Reporting by Semafor and Iran International this week reveals that the Iranian government tried to cultivate a network of scholars from the U.S. and other Western countries to propagate its talking points during the Iran nuclear talks in 2014.
As the NR editors pointed out, although the scoop is about emails from nearly a decade ago, the people who sent them currently serve in the Biden administration or have worked in close proximity with Robert Malley, the controversial, suspended Iran envoy. In the emails, they ingratiated themselves with Iranian officials in a particularly jarring way, with one analyst telling the then-foreign minister of the country over email: “As an Iranian, based on my national and patriotic duty, I have not hesitated to help you in any way.” More recently, that analyst reportedly wrote many of the tweets that Malley posted from his State Department account; he did that outside of government because he failed a background check.
After the reports ran this week, the Beltway’s most pugnacious proponents of engaging Iran rushed to attack Semafor and Iran International, with allegations that the outlets had put forward unfounded and McCarthyist smears. I thought that Graeme Wood’s analysis of those attacks today was apt:
One sign of the gravity of these accusations is the unconvincing attempts to minimize them. The commentator Esfandyar Batmanghelidj said opponents of Tehran had smeared the analysts merely because they “maintained dialogue and exchanged views with Iranian officials.” He went on to note Semafor’s links to Qatar and Iran International’s to Iran’s archenemy, Saudi Arabia. The journalist Laura Rozen tweeted that the stories were “McCarthyistic” and targeted blameless analysts “because they try to talk to everybody and because of their Iranian heritage.”
Defending the emails as maintaining “dialogue” so ludicrously misrepresents the accusation that I am forced to conclude that these defenders find the actual accusation indefensible. No one is alarmed that Americans of Iranian descent are talking with Iranian-government officials. What’s alarming is the servile tone of the Iranian American side of that dialogue, and the apparent lack of concern that the Iranian government views them as tools for its political ends. Rozen and Batmanghelidj don’t dispute the emails’ authenticity. Comparing the Iranian influence operation to supposed Qatari and Saudi ones is, in turn, tacit admission that the emails are probably real.
The most serious potential criticism of the reporting would entail an attempt to contest the authenticity of the emails, but the harshest critics of these reports haven’t done that at all.