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True Monsters of Iran: Terrorist Theocrats, Not the Mujahedeen-e Khalq

Clare M. Lopez - 1/31/2006

The broadside that Michael Rubin unleashed against the Iranian opposition group, the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), in his January 13, 2006 article, "Monsters of the Left: The Mujahedin al-Khalq," vilified the one organization that actually has the wherewithal to challenge the terrorist theocrats in Tehran and missed the mark on a number of points. By recycling a combination of old, disproved allegations along with Tehran regime disinformation, Rubin falls neatly into the clerics' scheme for self-preservation.

It seems ironic that Rubin relied for his historical account of the MEK on sources of information tainted by Soviet communist links and Iranian disinformation campaigns; he also failed to incorporate into his research either any direct contact with MEK members themselves or any of the extensive record of interaction with the MEK by such well-respected international organizations as the International Red Cross and the United Nations High Commission on Refugees.

Rubin's gratuitous criticism of General Ray Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, for his positive comments about the MEK, also shows an uncharacteristic inattention to detail: Gen. Odierno is far from the only American military commander who has remarked favorably about his interactions with the MEK. Major General Geoffrey D. Miller, Colonel David Phillips , and Colonel (USA, ret.) Thomas Cantwell each has reported publicly and positively about his impressions of the MEK.

Rubin's footnoted material includes a number of citations from Ervand Abrahamian, who long was a supporter of the Iranian communist Tudeh party and more recently has been a vociferous defender of the Islamic Republic. During the 1970s, the Tudeh Party was a bitter enemy of the MEK, cooperated with the Shah's security forces by informing on the MEK, and not only supported the 1980 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (which, in fact, the MEK did not), but even assisted Soviet military and political advisors running the Afghan army and government. Abrahamian's book, The Iranian Mojahedin, is considered a comprehensive study of the MEK; given his ideological bent, however, he hardly makes a dispassionate source about the group.

The MEK's battle for freedom and democracy in its homeland has never wavered in over 35 years of struggle, first against an autocratic monarchy, and since 1979, against a radical Islamist ideology that supports terrorism, opposes a Middle East peace plan, commits atrocities against its own people, and now threatens the entire region with its drive to acquire nuclear weapons. The stalwart support the MEK receives from such American legislators as Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), European parliamentary leaders, and others simply serves to highlight the words of President George W. Bush: "... and to the Iranian people I say, as you stand for liberty, America stands with you."

Rubin rightly traces the roots of the MEK to the 1960s, when opposition to the Shah's rule coalesced around a number of student-led groups, which, as he notes, advocated political reform but were ruthlessly repressed. Where Rubin begins to stumble, however, is in his conflation of the MEK's desire to overthrow the Shah with anti-Americanism or terrorism. That the MEK was able to attract such a strong base of support throughout Iranian society in the early 1970s was due to a gathering antipathy to the Shah's harsh rule which the MEK shared; to the extent that the MEK expressed anti-American sentiments, it was because of the United States' support for the Shah, not because of any enmity towards Americans, or ideological hostility to concepts of secular democracy. In any case, anti-American sentiments are a long way from killing or terrorism, both of which reflect spurious and long-since disproved allegations that are mostly recycled these days through efforts of the Tehran regime's intelligence services.

The facts about these allegations are the following. The Shah cracked down on the MEK in 1972, jailing (and eventually killing) most of the original top leadership and more than half of the rank and file membership. MEK Central Committee member Massoud Rajavi himself remained in prison until just before the Ayatollah Khomeini's return to Iran in 1979. During these years, a few MEK leaders and members who remained free attempted a coup d'etat against the group in an effort to take it over and establish their credentials as the most radical of the Shah's opponents. They even attempted to legitimize their splinter group by arrogating to themselves the Mojahedin name and the organization's emblem.

These renegades are the ones responsible for the killing of six American military officers and defense contractors in Iran during the 1970s-killings which were denounced by Massoud Rajavi and the other jailed MEK leaders and admitted by the perpetrators in later years. These and other criminal acts by MEK outcasts led to the group's splintering, with the mainstream remnant under Rajavi's leadership not emerging from detention to take back control of the real MEK until the return of Khomeini to Iran and the departure of the Shah.

Unfortunately, it didn't take long for Khomeini's radical clerics to show their true intentions, which were anything but democratic. The MEK neither participated in, nor benefited from, the attacks on the American Embassy in Tehran in February and November 1979 and had nothing to do either with the hostage crisis that followed, according to Massoumeh Ebtekar, the spokesperson for the student group that took over the Embassy and later Vice President for the Department of the Environment in the administration of President Khatami. In her book, Takeover in Tehran, she explicitly stated that ".we had completely excluded the MKO [MEK] and its members from participation in the embassy takeover." MEK leaders today express regret only that they did not speak up sooner and forcefully to oppose the Embassy takeover, and explain now that their hesitation stemmed from a dawning realization that they were losing all influence over the course of the Iranian Revolution but harbored a lingering unwillingness to give up trying entirely.

It is nothing short of incredible that Rubin's account next succeeds in somehow portraying the MEK as villainous while Khomeini's extremist regime (for which the MEK's ideology was "anathema") is described as "otherwise conservative". In fact, the regime's June 1981 slaughter of innocent unarmed demonstrators in the streets of Tehran triggered the final break between the MEK and the Revolution. The MEK went underground, established military camps inside Iraq, and turned to armed struggle after that, but never resorted to terrorism and never deliberately targeted civilian non-combatants.

Even the Department of State Country Reports (27 April 2003) notes that the MEK had only targeted members of the clerical regime and its enforcement officers, particularly those who were in charge of interrogations and torture in the Iranian prison system. The official United States (U.S.) governmental investigation in 2003-2004 of all 3,800 MEK members then living in Camp Ashraf, Iraq (which included individual interviews and DNA samples to determine whether any had been involved in terrorist activities), resulted in a finding that none had been and that there was "no basis to charge members of [the MEK] with violations of American law."

Rubin's implication that the MEK somehow are or ought to be considered by the U.S. administration as "prisoners" is simply mistaken. After completion of the intensive 16-month interdepartmental government investigation, all MEK members at Camp Ashraf were granted "protected persons" status under the Fourth Geneva Accords; that status charges the United States military with physical protection of MEK members at Camp Ashraf, a status and a role that conflict rather incongruously with the MEK's continued placement on the Department of State's Foreign Terrorist Organizations list.

In the course of formalizing 4th Geneva Accords procedures, each and every MEK member in Camp Ashraf personally signed a document given them by the American authorities in which they pledged to denounce terrorism and to refrain from engagement in armed activities. In any case, the MEK already had ceased all armed attacks against the Tehran regime by 2001 and gave up all of its weapons to U.S. forces in a 2003 agreement following the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Thus, accusations of terrorism are as demonstrably false as other recent accusations (e.g., from Human Rights Watch) that MEK members committed abuse against former members, or the group never could have emerged from such intensive scrutiny by U.S. government investigators with an entirely clean bill of health.

Contrary to Rubin's accusations, although the MEK accepted safe haven on Iraqi soil for over two decades, and launched its own attacks against the Tehran regime while Iran and Iraq fought a brutal 8-year-long war during the 1980s, the group never integrated militarily with Iraqi forces and actively and very publicly stayed out of the 1991 Gulf War. Nor did the MEK join in Saddam Hussein's suppression of Kurds and Shi'ites following the First Gulf War; this canard has been denied in public (including in sworn court testimony) by a variety of credible Iraqi Shi'ite, Sunni, and Kurdish figures.

While the MEK's wartime actions undeniably alienated some Iranians, the group's survival and ability to organize itself, and collect and disseminate key intelligence about Iran's top-secret nuclear weapons and other Weapons of Mass Destruction programs clearly attest to an extensive base of support inside the country today. The MEK's broad level of support among the Iranian Diaspora is obvious in regular and large-scale demonstrations, for instance, in New York City to protest the September 2005 appearance of Iran's terrorist president Ahmadinejad at the United Nations (U.N.) and on January 19 in Washington, D.C. to urge referral of Iran to the U.N. Security Council, where seas of hundreds of waving placards with photos of Massoud and Maryam Rajavi are always prominent features.

Finally, it is misleading for Rubin to accuse the MEK of trying to "reinvent the [MEK]'s image" in order to promote its democratic credentials. Fortunately, many original documents, communiqués and the texts of MEK leadership speeches remain available. A careful reading of such works as the Tabyin-e Jahan, a collection of lectures given by Massoud Rajavi in 1979 which constitutes perhaps the MEK's foremost work on ideology, provides the best view of the MEK's true thought and positions on such subjects as the nature of human existence, history, and epistemology. It is interesting to note Rajavi's extensive and critical commentary on Marxist materialistic dialectics. Also in this regard, the phrase "Islamic-Marxist" as applied to the MEK is not an analytical term-it was a propaganda term invented by the SAVAK, the Shah's intelligence organization, and has been carried over today by the clerical regime in Tehran and propagated among some elements of the Iranian exile community as part of a coordinated disinformation campaign by the MOIS (Ministry of Intelligence and Security).

The MEK's historical documentary collection as well as its more contemporaneous statements, demonstrate a firm dedication to the establishment of a democratic, secular republic in Iran that eschews terrorism and WMD, and supports individual liberties, equal opportunity and protection of minorities. Should documentary evidence not suffice, then personal contact with MEK members (both current and former), whether at Camp Ahsraf, among the National Council of Resistance of Iran (the umbrella group to which the MEK belongs) in Paris, or in discussions here at home in the U.S. cannot but impress the open-minded researcher of the sincerity of that commitment.

It is difficult to understand how the selfless dedication of so many Iranian patriots to a life of privation and struggle, in an effort to bring freedom to their oppressed people, can be construed as something suspicious or negative. The only explanation possible lies with the effectiveness of unceasing disinformation campaigns by the regime's intelligence and security services, which harness all the resources of the state to denial and deception operations, not only to conceal its own deep involvement in terrorism and clandestine work on an illicit nuclear weapons program, but also to smear the name of the only organization that poses a credible threat to the terrorist theocracy in Tehran. In the final analysis, any policy of encouraging regime change in Iran simply cannot ignore a legitimate and historical political force which has demonstrated since its inception an unequalled ability to organize Iranians both internally and in the Diaspora.

Supporting the Iranian people in their quest for liberty, freedom, and democracy means empowering the democratic opposition in order that the Iranian people themselves might choose freely their own leadership and future.