---

A former National Security Council official who recently accused the White House of censoring his op-ed piece for the New York Times may be threatening to expose the Bush Administration’s protection and utilization of an anti-Iranian terrorist organization.

Flynt Leverett, a former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council and a former CIA analyst, said the Bush Administration instructed a CIA censor board to edit his 1,000-word commentary criticizing the White House’s policy toward Iran. According to Leverett, one of the ‘key paragraphs’ that the CIA board wanted to cut pertained to a “grand bargain” negotiated between the U.S. and Iran in 2003. 

As previously reported by the American Monitor, one element of the “grand bargain” involved swapping members of an anti-Iranian terrorist organization, known as the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK or MKO), for senior al-Qaeda operatives that were in Iran’s custody at the time. The potential deal, however, as Leverett and others contend, was rejected by senior Bush Administration officials who sought to use the MEK as a proxy force against the Iranian regime, a tactic they reportedly began to carry out no later than January of 2005.

As Time magazine reported in May, “Former officials like Flynt Leverett, who headed Middle East policy at Bush's National Security Council, say the prisoner-swap deal died in part because Administration conservatives, in the heady days after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, envisioned the M.E.K. as a potential vanguard force in an attempt to overthrow the Islamic regime in Tehran.”

According to several reports, the MEK have subsequently been used by the Pentagon to orchestrate attacks in Iran’s oil-rich province of Khuzestan and in the opium-smuggling border province of Sistan-Baluchistan, where suspected U.S.-MEK operatives attacked and killed 22 Iranian officials this March.

As early as January of 2005 the MEK were “launching raids” from Camp Habib in Basra on behalf of the US, and had also been given permission by Pakistani President Pervez Musharaff to operate from Pakistan’s Baluchi area, according to U.S. officials who spoke to UPI.

As one UN official close to the Security Council explained to the reputable online publication Raw Story, “the newly renamed MEK soldiers are being run instead of military advance teams, committing acts of violence in hopes of staging an insurgency of the Iranian Sunni population.”

“[Undersecretary of Defense Intelligence Stephen] Cambone and those guys made MEK members swear an oath to Democracy and resign from the MEK and then our guys incorporated them into their unit and trained them,” one intelligence official told Raw Story. “These guys are nuts,” he reportedly said.

Any such operations would almost certainly be in direct violation of the law.

As the Associated Press reported in February of 2005, “as soon as the State Department created a list of terror organizations in 1997, it named the MEK, putting it in a club that includes al-Qaida and barring anyone in the United States from providing material support [to the group].”

Moreover, in August of 2003, the U.S. Treasury Department officially designated the MEK and its affiliated organizations as “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” entities, “effectively freezing all [of their] assets and properties and prohibiting transactions between U.S. persons and these organizations.”

What’s more, military and intelligence sources, as Raw Story reported, “say no Presidential finding exists on MEK ops. Without a presidential finding, the operation circumvents the oversight of the House and Senate Intelligence committees.”

Several members of Congress have requested briefings from the Departments of Defense and State regarding operations being conducted inside Iranian territory, but administration officials have neglected to appear for such briefings, according to one source, because the White House fears the U.S.-sponsored MEK operations will be exposed.

“A retired US colonel recently said in a TV interview that the reason underlying [the] absence of the Defense and State…officials in such meetings pertains to the White House worries about the disclosure of the illegal operations of the US army inside Iran and the army's use of the anti-revolutionary Mojahedin-e Khaq Organization (MKO) in the reconnaissance operations on the Iranian soil," Iran’s Fars News Agency reported in October.

Reports of such operations and/or their influence on U.S-Iranian relations would indeed lead to major political consequences for an administration already suffering from record low public approval ratings.

Although it is still unclear whether or not Flynt Leverett’s censored column specifically referenced the MEK element of the 2003 negotiations with Iran, it is apparent that the administration has a motive for keeping such information buried.

While speaking about the censorship of his op-ed piece at a recent press conference, Flynt Leverett said, “the White House is using the rubric of protecting classified information, not to protect classified information, but to limit the dissemination of the views of someone who is very critical of their approach to Iran policy.”

“Enterprising journalists have managed to obtain copies of the document that the Iranians sent into us proposing these negotiations, but for me to write about this and the way that the administration blew this opportunity in 2003, for me to write about that now at this critical moment on the op-ed pages of the New York Times, for that, the White House threatens me with criminal prosecution…”