GULF STATES RAN HIGHLY ACTIVE D.C. FOREIGN INFLUENCE OPERATION TARGETING IRAN’S IRGC
The listing of the IRGC as a foreign terror group has emerged as the central obstacle blocking a new Iran nuclear deal.
IN 2019, the Trump administration took the controversial step of listing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an ideological branch of the Iranian military, as a foreign terrorist organization. The designation, an apparent poison pill to block further diplomacy with Iran, has become a major obstacle in negotiations to revive the nuclear deal with Iran, which Trump abrogated in 2018.
Though the domestic political pressure on the Biden administration against delisting has been widely discussed — with fears of Republicans campaigning against the move and pro-Israel forces roundly opposing it — few have noted the effect and breadth of the campaign to place and keep the IRGC on the terror rolls.
Documents, including rafts of public disclosure filings and a hacked email from a Washington diplomat, reveal a highly active foreign influence operation over the past five years to blanket Washington with messages supporting confrontation with Iran and targeting the IRGC with sanctions and inclusion on the terrorist list.
Since at least 2015, a variety of communications consultants, law firms, and lobbyists working for foreign governments — primarily Iranian regional rivals Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain — produced a steady stream of tweets, talking points, press releases, and reports warning about the dangers of the IRGC and supporting the foreign terrorist organization, or FTO, designation.
“We should not be allowing foreign government lobbyists to buy influence on important national security policies.”
“All you need to know about what a politicized cudgel the FTO list has become is seeing the UAE and Saudi Arabia — responsible for some of the most heinous terror against civilians in Yemen — lobbying to get the IRGC on the FTO and keep them listed,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of the advocacy group Democracy for the Arab World Now. “We should not be allowing foreign government lobbyists to buy influence on important national security policies, like the FTO designation of a government we want to reach a critical nuclear deal with.”
The previously unreported hacked email sent by a UAE diplomat lays bare an attempt by a foreign interest to influence the U.S. government’s approach to the IRGC. In the email, drawn from a trove released in 2017 by a group calling itself Global Leaks, UAE Ambassador to the U.S. Yousef al-Otaiba, one of the most influential foreign diplomats in Washington, messages with a reporter about the listing. The email released by Global Leaks shows that then-Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon wrote to Otaiba on February 3, 2017, asking: “You hear anything about the [Trump] administration considering designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization?”
In the email chain, Otaiba responded within minutes: “No idea where they are on decision making, but I have made the suggestion to several people.”
The UAE Embassy did not respond to a request comment on the purported email, which Responsible Statecraft and The Intercept were unable to separately authenticate. Otaiba never specified in the exchange who he “made the suggestion to.”
AT THE SAME time as the Global Leaks exchange between Otaiba and Solomon, an army of paid agents for the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the Iranian dissident group Mojahedin-e Khalq, or MEK, were bombarding congressional staffers, think tanks, and the State Department with messages emphasizing the dangers of the IRGC.On February 14, 2017, the National Council of Resistance of Iran — the political wing of the Mojahedin-e Khalq, a group with little support inside Iran but has close ties with Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies — held a press conference about the IRGC’s “terrorist training centers” and held a March 8, 2017 “panel discussion on the rise of the IRGC financial empire.”Between February and May 2017, the group’s U.S. leadership acted as sources regarding the IRGC for a host of outlets mostly on the right but also including mainstream outlets like the Associated Press, according to National Council of Resistance of Iran’s disclosure under the Foreign Agent Registration Act, a law requiring agents of foreign principals to periodically report on their activities.Other Gulf rivals of Iran were also paying communications firms and lobbyists to circulate reports and white papers denouncing the IRGC, according to disclosures. In May 2017, Qorvis Communications, working on behalf of Saudi Arabia, circulated a “summary: counterterrorism white paper” about “Saudi Arabia and counterterrorism” that repeatedly referred to the IRGC’s backing of Houthi rebels who the Saudis and UAE were fighting in Yemen. (None of the registered foreign agents in this article responded to requests for comment.)
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