ANNUAL OVERVIEW

Iran opposition buoyed by Trump’s 'maximum pressure' campaign

Julian Pecquet Julian Pecquet is the Editor of Special Projects for Al-Monitor, where he supervises the award-winning Lobbying Tracker as well as managing long-form stories. Before that he covered the US Congress for Al-Monitor. Prior to joining Al-Monitor, Pecquet led global affairs coverage for the political newspaper The Hill.

Posted: September 11, 2019

Iran’s main exiled opposition group is seeing large swaths of its decades-old agenda become reality under US President Donald Trump, even as its ultimate dream of regime change in Tehran remains out of reach. The Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an umbrella group dominated by the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), has consistently applauded Trump’s so-called maximum pressure campaign against Tehran and the imposition of sanctions. Long dismissed as a fringe cult by critics — and as terrorists by the Iranian regime (as well as the United States until 2012) — the MEK is now being embraced by the Trump administration. This January, the NCRI hired its first new lobbyist in six years when it brought on Robert Joseph, a former undersecretary of state for arms control and international security under President George W. Bush. The investment has paid off, with Joseph getting paid $90,000 in the first half of this year while scoring meetings with key actors including US Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy John Rood and National Security Council hawk Richard Goldberg. The NCRI also has ties to national security adviser John Bolton, spending $40,000 so he could attend its annual summit near Paris in 2017. And former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., a close Trump ally, considered registering as a foreign agent for the group last year after making several paid appearances sponsored by the group (Gingrich has not registered to date).

Meanwhile, Al-Monitor first reported that the State Department changed its talking points ahead of the US anti-Iran summit in Warsaw in February to stop precluding the MEK as a viable alternative to the Iranian theocracy. Despite the string of victories, the NCRI has suffered a few setbacks as well.

Last year, the group was accused of running a Twitter troll farm from Albania to artificially inflate support for a US hard line against Tehran. (The last remaining MEK fighters were relocated from Iraq to the Balkan nation in 2016.) This year, the NCRI hosted its annual rally at its new Ashraf 3 compound in the Albania capital of Tirana. The event drew the usual crowd of (well-compensated) former US and international officials but no current members of the Trump administration and only one lawmaker, freshman Rep. Lance Gooden, R-Texas.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s own hawkish rhetoric on Iran has caused the president to periodically soften his stance to reassure his war-skeptic base. “We are not looking for regime change,” Trump insisted in July. “We are not looking for that at all.” The president has also said that he has made a “lot of progress” in reaching a new nuclear deal with Tehran after he tore up the old one. Al-Monitor reported in July that Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., had met with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif as an informal US emissary.

Other groups have also jumped on the anti-regime bandwagon, albeit far less visibly than the NCRI. Last September, the Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan, an exiled armed group with communist origins, opened an office in Washington to build connections with Congress and the Trump administration. The group hired Ayal Frank, a former longtime lobbyist for the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq, and his AF International firm in February for $4,500 a month. On the other side of the debate, the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) has relinquished its position as the main advocate for a less hawkish approach to Iran amid rising concerns from the Democratic Party and the departure of founder Trita Parsi. Powerful liberal groups, including J Street, have made diplomacy with Iran a priority in their outreach to the candidates running for president in 2020.