Iranian Agent Hides in Washington Post as U.S. Prof
The following letter to the editor was sent to The Washington Post, but went unpublished:
“Aug. 31, 2015
Letter to the Editor
The Washington Post
Washington, D.C.
Dear Editor:
The Washington Post identifies Op-Ed writer Seyed Hossein Mousavian (“The new pragmatism in Iran,” August 30) as “a research scholar at Princeton University and a former spokesman for Iran’s nuclear negotiators.” He is much more than that, and for readers to evaluate his “lift the sanction permanently” argument, they should know.
Mousavian served as the Islamic Republic of Iran’s ambassador to German in 1992 when Iranian terrorist agents assassinated dissident Iranian Kurdish leaders in a Berlin restaurant.
As World Affairs Journal has noted (“The Assassins’ Trail: Unraveling the Mykonos Killings,” November 2011) Iran’s Berlin embassy under Mousavian’s leadership, served as “headquarters for a government intelligence gathering operation largely focused on the activities of the exiled [Iranian] opposition.”
German police arrested Kazem Darabi, an Iranian grocer “with ties to Iran’s German embassy” along with several others. A four-year long trial included testimony from Abdel Ghassem Messbahi, a former senior Islamic Republic intelligence official who had defected. Messbahi described how the Mykonos assassinations were ordered by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other high-ranking officials working off of a hit list of 500 or so exiled Iranian opposition figures living abroad. At the trial’s conclusion, Darabi and another assassin were sentenced to 23 years. Mousavian and fourteen members of his staff were expelled.
Mousavian returned to Iran and was promoted to head the powerful Foreign Relations Committee of Iran’s National Security Council.
In his Post commentary extolling alleged mutual benefits of rapid, permanent sanctions relief, Mousavian—whose research at Princeton is funded partly by Iran deal proponents the Ploughshares Fund—describes Iranian President Hassan Rouhani as a “moderate.” Rouhani served as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council during the assassination of exiled opposition leaders in Germany in 1992, Austria in 1989 and elsewhere and during the Iranian-supported bombings of the Israeli embassy and Jewish community center in Argentina.
Absent adequate identification of Mousavian and financial supporters of his Princeton work, his Op-Ed was more of an advertorial.
Durns is Media Assistant for the Washington D.C. office of CAMERA—the 65,000 member Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America”
—Sean Durns
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