Iranian “NGO” Trying to Recruit American Journalists and Academics

On June 14, 2015, the American journalist and author Shane Harris published an account titled “Iran’s Spies Tried to Recruit Me.” Harris currently works for The Daily Beast and covers issues of national security and intelligence.

Harris details how he was contacted in late May by a representative from the International Congress on 17000 Iranian Terror Victims, an Iranian non-governmental organization planning its second conference in Tehran this August. He looked at the conference’s website and saw that the themes for this year include “Zionist State Terrorism against Iran,” “Cyber Terrorism against Iran,” and “Economic Terrorism against Iran in the Light of Sanctions.” Harris was confused, as he has never written anything that would indicate sympathies toward Iran.

The conference, run by the Habilian Association for the Families of Iranian Terror Victims,  is mainly focused on publicizing what the group alleges were terrorist attacks perpetrated by the group Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO is the acronym most commonly used by the Iranian regime, but it is better known as the MEK or National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) in the West).

Harris looked further into the sponsors of the conference and saw that they included religious groups, Iran’s state-run broadcasting company, and Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (a government council that is run by one of Supreme Leader Ali Khameini’s senior advisors, and also the council currently negotiating with the US over Iran’s nuclear program).

Out of curiosity, Harris engaged in further correspondence with the representative from the Congress on 17000, who gave him a list of potential topics to write about that centered around “Iranophobia” and Israel’s work to undermine Iran’s nuclear program.

While on its surface, the conference appears to be a remembrance of victims of terrorist attacks, it actually has a much more political agenda of promoting Iran and defaming Israel and its allies. Foreign authors that submitted papers to the first conference in 2013 include a number of highly controversial figures. Dr. Kevin Barrett, of the US, has come under intense scrutiny for his assertions that the 9/11 attacks were actually carried out by the US government in order to start a long war in the Middle East. Dr. James F. Tracy, of the US, said that the Sandy Hook shooting did not actually happen and that the Boston Marathon Bombing was a national conspiracy. Other notables include the Australian Dr. Frederick Toben, who spent seven months in German prison after denying that the Holocaust happened, and Merlin Miller, the producer of the television show “Amish Mafia” and the chairman of an extreme libertarian political party called the American Eagle Party.

The Habilian Association’s attempts to draw journalists and professors into its conference are troubling, considering the group’s agenda and clear backing by the Iranian government. Many countries in modern history have recruited reporters and academics to act as spies. For example, in 1941, the USSR had, among its spies in America, twenty-two journalists and eight professors (as well as forty-nine engineers and four economists).

Iran is very likely using this conference, run and promoted under the guise of a non-governmental group, to recruit sympathetic foreign journalists and professors. While the conference has, in the past, attracted American fringe and conspiracy theorists, Iran’s attempts to draw in mainstream reporters demonstrates a worrisome increase in the sophistication of its intelligence operations.