ISJ – US Ambassador Lincoln Bloomfield, former Assistant Secretary of State for political military affairs, spoke at a high-level conference near Paris on June 30 as part of the “World Summit for a Free Iran”. He took part in the panel on misinformation about the Iranian Resistance. Here are excerpts from his speech:
A dozen years ago I started looking at the issue of disinformation [about the People’s Mujahidin Organization of Iran or MEK], just looking at allegations independently because everything I saw on the web – I was the chairman of a think tank and I looked at all the other think tanks, and they said the exact same thing, almost word for word: “Don’t go near them. They’re terrorists. They killed Americans. They’re Marxists. They’re strange. Stay away from them. Don’t trust them”.
Then I looked into the source documents from the timeframes involved, 1979, 1980, 1981, even going back to the early 70s and the 60s, and I would find differences and said, wait a minute, this is not what really happened. And these few early moments turned into one chapter after another of a different story, an untold story, to the point where I would say two things.
One, there is an entirely wrong narrative about the Iranian resistance and about the regime. Two, it is still believed by many people in Washington, and it is still repeated by most of the major media. There is a psychological reason for that. They want to hear the White House or the State Department say it first before they put it in the headline of their story, but the story lives on.
And so I’ve thought about this, and here are my thoughts. This is an American view. One is that when your children lie to you, you know they are lying. But this disinformation has been successful. What’s the difference? It seems to me that one party is going to try to deceive, but it only works if the other party wants to believe. My view of this is a tale of two cities, of Tehran and Washington.
The hostage crisis
The formative event was the hostage crisis. It traumatized the United States. It for the first time seized the entire U.S. media daily for 444 days. And three things came from that. One, we didn’t focus on anything else. Two, when it was over, no one wanted to hear the word Iran in the U.S. anymore. We were done with it. We were tired of it. And three, Ayatollah Khomeini and his people learned something about the Americans.
And so let me start with that. What did they learn? They learned that the Americans had been shocked. They tried to rescue the hostages. It didn’t work. They could be cowed into submission, into keeping their distance. Well, that escalated to Lebanon. I was the desk officer for the Pentagon. When the Marines were bombed, when the embassies were bombed, when the hostages were taken, the TW8-47, Rich Higgins, we helped send him there, a Marine, he was murdered. All of these traumatic events happened. They learned from that that it actually works. Terrorism works. If they punch you in the face, you might stay clear.
And when we got tired of that, along came the secret nuclear program, which all of a sudden became the one and only thing that matters, the nuclear program. I’ll get to the disinformation in a minute, but even as the nuclear issue suddenly loses a little currency, now let’s back and seize some hostages. Let’s take this kindly Belgian aid worker, a Norwegian refugee fund, and let’s – if they aren’t scared by 40 years in prison, maybe 74 lashes will really scare them. And it did. They got their spy back, Assadi, from Belgium by trading a hostage. That I think is part of the story of disinformation.
No unified story about Iran
When we look at China, the United States doesn’t have any problem saying China’s the pacing threat. You know, we’re going to build toward China. We’re doing all these things to get ready for deterrence, extended deterrence with China. When it comes to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, there’s no two versions of Putin. Some people may have sympathy for him, not very many anymore. You know, what he has done to violate the UN Charter and do so much harm to the Ukrainians.
When it comes to Iran, we don’t have a narrative. We don’t have a unified story of what happened. We missed a whole lot of formative things that happened. We didn’t understand in Washington who is the MEK. We didn’t know it was a student movement. They still call them Marxists. They were studying social equity issues that Marx wrote about. I studied Marx in college, but they didn’t embrace Marx’s political agenda of totalitarian rule. They never embraced that. And in fact, the Shah was a very good propagandist. When they saw left-wing, non-Islamic, violent student radicals, they may not even have been students, they lumped them all together. They’re all Mojahedin. These are all crazy. And they scared the population against the young radicals. And so everyone was lumped into this business that they’re Marxists, they’re extremists.
Never killed Americans
They killed the Americans. Well, folks, they didn’t kill the Americans. Massoud Rajavi’s MEK never killed the Americans. They had nothing to do with it. In fact, they opposed the people who did. And there was blood in the streets. Sharif University is named after an MEK person who was killed by the leftist extremists who killed the Americans. And so we missed the story.
We didn’t see that there was a season of politics where Mrs. Madam Rajavi ran for office. She won a lot of votes, but was then disqualified. Ayatollah Khomeini wanted Massoud Rajavi and the MEK students, these educated, young, bright men and women, he wanted them as part of his movement. They were with him in Paris. He talked about democracy. He never said anything about Velayat-e Faqih. He never said we’re going to have a totalitarian one-man rule that is divinely ordained by the 12th imam of the prophet. He never said that until he got to Tehran, and then suddenly he had this constitution.
People were afraid of the Basij beating people up in the street and tearing down printing machines and whatnot. Massoud Rajavi and his supporters, your supporters, your families, stood their ground and continued to show up for the rallies. And it boiled on June 20th, 1981, the reign of terror began. They shot their way to power. They stole the revolution that never belonged to them. The Americans missed this story.
Terrorist list
So of course, if you see that you have gotten away with all of this, then you can propagate all sorts of narratives that can be believed. I studied the terrorism reports for 19 years out of the State Department. For the first part, they weren’t so bad, but then along came the time when they put the MEK on the terrorism list in 1987. As Director Freeh just explained, the FBI wasn’t consulted. It had nothing to do with a dossier of terrorism. The terrorism reports changed overnight, and soon terrible events that had been attributed to upwards of seven different groups, like the bombing against the Islamic Revolutionary Party that injured Ali Khamenei’s arm and killed Beheshti. The MEK was never a suspect when that happened, and they never claimed it, as they did with some of their other armed resistance activities over 20 years. But after a while, all of these things were the MEK. It was all the MEK, and it showed up in the U.S. State Department report. And of course, the newspapers printed it.
I thought that our research was a little bit risky. We’re trying to say that we have different facts than the governments of the West are repeating. We can sit here now in 2023 and say we have been right all along. All of you have been right all along. The narrative that we uncovered, the narrative that I got by asking questions and others have gotten, that Struan Stevenson’s books have described so well, was all true.
Agents of influence
So I want to finish by saying disinformation won’t work so well if the media keeps repeating it. So my appeal to you and to all the journalists here is that you must stop repeating things that you now know are untrue. You must stop. And we will keep telling you to stop. You cannot repeat these false narratives. You now know that the people who have left the MEK and said, I was kept in a room and I was asked to confess my sins and I was tortured and I couldn’t leave, you know that they’re on the payroll of the Ministry of Intelligence. Read the Antwerp court report when Assadi was indicted. I will give it to you if you ask me for a copy.
This will describe the operation of Section 312 of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security across Europe, across the United States, across Canada. We are being influenced by agents of influence in our midst, in the universities, in the think tanks, and in some places in government. I think we can fix this, but we have to stand up for the truth. We have to point a finger. We have to demand that the media organizations have professional pride, do the brave thing. You’re not going to get any more visas to Tehran, sorry. Tell the truth. And when we do that, the regime will be exposed as the weak and illegitimate entity of ruthless and unprincipled people that they surely are.