ANALYSIS – Almost two months ago, I wrote about the incredible Iranian influence operation inside both the Obama and Biden administrations. The clandestine effort succeeded in placing Iranian agents at the highest levels of the U.S. government.
Their job has been to influence U.S. policy to be more favorable to the interests of the Iranian terror regime. And based on the way both administrations have behaved, and the billions of dollars they have given to Iran, Tehran's efforts have been highly successful.
One potential Iranian agent is Robert Malley, the discredited former lead U.S. negotiator with Iran on its nuclear program. He is currently on unpaid leave and his security clearance suspended while being investigated for issues related to the handling of classified information. (RELATED: Here's How The FBI Has Been Spying On You Without A Warrant. Now Senators Want To Stop It.)
Malley was the prime architect of the Obama administration's disastrous Iran nuclear deal. He was brought back by Joe Biden to revive the deal canceled by Donald Trump.
At least he is out of the government, for now.
Potentially far more dangerous is Ariane Tabatabai, the Iranian-born Biden Pentagon official who I named in my earlier piece. She is now ideally positioned to be a top spy for Tehran.
She is now also reportedly under investigation. Though nobody in the government will explain why. But in addition to her place atop the Pentagon special operations bureaucracy, she is unbelievably also training to be an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy Reserves.
In my opinion as a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), a first generation Iranian American whose Iran-based father is a university professor close to former Iranian president Hassan Rouhani, should never have been granted any type of security clearance.
Yet, shockingly, Tabatabai ended up as a diplomat on Malley's Iran nuclear negotiating team after Biden took office in 2021, and she has kept infiltrating Team Biden, now at the Pentagon. (RELATED: Biden Weakness Encourages Iranian Attacks On US Forces)
As The New York Post reported:
Not only is Tabatabai the chief-of-staff to the Pentagon's assistant secretary of defense for special operations, Christopher Maier, but, according to Navy sources, she recently became a US reserve naval intelligence officer.
Tabatabai has completed her five-month training at the Center for Information Dominance in Dam Neck, Va., according to a fellow officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity and expressed concern that Tabatabai retains her security clearance, despite the counterintelligence investigation.
The officer says Tabatabai would receive access in her reservist intelligence role to such sensitive information as staff rosters and movements of US ships and submarines in the Persian Gulf, all of which is clearly of interest to Iran amid the current Gaza conflict.
“The Navy has been actively training her to be an intelligence officer and giving her access to, not just what she has in her civilian job, but access to all the need-to-know information that a reserve unit has,” says the officer.
The officer added, according to The Post: “Everyone she has contact with in the Navy intelligence realm is now potentially outed.”
Tabatabai's security access has been a source of ongoing concern among colleagues, especially as “the investigation has been going on for so long,” the officer continued.
“It's a clear and present danger, in that even if [the investigation] affords her the right to due process, her clearance still should be on hold, and she should not have any access to go into the Pentagon or any other military installation,” the officer noted.
As I reported earlier, “Tehran began its influence operation in early 2014, focused primarily on protecting its ongoing nuclear weapons program. The Iranian effort was primarily geared toward aggressively promoting a nuclear deal between Tehran and Washington, eventually finalized in mid-2015.”
Iran's effort involved building ties with a network of influential overseas academics and researchers.” They called it the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI).
According to Semafor:
The scope and scale of the IEI project has emerged in a large cache of Iranian government correspondence and emails reported for the first time by Semafor and Iran International. The officials… congratulated themselves on the impact of the initiative. At least three of the people on the Foreign Ministry's list were, or became, top aides to Robert Malley, the Biden administration's special envoy on Iran, who was placed on leave this June following the suspension of his security clearance.
Ariane Tabatabai was one of the three who agreed to be the core group of the IEI. And she has been burrowing deeply into America's national security apparatus ever since.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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