FLASHBACK: (Found via Atheo News)
New Front Sets Sights On Toppling Iran Regime
By Marc Perelman
Published May 16, 2003, issue of May 16, 2003.
A budding coalition of conservative hawks, Jewish organizations and Iranian monarchists is pressing the White House to step up American efforts to bring about regime change in Iran.
For now, President Bush’s official stance is to encourage the Iranian people to push the mullah regime aside themselves, but observers believe that the policy is not yet firm, and that has created an opportunity for activists. Neoconservatives advocating regime change in Tehran through diplomatic pressure — and even covert action — appear to be winning the debate within the administration, several knowledgeable observers said.
“There is a pact emerging between hawks in the administration, Jewish groups and Iranian supporters of Reza Pahlavi [the exiled son of the former shah of Iran] to push for regime change,” said Pooya Dayanim, president of the Iranian-Jewish Public Affairs Committee in Los Angeles and a hawk on Iran.
The emerging coalition is reminiscent of the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, with Pahlavi possibly assuming the role of Iraqi exile opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi, a favorite of neoconservatives. Like Chalabi, Pahlavi has good relations with several Jewish groups. He has addressed the board of the hawkish Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and gave a public speech at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, and met with Jewish communal leaders.
Pahlavi also has had quiet contacts with top Israeli officials. During the last two years, according to a knowledgeable source, he has met privately with Prime Minister Sharon and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as Israel’s Iranian-born president, Moshe Katsav.
In another parallel to the pre-invasion debate over Iraq, an intense policy battle is heating up between the State and Defense departments over what to do in Iran.
“The president, the vice president and, even more so, the Pentagon support regime change,” said a source who follows the internal debate closely. “But State does not want to meddle in Iran, so you have a big fight right now within the administration.”
As was the case during the Iraq debate, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol is leading the charge for a more aggressive policy on Iran. In the magazine’s May 12 issue, he wrote an editorial pushing for covert action and other steps to trigger regime change in Tehran.
Advocates of a more restrained policy note that American and Iranian officials meet regularly, but say that the disappointing performance of the reformist camp in Iran has undercut their efforts to promote American engagement with Iran.
“Some people at the Pentagon have concluded that the reformists are just mullahs with smiling faces and that regime change is the only way,” said Gary Sick, director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University and an advocate of engaging Iran. “They believe that Iran is ripe for revolution, but I think this is highly questionable.”
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputies Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith are known to support regime change, although they have been much less vocal about Iran than Iraq.
At a lower level, two sources said, Iran expert Michael Rubin is now working for the Pentagon’s “special plans” office, a small unit set up to gather intelligence on Iraq, but apparently also working on Iran. Previously a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East policy, Rubin has vocally advocated regime change in Tehran. He did respond to e-mails seeking comment.
Intelligence sources have complained about what they describe as the tendency of the secretive office to color intelligence on Iraq according to its hard line. “The office of special plans has been interviewing people and gathering intelligence on Iran in order to be ready to support democracy,” a hawkish source said. “They have spent much more time doing that than the State experts on Iran.”
Meanwhile, in Congress, Democrat Rep. Tom Lantos of California is sponsoring a resolution supporting the people of Iran against the regime. Republican Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas has introduced an amendment that would set aside $50 million to fund Iranian opposition television and radio stations in Los Angeles — most of which promote a restoration of the shah’s monarchy — as well as human rights and pro-democracy groups.
Supporters of the shah’s son, Pahlavi, have been supporting Brownback’s amendment, know as the Iran Democracy Act. So has the main pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
“We support efforts to encourage the people of Iran to cut the regime’s ties to terrorism and its pursuit of nuclear weapons,” said Rebecca Dinar, a spokeswoman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. While Morris Amitay, a former Aipac director and active hawk on Iran, told the Forward that it would only be natural for Jewish groups to openly back regime change in Iran, most prefer to keep a low profile on this issue.
For example, Pahlavi was slated to meet Iranian Jewish members of Aipac at the group’s annual conference this spring. But Aipac officials, worried that it could be seen as inappropriate, scuttled the plan, two sources said.
“The Jewish groups are telling Reza that they will give him private support and help arrange meetings with U.S. officials,” one of the sources said.
Iranian Jewish groups are playing a key role in forging the relationship. The Iranian Jewish Public Affairs Committee’s Dayanim, a regular contributor to the National Review Online, has been one of the most active hawks. He argued that support for Pahlavi among Iranian Americans may have less to do with deep pro-monarchist feelings than with his status as the most recognizable opposition figure among immigrants.
Still, Dayanim acknowledged that many Iranian Jews were “in love with Pahlavi” because they see his father’s reign as a golden era for Jews. Pahlavi has expressed support for democracy while calling for a referendum restoring the monarchy.
One key Pahlavi supporter who has become popular in Iranian American circles is former Reagan administration official Michael Ledeen, now a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
In numerous addresses and articles, Ledeen has been arguing that the mullah regime is on the brink of collapse and that the time has come for Washington to push it over the edge. He has joined with Amitay, ex-CIA head James Woolsey, former Reagan administration official Frank Gaffney, former Senator Paul Simon and oil consultant Rob Sobhani to set up a group called the Coalition for Democracy in Iran. Several of them took part May 6 in a one-day American Enterprise Institute conference titled “The Future of Iran.” During the event, Ledeen argued that help from outside actors was needed to help ignite revolutionary changes in Iran.
While Ledeen has not called for military action, some of his declarations appear to suggest that aggressive action could be taken.
Last month, Ledeen gave a speech to a pro-monarchist crowd in Los Angeles. In the question-and-answer session, he reportedly said that with $20 million, there could be a “free Iran” — and that he knew how best to use the money.
Ledeen, who was involved in the Iran-contra scandal but never charged, declined comment.
Asked about the possibility of covert action, a member of the Pentagon-linked Defense Policy Board answered with one word: “maybe.” He refused to elaborate.
http://www.forward.com/articles/8807/
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Human Events interviews Reza Pahlavi:
Shah of Iran's Heir Plans Overthrow of Regime
05/01/2006
Excerpt
You would be willing to renounce that idea that Iran could develop a nuclear weapon?
I’m against developing any weapons of mass destruction. I work to see the world develop a process of disarmament because otherwise it will be madness. If we build it, tomorrow the Turks will build it, then the Saudis want to build it, then the Egyptians want to build it. Believe me, in that part of the world, there’s some track record how stable the world will feel having a whole bunch of nuclear warheads in the hands of all these people. Forget it. I’d be the first one proposing a plan to reverse the cycle of proliferation.
You don’t believe Iran needs a nuclear weapon to balance Israel’s nuclear weapon?
No.
You would not demand that Israel disarm?
Since when has Israel been a threat to anyone? Israel just wants to be left alone and live in peace side by side with its neighbors. As far as I’m concerned, Israel never had any ambition to territorially go and invade, I don’t know, Spain or Morocco or anywhere else. And let me tell something else about Iran: Unlike the rest of the Islamic or Arab world, the relationship between Persia and the Jews goes back to the days of Cyrus the Great. We take pride as Iranians of having a history where Cyrus was the most quoted figure in the Torah, as a liberator of Jewish slaves, who went to Babylon and gave them true freedom for them to worship and in fact helped them build a temple. We have a biblical relation with Jews, and we have no problem with modern day Israel. As far as regional politics, I believe, I think many Iranians believe so, that as much as Israel has a right to exist, so should the Palestinians. They have to work the problem between each other. And we have no business interfering, and we need to help get as much stability in the region.
A democratic regime in Iran would be doing that, but a clerical regime in Tehran that sends money to Hamas and to Hizballah and to all the terrorists around the globe obviously is not promoting stability and peace, it is doing the reverse.
http://atheonews.blogspot.com/2009/06/w ... -shah.html
05/01/2006:
Reza Pahlavi, son of the late Shah of Iran, told the editors of HUMAN EVENTS last week that in the next two to three months he hopes to finalize the organization of a movement aimed at overthrowing the Islamic regime in Tehran and replacing it with a democratic government.
He believes the cause is urgent because of the prospect that Iran may soon develop a nuclear weapon or the U.S. may use military force to preempt that. He hopes to offer a way out of this dilemma:
a revolution sparked by massive civil disobedience in which the masses in the streets are backed by elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=14424
Ministry of Security SAVAK
Shah-an-Shah [King of Kings] Mohammad Reza Pahlevi was restored to the Peacock Throne of Iran with the assistance of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1953.
CIA mounted a coup against the left-leaning government of Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq, which had planned to nationalize Iran's oil industry. CIA subsequently provided organizational and and training assistance for the establishment of an intelligence organization for the Shah. With training focused on domestic security and interrogation, the primary purpose of the intelligence unit, headed by General Teymur Bakhtiar, was to eliminate threats to Shah.
Formed under the guidance of United States and Israeli intelligence officers in 1957, SAVAK developed into an effective secret agency.
Bakhtiar was appointed its first director, only to be dismissed in 1961, allegedly for organizing a coup; he was assassinated in 1970 under mysterious circumstances, probably on the shah's direct order. His successor, General Hosain Pakravan, was dismissed in 1966, allegedly for having failed to crush the clerical opposition in the early 1960s. The shah turned to his childhood friend and classmate, General Nematollah Nassiri, to rebuild SAVAK and properly "serve" the monarch. Mansur Rafizadeh, the SAVAK director in the United States throughout the 1970s, claimed that General Nassiri's telephone was tapped by SAVAK agents reporting directly to the shah, an example of the level of mistrust pervading the government on the eve of the Revolution.
SAVAK increasingly to symbolized the Shah's rule from 1963-79, a period of corruption in the royal family, one-party rule, the torture and execution of thousands of political prisoners, suppression of dissent, and alienation of the religious masses. The United States reinforced its position as the Shah's protector and supporter, sowing the seeds of the anti-Americanism that later manifested itself in the revolution against the monarchy.
Accurate information concerning SAVAK remains publicly unavailable. A flurry of pamphlets issued by the revolutionary regime after 1979 indicated that SAVAK had been a full-scale intelligence agency with more than 15,000 full-time personnel and thousands of part-time informants. SAVAK was attached to the Office of the Prime Minister, and its director assumed the title of deputy to the prime minister for national security affairs. Although officially a civilian agency, SAVAK had close ties to the military; many of its officers served simultaneously in branches of the armed forces.
Another childhood friend and close confidant of the shah, Major General Hosain Fardust, was deputy director of SAVAK until the early 1970s, when the shah promoted him to the directorship of the Special Intelligence Bureau, which operated inside Niavaran Palace, independently of SAVAK.
Founded to round up members of the outlawed Tudeh [
Iranian Communist Party -- Alice], SAVAK expanded its activities to include gathering intelligence and neutralizing the regime's opponents.
An elaborate system was created to monitor all facets of political life. For example, a censorship office was established to monitor journalists, literary figures, and academics throughout the country; it took appropriate measures against those who fell out of line. Universities, labor unions, and peasant organizations, among others, were all subjected to intense surveillance by SAVAK agents and paid informants. The agency was also active abroad, especially in monitoring Iranian students who publicly opposed Pahlavi rule.
SAVAK paid Rockwell International to implement a large communications monitoring system called IBEX. The Stanford Technology Corp. [STC, owned by Hakim] had a $5.5 million contract to supply the CIA-promoted IBEX project. STC had another $7.5 million contract with Iran's air force for a telephone monitoring system, operated by SAVAK, to enable the Shah to track his top commanders' communications.
Over the years, SAVAK became a law unto itself, having legal authority to arrest and detain suspected persons indefinitely. SAVAK operated its own prisons in Tehran (the Komiteh and Evin facilities) and, many suspected, throughout the country as well.
SAVAK's torture methods included electric shock, whipping, beating, inserting broken glass and pouring boiling water into the rectum, tying weights to the testicles, and the extraction of teeth and nails. Many of these activities were carried out without any institutional checks.
At the peak its influence under the Shah SAVAK had at least 13 full-time case officers running a network of informers and infiltration covering 30,000 Iranian students on United States college campuses. The head of the SAVAK agents in the United States operated under the cover of an attache at the Iranian Mission to the United Nations, with the FBI, CIA, and State Department fully aware of these activities.
In 1978 the deepening opposition to the Shah errupted in widespread demonstrations and rioting.
SAVAK and the military responded with widespread repression that killed thousands of people. Recognizing that even this level of violence had failed to crush the rebellion, the Shah abdicated the Peacock Throne and departed Iran on 16 January 1979. Despite decades of pervasive surveillance by SAVAK, working closely with CIA, the extent of public opposition to the Shah, and his sudden departure, came as a considerable suprise to the US intelligence community and national leadership. As late as September 28, 1978 the US Defense Intelligence Agency reported that the shah "is expected to remain actively in power over the next ten years."
However, it was no surprise that SAVAK was singled out as a primary target for reprisals, its headquarters overrun, and prominent leaders tried and executed by komiteh representatives. High-ranking SAVAK agents were purged between 1979 and 1981; there were 61 SAVAK officials among 248 military personnel executed between February and September 1979. The organization was officially dissolved by Khomeini shortly after he came to power in 1979.
http://www.cambridgeforecast.org/MIDDLEEAST/SAVAK.html
"If you're not careful the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing." - Malcolm X
