Iran’s Captive Minds

In June 2014, Dina Esfandiary and Ariane Tabatabai wrote an article in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, making the case that Iran had “genuine and reasonable concerns” about its nuclear fuel supplies and that it would need many more centrifuges to become energy independent. There had to be “a mechanism to guarantee Iranian supply,” they wrote, a position plainly sympathetic to Tehran’s interests.

At the time, Esfandiary was a research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and Tabatabai was a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. But both women also belonged to the Iran Experts Initiative. According to blockbuster reporting in Semafor and Iran International, it was a high-level informal influence operation, involving a handful of scholars of Iranian descent, that was conceived and manipulated by the Iranian regime.

Another well-known participant in the I.E.I. was Ali Vaez, now the Iran project director at the International Crisis Group. Over several years, the trio wrote guest essays (including in The Times) and gave scores of interviews to major Western media outlets, making them unusually influential in the debates about Iran.

Vaez is also close to Robert Malley, who helped lead the Obama administration’s negotiations over the nuclear deal. Malley returned to government as the Biden administration’s special envoy to Iran. Tabatabai joined his team at the State Department and later moved to the Pentagon, where she is now chief of staff to Christopher Maier, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations.

Then things got interesting. In April, Malley’s security clearance was suspended by the State Department on suspicion of mishandling information. In June, he was put on leave. In July, Semafor reported that he is under F.B.I. investigation. (Maier told a House committee last week that Tabatabai’s security clearance was being investigated.)

Around the same time, Iran International, a London-based, Persian-language opposition news channel, obtained a trove of Iranian government emails. Many center on Mostafa Zahrani, a top Iranian diplomat.

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