Spies Who Came in from the Dark PDF Print E-mail
Friday, 18 November 2005
From the Enemies of the Ayatollahs by Mohammad Mohaddessin
   
“Thanks to its dedicated, pious and experienced personnel, our country’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) is one of the most powerful intelligence organizations in the world.”
Ali Younessi

Every government has its own intelligence and spy agencies. Organised crime gangs operate in almost every corner of the world. Terrorists are also active in many countries. But in only one country, all three operate under one government agency: Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security.

According to insiders and defectors, the MOIS is a notorious mafia of terror, murder, espionage and organized crime. Much has been said about this agency whose huge budget and unrestrained power have turned it into one of the key pillars of the mullahs’ regime. But the most shocking accounts have come from those who worked inside the MOIS and collaborated with it for years.

Defector’s chilling revelations
For many years, the MOIS used the services of Jamshid Tafrishi, billing him as a “senior PMOI member.” Over a period of ten years, Tafrishi played a key role in Tehran’s anti-Mojahedin propaganda, publishing reports and giving lectures on “the imprisonment, torture and harassment of former PMOI members,” accusing the PMOI of involvement in the suppression of Iraqi Kurds and alleging that the Mojahedin had been entrusted by Saddam Hussein with storing his weapons of mass destruction in their camps. The MOIS also used Tafrishi to establish contact with activists and artists who were cooperating with the National Council of Resistance of Iran in a bid to encourage them to withdraw their support for the Resistance.

Contrary to Tehran’s propaganda, Tafrishi was not a PMOI member, let alone a senior official. He left Iran to go to Turkey in 1988 and contacted the local association of PMOI supporters. He wrote to the Iraq-based National Liberation Army of Iran and asked to join its ranks. He went to Iraq in May 1989, but a year later, he wrote in a letter to NLA officials: “I am unable to continue my stay in the NLA, because of personal problems and preoccupations.”

A few days later, Tafrishi asked to be sent to a refugee camp run by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. His request was granted. In January 1991, he approached the PMOI office in Baghdad and requested financial help to leave Iraq. He was given the equivalent of 1,800 US dollars and left Iraq to go first to Jordan and Turkey, before finally settling in Europe.

Tafrishi revealed after his defection in the year 2000 that after arriving in Turkey in 1991, he was approached by Iranian intelligence agents, who recruited him. That was the beginning of an undercover career in the Ministry of Intelligence and Security that went on for a decade. In an affidavit to the Federal Appeals Court in the District of Columbia in 2001, Tafrishi wrote:

Until last year, I pretended that I was an opponent of the Iranian regime, while I was in fact carrying out assignments given by the Iranian regime's Ministry of Intelligence and Security. In those years, I actively participated in the Iranian regime conspiracy to accuse the PMOI of human rights violations. I was also involved in other plans, such as giving false information about the PMOI to foreign governments and alleging that the PMOI was supported by the Iraqi government, to tarnish the image of the organization.

In those years, the Intelligence Ministry summoned me to Singapore four times to meet the most senior MOIS officials. Singapore is one of the locations the Intelligence Ministry uses to meet its agents. I later traveled secretly to Iran in a trip arranged by the MOIS and met with the Ministry's senior officials in Tehran and Shiraz. From 1995 until 1999, I received a total of 72,000 dollars from the Intelligence Ministry as payment for my work.

I met Saeed Emami (a.k.a Shamshiri), the number two man in the Intelligence Ministry for eight years, who was behind the murder of at least 100 dissidents in Iran. The latest of these serial killings was exposed in November 1998, when Dariush Forouhar and his wife Parvaneh were brutally murdered in their home in Tehran. Emami was also responsible for the assassination of dozens of dissidents abroad. I also met Mostafa Kazemi (a.k.a Sanjari, Emami's deputy), Amir Hossein Taqavi (responsible for counter-PMOI operations in the Intelligence Ministry) and Hossein Shariatmadari (a Revolutionary Guards brigadier and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s representative at the government-owned Kayhan newspaper). My contact with the Ministry was a man by the name of Reza who was an assistant to Saeed Emami. It was revealed later that his name was Morteza Qobbeh. He was Emami's deputy and had the task of recruiting those who had left the Mojahedin Organization.

The Ministry assigned me to carry out several tasks:
1. To draw up reports and articles for propaganda use against the PMOI as someone who had previously worked with the organization, accusing it of human rights violations and other crimes.
2. To recruit disaffected members and lure non-PMOI members of the NCRI away from that coalition.
3. To provide false information to European governments on the PMOI and the NCRI. I was also aware that other agents are engaged in similar activities in other countries.

Alleging human rights abuses against the PMOI was one of the most serious projects the Ministry was pursuing outside Iran with me and a number of its other agents. The Ministry was convinced that if it were successful in neutralizing the PMOI and the NCRI in their actions that exposed human rights abuses in Iran, the United Nations would no longer condemn the Iranian regime. They felt that the only way to achieve this was to accuse the PMOI of human rights abuses. Thus, acting as disaffected members of the PMOI, our responsibility was to accuse the organization of human rights abuses in order to disarm them of the human rights weapon.

In 1994, we were engaged in an extensive campaign to convince Human Rights Watch that PMOI is engaged in human rights abuses and encouraged them to prepare a report in this regard. The information was also being sent to the United States Department of State who was preparing a report on the Mojahedin at the time.

In 1996, using the same story against the PMOI, we met in Geneva with Professor Maurice Danby Copithorne, UN Human Rights Commission's Special Representative on human rights situation in Iran. The Intelligence Ministry organized everything regarding this meeting. The contact person with professor Copithorne was Nasser Khajeh-nouri who operated from US but regularly visited Europe.

A similar attempt was made at Amnesty International in 1996, when a number of Intelligence Ministry agents met with the representative of the human rights organization in Germany.

One of our tasks was to discredit the PMOI among members of parliaments and governments in Europe and the United States. In this respect we were asked to claim that the PMOI is cooperating with, or being helped by, the Iraqi government. 

As part of this plan, I was assigned to inform international organizations as well as foreign governments that the PMOI was involved in suppressing the Kurdish rebellion in Iraq. This plan was conducted under the supervision of Nasser Khajeh-Nouri, who was the regime’s agent in the United States. He organized interview for me and other agents with an Iranian radio station in Los Angeles to tell our story that PMOI suppressed the Kurdish people along the Iraqi forces. Khajeh-Nouri consequently prepared a report under my name on this issue and sent it to US intelligence and government agencies as well as the United Nations. Consequently, a US non-governmental organization, the International Educational Development, prepared a report of their investigation on this issue refuting our allegations against the Mojahedin, which was published as UN document on August 22, 1995.

In a similar move, Nasser Khajeh-Nouri once told me that he has received reliable information that PMOI is helping the Iraqi government to buy chemical weapons and other kinds of weapons of mass destruction. He asked me to expose the information and said we would then make it an international issue, by sending it to US government as well as European governments and international organizations. He said he would personally provide this information to US officials. To this end a public meeting was organized in June 1995, in Hamburg, Germany where I disclosed the information that had been given to me.
 
Along with 13 other MOIS agents, Tafrishi went to see Prof. Copithorne in January 1996 and claimed to have been tortured and imprisoned by the Mojahedin. This group held similar meetings with representatives of the Amnesty International and the Human Rights Watch. In late 2000, in a letter to Prof. Copithorne, he wrote:

I am Jamshid Tafrishi and met with you in Geneva together with 13 other individuals, including two children, as former members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran on January 16, 1996. I had written to you from Hamburg on the same subject a month prior to our meeting. The objective of our meeting was to accuse the Mojahedin of having prisons and committing torture, execution and violation of human rights on the eve of your anticipated visit to Iran and to request that you would reflect our information in your report.

After elaborating on the activities abroad against the PMOI in those years, Tafrishi wrote:

My last meeting with Intelligence Ministry officials in Tehran was in October 1998. The arrangement was that I set aside limitations on holding meetings abroad and go to Tehran. A travel document was provided to me by the regime’s embassy in the Hague and I flew to Tehran on a direct flight. During the trip, I met Sanjari, Reza, Hossein and Pirnia. The meeting with Sanjari took place in Shiraz. The rest of my meetings were in Tehran in Laleh Hotel. Owing to the secret nature of my ties with the Iranian regime, I was taken around in a vehicle with dark windshields. The objectives of these trips were to be briefed about more public support for the regime and activities against the Resistance outside Iran in tandem with other Intelligence Ministry agents.

About one year after my last visit to Tehran, when the factional feuding within the regime heightened over the serial murders of Iranian dissidents in the country, I saw pictures of Saeed Emami and other perpetrators of the chain murders and realized what kind of criminals I had been collaborating with. That was the beginning of the process that finally led me to defect.

Elaborate disinformation scheme
Another Iranian, Mahmoud Massoudi, wrote a letter in August 2002 to Ruud Lubbers, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and revealed the active links between the MOIS and agents who operate as “ex-PMOI members” in such propaganda campaigns. The letter was published in a number of journals and posted on websites.

Massoudi wrote that in early 1994, he decided to leave the PMOI for personal reasons and asked to go to Europe to lead an ordinary life. He obatined political asylum in Germany and began to write articles in different newspapers as a dissident. This put him in contact with several MOIS agents and for seven years, Massoudi was in close touch with them. He wrote in his letter to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees:

My experience of the past seven years made it clear that the ruling religious dictatorship makes political and intelligence-gathering use of certain groups and individuals, who have identified themselves as political refugees and opponents of the mullahs' regime, in order to ensure its own survival and destroy its real opponents, who want to overthrow it. I therefore set out here some of my observations and reliable information, about which I am prepared to testify in any court of law:

1. I was informed in April 2002 that several individuals identifying themselves as "former officials of the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran" have come to Europe, including Germany, to obtain political asylum. I was then informed that on April 5, 2002, a meeting was held at the home of Bahman Rastgou in Cologne, Germany, with the participation of Karim Haghi, Hadi Shams-Haeri, Mehdi Khoshhal, Mohammad-Reza Haghi, Bahman Rastgou, and several of the new arrivals, including Mohammad-Hossein Sobhani and Farhad Javaheri-Yar. In the meeting, Sobhani, who is the senior agent over Javaheri-Yar, explained the plans and aims of his team in coming to Germany and in this connection, they agreed on a division of labor. Sobhani and Javaheri-Yar told those present that they came from Iran and more agents would follow them.
2. Prior to the April 5 meeting, he had mentioned the Intelligence Ministry's forthcoming plan to bring individuals from Iran to Europe to Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr, Mehdi Khan-Baba Tehrani, Bahman Niroumand, Mansour Bayatzadeh and several others so that they would assist the new arrivals from Iran and write letters of confirmation for them. These individuals promised to spare no effort.
3. Alireza Nourizadeh, an agent of the mullahs' Intelligence Ministry working under the cover of journalism, told me in a telephone conversation on May 8: "There are new individuals who have come from the Mojahedin. He mentioned Adham Tayyebi (a.k.a. Massoud Tayyebi) and said, "They have come with documents to prove that the Mojahedin carried out espionage and operations for Iraq and intend to hold a big trial and prove that the Mojahedin are terrorists."

My own experience and that of others who have defected from the Mojahedin and are leading their own lives in Europe showed clearly that these claims were not credible. I knew very well that the Islamic Republic had fabricated since a long time ago the stories of "maltreatment" and "imprisonment of innocent individuals" against their main opposition.
4. Nourizadeh emphasized that every support must be given to the Intelligence Ministry's agents being sent from Iran. He warmly welcomed an interview with Sobhani and asked me to do the interview for publication in the monthly Rouzegar-e No. Nourizadeh recently bought this monthly with the funds he received from the mullahs' regime. He told me that he would pay for all the expenses, including the trip to Doblen in Germany, where Sobhani is residing, so that I would make the interview. I went to Doblen on July 30, talked to Sobhani for eight hours, and recorded a 40-minute interview with him.
5. Sobhani's scenario was as follows: He was an official of "the Mojahedin's Political Security Department" and had been "imprisoned and tortured" by the Mojahedin because he was "opposed to the organization's policies." After years in solitary confinement, he was handed over to Iraq and then spent several years in Iraqi jails and was then "extradited" to Iran and imprisoned by the Intelligence Ministry. But on the third day of arriving in Iran, he "fled" the Intelligence Ministry's prison and came to Germany! Sobhani did not offer any explanation as to how he fled the Intelligence Ministry's prison and answered all my questions on this with a simple grin.
6. Sobhani claims that his "mission" abroad is to fight against the Mojahedin and the person of Mr. Massoud Rajavi and the most important thing, he says, is to attack Mr. Rajavi. He also said that he was responsible for organizing other "Mojahedin defectors" who "are escaping" from Iran.
7. After hours of discussion and numerous telephone conversations with Sobhani, it has become crystal clear to me that he is neither a political refugee, nor a defector seeking to lead an ordinary life. He is in fact a trained agent sent by the Intelligence Ministry with strong financial and communication backing and, as he put it, "I have come outside Iran only for the purpose of fighting the Mojahedin and have no mission other than opposing them."
8. On August 5, 2002, Sobhani faxed a ten-page statement to me with the joint signatures of Javaheri-Yar and Edward Termadoyan. On this typed statement, there were corrections in handwriting that belonged neither to Sobhani nor to Javaheri-Yar or Termadoyan. It was clear that they had received the typed text from outside Germany and the original sender was in the Intelligence Ministry in Tehran.
9. In this statement, Javaheri-Yar and Termadoyan were giving a scenario that was almost identical to Sobhani: they claimed that they were "Mojahedin dissidents" who had been arrested by the Mojahedin and handed over to Iraq, which in turn handed them over to Iran and they then escaped from the Intelligence Ministry and came to Europe... Precisely the same scenario was again repeated by another agent, Hamid-Reza Barahoun. Anyone least familiar with the notorious prisons in Iran knows very well that it is impossible to believe that so many political prisoners would have escaped one after the other in such a short time. Throughout the past 20 years, only a handful of political prisoners are known to have escaped from mullahs' jails. So how could these "prisoners" escape one by one and quickly turn up in Europe, while thousands of Iranian refugees have been waiting to come to Europe from Iran's neighboring countries like Turkey, Pakistan, UAE and Azerbaijan?