The murky web of on and offline actors targeting Iran
The projected path and intensity of Hurricane Ian. (Photo Credit: FOX Weather)
Editor’s note
We’re pleased to re-publish this article, with an added paragraph, from TCF Advisory Board member Kit Klarenberg, which was originally published on Press TV.
Written by: Kit Klarenberg
On 16 September, the second day of a historic Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, Xi Jinping called on members of the Central Asian grouping to work together to prevent “external forces” from instigating “color revolutions” in the region.
Believing the prospect to be a major risk in the near future, as part of this joint effort, the Chinese President offered to tutor 2,000 specialist police officers at a regional training center in order to “strengthen law enforcement capacity building” among member nations.
His comments were eerily serendipitous, for within hours, hordes of demonstrators took to the streets of Tehran and other major Iranian cities, engaging in violent acts, and calling for the government’s overthrow.
A week later, despite several million-strong counter-protests by government supporters and arrests of key agitators, the upheaval shows little sign of abating. Despite widespread barbarity targeted at civilians and authorities alike, such as the destruction of an ambulance ferrying police officers away from the scene of a brutal riot, many protesters purport to be motivated by human rights concerns.
For residents of the former Soviet sphere, these scenes will be familiar, and indeed ominous. After all, it is in these lands where, since the turn of the century, multiple governments have been ousted in color-coded uprisings - for example, Georgia’s 2003 Rose Revolution, Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, and Kyrgyzstan’s 2005 Tulip Revolution.
Invariably, they began as massive street-protests, which quickly turned incendiary following inevitable responses from local authorities. Invariably too, they were framed in the Western media as spontaneous, organic explosions of popular will, motivated by overwhelming local demand for human rights, democracy, and freedom.
In every case too, what replaced the felled administrations were autocratic and unpopular Western-backed regimes, which did nothing to advance the causes of humanitarianism, progress, or liberty, but an enormous amount to further Western ideological and financial interests, supplant national sovereignty over key industries and economic sectors, and reduce their countries and citizens to vassals of the American empire.
The key driving force behind these “revolutions” was the National Endowment for Democracy, a US government agency founded in November 1983. Then-Central Intelligence Agency director William Casey was at the heart of its creation. He sought to construct a public mechanism to support opposition groups, activist movements and media outlets overseas that would engage in propaganda and political activism to disrupt, destabilize, and ultimately displace ‘enemy’ regimes.
Such activities were traditionally the CIA’s purview, but embarrassing scandals throughout the 1970s forced the US to consider more public means of achieving its malign ends. The insidious nature of NED was confirmed in a 1991 Washington Post article, which outlined how the agency conducted “spyless coups” abroad through “overt operations”, by openly funding anti-government elements.
“Covert funding for these groups would have been the kiss of death, if discovered. Overt funding, it would seem, has been a kiss of life,” the newspaper recorded.
That article also quoted at some length senior NED official Allen Weinstein, who acknowledged: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
‘Propaganda discredits the transgressors’
In 2015, Russia banned NED from operating on its soil, a move framed by the Western media as a tyrannical crackdown on civil society. Many other countries have followed suit since, particularly in the Global South, the segment of the world most at-risk of Endowment-sponsored meddling.
Canadians also face the spectre of NED interference, which has ramped up since the mid 2010s. In 2021, a Canadian parliamentary vote to declare a "Uyghur genocide" was driven by Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, created in 2020 directly through NED funding.
Somewhat amazingly though, NED is still permitted to operate in Tehran. The organization’s grants database shows that between 2016 and 2022, it sponsored 51 separate projects at a cost of almost $5 million in the country. A report on its activities over the past year shows that it bankrolled numerous projects related to exposing rights abuses.
For instance, $45,000 was committed to an unnamed organization for “human rights monitoring and documentation,” in order to “raise awareness about human rights and strengthen the capacity of human rights defenders” in the country.
“The organization will monitor, document and report on human rights violations and expand its online political prisoners’ database and compile related data,” the grant listing states. “It will also work closely with its network of human rights activists to build their capacity in reporting, advocacy, and digital security. In addition, it will publish a quarterly magazine to provide analysis on human rights laws and issues.”
Elsewhere, $70,000 was used to finance a “human rights law journal” to “raise awareness among lawyers and civil society actors about the rule of law and civic rights and to foster debate” among “lawyers, law students and clerics,” on “democratic reforms.”
As CIA whistleblower Ralph McGehee once explained, stoking fraudulent concerns about human rights is a well-established US Trojan Horse strategy, and the first stage in an NED-run regime change operation.
“The US administration either influences or creates new human rights organizations which declare a non-compliant country in violation of human rights. Propaganda discredits the transgressors. As soon as a government has been appropriately demonized, diplomatic, political, propaganda, media operations and economic measures are applied to force the target country to toe the line. When the target nation lessens political restrictions, the NED, USAID, the World Bank, etc begin overt or covert operations to modify or replace governing authority.”
That the NED is keeping a close eye on events in Tehran is evident. On 22 September, the organization urged those interested in “coverage of the rising protests in Iran” to follow its grant recipient, the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center.
The terms of the organization’s NED grants show it has received hundreds of thousands of dollars since 2016 to “promote human rights and democracy education, discourse and advocacy,” and “monitor and document human rights violations, publicly disseminate its findings, and advocate for greater accountability to international treaty obligations as well as for victims of human rights violations.” In other words, it is now doing the job it is funded so lavishly to do.
Abdorrahman Boroumand Center’s work no doubt augments NED’s attempts to engage and weaponize lawyers in Iran as footsoldiers. In recent decades, “lawfare” has become an increasingly popular destabilization tactic for Washington, with often absolutely devastating effects. Brazil’s Operation Lava Jato saw numerous popular left-wing political figures jailed, and successful domestic companies crippled, on bogus charges of corruption, in turn wreaking havoc on the country’s economy, and ushering in the rule of Jair Bolsanaro.
The Lava Jato taskforce were hailed by mainstream journalists as crusading heroes on a righteous crusade to purge Brazil of financial criminality at the country’s highest levels. In reality, the taskforce was itself comprised of corrupted laywers, who received extensive training and direction in their activities from the US Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In private conversations via the Telegram app, they boasted of how the arrest and imprisonment of former Brazilian President Lula da Silva was “a gift from the CIA.” Now a free man after spending 580 days in jail, his vexatious convictions have been overturned, and he is now the clear frontrunner in polls ahead of the country’s impending Presidential election.
NED also has a track record of engaging in such activity. In September 2003, the organization granted the Washington-based Center for Justice and International Law $83,000 to train Venezuelans citizens in launching legal actions against their government via the Inter-American Comission and Inter-American Court of Human Rights, a little-known yet extremely powerful US and Costa Rica-based legal nexus that claims jurisdiction over the entirety of the Americas.
This led to a dramatic increase in frivolous claims brought against the Venezuelan government by opposition activists, all of which circumvented the country’s legal system and undermined its sovereignty, granting power of judgment to a foreign-run body.
‘Dark arts of espionage’
Turning back to CIA whistleblower Ralph McGehee’s testimony, he revealed that another core component of US regime change programs are “false evidence operations,” in which discrediting documents are forged, and placed “where they will be discovered and distributed,” in the process “glorifying demons and demonizing targets, even the most honorable.”
One of the key means by which the CIA circulates such material today is via hacking, and hacking groups - and Iran has been confirmed by Western news sources as being in the crosshairs of the Agency’s efforts in this regard. In 2018, then-US President Donald Trump authorized Langley to “run wild” and conduct “much more aggressive” offensive cyber activities against Tehran, which led to a welter of “hack-and-dump operations” and “cyberattacks on Iranian infrastructure” with “less White House oversight” than before.
It seems likely that these activities resulted in “The Iran Cables”, a series of articles published by The Intercept and New York Times in November 2019, based on an “unprecedented leak” of 700 pages of reports supposedly compiled by Tehran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security. The series sought to expose the scale of Iranian “influence” in Iraq in the years following the illegal war.
The series may have contributed to the murder of Iranian General Qasem Suleimani. One instalment focused heavily on his alleged role as the Iraqi government’s secret puppet master, claiming he “more than anyone else” had employed “dark arts of espionage and covert military action to ensure that Shiite power remains ascendant” in the country. Two months later, he was incinerated in an illegal US drone strike as he left Baghdad International Airport for a peace conference.
Since the recent unrest erupted in Iran, hackers have again targeted the country in droves, with illicit material and claims of cyberattack success being widely shared on Twitter accompanied by “#OpIran”.
Analysis by digital disinformation specialist Marc Owen Jones indicates that many of the accounts involved were registered following 16 September, and many hundreds of accounts using that hashtag have been created every day since, raising the obvious prospect they are bots or trolls, centrally controlled by shadowy actors unknown.
It may be significant that on 19 September, the Washington Post revealed the Pentagon’s Centcom unit, which covers all US military operations across the “central” area of the globe, was auditing all its psychological warfare activities online, after a number of fake users managed by the division were exposed publicly, and banned by Facebook. Among the accounts taken down was a bogus news platform sharing content published by US propaganda outlet Voice of America Farsi.
An ostensibly private group of hackers has gone to the extent of creating a dedicated Telegram channel, where Iranian citizens are encouraged “to send videos of abuses and information the Iran regime does not want the world to see,” pledging that the collective would “make sure your voice is heard and share with the world what you send.”
Here, we see how separate Western psychological and digital warfare strategies might intersect, and complement one another. In the process, the likelihood the tumult unfolding in Iran is foreign-borne, directed, and amplified, and ultimately concerned with unseating a troublesome government becomes a virtual certainty.
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Kit Klarenberg is a member of The Canada Files' Advisory Board. An investigative journalist whose work explores the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions, he leads The Grayzone's British division, is a chief contributor to The Scrum, and has written for The Cradle, Declassified UK, Electronic Intifada, MintPress and ShadowProof.
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