Well, this explains a lot.

The Obama and now Biden Iran policies have never made much sense to me.

Iran is the avowed enemy of our allies and partners in the Middle East region, but for some reason, the Obama and Biden Administrations have spent enormous efforts appeasing Iran at the same time that they have been increasingly hostile to countries that have allied themselves with us.

A new revelation that first popped up on Semaphor, written by two Wall Street Journal reporters, sheds some light on who was driving US policies toward Iran, and the news isn’t good.

The Washington Post in 2021: “Biden's pick for Iran envoy is a pro. Deal with it.”

REALITY CHECK: “The Biden administration’s now-suspended Iran envoy Robert Malley helped to fund, support, and direct an Iranian intelligence operation designed to influence the United States…” pic.twitter.com/u79RgVS04v

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) October 3, 2023

Apparently the Biden Administration has known for months that their key Iran Envoy, Robert Malley, was a key member of an Iranian spy ring/influence operation. He was suspended several months ago–disappearing off the stage–and a couple months after the suspension it was revealed through some sleuthing that he is being investigated for “mishandling” classified documents.

There seems to be a lot of that in Washington.

When Malley was appointed by Biden he was applauded by all the “best” people as a real pro, and indeed he was. Just not a pro at protecting US interests.

The spy ring/influence operation was revealed through a leak of a cache of emails from the Iranian foreign ministry.

The emails were obtained and translated by Iran International, a Persian-language television news channel headquartered in London — which was briefly based in Washington due to Iranian government threats — and shared with Semafor. Semafor and Iran International jointly reported on some aspects of the IEI. Both organizations have produced their own stories independently.

The communications reveal the access Rouhani’s diplomats have had to Washington’s and Europe’s policy circles, particularly during the final years of the Obama administration, through this network. One of the German academics in the IEI, according to the emails, offered to ghostwrite op-eds for officials in Tehran. Others would, at times, seek advice from the Foreign Ministry’s staff about attending conferences and hearings in the U.S. and Israel. The IEI participants were prolific writers of op-eds and analyses, and provided insights on television and Twitter, regularly touting the need for a compromise with Tehran on the nuclear issue — a position in line with both the Obama and Rouhani administrations at the time. The emails describe the IEI being initiated following Rouhani’s 2013 election, when he was looking to find an accommodation with the West on the nuclear issue. According to the emails, Iran’s Foreign Ministry, through its in-house think tank — the Institute for Political and International Studies — reached out to ten “core” members for the project, through which it planned to liaise over the next 18 months to aggressively promote the merits of a nuclear deal between Tehran and Washington, which was finalized in July 2015.

And this is the full espionage story unfolding now. Astonishing https://t.co/Cde9wSTJMG

— Jake Wallis Simons (@JakeWSimons) October 2, 2023

Iranian agents have been working both inside and outside the US government to influence US policy, making it much more friendly to Iran and pushing concessions on Iranian nuclear programs.

This should be shocking to me, but it isn’t. Both Obama’s Iran policy and the dovish one pushed by Biden are almost inexplicable but for the possibility that key people have been shilling for Iran.

The Biden administration’s now-suspended Iran envoy Robert Malley helped to fund, support, and direct an Iranian intelligence operation designed to influence the United States and allied governments, according to a trove of purloined Iranian government emails. The emails, which were reported on by veteran Wall Street Journal correspondent Jay Solomon, writing in Semafor, and by Iran International, the London-based émigré opposition outlet which is the most widely read independent news source inside Iran, were published last week after being extensively verified over a period of several months by the two outlets. They showed that Malley had helped to infiltrate an Iranian agent of influence named Ariane Tabatabai into some of the most sensitive positions in the U.S. government—first at the State Department and now the Pentagon, where she has been serving as chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, Christopher Maier.

Chief of Staff for the Assistant Secretary of Defense for special operations.

No big deal, that. Why on earth would Iran want somebody placed there, I wonder?

The contents of the emails are damning, showing a group of Iranian American academics being recruited by the Iranian regime, meeting together in foreign countries to receive instructions from top regime officials, and pledging their personal loyalty to the regime. They also show how these operatives used their Iranian heritage and Western academic positions to influence U.S. policy toward Iran, first as outside “experts” and then from high-level U.S. government posts. Both inside and outside of government, the efforts of members of this circle were repeatedly supported and advanced by Malley, who served as the U.S. government’s chief interlocutor with Iran under both the Obama and the Biden administrations. Malley is also the former head of the International Crisis Group (ICG), which directly paid and credentialed several key members of the regime’s influence operation.

Methinks that it may be time for the government to review its security clearance policies.

Yes, but…it appears that the US government did have access to at least some of these emails and cleared members of this influence operation/spy ring to work in high-level positions of the government. Very very high levels, in a place not only to collect intelligence but to help set policies.

In response to a Tablet email requesting comment on Malley’s and Tabatabai’s role in an Iranian spy ring, a State Department spokesman wrote: “We have seen the Semafor article, which does not presume it was a ‘spy ring,’ and we reject that characterization. Rob Malley remains on leave and we have no further comment due to privacy considerations. The Biden-Harris administration appointed Ariane Tabatabai [one of the spies who was directed by Iran] to serve various roles in the U.S. government because of her expertise on nuclear and other foreign policy issues.” The Defense Department did not respond by press time to Tablet’s email requesting comment on Ariane Tabatabai’s role in an Iranian spy ring.

Whether the IEI is best characterized as an Iranian “spy ring” or as a “regime-directed influence operation” is a semantic question that beggars the larger question of how any responsible U.S. security official in possession of Tabatabai’s correspondence could have cleared her to enter the State Department building or the Pentagon—let alone cleared her to work as a chief of staff in the Defense Department, with direct access to the most sensitive real-time details of U.S. special forces operations.

They apparently knew, and hired her anyway at the behest of Malley, who also was a proxy for the Iranian government.

It seems likely that by the time of her appointment to the Pentagon’s special operations office, Tabatabai’s covert activities on behalf of the Iranian regime were well known in Biden administration and intelligence circles. “The hoops you have to jump through to get a bare-bones top secret clearance even without compartments or special access programs are enormous,” says Theroux. “They grill you on your foreign contacts. Contacts with any foreign government raise more red flags than Bernie Sanders’ honeymoon. Contacts with senior officials from enemy governments, classified as non-frat governments like Russia, China, Cuba, as well as Iran, are in a different category altogether—what would normally be totally disqualifying.”

There is also the fact that, as early as 2014, as Tablet has reported, the Obama administration was spying on Israeli officials and their contacts within the United States, including U.S. lawmakers and pro-Israel activists. The fact that U.S. intelligence services routinely disobeyed guidelines preventing them from unmasking the identities of U.S. persons recorded in transcripts of foreign intelligence intercepts has been exhaustively demonstrated in a long series of U.S. government reports, Congressional investigations, and other reporting. Since Zarif’s communications and the IRGC’s communications were also collected, U.S. officials would have known about the IEI—and about the names of those working on behalf of Iran, such as Vaez and Tabatabai.

Malley, as a ringleader in this influence operation, has been sidelined, but his protege is still in a key position with access to some of the most closely guarded secrets about our special operations. Still.

It is mind-blowing.

The facts of Malley’s involvement with the IEI and its agents are likely to have been old news within the Biden administration; the impending publication of the IEI emails is likely the reason why Malley was put on leave in April and had his security clearances suspended. As news of emails and their impending publication circulated in Washington, the administration moved him to the sidelines before Republican officials had the chance to demand his head on a spike.

Why an Iranian operative is still at the Pentagon, especially in a job which gives her daily access to classified information that puts the country’s most sensitive military operations at risk, is another matter entirely. “The optimistic reading,” says Theroux, “is that they were watching her to see what she does and the FBI has her apartment all teched up. But to be an optimist you have to believe the FBI is clean, rather than see this as a huge counterintelligence failure. Though, of course, it’s not a failure if they were complicit.”

There is much more in the latest Semaphor article, and I suggest you read it and weep. The depths of either incompetence or, worse, complicity with Iran in both the Biden and Obama administrations is shocking.

Read the whole thing here.