A week ago Semafor broke a major story about a secret effort by the Iranian government “to bolster Tehran’s image and positions on global security issues — particularly its nuclear program — by building ties with a network of influential overseas academics and researchers.” One of the people recruited into this group was Robert Malley, Joe Biden’s special envoy for Iran. Malley brought Ariane Tabatabai into government. Tabatabai ended up as chief of staff to Christopher Maier, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, the Defense Department’s top counterterrorism official. Tabatabai remains on the job even though we have emails from her checking in with Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officials about what her views should be on various subjects.
Put this in the context of the same policy that released $6 billion to Iran (Former State Department Advisor Decimates Biden Team Excuses About the $6 Billion for Iran) to be placed in a bank in Qatar, which is Hamas’s major source of funding and where top Hamas leaders live to be safe, and you would be right to wonder how deeply our Iran policy is run from Tehran. By the way, this is not new behavior if you consider Biden to be Obama’s third term. It was Obama who cut a deal to give Iran nuclear weapons, but one of the architects of that deal was Ben Rhodes, who had difficulty obtaining a security clearance because, it was rumored, of his ties to Iran.
If Iranian agents advise senior policymakers in the Biden NSC, Pentagon, and State Department, it would be no shock that intelligence would be interpreted through the lens of that advice. It also wouldn’t be a shock that someone who asked an IRGC officer how to testify to a Senate committee might have similar conversations about what to expect in the way of a US response.
The danger is not that this was an intelligence blunder; blunders happen, and blunders are fixable. The danger is that it was a blunder made possible by the high-level penetration of the Biden foreign and defense policy apparatus by Iranian agents of influence. If that is the case, then this represents the most colossal failure of intelligence due to foreign penetration in our history.
R&I = TP
DGM