A senior Department of Defense official linked to an organization that lobbies for the mullahs in Tehran has continued to hold the highest level of security clearance and visit the White House.
In September 2023, Semafor posted an expose of the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI), a project of the Iranian Foreign Ministry. It was initiated in 2014 with the mission to “promote Tehran’s arguments in the West.”
“This initiative which we call ‘Iran Experts Initiative (IEI)’ is consisted of a core group of 6-10 distinguished second-generation Iranians who have established affiliations with the leading international think-tanks and academic institutions, mainly in Europe and the US,” Saeed Khatibzadeh, a Berlin-based Iranian diplomat and future Foreign Ministry spokesman, wrote to Mostafa Zahrani, the head of the IPIS think tank in Tehran, on March 5, 2014, as the project gained steam….
