People's Mujahedin of Iran - Designation As A Terrorist Organization

Designation As A Terrorist Organization

The United States put MEK on the U.S. State Department list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations in 1997 because of the killing of Americans in the 1970s and the 1992 attempted attack against the Iranian mission to the United Nations in New York. However, since 2004 the United States also has considered the group as "noncombatants" and "protected persons" under the Geneva Conventions because most members have been located in a refugee camp in Iraq for more than 25 years. In 2002 the European Union, pressured by Washington, added MEK to its terrorist list.

MEK leaders then began a lobbying campaign to be removed from the list by promoting itself as a viable opposition to the mullahs in Tehran. Gary Sick, a Persian Gulf expert at Columbia University's Middle East Institute told Time magazine that "They have been extremely clever and very, very effective in their propaganda and lobbying of members of Congress." He said they were successful in getting congressional representatives to overlook terrorism accusations because the group styled itself a "democratic alternative to the Iranian regime." In 2008 U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denied MEK its request to be delisted, despite its lobbying the State Department.

In 2011, several former senior US officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, three former chairmen of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, two former directors of the CIA, former commander of NATO Wesley Clark, two former US Ambassadors to the United Nations, the former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, a former White House Chief of Staff, a former commander of the United States Marine Corps, former U.S. National Security Advisor Frances Townsend, and US President Barack Obama's retired National Security Adviser General James L. Jones called for the MEK to be removed from its official State Department foreign terrorist listing on the grounds that they constituted a viable opposition to the Iranian regime. In early 2012, a controversy arose regarding whether Townsend had committed federal felonies by providing material support to the MEK. Many of MEK's American supporters accepted fees of $15,000 to $30,000 to give speeches to the group and took travel expense money to go to Paris for MEK rallies. Former Pennsylvania governor Edward G. Rendell was paid over $150,000 and faced a United States Treasury Department investigation.

In April 2012, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh reported that the US Joint Special Operations Command had trained MEK operatives at a secret site in Nevada from 2005 to 2009. According to Hersh, MEK members were trained in intercepting communications, cryptography, weaponry and small unit tactics at the Nevada site up until President Barack Obama took office in 2009. Hersh also reported additional names of former U.S. officials paid to speak in support of MEK, including former CIA directors James Woolsey and Porter Goss; New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani; former Vermont Governor Howard Dean; former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Louis Freeh and former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton.