An Iranian-born Pentagon official, PENTAGON ADVISOR LEAKS ISRAEL’S WAR PLANS TO IRAN : Full Report

Ariane Tabatabai, a key figure in Obama’s Iranian nuclear deal and a senior Pentagon advisor, has been allegedly exposed as a covert asset tied to Tehran.

Educated at King’s College London and once a top U.S. negotiator, she’s now linked to the leak of Israel’s secret military plans against Iran.

The highly classified intel, shared on a Tehran-based Telegram channel, included satellite data and troop movements.

Sources: AP, Axios, New York Post, Sky Arabia, Iran Int.

Top Iranian Pentagon aide keeps security clearance despite ‘spying for Tehran’ accusation

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

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.

Malley was quietly placed on unpaid leave in June for his alleged mishandling of “protected material.”

But the Pentagon will let Tabatabai, 38, keep her $153,434-a-year job, along with her top secret security clearance, the Washington Free Beacon reported Wednesday.

“Ms. Tabatabai’s employment and clearance processes were carried out in accordance with all appropriate laws and policies,” Pentagon official Rheanne E. Wirkkala wrote to Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) last week.

Republicans reacted with fury to news that Tabatabai will keep her job — and her access to the Pentagon’s most sensitive secrets — and called her an Iranian “spy.”

“Biden’s DoD is REFUSING to revoke the security clearance of an Iranian spy working at the Pentagon,” Ernst wrote on X. “More of POTUS’s appeasement strategy that has emboldened [Iran] & its proxies, like Hamas, & threatened our nat’l security.”

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said he may subpoena Tabatabai as part of his committee’s probe into Malley.

A Pentagon official told The Post: “The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency has enrolled all Defense Department service members, civilians, and contractors with a security clearance in its continuous vetting program, which is a process that involves regularly reviewing a cleared individual’s background to ensure they continue to meet security clearance requirements and may continue to hold positions of trust.”

Tabatabai, 38, who was brought up in Tehran as the daughter of one of the country’s leading political thinkers, has openly argued that Iran is “too powerful to contain” — and has urged the United States to align with the Islamic republic and break its ties with Israel and the Gulf states, for America’s own good.

Her background and writings cast doubt on the wisdom of the Pentagon’s defense of the Iranian-born Tabatabai, whose Pentagon perch gives her access to America’s critical military intelligence

Tabatabai, a US citizen born in Tehran, recalled Iran as “a country where one learns about hating ‘Zionists’ before being able to spell the word” in a 2014 Tumblr post, although she also claimed to not “want to have anything to do with any of that.”

Her father, political philosopher Javad Tabatabai, was one of Iran’s most celebrated thinkers before his death in February.

“My childhood … was dominated by politics,” she wrote.

A one-time officer in the Iranian military’s propaganda corps, Javad Tabatabai studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he developed a theory of Iranian supremacy and became deputy dean of the state-run Tehran University Law School after the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

When he was ousted in 1993, Tabatabai followed her father as he served as a visiting scholar in Germany, France and the US.

After graduating from SUNY Stony Brook in 2008, she returned to Iran, where her father had been inching back into the regime’s good graces.

He became an adviser to President Muhammad Khatami and was apparently close to President Hassan Rouhani, who presented him with an award in 2019.

In 2014, less than a year into Rouhani’s first term, Tabatabai was one of three Western-based academics quietly invited by the Iranian Foreign Ministry to help form a secret influence group, the Iran Experts Initiative, the leaked documents said.

The IEI, organized by Mostafa Zahrani, head of the Iranian foreign ministry’s main think tank, aimed to boost public acceptance of then-US President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), via an aggressive media campaign.

At the time, Tabatabai was a perpetual student at age 29. She had earned a master’s degree from King’s College London but was still pursuing her PhD as a pre-doctoral fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

Within weeks of the IEI’s formation, Tabatabai apparently delivered — sending Zahrani articles she wrote in the Boston Globe and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in which she claimed that Iran needed nuclear capabilities not for weapons but for the “production of radioisotopes for medical purposes” and for “desalination, an energy-intensive process.”

Her goal, she explained to Zahrani, “was to show … that Iran should not be expected to reduce the number of its centrifuges” in the ongoing nuclear negotiations.

She scored face time with top Iranian officials, including then-Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, to glean quotes for a January 2015 paper she published in the journal International Affairs, a coup for a PhD candidate.

Meanwhile, documents show, she used her Harvard email address to seek Zahrani’s approval of her attendance at international conferences — and even to request his help as she crafted testimony to deliver to a US congressional hearing on the nuclear deal.

“I will bother you in the coming days,” she wrote — confiding that her task before the committee “will be a little difficult” because her fellow witnesses “do not have favorable views on Iran.”

“This is how recruited assets speak to their handling officers,” former CIA analyst Peter Theroux told Tablet magazine after reviewing the email chain.

As the IEI sought to sway public opinion, Tabatabai’s career zoomed.

She became a visiting assistant professor at Georgetown University, completed her PhD in war studies at King’s College London and established herself as a frequent guest on NPR, the BBC, Al Jazeera and more — apparently without ever disclosing her connection to the mullahs’ regime.

In a single week in April 2015, as the Iran deal neared completion, she published four articles in influential publications like Foreign Policy and sat for multiple interviews, much to the delight of her Tehran contacts,

“With or without a deal, Iran is a force to be reckoned with in the Middle East,” she wrote in the National Interest in an analysis titled “Mission Impossible: Iran Is Too Powerful to Contain.”

The IEI’s activities faded once the JCPOA was adopted on July 14, 2015, but Tabatabai continued to rise.

Over the next five years, she held prominent positions at a string of major universities and think tanks — and at each stop, she voiced her Iranian sympathies.

“The balance of power is really what Iran has been seeking,” she insisted in November 2018, soon after former President Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA and imposed “maximum pressure” sanctions on Tehran.

In fact, she argued, Iran’s support of “non-state actors, terrorist groups, militias, insurgents” was all America’s fault.

“Iran’s relationships with these players” — including Hamas and Hezbollah — “are largely shaped on Iran’s need to overcome isolation,” Tabatabai said at the Middle East Institute.

“You know, we can’t ask Iran to give up all missile activity for the future,” she said in October 2019 at the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress.

“Zones of possible agreement” might be found in the types of missiles Iran could agree to have, Tabatabai suggested — making no mention of the threat such weapons would pose to Israel, 1,100 miles (1,700 kilometers) from Iran’s border.

“It’s clear that everyone wants a missile program, but it’s not clear how far these missiles should be able to go,” she continued. “The supreme leader has said 2,000 kilometers, others have said 5,000 … those are places to look and to think about.”

Torsten Prochnow
@TorstenProchnow
Iranian-American spy Ariane Tabatabai, a key figure in Obama’s Iranian nuclear deal and a senior Pentagon advisor, has been exposed as a covert asset tied to Tehran. Educated at King’s College London and a top U.S. government official, she’s now linked to the leak of Israel’s top secret military plans against Iran. The highly classified intel, shared on a Tehran-based Telegram channel, included satellite data and troop movements.

This Iranian-American traitor’s outrageous breach of national security is an unforgivable failure by the Biden-Harris administration. How can the United States allow someone with Iranian ties to hold such a sensitive role within the Pentagon? Ariane Tabatabai, an American of Iranian descent, had access to highly classified military plans involving Israel’s strike against Iran, which should raise alarms for every American.

Iran, a hostile regime with a long history of espionage against the U.S. and its allies, should never have anyone with potential ties to its operations in positions of power. Allowing this is not only reckless but outright dangerous.

What makes this even more egregious is that Tabatabai was already outed in October 2023 when Republicans called her out as an Iranian spy. Media outlets like the New York Post revealed she was a willing participant in a covert influence operation run by Tehran’s foreign ministry, based on leaked files from Semafor.

Yet, despite these revelations, the Biden administration shockingly allowed her to keep her top-secret clearance. It was a scandal then, and now, with this latest breach, the outrage has only grown as she continues to hold access to sensitive information.

Iranian-American employees in sensitive government roles pose a clear and present danger to national security, given Iran’s known tactics of exploiting its diaspora for intelligence purposes. The Pentagon’s vetting process should be airtight, but under Biden and Harris, it appears security standards have been sacrificed for political correctness. This scandal underscores the risk of prioritizing inclusivity over the safety of the nation.

Ariana Tabatabai, the Iranian spy, was so active in her deceit that she even managed to infiltrate the pages of the New York Times. This is yet another disgusting example of how unreliable and untrustworthy the New York Times has become. For years, it has been clear that the New York Times spreads lies, and this is just one more instance where they allowed themselves to be manipulated by someone working against American interests. Legacy media, particularly the New York Times, cannot be trusted, and this situation highlights how deeply they have failed their readers. In an opinion piece authored by Tabatabai titled “The Choice That’s Coming: An Iran With a Bomb or Bombing Iran,” the article shamelessly pushed a pro-Iranian narrative, arguing that the Trump administration might face a dilemma the nuclear deal was designed to avoid. It is a complete disgrace that the New York Times allowed an Iranian spy to influence public opinion on such a critical issue. This incident exposes how far the media has fallen and reinforces the need for vigilance when consuming information from legacy outlets that have repeatedly proven to be untrustworthy.

The FBI may be scrambling to address the situation now, but the damage could already be done. How many more individuals with Iranian ties are operating within critical areas of government? How many times will America’s security be compromised by an administration more focused on diversity than on protecting the country? This breach could have devastating consequences not only for Israel but for U.S. strategic interests around the world. The Biden-Harris administration is playing a dangerous game with national security, and it must stop before more irreparable damage occurs.