajavi, killed in 1982 in a Khomeini police raid on her home. His sister was jailed in 1982 and killed in 1988 in the mass executions of political prisoners that followed the Khomeini regime's defeat in Iran's war with Iraq. His present wife, Maryam Rajavi, who is president of the NCR, had one sister executed by the shah's regime, and another sister arrested and tortured to death, along with the sister's husband, by the Khomeini regime in 1982, when the sister was six months pregnant.

Masoud Rajavi, who was barred from running for president of Iran by the Khomeini government in the elections that followed the shah's fall, fled the country in 1981. With him in an Iranian military jet flown by the shah's former personal pilot, who was a Mojahedin member, was Iran's then-President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, who also had come to fear for his life. For a time the two, who had become political rivals in the scramble for power after the shah's fall, became such close collaborators in exile in Paris that, after his wife's death in Tehran, Rajavi sealed the alliance by marrying Bani-Sadr's 18-year-old daughter. Later, however, the two leaders diverged over the war with Iraq and the marriage, like their alliance, unraveled.

A 1982 Iranian arrival in Paris was Maryam Azadanloo, a Mojahedin member since 1971 who had run for a parliamentary seat representing Tehran after the shah's fall. She fled the country to work against the Khomeini regime from abroad, and in 1986 married the once-widowed, once-divorced Mojahedin leader, who had spent eight years in the shah's jails, much of the time under a death sentence. Both know how statements like that extorted from Murphy are used in Iran to demoralize Mojahedin political prisoners and perhaps other opposition supporters hoping for deliverance from the "party of God" that for many Iranians has turned into a regime from hell.

Like its earlier chapters, this year's saga of Mojahedin relations with the U.S. government began in Congress, which last April asked President Clinton for submission of a report on the organization within 180 days. The request, in the form of an amendment to the State Department Authorization Bill for fiscal year 1995, specified that the report should have no pre-judgments, and that the "widest range of people possible should be consulted."

The request reflected ever-increasing interest within the Congress itself, which has been intensively cultivated by Mojahedin supporters, thousands of whom have been fleeing Iran as political exiles for more than a generation. Many are highly trained professionals who are well established throughout the United States.

There also has been intensive cultivation of some Americans by the Iranian government. Although Iran has no diplomatic relations with the U.S., the Forum on American-Iranian Relations (FAIR) registered in July 1992 to lobby for the Iranian government in the United States and it, too, is active on Capitol Hill. It also plays a role in maintaining the Iranian government's access to "Iran experts" in U.S. journalism and academia.

The Iranian government manipulates both through the time-honored device of granting or denying them visas to Iran. Those who return to write or say things favorable to the Iranian government get visas to visit again. Others lose their access. Soon the only "Iran experts" who have visited the country recently and to whom the media can turn are those who have proven friendly to the incumbent regime or, at least, not unduly repelled by its abysmal human rights record. Such manipulation of foreign "opinion molders" is a classical tactic of despotic regimes, and is by no means limited to the Middle East.

Down the Irangate Path

On Sept. 8, suspicion that the Clinton administration was about to take its own first step down the Irangate path led 12 senators and 98 House members to write Secretary of State Warren Christopher recommending that, since Congress desires "an accurate picture of the People's Mojahedin," he "ensure that representatives of the Mojahedin or National Council of Resistance are consulted directly by those who prepare the report."

The congressmen were supported by U.S. press comment, probably prompted by the Mojahedin's active Washington, DC press office.

In an editorial entitled "Listen to All Iranian Voices," The New York Times noted that "in dealing with a dictatorship, it is simple prudence to listen to its critics...It is especially distasteful that this boycott [of the Mojahedin] is treated as a victory by Iranian mullahs, who urge other states to have no contacts with Mr. Rajavi's 'terrorists.' This comes with special impudence from clergymen who clamor for the death of the novelist Salman Rushdie [and] who are plausibly linked with the murder of Iranian dissidents in France, Switzerland, Turkey and elsewhere."

At the same time, however, negative reports, perhaps inspired by State Department defenders of the boycott of the Mojahedin or by Iran's lobby, also have appeared in the U.S. press. Some repeat charges summed up by Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs Wendy Sherman in a June 26 letter responding to a request by Rep. Robert Torricelli (D- NJ) that the State Department's report provide "a new and honest evaluation of the activities of the People's Mojahedin of Iran."

Old and New Recriminations

Sherman's reply contained both old and new recriminations. The old ones were that "private U.S. citizens and U.S. military personnel were victims of Mojahedin terrorism in the 1970s," that "the group supported the takeover" of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979, that the group's military wing, the National Liberation Army, "is based in Iraq" and "funded and equipped by Saddam Hussain," that it "participated in Saddam's brutal suppression of Kurdish groups after Desert Storm" and that Masoud Rajavi "is based in Baghdad."

In response, Chairman Mohammad Mohaddessin of the NCR's Foreign Affairs Committee made available to Washington journalists a 161-page book, extensively footnoted and documented, responding to each of these charges. All political murders of U.S. personnel in Tehran took place, it points out, after August 1971, when "all leaders and most members of the Mojahedin, including Mr. Rajavi," were arrested by the shah's SAVAK internal security police. All of those Mojahedin leaders were executed, except Masoud Rajavi, whose death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment but who remained in prison until January 1979, a few days before the fall of the shah.

The book blames the murders of Americans on "individuals who had infiltrated in 1971-72" and "taking advantage of the execution and imprisonment of the Mojahedin's leaders...relinquished the Mojahedin's democratic and Islamic ideology in favor of Marxism, eliminated the Qur'anic verse from the Mojahedin emblem, and murdered the Mojahedin officials who had not been arrested." The book asserts that Rajavi condemned from jail the use of the Mojahedin name by the Marxists and "clearly demarcated the differences between the Mojahedin and this group." In any case, the group responsible for the killings of Americans changed its name in 1977 to Peykar, a Farsi acronym for "Organization of Struggle in the Path of Emancipation of the Working Class." There literally is no connection, the Mojahedin assert, between their own leaders of that time and since, and the Marxists who for six years assumed control of their organization, committed the political assassinations of Americans, and then moved on to create a Marxist group of their own.

Summarized, the Mojahedin answers to the other charges are that its members neither participated in nor denounced the occupation of the U.S. Embassy by organized student supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini (many of whom now are in the Iranian government's diplomatic and security services) because the Mojahedin members knew that to denounce the hostage taking would provide the Khomeini government the excuse to outlaw the Mojahedin; the NLF is based in Iraq in an area contiguous to Iran because that is the only way it can remain a viable threat to the present regime; Iraq provides the land but no funding and NLF equipment is former Iranian army equipment captured by the NLF itself during and immediately after the Iran-Iraq war; and that the NLF has had no military encounters with units loyal to Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani and that its sporadic encounters with units controlled by Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani began after 1985 during the Iraq-Iran war, when Talabani had thrown in his lot with the Iranian government, and the NLF was supporting the Iraqi government.

The most serious incident after Desert Storm occurred in March 1991, the Mojahedin claim, after the NLF had been attacked in Iraq by Iranian national guards. A platoon of 18 NLF fighters in four vehicles en route to the Iranian border strayed into Talabani-controlled territory. Sixteen of the soldiers were killed and two were captured and turned over by the Kurds to the Iranian government. Despite appeals for clemency by the International Red Cross, the two NLF prisoners were executed in Iran. Finally, the Mojahedin book declares, Masoud Rajavi now is based in Baghdad because, in an apparent attempt to improve its relations with the Iranian government, the French government strongly suggested that he leave France in 1986.

The State Department letter also charges that both the Mojahedin and National Council of Resistance "engage in political violence." Both organizations deny this. NLF incursions into Iran, including a final major penetration at the end of the Iraq-Iran war, in 1988, were open military operations. Again, accusations of political violence against the Mojahedin pale in comparison to Mojahedin charges that Iranian regime torturers, acting in the name of God, routinely rape teen-aged female political prisoners before executing them to "awaken sinful desire" and thereby send the souls of their victims to hell.

Other statements in the State Department letter are not so easily dealt with. Sherman charges that the NLF "fought alongside Iraq in its eight-year war with Iran" and that "these ties to Saddam have discredited the Mojahedin in the eyes of many in Iran; the organization does not represent a significant force among Iranians."

The Iran-Iraq War

The Mojahedin reply that, at the time of Saddam Hussain's attack on Iran in 1980, its members volunteered to defend their country and fought as Mojahedin units at the front, despite frequent harassment by Khomeini's Revolutionary Guards. After Iraq's initial military defeats, and Saddam's offer to withdraw his units from all parts of Iranian soil in return for peace, the Mojahedin counseled acceptance. Khomeini, whose hold on the country had been strengthened immeasurably by the invasion, chose instead to continue the war and launch his military forces into Iraq. It was at this time that the Mojahedin withdrew their support. (It also was during this latter phase of the Iran-Iraq war that the U.S. intervened decisively on the side of Iraq and its Arab backers by breaking the Iranian naval blockade of the Persian/Arab Gulf.)

As evidence that they only supported Iraq after Iran became the aggressor, the Mojahedin point out that many of their fighters are Mojahedin members who were captured by Iraqi forces early in the war and who joined the NLF rather than return to Iran at the time of the prisoner exchange at the war's end.

Still harder to deal with is Sherman's charge that "the claims of the National Council of Resistance that it is a democratic organization have never been substantiated by its actions" and "we have no reason to believe the NCR has become democratic, nor that an Iranian government established by the NCR would be."

These charges grow out of criticism that, as the years of exile have lengthened and the NLF fighters have aged, it has become increasingly difficult for those members who wish to leave, particularly those stationed in Iraq, to do so. Some who have left have been quoted as saying that life within the Mojahedin, and particularly within its NLF military arm, increasingly has taken on trappings of a cult of personality, dominated by Masoud Rajavi and his wife, Maryam, and that Maryam Rajavi's first husband was shunted aside within the organization to make way for her marriage to its veteran leader.

Whatever the truth of these allegations, which the Mojahedin attribute to manipulation by bribe or blackmail of former Mojahedin members by the Iranian regime, many Iranians in the United States also voice unease about the organization's leadership. "I agree with what they say they stand for, but I don't trust them" is a common complaint. It may reflect the years of strident anti-Mojahedin propaganda by the regime. Or it may be the natural reaction of people who saw the corrupt regime of an increasingly megalomanical shah replaced by the quarrelsome, quixotic and even bloodier rule of the mullahs, who have seriously disrupted the oil-fueled economy of what should be one of the Middle East's most prosperous countries.

The most casual American observer can see, too, that whereas once it was commonplace to see young, well-dressed and well-spoken Mojahedin supporters with their gruesome displays of Iranian government atrocities in the downtown streets of major American cities, such displays now are rare. This may reflect a decline in popular support for the Mojahedin among Iranians abroad, or just a decline in the revenues available to the organization.

At least as important as what Iran's huge exile population is saying is what the 60 million ethnically diverse people inside the country are thinking. That's not too difficult to ascertain. Telephone links with Iran remain open, and Iranians abroad chat regularly with the family members they left behind. There also is a steady two-way traffic of Iranians visiting relatives abroad and vice versa.

When the 110 members of Congress called upon the State Department Sept. 9 for a "thorough assessment of the situation in Iran and its major players," they said they did so to "enable us to adopt a comprehensive and suitable policy toward Iran." It seems obvious that the best way to comply is to listen carefully to what is being said by Iranians—all Iranians. Those who claim otherwise open themselves to the suspicion that they have a hidden agenda, just as did the participants in Irangate, the worst foreign policy scandal in American history, only nine years ago.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report.