As part of its ongoing covert war against Iran, the U.S. government has for years been providing training — some of it on American soil — and other material support to a State Department-designated “foreign terrorist organization,” the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), the New Yorker’s Seymour M. Hersh reports. The MEK, wrote The New American’s Alex Newman, is “a notorious Islamic-Communist terror group” whose “history ... includes assassinations of more than a few senior U.S. military personnel, terror attacks on American installations, murder of civilians, and much more.” Despite public renunciations of violence and intense lobbying efforts, some involving former high U.S. officials, the group remains on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. As such, it is a crime for Americans “to knowingly provide ‘material support or resources’ ” to the MEK; yet that is precisely what the U.S. government has been doing with impunity for many years. And while current and former officials may never pay the price for their flouting of the law, average Americans may suffer as a result of it.
According to Hersh, from 2005 to at least 2007, the Defense Department’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training sessions for MEK members at the Energy Department’s Nevada National Security Site. The training included lessons “in commo [communications], crypto [cryptography], small-unit tactics, and weaponry,” a “retired four-star general, who has advised the Bush and Obama Administrations on national-security issues” told Hersh, saying he had been privately briefed on the training program in 2005. He also said that the site was being used simultaneously “for advanced training of élite Iraqi combat units.”
The Pentagon used Energy Department facilities for MEK training because it feared getting caught helping terrorists. “We did train them here, and washed them through the Energy Department because the D.O.E. owns all this land in southern Nevada,” a former senior American intelligence official told Hersh. “We were deploying them over long distances in the desert and mountains, and building their capacity in communications — coördinating commo is a big deal.” (A JSOC spokesman, naturally, denied the allegations of MEK training.)
MEK defector Massoud Khodabandeh, who now lives in England, told Hersh that he was also aware of the training in Nevada and that it went far beyond intergroup communication. “The U.S. provided M.E.K. operatives with the ability to intercept telephone calls and text messages inside Iran — which M.E.K. operatives translated and shared with American signals intelligence experts,” writes Hersh.
Why has the U.S. government, which denounces other governments’ involvement with terrorism, been supporting the MEK? Essentially it’s because the MEK is an enemy of the current Iranian regime. Such was not always the case, however. Initially the group opposed the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran and participated in the 1979 revolution that brought to power the Ayatollah Khomeini, who established the Islamic state that continues to rule Iran. Soon, though, the MEK turned on the new regime and began launching terrorist attacks against it. The government was successful in countering the MEK, and most of the group fled to France. In 1986 it relocated to Iraq, where it assisted Saddam Hussein in waging war on Iran; it also helped Saddam crush the 1991 Kurdish and Shiite uprisings.
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