Busted! Iranian Spy Published in the New York Times, Taught at Harvard

In other frauds, crooks and criminals news …..

“Afrasiabi allegedly sought to influence the American public and American policymakers for the benefit of his employer, the Iranian government, by disguising propaganda as objective policy analysis and expertise.”

(Seth D. DuCharme, Acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York)

Two days ago the news broke that the US Justice Department had filed charges against a long time Iranian agent working for the Islamic Republic of Iran as a mouthpiece for the Ayotollah since the George W Bush administration and throughout the Obama administration. (Hat tip: Cathy)

He lived in the Boston area and worked with an unnamed Congressman as he built up his ‘credibility’ and became a published writer at The New York Times.

I think we should find out how much influence he had over the likes of Former Secretary of State John Kerry during the Obama give-away to Iran.

Here is the bare bones story at the Daily News:

Feds arrest nuclear scholar for failing to register as Iranian foreign agent

For more than a decade on print and on TV, he looked the part of an academic expert on U.S.-Iranian relations — but Kaveh Afrasiabi was secretly on the Iranian government’s payroll, the feds said Tuesday.

Afrasiabi, 63, a longtime U.S. resident, was charged with conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent for working on behalf of Iran for the past 14 years, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said.

A writer and scholar, Afrasiabi received a Ph.D. in political science from Boston University and wrote a thesis titled “State and Populism in Iran” under the guidance of famed historian Howard Zinn, according to the bio on his website. The feds say he lives in Watertown, Mass., just outside of Boston.

Afrasiabi’s expertise helped him land TV speaking gigs, and informed his op-ed articles in The New York Times and his books. He was also a visiting professor at Harvard University and University of California-Berkeley.

All the while, say the feds, he was supported by the Iranian government.

Daily News continues….

As recently as 2020, Afrasiabi provided advice to the Iranian government on how to handle the fallout from the U.S. killing of Gen. Qasem Soleimani.

He suggested the country stop providing information on its nuclear program until the UN condemned the killing, the feds said.

It would “strike fear in the heart of the enemy,” he wrote, according to prosecutors.”

 

Here is what the Justice Department press statement says about that last bit, about Trump’s killing of Soleimani and how Afrasiabi was directing how the UN Security Council should act and how a gullible US media should view it.

…. in January 2020, Afrasiabi emailed Iran’s Foreign Minister and Permanent Representative to the United Nations with advice for “retaliation” for the U.S. military airstrike that killed Major General Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force, the external operations arm of the Iranian government’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, proposing that the Iranian government “end all inspections and end all information on Iran’s nuclear activities pending a [United Nations Security Council] condemnation of [the United States’] illegal crime.” Afrasiabi claimed that such a move would, among other things, “strike fear in the heart of [the] enemy.”

Read the Justice Department Criminal Complaint. 

And, see what Daniel Greenfield said at Frontpage magazine about the charges against Afrasiabi.

Who was the Congressman working with the alleged spy?  Dem or Republican we should be told!

***Don’t skip this!

A summary at Amazon of Iranian agent Afrasiabi’s November 2019 book (emphasis is mine):

With the advent of the Trump Administration, relations between Iran and the United States have become increasingly conflictual to the point that a future war between the two countries is a realistic possibility. President Trump has unilaterally withdrawn the US from the historic Iran nuclear accord and has re-imposed the nuclear-related sanctions, which had been removed as a result of that accord. Reflecting a new determined US effort to curb Iran’s hegemonic behavior throughout the Middle East, Trump’s Iran policy has all the markings of a sharp discontinuity in the Iran containment strategy of the previous six US administrations. The regime change policy, spearheaded by a hawkish cabinet with a long history of antipathy toward the Iranian government, has become the most salient feature of US policy toward Iran under President Trump. This turn in US foreign policy has important consequences not just for Iran but also for Iran’s neighbors and prospects of long-term stability in the Persian Gulf and beyond. This book seeks to examine the fluid dynamic of US-Iran relations in the Trump era by providing a social scientific understanding of the pattern of hostility and antagonism between Washington and Tehran and the resulting spiraling conflict that may lead to a disastrous war in the region.

They hated President Trump!

Kind of leaves you wondering what role the Iranian government had in the Great Election Steal of 2020.

And, one last thing!  So Iranian agents can teach at Harvard, but Trump aides are barred from teaching there, and a movement is afoot to strip Harvard degrees from anyone who was, or is, loyal to President Donald Trump.