Self-Sacrifice (28 page)

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Washington D.C.

The first time I went to Washington D.C. on behalf of the PMOI was in July 2006. I had to address a major Congressional briefing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday 25 July on ‘Women: Key to Establishing Democracy in the Middle East’. Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee chaired the event. I recall one of the speakers at the event was a young Iranian lady from California who had been imprisoned in Evin Prison in Tehran for being a supporter of the PMOI. She told us in graphic detail of the tortures she had endured before her release and escape to the West. She wept as she described how her bare feet had been whipped with electric cables until the flesh peeled off. She told us how a pregnant woman had miscarried after being tortured, and the guards had kicked the foetus across the floor of the cell. You could have heard a pin drop in the Caucus Room where the meeting was held. People in the audience were weeping. It was a profoundly moving experience.

The following morning, I had arranged to meet Will Schirano of the Heritage Foundation on Massachusetts Avenue. Like most Heritage Foundation acolytes, Schirano was a young, fresh-faced college graduate who left you in no doubt that he knew it all and was not about to be steered off his chosen right-wing Republican path in life. I explained that I had been previously to the Heritage Foundation before I was elected as an MEP and had lectured a large audience on devolved government for Scotland. I said, however, I wished to take this opportunity to brief the Heritage Foundation, as one of America’s most influential think-tanks, on the need to remove the PMOI from the US Foreign Terrorist Organisations list.

As I spoke, Schirano became increasingly agitated and fidgety, twiddling his thumbs and on occasion ‘harrumphing’ audibly. When I had finished, he launched into a tirade, describing the PMOI as a Marxist Islamic cult, which had carried out terrorist operations and
was guilty of killing Americans. I started to rebut his arguments, but he was deaf to all my explanations. He handed me a Heritage Foundation tie and bade me farewell. I was somewhat taken aback by his naked hostility. If this is what we are up against in government circles in the US, then God help us, I thought.

That evening I had dinner with one of the great American supporters of the PMOI, Professor Raymond Tanter. He roared with laughter when I told him about Schirano. ‘These are just kids,’ he said, ‘they know nothing.’ Raymond is a professor of political science at Georgetown University and an adjunct scholar of the Washington Institute, researching US policy options toward Iran. In the early eighties Dr Tanter served on the National Security Council staff and was personal representative of the Secretary of Defence to the 1983-1984 arms control talks held in Madrid, Helsinki, Stockholm, and Vienna. He has written many books on Iran and the Middle East. He is a great guy.

On Thursday 27 July I addressed a second Congressional Briefing on Capitol Hill, this time on the subject of ‘EU and US: Options to Promote Femocracy in Iran’. Members of the United States Congress had sponsored the event and I joined a panel of members of the European Parliament, members of the UK House of Commons and House of Lords, Congressmen and women and Iran Policy Committee experts like Professor Tanter. The panel provided an opportunity for an intercontinental parliamentary exchange of views about Iran policy, as well as an opportunity for Washington policy-makers to hear European voices on the sensitive issue of Iran.

Mrs Rajavi asked me if I could go to Washington D.C. again in February 2009, just as President Obama took office to begin his first term as America’s first-ever black President. It was an exciting time. Back in late 2008, as President George W. Bush neared the end of his beleaguered presidency, it was certain that neither Barack Obama nor John McCain would thank him for the legacy of conflict one or the other would inherit in the Middle East. Both candidates had named Iran as a key policy issue, but both from dramatically different perspectives. Obama wanted to sit down and negotiate with President Ahmadinejad, the crazed leader of Iran, who had repeatedly told the world that he wanted to wipe Israel off the map and
was busily building the nuclear weapons that would enable him to do so. McCain ominously said that he would use all the power at his disposal, if he became President, to stop Iran developing a nuclear weapon. The choice between appeasement and military intervention loomed large.

Indeed in September 2008, the European Parliament sent me as an observer to attend the GOP Convention in Minneapolis St Paul, where McCain and Sarah Palin made their keynote speeches. I had some high-level meetings set up with Mitt Romney, Larry Eagleburger and Henry Kissinger. I asked Larry Eagleburger, former US Secretary of State under George Bush Sr., and now security and defence advisor to John McCain, what he would do about Iran if McCain became President. I was horrified to hear Eagleburger state that if we failed to deal with the nuclear weapons issue in Iran now, then for certain a nuclear weapon would be fired in anger during the next decade. When pressed by me whether he believed military intervention was the only answer, he replied, ‘Yes!’

I met Richard S. Williamson, former US Ambassador to the United Nations and at that time special US envoy in Sudan. He was a key foreign policy adviser to John McCain and I discussed Darfur, Iran, Russia and a whole range of strategic issues with him. He said that advising John McCain on foreign policy was like coaching Tiger Woods on golf! But he said that the biggest problem facing the next US President was certainly going to be a nuclear-armed Iran. He reckoned the ascendancy of Iran in the Middle East had been linked directly to the war in Iraq and that the Mullahs’ support for Hezbollah and Hamas and their determination to ‘accentuate the Shiia–Sunni split,’ has marked them out as a dangerous enemy of freedom and democracy.

When I visited Washington D.C. in February 2009, the American capital was frozen solid and covered in a thick blanket of snow. In an apparent attempt to regain the initiative in Washington, the Iranian Mullahs had sponsored some strident calls in the media, often in cyberspace, opposing the delisting of the PMOI. They did this by using subterfuge and deception. Of course their agents who expressed these views could provide no hard facts or evidence for keeping the PMOI on the list, so they resorted to insults and innuendo, claiming that the
PMOI was a cult-like group, which had no popular support in Iran. Apart from their absurdity, such claims had nothing to do with anti-terrorism law. However, they did serve to reveal the fingerprints of the Iranian regime, which always hides behind various cover names like the so-called ‘Green Movement’,
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to spread its propaganda in an attempt to vilify their most feared opposition, the PMOI.

I met Ambassador Dennis B. Ross in the State Department. Ross had served as the Director of Policy Planning in the State Department under President George H. W. Bush and was special Middle East coordinator under President Bill Clinton. On the day I met him, he had just taken up his new role of special advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia (which included Iran). I was able to give him a comprehensive overview of the EU’s position on Iran and Iraq, vigorously attacking the policy of appeasement and urging Ambassador Ross to give State Department support to the ordinary citizens of Iran who were desperate for regime change. I also filled him in on the need to delist the PMOI from the US list of Foreign Terrorist Organisations. He promised to do his best.

Despite Ambassador Ross’s best efforts, it wasn’t until 28 September 2012 that the US State Department finally formally removed the PMOI/MEK from its official list of foreign terrorist organizations, beating by days a 1 October deadline set by the US courts. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a statement the decision was made because the PMOI/MEK had renounced violence and had cooperated in closing their Iraqi paramilitary base. This statement, as she knew, was risible. Had she not delisted the MEK/PMOI, the courts would have done it for her. Her hand had been forced and our campaign of many years had at last succeeded.

In all my high-level meetings in Congress and the Senate during my 2009 visit to Washington I explained the fact that there was not even one shred of evidence supporting the group’s terrorist designation. I
explained that the PMOI terror tag did not have any factual or legal basis and the group did not meet the legal criteria of a terrorist organization. Justice, law and fairness demanded their immediate removal from the list.

With the argument for keeping the MEK on the FTO list losing ground rapidly, lobbyists for the regime were now hysterically claiming that their delisting would ‘embolden Iran’s hardliners to intensify their repression of the Green Movement,’ or even that, ‘it would trigger a huge loss of US soft power in Iran,’ and ‘damage Iran’s democratic progress’. The reality was obvious and deeply sinister. These strident voices did not come from the Opposition; they came directly from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). This was another typical disinformation manoeuvre to try to keep the fading embers of the failed appeasement policy alight in Washington. But, I argued on Capitol Hill, US citizens had to be clear, there was no realistic alternative to the Mullahs inside Iran. Mir-Hossein Mousavi Khameneh became the figurehead leader of the Green Movement as the default opposition to Ahmadinejad, following the blatantly swindled election of 2009. But when it counted the most, this spineless extremist of the 1980s, under whose premiership tens of thousands of political prisoners were executed, betrayed even his own supporters in order to save his own neck.

Many distinguished former members of the US administration during the Clinton, Bush and Obama era, including the former Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge and the former Attorney General until 2009, Michael Mukasey, stepped forward to support the delisting of the PMOI. They urged Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to heed the warnings from the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to delist the PMOI or the court would intercede and do it themselves.

On 24 February 2009, I spoke in the US Congress in Washington D.C. to a large audience of congressmen and women and staffers. Some journalists also attended. I said:

Following my speech, I met with many of the PMOI’s supporters in the US, a formidable collection of political leaders including two former CIA Directors, James Woolsey and Porter Goss, the former mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, the former Governor of Vermont and former Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean, the former FBI Director, Louis Freeh, and the former US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton. Democrats and Republicans alike had come out in open support of delisting the PMOI. These were brave politicians willing to put their own reputations on the line in the name of American justice.

I was back in Washington in January 2010 and this time delivered a lecture on Capitol Hill entitled ‘Winning Hearts and Minds in the War on Terror’, in which I said:

In January 2013 the Pentagon and the Library of Congress published a report entitled ‘Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security: A Profile’. This was a fascinating if rather alarming document. It was based on exhaustive research undertaken by the Pentagon and the US Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, and it contained striking revelations about the extent of the activities of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) against dissidents, and in particular efforts to discredit the main opposition People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI/MEK).