Top Iranian Pentagon Official Ariane Tabatabai Is Israeli-Iran Attack Plan LEAKER Who Kept Her Top-Level Security Clearance Despite Previous ‘Spying for Tehran’ Accusations

Sky News officially names Ariane Tabatabai as suspect in Israeli – Pentagon document leak.

Tabatabai is a long time Iranian operative who who kept her security clearance despite previous ‘spying for Tehran’ accusations.

The Iranian-born Pentagon official kept her top-level security clearance despite being named as part of a covert influence campaign run by Tehran — and being called a “spy.”

She was not working alone.

The refusal by Pentagon top brass to remove Tabatabai – and her security clearance at the very least – are complicit in this act of treason.

Ariane Tabatabai appeared to be a willing recruit in the covert influence operation run by Tehran’s Foreign Ministry, according to a trove of leaked files revealed last month by Semafor.

She was previously a key aide to the suspended Iran envoy Robert Malley, whose secret ties to Tehran sparked congressional uproar.

Since early 2022, Tabatabai has been chief of staff to the Pentagon’s assistant secretory of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, Christopher P. Maier.

Bring back the death penalty for treason.

Back in April:

Frustration is swirling on Capitol Hill following a top Defense Department official’s revelation that a suspected Iranian influence agent remained on the job at the Pentagon last week while U.S. national security officials were coordinating international efforts to defend Israel from a coming Iranian attack.

Sparks flew during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last week when Assistant Secretary of Defense Christopher Maier told lawmakers that Ariane Tabatabai remained at work in an office overseeing special operations and irregular warfare despite concerns from lawmakers that she has operated at the behest of the Iranian regime.

Suspicion among lawmakers about Ms. Tabatabai’s potential participation in a hidden effort directed by the Iranian regime first came to the fore last year when alleged details about her appeared in a trove of emails from Iranian diplomats spanning from 2003 to 2021 that were published by news outlets.

In September, a group of 31 Republican senators wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, pressing him for answers about Ms. Tabatabai‘s work at the Pentagon.

Concerns about Ms. Tabatabai boiled anew on Capitol Hill last week, with Sen. Tom Cotton asserting that the Department of Defense has only assured lawmakers that protocols were followed regarding Ms. Tabatabai’s work and Congress did not get more information.

The Arkansas Republican questioned Ms. Tabatabai’s boss, Assistant Secretary of Defense Christopher Maier, at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

“I’m sure protocols were followed for Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen as well,” Mr. Cotton said to Mr. Maier at the hearing. “I think it’s a basic function of our oversight responsibility for us to have more information about Ms. Tabatabai and how someone with these ties to well-known Iranian influence operation ended up working for you.”

Ames and Hanssen are former CIA and FBI employees convicted in U.S. federal court of spying for Russia. Mr. Cotton made clear that Mr. Maier, who oversees special operations and low-intensity conflict, was not responsible for Ms. Tabatabai’s hiring, but also said she served as chief of staff for his office.

Mr. Maier told lawmakers that Ms. Tabatabai still works in the office.

“Senator Cotton, Ms. Tabatabai still is employed in my office,” he said at the Wednesday hearing. “She is part, like all the other civilians, military, contractors in the department, subject to continuous vetting that’s done by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency. That’s about all that I can provide you in this forum and that’s what I’ve been provided by the folks that are really responsible for security in our department, sir.”

Pressed by Mr. Cotton to give additional details in a closed-door hearing, Mr. Maier said he would provide a bit more in the classified session with senators. A Senate Armed Services Committee spokesman declined to comment when asked if senators were satisfied with the additional testimony from Mr. Maier.

Whether Ms. Tabatabai had any visibility into the Pentagon efforts to stop the attack that Iran carried out against Israel over the weekend is not clear.

The Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, which employs Ms. Tabatabai, manages secret programs and has knowledge of American forces operating in close proximity to Iranian proxies, according to Hudson Institute adjunct fellow Garrett Exner.

Mr. Exner wrote for the Hudson Institute last year that he served as a special operations policy adviser to that office for three years and believed an Iranian operative’s presence would put special operations forces in extreme danger.

A suspected Iranian operative’s presence could also jeopardize good diplomatic relations with America’s allies.

Jewish Institute for National Security of America fellow Gabriel Noronha claims that Pentagon officials have told him that European counterparts have refused to take meetings when Ms. Tabatabai participates, citing concerns about leaks of sensitive information.

Mr. Noronha told The Washington Times the Pentagon needs to reevaluate its approach to security investigations.

“In Ms. Tabatabai’s case, the public evidence alone is clear: she has close family connections and professional association with the regime’s senior leadership that should disqualify her from receiving a security clearance, which is a privilege and not a right,” Mr. Noronha said.

Details of Ms. Tabatabai’s alleged connections to Iran were published last year by the U.K.-based Iran International media outlet. The publication said Ms. Tabatabai participated in a network of academics and researchers privately working with the Iranian foreign ministry.

Iran International said it obtained the communications of Mostafa Zahrani, a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, that showed Ms. Tabatabai seeking Tehran’s advice on matters such as trips to Israel and participation in various conferences.

Ms. Tabatabai also served between 2021 and 2022 as an advisor to Robert Malley, a Biden administration official on leave from the State Department following the suspension of his security clearance, according to Iran International. The publication said she accompanied Mr. Malley to nuclear negotiations in Vienna in 2021.

High-Level Iranian Spy Ring Busted in Washington

The trail that leads from Tehran to D.C. passes directly through the offices of Robert Malley and the International Crisis Group

by Lee Smith · October 01, 2023

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.

On Thursday, Maier told a congressional committee that the Defense Department is “actively looking into whether all law and policy was properly followed in granting my chief of staff top secret special compartmented information.”

The emails, which were exchanged over a period of several years between Iranian regime diplomats and analysts, show that Tabatabai was part of a regime propaganda unit set up in 2014 by the Iranian Foreign Ministry. The Iran Experts Initiative (IEI) tasked operatives drawn from Iranian diaspora communities to promote Iranian interests during the clerical regime’s negotiations with the United States over its nuclear weapons program. Though several of the IEI operatives and others named in the emails have sought to portray themselves on social media as having engaged with the regime in their capacity as academic experts, or in order to promote better understanding between the United States and Iran, none has questioned the veracity of the emails.

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.

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AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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